LUCILLE
School is a stress dream come to life.
I park my car and rush straight to my first period—eyes following my pink hair like I’m glowing—which, since it’s a green-block day, is history. History with the reading I couldn’t make myself finish and the quiz I couldn’t force myself to study for. And I seriously doubt Ms. Martin will take “I was distracted by my clone” as a valid excuse.
I find a seat I can’t be sure is “mine,” set my book on my desk, hunch down, and chant please, please, please, please in my head while I wait for the bell to ring, begging Providence to shine on me by giving both Cass and Bode a different class this period. When the warning bell rings, I watch the second hand circle the clock, relaxing with each tick.
Then Louise walks through the door.
I look away, tuck my head, pretend to study. But she turns down my row and slows by my desk, nudging my shoulder as she goes. I glance up.
“Love it,” she says, gesturing to my hair.
I manage a smile—I think—and as the final bell rings, she slides into a desk one row over and two seats back.
Louise too?
Out of fifteen questions on the quiz, I know the answers to three.
LUCY
Boris stretches out on the carpet of Lucille’s room and huffs a contented sigh. I open her laptop, type in her password. Stare at the flash drive on the palm of my too-smooth hand. Then plug it in. Click the icon. Open the first folder, a video.
And press play.
Isobel sits eye-level with the camera. She’s wearing a white doctor’s coat, with her hair down in tight curls and dangling orange earrings in her ears. Her expression is stoic. “Stardate nine five seven three seven point—” Then she’s laughing, smile spreading bright and quick. “Sorry, okay.” She clears her throat. “Today is February nineteenth, two thousand eighteen, it’s”—she glances at her watch—“a little after ten-thirty in the morning, and I am Dr. Olivia Mitchell, lead geneticist at Life Squared.”
LUCILLE
I sit at my regular table in the library, chewing a bite of granola bar, looking up the answers to the history quiz questions that I didn’t know. But I can’t focus. What have I done, what am I going to do, what have I done, what am I going to—
My phone buzzes. I flip it face-up on the table. It’s Cass: Bode’s wondering where the hell you are, says you won’t answer any of his texts. So…You coming to lunch or?
I stare at it, chewing the second half of my granola bar, then tap a two-letter response.
“Yeah, I didn’t think you were.”
I look up, nearly choking on my mouthful. “Jesus. Creepy much?”
“The pink hair’s interesting.”
“Thanks?”
Cass smiles. “Let’s ditch.”
I arch an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yes. Really. What do you have next?”
A tightening spiral into my massive existential and legal crisis. “Independent study.”
“Seriously?”
“Convinced admin I needed it for History Day and Science Fair and such.”
“Well, then, what are we waiting for? Get up! You can take me to get frozen yogurt in your fancy new car.”
“What do you have?”
“Choir. I’ll tell Mr. Campbell I have cramps. Which I do, so it’s not even lying.”
I roll my eyes.
“Come on. You know you want to.”
And I do. I so do.
LUCY
There are hundreds of them, each one time-stamped, spanning more than two years.
On February 22, 2018, at 11:37 p.m., she started without preamble: “Major breakthrough. And I mean major.” Her expression is ecstatic. She can barely sit still. “It’s a match! I almost can’t believe it. A fully functional human kidney. Grown from scratch. And matched specifically to the recipient.” She (Olivia not Isobel, Olivia not Isobel, Oliv-liv-liv-liv) huffs an astonished sigh and leans back in her chair. The room around her is dim, gray, her face illuminated by what I’m guessing is the computer she’s using to record and maybe a desk lamp. Apart from her, the frame is empty.
“The implications of this are…” Her eyes go unfocused, aimed somewhere up and beyond the camera. She shakes her head, purses her lips. Blinks away tears. “It’s life-changing. Humanity-changing.” She looks into the camera again. “No more transplant waiting lists. No more donor databases.” She laughs, overcome by amazement. “We can cure…cancer. Replace amputated limbs. Cure heart disease, lung disease, cirrhosis. Jesus. We could do transfusions with the patient’s own blood. Limitless. The possibilities are truly limitless. We’ve just made the human body a machine with entirely replaceable par—”
There’s the sound of a knock and a door opening. Olivia sits ups, looking beyond the camera to her right. “We’re going to celebrate. Coming?” someone asks, and I recognize Dr. Adebayo’s voice.
Dr. Mitchell nods, and the video cuts off.
I open another, dated about six weeks later.
“Sunday, April eighth, two thousand eighteen. Two twenty-two”—she snorts a laugh, shakes her head—“a.m. No, wait. That makes it Monday. The ninth.” Dark circles under her eyes, she blinks rapidly a few times, then yawns. “It’s official. The kidney failed.
“Well, the kidney didn’t fail. The suspension process failed. Had we had a recipient ready six weeks ago, a month ago even, I feel confident it would’ve worked. But if the aim is to create a delicate organ like a kidney or a lung or…” She trails off, a slight crease appearing then disappearing between her dark eyebrows. “Or a brain. We’ll need—” Her eyes go wide and she leaps out of her seat, running out of the frame. Ten seconds later, her arm cuts in front of the camera, maybe reaching for the keyboard, and the screen goes black.
The next one’s dated three days later. “I knew it! It’s the hydrogel. The organs need to stay alive. Without a host. For an extended period of time. So.” She shrugs like it’s nothing, then her expression brightens with pride and she starts dancing in her chair. “Tailor the hydrogel! Genetically! To mimic the future host! Circulate oxygenated donor blood and there we go. We still need to test it, but it’s perfect. I know it is.”
I skip ahead two months, to one dated June 5, 2018, 1:33 p.m. “It’s digesting. Di-gest-ing. Fucking unreal. Sorry, language.” She laughs. “Kim’s planning to attach the small and large intestines tomorrow. Thompson says it’s time to shit or get off the pot. Ha. What she really said was something like What are you waiting for? Shanghai and Stockholm already have functioning livers. Which was a completely wasted opportunity when discussing the digestive system, if you ask me.”
Grinning, she drops her eyes to her lap.
“I wish I could tell someone about it.” She lifts her eyes to the camera again. “I know why we can’t. It’s all proprietary. And we’re in competition with the other branches. Not to mention the chaos leaking any of this to the public would cause. I’m not even supposed to be keeping this video journal.
“I just mean…the work we’re doing is light-years beyond what I thought possible six months ago. It’s not groundbreaking, it’s earth-shattering. The minds at work here?” She shakes her head. “Baffling. I’m part of the team, and I’m baffled. Awestruck.”
July 1, 2018, 1:12 a.m., and she glares at the camera for a full minute before beginning to speak. “Fucking money. A river of it coming from the investors, whoever the hell they are, yet we can’t spare a single kidney? A heart? Some kid with shit lungs dies on a waiting list while we could grow him a new pair in a matter of months. Burn victims languish in agony while we could print them a whole new suit of skin. And I’m the ridiculous one? For suggesting that all of this amazing shit we’re doing be used for more than some megalomaniac’s immortality wet dream?
“Thompson says to be patient. They get what they want, make their money, then, eventually, let the benefits trickle down.” Jaw tight, she shakes her head. “Some of us know that’s not how this shit works.”
She leans back, resting an elbow on the arm of her chair. I watch her shoulders rise and fall with deep, calming breaths. Still looking away, she says, “I should delete this one. Even with Damian’s encryption.” Then she reaches for the keyboard and the screen goes black.
Boris snores on the carpet behind me. Great blubbering snores. Paws twitching as he chases something in his dreams. I check the time (almost noon) and skip ahead six months, to January 7, 2019, 8:15 a.m., and Dr. Mitchell starting the video off with a truly epic yawn. She sips from a hot mug, eyes bleary behind the rising steam. “It’s done. Assembly on BF1901 completed at”— she looks at her watch, blinks, looks again, gives up—“twenty-ish minutes ago. Now we just wait for, well. Everything. We wait for everything.”
BF1901.
01.
The first clone.
Face-up on the desk, my phone lights up. I glance at it. Three unopened texts from Bode and a new one from Life2.
I open the next file.
“Like dominoes,” she says, miming it with a sweep of her hand. “One after another. Kidneys, liver, pancreas, intestines, stomach, lungs, heart. Brain. It’d have been impressive if it didn’t mean watching months of relentless work literally die. Necrosis and catastrophic organ failure. Even his—its. Sorry. Semantics matter. Even its skin. Which was…” She shakes her head, takes a deep breath, then cuts the video off.
I start skipping. Looking for clones two through nine.
March 12, 2019, 9:55 a.m.
“Progress. That’s what we focus on. Progress. Stanch IE1902’s necrotic spread, only to watch her fall apart at the seams.” She barks a dark laugh. “You forget. You know, of course. But. Five liters feels like so much more when it’s oozing out all over the floor.”
June 2, 2019, 4:32 p.m.
Dr. Mitchell sits with her forehead in her hand. Her hair’s pulled back into a (Isobel’s) tight bun. “We learn so much. Each time, we learn so much. Twice as much since we did AA1903 and GT1904, concurrently this time. But it still feels…”
Inhaling deeply, she sits back, a slight smile on her lips. “They tease me for being squeamish. Because I usually spend my time at a microscope instead of elbow-deep in guts. I like to remind them that despite my being sans MD—all PhDs all the time over here—I’ve become quite the adept surgical nurse in recent months. Besides, it wasn’t me who lost it on the lab floor today.” She arches a brow and quirks her lip. “That was Thompson.”
August 17, 2019, 1:12 p.m.
“It’s the brain. Which we all know, even without what happened to JO1905. All of it. Lymph nodes and endocrine glands and perfectly formed heart valves. It can’t work in concert without the brain.” She huffs a breath out her nose. “Everything we’ve already done. Enough to save millions. Yet, without the brain, they’ll always be parts,” she mimics someone. “As though those parts aren’t already a miracle.”
October 9, 2019, 7:58 p.m.
“You start to wonder what the point is. You start to wonder…” She swallows thickly. “You disassociate. You have to. Because if they’re people, then— Are we murderers? Seven of them. With RK1906’s removal from life support yesterday and NK1907…” She takes a deep breath. “And NK1907 gone today, that makes seven. Karlsson immediately went into research mode, wanting to open it up and find out what happened.
“I found Kim in the hallway afterward. Crying. And when I set a hand on his arm, he said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’ I said something about it being normal and we laughed. Because none of this is normal. Five minutes earlier, Kim had watched himself die. Watched his Facsimile suffer consecutive grand mal seizures and go into cardiac arrest. There’s no way that doesn’t fuck you up. Even if they aren’t—”
She shakes her head. “That’s the crux, right? Are they people? Are they individuals? Do they have souls? Does it make a difference either way? They’re just bodies, Karlsson says. But we can’t know that. Not until one of them succeeds long enough to be able to converse. Until we can prove consciousness, cognizance. Would that simplify it? The individuality question? They’re still exact replicas of preexisting individuals. NK1907 was Nathanial Kim in every physical aspect. A duplicate. But so are identical twins. Genetic duplicates. Yet we’d never say that neither was an ‘individual.’ So what are they?”
Dr. Mitchell frowns at her lap. “The truth is, I don’t know. None of us do.”
December 23, 2019, 11:55 p.m.
Her face is blank. No, not blank, frozen. I check the time bar, but the video’s still playing. Then she blinks. “He woke up. Patel’s. But…” She swallows. “All he did was scream.”
December 26, 2019, 2:32 a.m.
“Onward. It’s what we all say. Even cheersed to it tonight after our mandatory day off. Thompson was right, of course. We needed it. I’ve never seen her this affected. Not even by GT1904. But I can’t tell if it’s because we got so close only to fail again, or if RP1908’s conscious state disturbed her the way it did the rest of us.
“Anyway. Tomorrow’s my full-body mold, and I’m trying not to get preemptively claustrophobic. Adebayo’s been teaching me breathing techniques, and I practiced wearing the face mask yesterday.”
She pulls one foot up onto her chair and hugs her knee to her chest. Her eyes go wistful. “I asked tonight why we don’t have funerals for them. Karlsson shot whiskey out her nose, then cursed me in Swedish while tears streamed down her face. It turned the mood. Adebayo said that when it finally works, we’ll have things to consider. Kim said it’s the Board’s job. Patel said it’s also the client’s.
“Then I asked, ‘Not the creators’?’ And the table went quiet.”
February 1, 2020, 6:01 a.m.
She’s dressed in Life2 scrubs. White and soft. I remember the feel of them against my skin. Her hair is down, her eyes bright. “Today is the day. Kim and Adebayo have made substantial adjustments to the Mimeo since RP1908, and honestly, despite all of it, I’m feeling…excited? Hopeful. Truly. OM2009 is almost done. And she’s…” She shakes her head, grinning, almost proud. “Magnificent.”
Then there’s a two-month gap.
I click the next video file, dated March 29, 2020, 5:58 a.m.
She’s in the scrubs again. Hair pulled back in a tight bun. Expression blank. I wait for her to say something, anything, as seconds, then minutes, tick by in utter silence. Then I recognize it.
That stillness.
That quiet.
It isn’t Dr. Mitchell. It’s Isobel.
LUCILLE
“So,” Cass says as we walk to the parking lot, leaving through the empty gym to avoid passing the main office. “Pink, huh?”
I reach for my hair, self-conscious. “Yeah.”
She nods.
“What?”
“Remember in first grade when we both wanted those ridiculous winged unicorn things?”
“I remember.”
“Good. So, then you remember that when we got them, you threw this epic fit—”
“I did not. I was just—”
“—about how you wanted the purple one because you hated pink and I got the purple one and that wasn’t fair. And I was, like, Forget that I hate pink too, so finally we both ended up with purple ones and we colored the hooves on yours silver with a Sharpie so we could tell them apart?”
“What’s your point?”
She stops between two cars and turns to face me. “You hate pink! You have always hated pink. So…” She waves a hand, urging me on. “What’s up with the hair?”
I squeeze past Cass and start walking again. “I wanted to do somethi
ng different.”
“Bullshit.”
I scoff.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, “it looks awesome. But…”
We reach my car. I look at her over the roof. “But what? I’m not allowed to do something different because that’s ‘not like you’?”
“Well, yeah. You’ve been a lot ‘not like you’ lately.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on. Really? Bode. Art. Saturday. The hair.”
Wait, what? “Saturday?”
The look she gives me—like I’ve lost half my head or sprouted a second one—sends a spark up my spine. Cass is how Lucy got home. I duck down and climb in the driver’s side. My hand shakes as I put my key in the ignition to start the car and roll the windows down. After a beat, Cass opens the passenger door and gets in.
I sit, trying to order my thoughts, and finally say, “How do you know what is or isn’t like me when I don’t even know myself?”
She’s quiet for so long that I purse my lips to keep from filling the silence with something I shouldn’t say. Sitting like this, quiet and alone and close, I realize just how much I miss her. All summer. Last year. Right now, even though she’s right next to me.
I miss her.
Cass, the person I shared not just inside jokes but whole stories, whole imaginary universes with. Cass, who cried with me when my first dog, Nellie, died; who called the only boy I ever asked to dance—and said no—a “human suit filled with rancid turkey fat” to his face; who told me about her first kiss in the seventh grade before she told anyone else, then cried on my couch when he broke up with her a week later.
Cass, the person I used to tell everything to, shared everything with. Cass, who now knows nothing—about my parents, Marco, my freaking clone—beyond a series of flimsy lies.
Then she says, “I know that even thinking about Dumbo makes you feel like you’re going to cry. I know that you think Twizzlers are good in theory but make you sick to your stomach. I know that while your mom loves Gilmore Girls and has made you watch the whole series with her, you think Rory’s a self-absorbed snob. I know that when you flipped over your handlebars and got that cut on your temple, you didn’t even cry.
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