Half Life

by Lillian Clark

  When I step out, they barely pause their conversation, Thompson drilling Kim about Shanghai’s dates for their subject’s Mimeo and him responding that they’re only rumors.

  Dr. Adebayo skirts them, smiling as he walks toward me, while behind him, Karlsson opens the cover on the incubation pod. It’s already half-full of translucent blue goo. Standing beside it, Adebayo fits one breathing apparatus into my nose and another in my mouth. “Practice,” he says in his thick Yoruban accent. “In through your nose. Out your mouth. Calmly.”

  I do it, in and out, five times.

  “Good,” he says. “It will be cold at first, but the hydrogel will adjust quickly to your body temperature.” He holds my eye, intent. “You cannot move. Keep your eyes closed. And remember to breathe slowly. The sensors in your suit will track your heart rate and alert us if you begin to panic.”

  “Don’t panic,” Karlsson adds, her accent Scandinavian. “If you do, you ruin the mold and we have to start over.”

  Mouth and nose full, breathing in and out, I nod.

  Finally, Adebayo shows me a wireless earbud, lifts the edge of my hood, and tucks it gently into my right ear. Then, with Karlsson standing on a stool on the pod’s opposite side, he helps me up the steps and they both help me climb into the pod.

  The hydrogel is thick, cool. Viscous. My feet sink into it, but slowly. Karlsson and Adebayo help me sit and then lie down, physically shifting my limbs, arms set six inches from my sides, fingers splayed, and feet shoulder-width apart, body buoyed a few inches above the bottom of the pod by the goop.

  I swallow, fail to suppress a shiver. But the gel compensates, slowing my vibrations before they cause a ripple. It’s already beginning to warm, from cool and damp to a thick nothing, the same temperature as my skin.

  Adebayo attaches tubes to my nose and mouth apparatuses, then leans back. “Ready?” he asks. “Blink twice.”

  I do.

  And they close the lid, the clear, rounded length of it descending slowly from its anchor down past my feet. It settles and suctions closed.

  “Slow breaths,” he reminds me in my ear. “We’ll fill the pod now.”

  The gel rises around me. Blue goop encasing me, inch by fraction of an inch. Over my fingers. Up my ankles. Seeping in over my collarbone and around my neck.

  I close my eyes.

  Recite SAT vocabulary from last night’s tutoring session.

  Aberration: not normal, deviation

  It reaches my hips.

  Derivative: not original

  My stomach.

  Inscrutable: mysterious

  Touches my cheeks.

  “Slow. Breaths,” Adebayo’s voice says, deep and calming. “Count with me. In, one, two, three. Out, one, two, three.”

  Over my lips, around my nose, pooling into my eye sockets.

  In, one, two, three.

  Teeming: abundant

  Out, one, two, three.

  Covers my forehead, coating me completely.

  “Twenty minutes for the gel to set.”

  Predecessor: someone who came before

  Isobel did this.

  No, Isobel remembers doing this. Remembers doing something she’s never actually done. Like mine will.

  * * *

  It’s hot, ninety-something at least. From my spot on the side of the field supervising a flag football game, I can see heat waves rising off the Reach the Sky parking lot. I lift my sunglasses to wipe the sweat from the bridge of my nose for the eighth time in the last five minutes.

  “Hey,” Marco says, joining me. He has a bag of orange slices in each hand and a Gatorade under each arm.

  “Hey.” I grab the bags and together we head over to one of the nearby picnic tables to finish setting up the snacks, dumping the orange slices into a giant plastic bowl and making sure the water cooler’s full.

  “Sorry, armpit Gatorade,” he says when we’re done, and holds out the bottles, one red, one blue.

  I laugh and pick the red one, twisting open the cap to take a long drink. “Thanks.”

  We turn back to the field. “Letting Ariana play flag football is a terrible idea,” he says. On the field, her long hair pulled back in a tangled ponytail, blue jersey hanging longer than her shorts and cinched tight at the waist by her flag belt, Ariana sprints straight at the kid—opposite team, yellow jersey, eyes going wide with terror—holding the ball. He hesitates as she nears. Eyes searching, knowing he should throw it, then when she’s a pace or two off, panicking and chucking it up in the air. Ari stops, catches the ball, then runs back to score a touchdown.

  The blue team cheers. Marco and I cheer, too. A teacher blows a whistle.

  “Damn, Ari!”

  Marco laughs. “You’re telling me. Do not get on that girl’s bad side.” He takes a drink of blue Gatorade, then sets the bottle in the grass at his feet and crosses his arms, standing close enough to me that his elbow brushes my arm.

  He asks, “Do you ever think about how many people have walked or sat or slept or peed or even died, right here, where we’re standing? Like, in history?”

  I breathe a laugh. “I am now.”

  He grins. “You’re thinking about pee, aren’t you?”

  “And dead people.”

  “In which case it’d be both, thanks to the evacuation-of-your-bowels thing.”

  “Delightful. The one thing this moment was missing was a graphic mental image of a corpse that’s soiled itself.”

  “Who am I to deny you graphic mental images of historical deaths and subsequent shatting?”

  “Don’t try to pretty it up with your fancy poop words, Marco. The damage has been done.”

  He laughs and uncrosses his arms. Ridiculous arms. Not “ridiculous” like, Damn, look at that guy’s ridiculous arms. They’re the size of my leg! Marco’s arms are just…Whatever, I like his arms.

  He clears his throat. “Plans this weekend?”

  A spark rolls up my spine to settle in my cheeks. Is he going to ask me out? Is that ridiculous? Conceited? Why am I assuming he likes me? We flirt, sure, but people flirt. For fun, when they’re bored. And boys do not ask me out. Like, ever.

  “Just staying at my dad’s.” Oh, and getting my consciousness digitized. No big.

  “Ah, Camp Divorcé.”

  “Yes. Where there are, like, five pieces of furniture, and three framed pictures sitting on the floor waiting to be hung.”

  “And one lonely houseplant, still in its store-bought plastic pot in the corner?”

  “More like no plants because my dad has decided he’s done trying to keep things alive.”

  “Now who’s being morbid?”

  A kid from the blue team scores a touchdown, and Marco and I cheer again.

  “That’s less morbid and more bleak reality.” It’s weird, but I can’t remember when I told Marco about my parents. It’s like that with us. Spending so much time together this week, of course we talk. Anyone would. But this feels different. That, or I’m delusional, and I want this to be different, special, so badly that I’ve skewed it in my head. Like Bode’s wink that night in the park. Tell yourself a lie until it becomes your truth, right? Marco’s stuck with me either way. Maybe he’s just being nice.

  “Well,” he says, “you’ve got to earn those two Christmases somehow. Or in my case, one Christmas and one Hanukkah. I mean, come on. It can’t all be guilt kittens and pity rainbows.”

  “What on earth is a pity rainbow?”

  “Fine. Pity…I don’t know. Whatever love-me-more-than-my-ex bribe you want. The sky is the freaking limit.”

  “Reach for the rainbow?”

  “No, that’s not a thing. You’re thinking Skittles. Taste the rainbow.”

  We watch the teachers set the kids up for a final play, and I take another drink of Ga
torade. I’d feel bad complaining about it, since at least my dad still lives here, while Marco, Ari, and Sam’s is all the way in Seattle, but the first time I tried to apologize, he brushed it off.

  “It’s weird only seeing him once a week,” I say. “Though it’s not like I see much of my mom either. With her work and this and everything else. My family’s a Venn diagram, but the circles no longer overlap.”

  “Damn.”

  I shrug.

  “I mean it,” he says. “That’s tragic. I’m picturing it now: three bubbles floating in the same void, together but totally alone. That’s like Bing Bong-dying-in-the-Memory Dump sad.”

  “It so is not.”

  “Who’s your friend who likes…” He waves his hand, beckoning me to finish the lyric.

  “No.”

  “Sing it with me, Lucille. Honor his sacrifice.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Here.” He reaches for my Gatorade, uncaps it, and pours a sip onto the ground. “For Bing Bong. ’Cause it’s basically sugar water, which he’d like.”

  “Glorious,” I say. “I’m sure Bing Bong appreciates it.”

  “He better. Cotton-candy punk.”

  I laugh. The teacher blows the whistle again, calling the end of the game—no official winner since they don’t keep score, but Ari’s smug expression suggests she knows who won, anyway—then announces that it’s time for snack. The kids shed their gear and sprint for the table, followed by two teachers who’ll help fill up water cups and pass out the granola bars we hid in the shade. Marco and I hang back to clean up the flag belts and jerseys left all over the field.

  “So, that it?” he asks. “Sitting around your dad’s sad apartment staring at unhung pictures?”

  “Yep. In the dark, probably.”

  “Obviously. Since I’m sure he keeps forgetting to buy lightbulbs.”

  “And eating bologna sandwiches on stale bread because he never remembers to grocery shop.” I try to take the Gatorade back from him, but he takes a long drink first.

  “Hey,” he says, offering me the Gatorade, cap still off. I take it and drink, overly aware that his lips just touched where my lips are touching, because apparently I’m in the fifth grade and sharing spit means something. “Bologna is delicious.”

  I grab the bin for the jerseys and head out onto the field. “It’s slices of giant, cold hot dog.”

  “Exactly,” he says, following with the one for the flag belts. “Delicious.”

  “You’re a horror show.”

  He smiles, overly wide, showing too many teeth.

  “Not helping,” I say.

  Will my Facsimile get this? This perfect image? This sun-soaked moment? I don’t know how I feel about that. I’ve never had anything like this. Something separate and special. Something I, delusion or not, want to keep all my own.

  Except, she’ll be me. Does that mean she’ll feel about Marco the way I feel? Will feelings transfer the same way memories will? Or will she get the image, but not the emotional context? Will she hear all this internal rambling and feel it? Or will it be like remembering facts from a textbook?

  As Marco and I fill our bins, I realize I don’t want her to feel this. What I feel for him. But I certainly wouldn’t mind having someone who understands the rest of it, even if only for a month.

  * * *

  “Everything,” I say, repeating Dr. Kim. “She’ll know everything I know.”

  Dr. Kim nods while Dr. Thompson says, “The Mimeo gives us a complete digitized copy of your brain, every wrinkle and synapse. The purpose is to create an exact replica of your connectome as it is at the time of the scan, for use in building and operating your Facsimile’s wetware.”

  Hardware, software, wetware.

  “The ‘me’ part of—” I wave my hand, gesturing to my head, my body, me. I know this. I’ve known this. But with the actual procedure happening in two days, I crave clarity. We’re in the conference room. Outside, the courtyard is shadowed. I check the time on my serviceless phone. Dad thinks I’m getting coffee with some Reach the Sky friends before I grab my stuff from Mom’s and head to his place for the night, and if it gets too late, he’ll worry and try to call.

  “Yes,” Thompson says.

  “Your specific physiology,” Kim says, “plus your memory. It’s chicken-and-egg, since brain configuration and function are two parts of the same whole. But, yeah. Memories, experiences, genes, all of it bundled together into your nervous system. That’s your connectome.”

  Dr. Thompson smiles. “MimeoMem is Life Squared’s crowning achievement. Of all our discoveries and advancements, it is our most monumental.”

  “And it works,” I say.

  They pause.

  It’s the final major procedure. Arguably the most invasive. The most important. And they freaking pause. I think of Isobel and those huge, unanswered questions: If they have her, what happened that they still need me? Isn’t she the “first fully functional, adult human duplicate”? Their “capstone”? But I don’t ask. Partly because I don’t want them to doubt me, my commitment, my “ideal fit,” and partly because I’m not sure I want to know.

  “Of course,” Thompson says. “Brain science is delicate. But we have refined the process to within a few percentage points of perfection.”

  “What?”

  They share a glance, and Kim says, “We have a ninety-eight percent success rate.”

  “Like, it works ninety-eight percent of the time? Or the Mimeo will copy ninety-eight percent of me?”

  “With anything at this level of complexity, there is room for error,” Dr. Thompson says. “But as with RapidReplicate and SemblanceSync, we at Life Squared have made it our mission to flout impossibility, to perfect the unperfectable.”

  She sounds like a freaking infomercial. Or a politician.

  I look at my reflection on the glossy table, and everything’s there on my face: my doubt, my worry. Then I relax my brow. I want this, and they want me. That’s answer enough, right?

  “How does the scan work?”

  Kim and Thompson share a second look before he asks, “Want to see?”

  I nod, and they stand. “It started with serial block-face scanning electron microscopy,” Kim says as I walk between them through Life2’s pearlescent halls. “But that wasn’t an option for us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’d have to be dead.”

  “SBFSEMs use small samples of brain tissue,” Thompson explains, “sliced by the ultramicrotome to a thickness of less than fifty nanometers, that are then scanned by focused beams of electrons to create an image. Images that are stacked together to create a 3-D digital portrait of the sample.”

  “The trick to the Mimeo,” Kim says, “is doing all of that. For your whole brain. While you’re alive. It’s the kind of discovery that will—”

  “Alter the course of humanity?”

  “Exactly.”

  We turn down the hall of laboratories, and Kim pauses before the first observation window. “Pit stop?” he asks me.

  I step up to the window beside him. Thompson joins me, crossing her arms. Inside, the team works—Adebayo, Karlsson, and the others I’ve yet to meet—spread throughout the lab, monitoring a handful of ITOPs and incubation pods, smaller versions of the ones next door.

  “Patel’s our cardiologist. See what he’s working on?” Kim asks. He nods to one of the sterile-suited scientists that I don’t recognize standing over an incubation pod roughly the size of a beach ball. The pod’s full of the same bluish hydrogel I lounged—suffocated—in to make my Facsimile’s full-body mold. And suspended in the middle?

  A heart.

  My heart.

  I try to take a slow breath in through my nose, try to pull the air deep into my stomach—in, one, two, three—try to exhale sl
owly out my mouth. Then I lean over and vomit all over the pretty white floor.

  * * *

  We cut the tour short. Thompson told Isobel to call a car, then left me to wait for it, saying only, “Be here by seven a.m. on Sunday. Prepare to stay all day.”

  Now, an hour and a half later, Mom squeezes me tight over the center console of her SUV. “Love you,” she says into my hair. “Have a good weekend.”

  My intestines.

  I pull back and grab my bag from between my feet. “You too.”

  My rib cage.

  When I get to the lobby door, she leans down and waves at me through the passenger window.

  My kidneys.

  I wave back, go inside, and watch her drive away through the glass door.

  My ovaries and uterus.

  A couple crosses the lobby, holding hands. Both men nod to me as I shift out of the way of the door.

  My eyes.

  “Eleven,” I say to the woman who asks for my floor when I join her in the elevator.

  My spine.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it. I had. But in a cartoon way. In a plastic way. Like the anatomical horse my parents gave me for my birthday one year. Its exterior horse shape was clear, with a skeleton and an assortment of organs that I was supposed to paint and assemble for the inside. That’s how I’d pictured it. Clean and neat with parts that clicked together and lungs you could paint blue.

  I hadn’t thought about muscles. Tendons, ligaments, cartilage. Marrow and blood. A tank of it. Waiting to fill her up.

  The woman gets off the elevator on the tenth floor. Two breaths later, I get off on the eleventh, then walk down the hall toward my dad’s apartment, digging through my purse for the key he gave me.

  At the door, I close my eyes and take a slow, deep breath. No more organs. No more Batman. Back to regular life.