Page 13 of The Echo Wife
The problem with the process is that, without intervention, the clone develops according to ideal conditions.
Humans rarely develop according to ideal conditions. My work, for the most part, has been focused on truly duplicative clones—ones that will look exactly like their originals. A body double for a politician, for example, must be convincing enough to attract a bullet, otherwise the expense involved in creating that double is unjustifiable. The expense in developing the processat allbecomes unjustifiable.
Thus, conditioning is necessary. Nutrient levels during development must be carefully controlled. Light exposure, allergenintroduction, heavy metal exposure: all are crucial during the nascent stages of growth and maturation.
But there are other factors at play. The original subject might have a crooked nose from a poorly healed fracture, or a distinctive burn scar, or a missing limb. A limp from a broken leg that never set quite right. A cracked tooth from a bar fight or a mugging.
This is the conditioning that necessitates a sense of remove, a steady hand, and a strong stomach.
Clones aren’t people, legally speaking. They don’t have rights. They’re specimens. They’re body doubles, or organ farms, or research subjects. They’re temporary, and when they stop being useful, they become biomedical waste. They are disposable. With the right mindset, conditioning a clone feels like any other research project. It feels like implanting stem cells under the skin of a mouse’s back, or clipping the wings of a crow so it can’t fly inside a controlled space. There’s blood, yes, and there’s some discomfort, but it’s necessary for the work.
By the time I knocked on Martine’s front door, I had been conditioning adult duplicative clones for several years. I had been disposing of specimens, both failed and successful, for even longer than that.
I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. “What happened?” I asked, because I had to say something. I couldn’t just stand there forever. Time would only begin to advance again once I imposed motion. Action was imperative.
“We had a fight,” Martine rasped.
There was so much blood.
“He was angry,” Martine said. “I told him about getting tea with you, and I asked him about the thing you said. About what I was made for.”
I started to say something—not an apology, never that, only an admission that I’d perhaps spoken too harshly—but she didn’t let me get a word in.
“No,” she interrupted. “You were right. I was made for something, and I’ve never even wondered about it. I was neveraskedif Iwanted this.” She gestured to her belly. “So I asked Nathan about it. I said…” She swallowed hard, lifted a hand to her throat as she did so. “What if I wanted something different? What if I didn’t want to be a mother? That’s what I asked him.” She darted a quick glance at me, her eyes fierce. “I do want to be a mother. I want this. More than anything. I just wanted to know whether I had a say or not.”
I believed her. Nathan would have programmed her, after all, to want this more than anything. But then, he also should have programmed her to not ask questions like “what if.” At least, that’s what I would have done, if I was going to build a perfect, docile version of myself. I couldn’t help but feel a twitch of satisfaction: Of course Nathan would cut that corner. He always was sloppy. “And what did he say?”
“He got so angry. He kept talking about his failure, saying that he’d overlooked my flaws. I was cooking dinner, and I turned to get a knife from the block, and it wasn’t there, and then I looked over and he was holding it, and.” She stopped talking midsentence and looked down at the knife in her hand. “Oh,” she said, and dropped it as though it had suddenly sprouted thorns. “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” she repeated in an increasingly frantic pitch. “Oh no, he—he came at me with the knife, and I screamed and I knocked it out of his hand, and he put his hands on my throat, and—”
I clapped my hands once, hard and loud, and Martine startled into silence. “Take a deep breath, Martine,” I said in a low voice. “I can put the rest together, you don’t have to tell me. Just take a deep breath, that’s good. Eyes on me. Don’t look at the floor, look at me.” I was not being gentle with Martine. This wasn’t a moment for gentleness. The trick of the thing was to crush her rising panic. I had done it with a dozen rejected lab assistants, the ones who couldn’t handle the process of conditioning live specimens. “Now, take three steps toward me.” Martine followed my instructions without question, her unblinking eyes locked on mine.
I took her by the arm. Her skin was tacky with half-dried blood. I led her farther into the house. “Where’s your bathroom?”
“Down the hall,” Martine whispered.
“Good. We’re going there.” I kept my voice authoritative. Let Martine think someone was in control of the situation. Let that someone be me.Forward.
We walked into the bathroom, decorated in muted tones of lavender and sage, all the soaps in decorative glass bottles with brushed aluminum pumps. I spun the knobs in the tub, turned the shower on, and undressed Martine while the water got warm.
It was like handling a doll. Martine was mute, pale-lipped. Her eyes stared right through the wall in front of her. I unzipped the blood-soaked dress and let it fall to the floor, a stiff puddle around Martine’s ankles. Her underwear was nice, obviously expensive: black lace with white stitching. I heard the echo of my own voice in the tea shop:What are you for?
I eased Martine’s lingerie off, touching her skin as little as possible in the process. I tried not to look at the gentle swell of her belly, or the way her nipples were the kind of dark and full that comes with pregnancy. I led my clone by the arm, helped her step over the lip of the tub, and guided her under the spray. She shivered, and I turned the hot water a little higher.
“There,” I said, watching the water around Martine’s feet turn pink, ignoring the water that was soaking my own shirtsleeves. My vision narrowed to the swirl of blood around the drain. I blinked hard. “That’s better. Can you wash?”
She nodded silently, but she didn’t move until I handed her a bottle of exfoliating soap. She scrubbed at herself mechanically, the dark brown of drying blood giving way to pink skin.
She didn’t have any of the freckles or scars that I did. Her skin was smooth, unblemished, hairless. She didn’t even have stretch marks.
I stared at the woman my husband had wanted, and I saw all the ways in which she was nothing like me. Another corner cut: Nathan had neglected her conditioning.
But then, maybe that wasn’t an accident. Why would he want a wife with a scar on her knee, when he could have a wife without one? Why would he take the time and care to break her wrist and splint it just a little crooked? It wasn’t anothermethat he was after. Martine was something—someone—else altogether.
She was the woman Nathan had been looking for. Had he been looking for her all along? Had I been a rough draft?
She didn’t stop scrubbing until I reached in and laid a hand on her wrist. “That’s enough. You’re all done.”
Martine turned once in the water, rinsing the last of the soap from her arms and face. She reached down to turn off the tap, her arms and hands moving slowly, her grip weak.
