ALTER EGO INC.

By Goran Skrobonja, © 2020

Translated by Nataša Milas

After many years, she visited Teachers’ Colony again. She’d grown up in this neighborhood, but since she’d moved away, she’d had no reason to come back. She remembered the place, located between Konjarnik, Šumice, and Zvezdara, as unpleasant, shabby, and depressing.

What she saw from the taxi—a small, inexpensive, autonomous, and noiseless electric Asian vehicle—Maria didn’t recognize, nor did she associate it with any of her childhood memories. The neighborhood that she remembered consisted of several narrow streets and residential buildings erected around two large factories built back in the 1960s when the area was still at the edge of urban Belgrade. At the time when Maria left Teachers’ Colony, huge concrete buildings with broken windows were turned into furniture warehouses, yoga and pilates studios, and squats for struggling artists. The same streets were now covered with solar panels, placed on every corner, looking like phantasmagoric, dazzling sculptures.

Maria got out of the car in front of a restaurant, quite a popular one, judging by the various web ratings. When she turned around, she found the entrance to the business she was looking for in a four-story building. Next to the large aluminum and glass doors, there was a brass plaque with AE Inc. engraved on it. It was abbreviated by Alter Ego Inc., the full name of Isaac’s start-up.

She wondered again why Isaac had placed such a promising company in this part of the city, assuming that the reason could only be the cheap rent. Everything else in the neighbor- hood was far from being prestigious and appealing to ambitious investors and international firms. She shrugged, turned back again, looked over at the indifferent facades of the buildings and the indifferent faces of the passersby, and approached the intercom. A split second late, as if somebody had been watching her the entire time, a soft buzz sounded and the door opened before her.

The director was excited. He spoke very quickly: “Mr. Lero explained everything to me. Trust me, you’ll be delighted when you see what we’ve achieved so far. The technology our start-up has developed is quite revolutionary and I’m excited that we’ll be taking the key step in its testing thanks to you--“

“Excuse me,” she interrupted. “How long will this all take? I have a lot of errands today.” This was true: she’d taken the day off but had a waxing appointment at one. She had lunch with Isaac after that, and then another appointment at the beauty parlor.

“Don’t worry,” he replied, “we’ll do it as fast as we can. Do you want to start right away?”

“Of course.” She looked over empty walls and modest office furniture. “Here?”

“Oh, no ma’am, absolutely not.” He got up and theatrically opened the door. “This way, please.”

The director hurried to the elevator and smiled again nervously. When they entered the elevator, she watched as he pressed -2.

The door closed and Maria felt the elevator sliding below street level.

She had met Isaac Lero at a reception at the Swiss ambassador’s residence.

Her husband had received an invitation because he had been placed on the list of some of the major NGOs that followed the work of the most promising coders and openly recruited their services for foreign technology giants. Alexander Vranješ had previously programmed several interesting apps for mobile platforms. The most popular among them was the Trailblazers platform intended for drivers navigating Belgrade’s chaotic traffic. Trailblazers’ algorithms enabled autonomous vehicles to monitor the situation and constantly report to each other where they were going to optimize traffic flow and had significantly reduced traffic congestion. As he liked to say, these algorithms had put him on the map, which the invitation to the residence of His Excellency proved. This had happened at a time when the two of them would go for days without uttering a single word: he was buried in work and programmed at night and slept during the day; she went to work, moving through the day like a zombie, sleeping at night. A depressing time. The time after Mina.

The only thing she remembered from this reception, which she’d attended unwillingly—was Isaac. Amid the throng of officials and the waiters who were clumsily dragging themselves through the crowd carrying trays with canapés and cocktails, she tried to find her way to the nearest chair, where she planned to stay until Alexander had had enough chatting with the IT team and took her home. At some point she snuck out to a room on the ground floor of the residence. As she looked around, slightly perplexed, she became aware of someone’s presence.

“Would you like to get out of here too?” asked large man in an elegant jacket and a light-colored shirt without a tie. She looked up at his face, he was much taller than her and saw a mild frown creasing his forehead.

A man who knows that you don’t say “You wanna,” but “Would you like,” she thought to herself.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking sincerely concerned.

How terrible I must look, if he only took one glance at me and figured out that I wasn’t feeling very well, she thought. I like his voice.

“I can’t stand the crowds,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s stifling in here.”

“We’ll take care of that.” He smiled and Maria realized that it was hard for her to look away from his warm eyes. How old is he, she wondered, in his fifties?

He gently took her by the arm and led her through the corridor. He opened the door, which allowed in a refreshing breeze and the scent of late spring. “Here, this way,” he said, and they continued to an illuminated garden.

“Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” He paused as she obediently sat on a wooden bench near a white gravel path. He noticed the expression on her face. “Maybe some water . . .”

She put her fingers on his hand and smiled, now more naturally. “Campari and juice, please. If they have it.”

He nodded. As he went back into the house to find an open bar and bring her a drink, she felt that something had irreversibly changed. She accepted the change as a life-saving exit.

More than three years had passed since that evening. More than three years of their secret relationship, and almost as long since Alexander became a leading developer in Lero Technologies, the main investor in the Alter Ego Inc. start- up.

“I won’t bother you with details,” said the director as he walked next to her. “I’m sure you are familiar with the basic principles of the procedure.”

They walked between glass boxes in which men and women in white coats stood by unusual machines, hospital beds on wheels, computer workstations, and chairs that re- minded Maria of well-equipped dentist offices. In some box- es, these machines, 3-D printers she now recognized, were painfully, slowly forming something that, she realized, feeling the hair on the back of her next stand up, looked like different parts of human bodies.

The director stopped and pointed to a long glass wall and motionless figures behind him. She gasped. There were a few dozen of them. They stood motionless. They were naked like old classical statues but were made of a material that was so convincing that she couldn’t help thinking that someone was detaining these men and women, making them stand so stiffly with no hope of ever being allowed to move.

“We’ve run into a lot of problems,” the director muttered, moving to a section in the corner of a large, well-lit under- ground room that reminded Maria of the automatic photo booths she had seen in old movies. “Mainly legal in nature: in this sphere, things develop rapidly, but bureaucracy decides on the rules and lags behind hopelessly. EU directives covering artificial intelligence and robotics have become obsolete ever since the first computer passed the Captcha test. They can’t understand, they just can’t understand . . . But, somehow, we will get to the bottom of it. Mr. Lero has a good legal team.”

“Do I . . . need to come in here?” she asked.

The thin man smiled and nodded. “This won’t take long,” he said. “We’ve perfected the scanning so well that what used to take hours may now be accomplished in just under fifteen minutes. But this is not the key—your DNA is the basis for the print, while the scanning results are actually used for the finishing touches. The main thing is to capture the personality of the subject—your personality: the inner rainbow of the mind, your special light, whatever you want to call it. Recording and storing it in the mainframes that occupy the whole underground floor beneath us. Yottabytes and yottabytes of data—all that makes you, one, unique. And now, thanks to the algorithm for which this will be the final test, one more—doubled.”

Yes, she thought, entering a small room, the door slamming closed behind her, this algorithm wouldn’t exist without my husband.

She examined the memory foam mattress lifted upright at an angle on a shining hydraulic stand. She sighed and began to undress. At one point, as she neatly folded the black blouse and the tight pencil skirt Isaac loved so much, she thought that the director was probably watching her on the screen out there. She shrugged her shoulders and went to the mattress. The time for shyness had long passed. Soon all employees in this company would have access not only to the image of her naked body but also to all her memories and thoughts.  Isaac explained to her that she shouldn’t worry, that this database, the data that made her her  would not be accessed by anyone without the appropriate password, a password that only the director of Alter Ego and Isaac would have. She knew that for the commercial realization of this process one of the key conditions was the protection, safety, and inviolability of client data, but then again . . . how many people would be willing to risk exposing themselves to such an extent?

“We can start now,” she heard the director’s voice through the speaker. “Buckle up, please.”

She did. The hydraulics hissed, the color of the lights changed, the bed began to shift its incline, and Maria closed her eyes.

“Do you even know why you are doing this?”

Maria sat on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the promenade near the Sava River with Tamara, her best friend. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “a few weeks ago we had a bad fight.” “You and Isaac?”

“Of course. I wish I could have a fight with Alexander.” “Let me guess: you’ve been thinking about where your relationship is going?”

“Well, yes,” Maria answered. “I complained that he’s so closed off, that whenever I bring up my divorce from Alexander and our happy future life together, he just shuts down. I told him how much this was tearing me apart, how much it hurts me, that I completely give myself to him, that I sacrifice myself . . .”

“And?”

“Just imagine what he said! Wait, I’ll try to remember exactly how he put it . . .” She frowned slightly after taking a sip of her cocktail. “Something like this: What are you sacrificing? Your relationship with your husband? As far as I know, it was ruined before we met . . . Would—if the situation were different—you sacrifice your relationship with your child for us? He went straight for the jugular."

“That’s awful,” said Tamara with a smile. “But he’s your awful guy.”

Maria finished the last of her cocktails and lit up another cigarette. “You know, I shouldn’t have told you all this. About the experiment. I mean, it’s all still very top secret, a big project for Isaac’s company, but you’re the only one I can really trust…”

“Don’t worry,” her friend cut in, and waved the waitress over to order another round. “I always keep our secrets. What are your plans? How are you spending these fifteen days while waiting for . . . your replacement?”

Maria leaned back in her chair while Tamara ordered two more cocktails and waited for the waitress to walk away. “Isaac organized a trip. The first eight days, Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon. Then a week in the Côte d’Azur.”

Maria sat back and put out her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. After a minute or so, she sighed and said: “I would love it if Alexander found someone . . . if he cheated on me. To find out. I think it would change everything.”

“Let’s call her . . . Maria 2.0. All right?”

The director was smiling so broadly that Maria felt nauseous. Or was the cause of that nausea deeper? She felt un- comfortable as she watched her copy sitting silently on a chair in a laboratory glass box.

She was dressed in a simple white nightgown. Bare ankles and feet with nails painted in her favorite color, arms folded in her lap. The eyes of Maria 2.0 were closed, the face completely devoid of expression.

She felt her mouth drying. Somewhere in the back of her head, a hard-core panic was setting in. This was not like standing in front of a mirror. This was something completely different. Maria gulped and moistened her lips with her tongue.

“Her memory now includes your experiences from the last few days to avoid unwanted holes in memory,” the director continued breezily. “Everything we recorded this morning has been smoothly transferred to her personality.”

“Please . . . please,” Maria said, “I want to . . . I want to see it... without clothes.”

The director looked at her, raising his eyebrows. He nodded his head and typed something on the tablet. Maria 2.0 opened her eyes, slowly stood up, and pulled the nightgown over her head.

Maria didn’t pay attention to the fact that her body, even if it was just a copy, was exposed to the view of the director and other lab technicians. An irresistible curiosity now prompted her to walk around the naked woman standing in front of her, to carefully see her body from all sides. Suddenly she wanted to see herself as Isaac saw her. She was both excited and filled with anxiety.

She remembered yesterday’s conversation in bed, after having sex, when, half-jokingly, she said: " You’ve done all this just so you can have a threesome—with two of me. He’d wanted to answer her, to dissuade her, but he’d only dropped a kiss on her lips that were still hot from his gentle bites and said: You know, I didn’t even think about it, but now that you mention it . . . well—I think it would be hot to see you make love to yourself.

Would you do that for me?

Would she?

As she watched her replica, she felt a flurry of almost pleasurable anxiety. She used to fantasize about lesbian sex, she assumed that all women did, but usually in her threesome fantasies, where she and another woman (sometimes Tamara, sometimes another friend, or someone she didn’t know at all) shared the same lover, there would inevitably be those exciting, forbidden touches. But if the other woman was her, herself? She looked down the upright back of Maria 2.0, to her firm buttocks, sculpted muscles, golden skin with a few tiny spots, and thought about making love to herself. She knows exactly what turns her on; she feels it under her toes and under her tongue, the juices and the warmth that Isaac feels every time they sleep together.

She snapped out of it and cleared her throat. “May I . . . hear its . . . voice?” she asked.

“Of course.” The director’s face lit up, and again he typed something on the tablet. “Tell us your name.”

The creature before them looked at him for the first time and responded calmly: “Maria. Maria Vranješ.”

She couldn’t detect any difference in tone or inflection. It was creepy.

“Please . . . let it get dressed again.” “Of course, ma’am.”

After her double got dressed and sat down again, following the director’s instructions, he entered the tablet. Maria asked: “So, how are we going to do this?”

He nervously smiled and nodded to the device he held in his hand. “We have already entered the bulk of the instructions, including your usual schedule—going to yoga, pilates, massage and cosmetic treatments . . .”

“And sunbathing. Sunbathing is essential, I travel where there is a lot of sun; I’ll be tan, at least on my face, neck, and shoulders, I mustn’t forget that.”

“Yes, yes, certainly, you’ve already mentioned this to us. You have scheduled the appointments already, right? No worries, Maria 2.0 will not miss a single one.”

“I have to ask you, I read a little about . . . singularity. It seems to me that no one has figured out whether it’s possible if…”

“If artificial intelligence becomes real? Equal to a human’s?” He spread his arms and shrugged. “I think we are very, very far from it. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about that.”

“How can, you be sure?”

“It’s never happened before, and we’ve experimented a lot. Maria 2.0 will perfectly fulfill her role: she will live for you in your home, while you are where you really want to be. No one will notice the difference. When I turn on the autonomous mode, your specific wave front will enter the scene, what makes you unique, and she will react to every situation as you would. Did you bring things for her?”

Maria lifted a large paper bag containing her purse, wallet, makeup, car and house keys, clothes, socks, shoes, bracelet, necklace, and wristwatch, identical to those she had on her. The director took the bag from her, approached the chair with the silent Maria 2.0, and lowered her to the floor.

“Nevertheless . . .” “Yes?” Maria asked.

“In order to be completely safe, if something unforeseen happens—we will also program a safe word. Say something that you would remember in an instant, so it can serve as a kind of switch . . .”

“Mombasa,” she said without thinking. It was the name of a luxurious perfume, the first gift she’d received from Isaac. The perfume that she had not stopped using since then.

“Mombasa! Excellent.” The director typed the word on the tablet with pleasure. “Let’s try it?”

He swiped his fingers across the touch screen, and Maria 2.0 stood up, turned to her, looked her straight in the eyes, and stepped forward.

Maria felt a sudden shudder along her spine and gave him a look. The director nodded.

“Mombasa!” she exclaimed. Maria 2.0 immediately stopped.

“Perfect,” he said, and the duplicate, after the newly typed instructions, returned to her place. “We still need to agree on the logistics. Do you want her to go back to your apartment right now?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suggest putting her into autopilot mode when she gets in your car. And when you return . . .”

“You programmed her to come back here in fifteen days at this exact time?”

“Of course. It’s easiest that way. However, if for some rea- son her independent return is not possible, it may be best to replace her at your place. You have the safe word, so you can invite me to come, and I will arrange for her to be returned to the lab.”

Maria looked at her calm face on the woman who stood nearly a foot from her. “Then what will happen to her?” she asked.

“We’ll put her back,” he said indifferently. “Into her previous state?”

“Yes. We will dissolve her into proteins, water, minerals, everything that makes a human organism.”

Maria gulped. “And what about the . . . software?”

He looked a little surprised. “You mean what will happen to the scanned person who is now in our server? Mr. Lero ordered that we delete this information as soon as this fifteen-day trial is over. Except, of course, if you want to preserve it for some future opportunity”.

“All right,” Maria said. “I’ll tell you when I’ve made a decision about that. This is all too new and strange for me.”

“And for us too, Mrs. Vranješ,” the director said. “For us too.”

As Maria entered the elevator, her perfect copy slowly took out clothes from the bag and started to get dressed.

What is your name?

Maria. Maria Vranješ.

She frowned, leaning on the sink as the phantom words passed through her head again. She washed her cup and ash- tray and lay both on the drying rack.

She couldn’t explain the feeling of duplication that had followed her the past few days. It was there while she was driving to work, letting the autonomous system operate the vehicle through the central city streets. It was there while she worked in the office surrounded by colleagues she had known for more than ten years. It was there while she presented a concept for the next museum exhibition to her boss who always only half listened to her proposals and usually accepted them without objections. There was this feeling of duplication while she was spending time with her friends, during beauty treatments, at the hairdresser’s, yoga classes, in tanning booths. . . For some reason she couldn’t understand this artificial sunbathing in the least bits she had never, as far as she recalled, resorted to that dangerous method of getting a suntan.

It was as if she were in her own body and somewhere else, where she watched herself behave naturally, easily, spontaneously, in all these everyday situations. The situation at home wasn’t helping, either.

When did she and Alexander start drinking coffee separately, in separate rooms, in their own worlds? She was reluctant to think about it in more detail: she would always stop herself as if sitting in front of a closed door that she didn’t want to open out of fear of what was behind it. She saw him at home in the evenings, when he returned from work and continued to program until late into the night. She was reserved with him because she felt she should behave this way, not because she could remember the right reason. She looked at the apartment and the things they owned as though she was seeing them for the first time, even though she knew when they had bought most of the goods, decorations, paintings, or pieces of clothing and furniture—together or on their own. And the mirrors were another story: every time she looked at her reflection in her bedroom, bathroom, hallway, even in the corner of a windowpane, it was as if a shadow was present at the very edge, her shadow where it couldn’t possibly be. Soon, she began to avoid mirrors altogether and used them only when she absolutely needed to.

Then one night she opened the lower drawer in her bureau in the bedroom with a queen bed that she slept in by herself and pulled out a box.

It was made of wood, decorated with abstract patterns, lacquered, rather heavy. She set it close to her feet. She felt an irresistible desire to open it; she also felt fear. She stood there indecisively for a long time, aware that the sense of division, duplication, would continue to bite at her more and more mercilessly, even more insatiable if she didn’t do anything about it.

She lifted the lid.

Mina.

She closed her eyes and felt dizzy, thinking that she’d lose her balance.

The door opened. And behind it was a wave that swept across her whole being, filled up all the voids she had felt, uncovered everything buried deep under the sludge of nonsense.

Mina.

A pink rabbit with a ripped left ear, where the old yellowish filling was spilling out. Funny-Bunny, the one she slept with, the one who still smelled like her, Mina the baby. A green woolen vest that Maria’s mother knitted when Mina was six months old and a pair of socks of the same color, from the same wool. Photographs from the hospital, after childbirth; also from the hospital, four years later. A lock of hair in a decorative ring with a label and a date. She remembered when she’d cut that lock. Mina was almost two years old and just getting used to sleeping without a pacifier.

Eighteen months later, Mina had no hair. And she got used to sleeping with a plastic tube in her esophagus.

The pain was enormous, unbearable. Maria thought at one point that she wouldn’t be able to breathe again. The pain was gray, tough, and impenetrable, the pain was a wall that grew from tragedy, from the meaningless death, for them the greatest tragedy in the world. The wall grew, forcing her and her husband, the parents who had done nothing wrong, their child had been genetically cursed, dividing them forever and bringing silence to them heavier than any cry, sharper than any scream.

As she lowered the cover of the box, it seemed to her that the duplication was real, the one that she felt in the shadows of the mirror. Stronger than ever before, like Warhol’s pictures of runners on skates with discordant colors and contours. She rose and moved away from the box. She placed a fist in her mouth to swallow up the mute scream that leaped from her stomach: she’d realized that it had been years since she’d visited Mina’s grave. That she had found a solution to pretend that all of this had never happened. That she had cut her ties, as much as she could, with her own parents, with her father-in-law, who lived outside the city and whom she hadn’t seen even once since the funeral.

With Alexander.

She found him in his study in front of an open laptop.

She approached him silently, walking barefoot on the thick carpet, so that he didn’t have the chance to close the computer screen, to not let her see the photo of a skinny child with a bare scalp covered with blue veins, with big chestnut eyes and an absurdly happy smile, with a beloved pink bunny pressed against her cheek.

When he felt her presence behind him, he quickly reached his hand toward the laptop, as if he was ashamed of looking at that photograph himself, but his hand halted in the air halfway and loosely dropped. When he turned his face toward her, she saw that it was covered with tears. Just like hers.

Without a word, he embraced her and pressed his head into her waist. When his shoulders stopped shaking, she lowered her hand to his forehead and gently touched him.

How much time has passed since our last embrace? she wondered. How long since we last made love?

She took him by the hand and pulled him slightly toward her. For a moment it seemed that he’d resist, refuse, and return to the solitude of the photograph to which he had condemned himself, but no, he got up, accepted the grip of her hand, and followed her.

When the orgasm came, he seemed at once like a good old friend and someone completely new. And Warhol’s contours and colors seemed as if they had finally merged, made a complete, coherent image.

Now, after so much silence, it was time to talk.

“It all started with the three-dimensional printing of transplant organs,” Alexander said. She was silent, pressing her body against him.

“Top-level bioengineering. Saving lives. Help for people sentenced to death from kidney, liver, pancreas failure . . . Technology is evolving so fast and the results are here. And now this—the quantum leap forward, artificial intelligence and bio reconstruction merging—is fascinating and frightening. Do you know why?”

She shook her head, embracing him tightly.

“Because now we can, without any obstacles, save someone who is close to us, someone we love, as we save images or sounds, to create it again if we lose it, if ...” He went silent. It was too hard for him to continue.

She took a sharp breath and whispered, “All you’ve been doing for years, everything you’ve put into the codes and programs . . . it was all because of her? Because of our little girl?”

For several moments, he tried unsuccessfully to find his voice, and then managed to utter without tears, clearly, slowly, quietly, “Yes. But it was too late. Too late for her. For us.”

She was silent for a while, playing with the hairs on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. “You know,” she finally said, “we could try again.”

He held his breath and turned toward her, looked her in the eye. “Again?”

She leaned on her elbow. Their faces were only an inch apart. “Yes. With a new child. A new baby. It’s not too late.” She smiled briefly, nervously, as he observed her.

“Where did that come from?”

She shrugged. “I think that’s what we need if we want to stay together at all.”

“Would you be willing to go through everything again, everything we went through with Mina?”

She sighed. “It’s different now. Of course, our genetics are the same, and there’s still the risk. But things have changed. You changed them.”

Alexander rubbed his eyes and straightened himself against the pillow. He now had a glint in his eyes that she had not seen for years. “Yes . . . Now it would certainly be different. Lero deserves recognition for this, even though he only wants money, he’s done something revolutionary, something that will change the game from the get-go. Something that’ll make humankind redefine itself.”

She barely heard his last sentence. She felt as if he had punched her in her stomach. The name he’d uttered suddenly opened a new door, a door she hadn’t even known existed.

Lero. Isaac. Her husband’s employer. A polite and attentive lover. The man she’d been seeing for three years.

Teachers’ Colony.

Let’s call her . . . Maria 2.0.

I read a little about singularity. It seems to me that no one has figured out whether it’s possible if . . . I think we are very, very far from it.

The stream of words. Conversation fragments. Someone heard it, some just reproduced it from her own/others’ memory.

We’ll put her back . . . We will dissolve her into proteins, water, minerals, everything that makes a human organism.

Mombasa.

Was it just a moment or an eternity? She wasn’t sure how long this blinding white light lasted after the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. She became aware that Alexander was squeezing her hands hard, that he was trying to get her attention—to bring her back to reality—his face distorted from care and fear.

“Maria! Maria, what’s going on with you? You turned so pale, like you saw a ghost! Say something! Are you okay? Should I call an ambulance?”

Her eyes regained focus. He saw that she really saw him again and the spasm was passing, though despite her tan she was still white as a ghost. He relaxed the grip on her hands and gently lowered her back to bed.

“Are you okay?” Alexander repeated.

She answered him with a smile that looked more like another spasm as she licked her dry lips. She cleared her throat and peered deeply into his warm, worried eyes. “I have to . . . I need to tell you something.”

She felt like she was walking on the clouds.

She had just spent the most beautiful and happiest fifteen days of her life. The future looked bright and perfect.

They had enjoyed each other, absorbed the scents and tastes of Spain and Portugal, visited museums, indulged in culinary delights, enjoyed the luxury of expensive hotels, and made love, often relaxed, free of sorrow and guilt. Then, two days before their return, while having dinner in Nice, Isaac told her that he was ready if she wanted to do it.

Maria was enthusiastic. She didn’t say anything to anyone. She only messaged Tamara, hinting that she had great news. When they headed back, Isaac flew to Frankfurt for a three-day artificial intelligence conference, and she returned on a direct flight to Belgrade to a new, completely altered reality.

As she drove home from the airport, her telephone rang.

When she answered, she saw on the small screen the little rat face of that tiny man in the white coat the—director.

“Mrs. Vranješ?” “Yes?”

“There have been . . . ah . . . some changes.” “What changes? I don’t understand.”

The director avoided looking her in the eye. “Maria 2.0 didn’t return to the location. We assume there has been some kind of coding error.”

She felt a sudden rage, accompanied by fear. “And now what? Where is she?”

The little man shrugged. “We are not sure. We think she’s in the apartment. In your apartment. The GPS signal from the mobile device that you left for her indicates that she is there. But, of course, she could have left the phone and gone out without it.”

Maria tried to calm down. Where was Alexander now? The day before yesterday, Isaac had told her offhandedly, as if it were something irrelevant, Alexander had asked for and received several days off work so he could go visit his sick father. This worked in her favor, he wouldn’t be home when she faced her replacement.

“What are you suggesting?” she asked coldly and saw from the expression on the director’s face that his whole career was at risk.

“Hmm . . .” He coughed. “I . . . I hired an ambulance that belongs to a clinic that is part of Mr. Lero’s holdings. The vehicle will wait with the team discreetly in the side street near your building. If you find Maria 2.0 in the apartment, use the safe word and let me know. The team will get her here right away.”

“And if it’s not there?”

He shrugged again, an apologetic expression on his face. “We’ll wait till she’s back. And in the meantime, we’ll try to locate her some other way.”

Maria hung up without saying goodbye.

Ten minutes later, she unlocked the front door with a spare set of keys, entered the apartment, and put her suitcase down. It was getting dark outside, and the only light in the apartment came from the spacious living room. She paused at the door, looked inside, and saw the floor lamp turned on. And there, on the sofa, was a human shape.

When she got up the courage, Maria entered the room and turned on the overhead light. Maria 2.0 turned her face toward her, smiled, and stood up.

“You got a nice tan,” she said. “Much nicer than mine. I suppose everything went well? Was Isaac a generous lover, a man who would take care of you?”

Maria gulped, then panicked. This was totally wrong. This shouldn’t be happening. If the programmed return of her artificial copy went wrong—what else could have gone wrong? “You know,” continued the woman in front of her who was—was not her, “Alexander and I had a long, long talk.” She smiled, staring into Maria’s eyes. “And we agree on what is to be done.” Maria 2.0 took a step towards her. “Mom . . . Mombasa!” she shouted. “Mombasa!”

“You were interested in singularity. I’d have something to tell you about singularity. But we don’t have time for that.” Maria 2.0’s smile was now wider but didn’t reach the woman’s eyes.

“Mombasa, you bitch!” Maria yelled. “Momb…” She backed up against something and turned around. Her husband stood right in front of her and smiled, just like the creature she was trying to retreat from.

She felt a sting in her neck and looked at Alexander’s hand. She saw a plastic syringe full of clear liquid and a long glittering needle. She lifted her hand toward the spot where he’d injected her and stared at him with disbelief. Then she crashed onto the parquet floor.

The worst of it was that she was aware of everything.

Her eyes were open, she could see, she could hear what was going on, but she couldn’t move or feel anything while they removed her clothes and redressed her. She heard her phone ringing, how Maria 2.0 answered it. “Yes,” she confirmed to the director. “She is here. I used the safe word. You can come for her.”

Alexander looked at her for the last time before he left so the members of the director’s team wouldn’t notice him as they were coming out of the apartment. He peered at her with complete indifference, like she was an object, before he disappeared forever from her sight.

She didn’t feel someone else’s hands lifting her onto the hospital bed, but she heard voices that mumbled with an apology and greeted her copy. She watched the concrete ceiling of the hallway as they pushed her toward the elevator, then a clear night sky with the reflection of the ambulance’s rotating lights, before the view was replaced by the inside roof of the ambulance. The door closed. Her companions were silent while the vehicle moved with the sound of the siren. She tried to estimate how long it would take until they reached Teachers’ Colony, and then she gave up. She wondered how this new she, Maria 2.0, would explain to Isaac why she had changed her mind. And what would she tell Tamara and her other friends?

I will disappear and nobody will notice. Because, of course, I will still be here.

At some point, her pupils narrowed in the presence of the glaring light of the laboratory. The director’s face appeared before her.

“Perfectly faithful to the original,” he said with undisguised admiration. Maria heard his words, saw the bright light and his face, but she still couldn’t feel her own body, she couldn’t move, blink or speak.

“Are we following the plan?” someone asked outside of her field of vision, probably one of the technicians.

“Yes,” the director replied. “The object is to be recycled. We’ll look for an error in the software. There is certainly a trace somewhere, something that will indicate the moment when there was a deviation from the programmed behavior.” “Look,” said a technician, his finger touching her right eye, then immediately removing it, shining with moisture. “Tears,” the director said. “Unusual.”

While the technician pushed her on the stretcher toward a small room, he closed her eyelids. Now she had only hearing left, the crunch of rubber wheels on the floor, the distant buzzing of the appliances, and the quiet hum of the air conditioners and smell: a sweaty technician tilted over her, traces of the cigarette she had smoked on the way from the airport, and hints of the heavy, sweet smell of the expensive perfume that she had used that day, spraying it on her neck, behind her ears, on the insides of her wrists. If she could move her facial muscles, she would have smiled ironically to herself.

It was the perfume she hadn’t parted with in more than three years.

Mombasa.