Oliver Jenson is washing up for work when his cough comes up wet. He spits red into the sink. The water quickly turns it pink, then clear. But it isn’t clear, not really. He looks up at the man in the mirror. Neither of them says anything.
A week of tests later he sits in an office with a heavy oak desk that seems to blur and vibrate under the word “cancer.” His doctor looks up shyly from his clipboard. He is halfway through explaining a surgery, but Oliver’s ears are hot and ringing too loudly to hear him. The surgery is dangerous, and it is not the kind of dangerous that insurance covers gladly. The doctor talks through the numbers, and Oliver watches them eat his savings, then his boat, then Mexico.
“There is a good chance you were exposed to carcinogenic compounds over a long period,” the doctor says. “You mentioned you work at a chemical plant. I would not be surprised if your employer bears some liability…”
Oliver is already shaking his head. “No. I signed away all of that when I took the job. I knew the risks. The hazard pay was the whole point. I figured if I made it fifteen years I’d have enough to retire on. Nothing fancy. A small boat. Work my way down the Mexican coast, fish, drop anchor wherever I liked.” He looks at his hands. “I had one year left. Almost made it.”
“I see. So you understood the risks.”
“I took a gamble and lost. I should have lived my life instead of saving up for one.”
Oliver’s lips curl into a contemptuous sneer at his own stupidity. He buries his face in his hands, ashamed. The doctor leans back and thinks for a moment, and when he speaks again his voice has changed registers, from condolence to presentation.
“With your comorbidities, this surgery is dangerous enough to qualify for duplication.”
Oliver looks up. “Duplication?”
“You may remember the stories a few years back, when the bio-duplicators were approved. There was quite a lot of noise about the regulations. They operate in one hundred hospitals worldwide, on a rotating schedule, and we have one arriving next week. The procedure itself is simple. You are scanned, a process very much like an MRI. Then a duplicate is printed, down to the atom. By law the entire thing is subsidized by the federal government, and by law it can only be offered for surgeries with a mortality rate above fifty percent. I can make the argument to the board that you qualify.”
“So it would be free? How does it work?”
“Your duplicate is kept under anesthesia for the duration, as a backup. If you die on the table, we learn from what went wrong, and your chances the second time improve considerably. The duplicate is then allowed to wake, and at that point he is, for all intents and purposes, you. He would not feel like a duplicate. He would have your memories up to the scan, nothing after. He would remember going under, and then being told his surgery was a success. That he is not physically the same body is irrelevant, since the original is dead and gone. He would be discharged under your full legal identity.”
Oliver does not find any of this as reassuring as the doctor seems to expect. The doctor tries again.
“Think of it this way. You go to sleep, and there become two of you. Each wakes with the same continuity of self. Whichever one opens his eyes would feel like the same man who closed them.”
“And if the first surgery goes fine? What happens to the duplicate then?”
“In that case the same surgery is performed on the duplicate, to test new methods, or to train less experienced staff. Regardless of how that goes, the duplicate is never permitted to regain consciousness. The hospital is bound by law to euthanize any redundant duplicate within twenty-four hours of printing, and the duplicate may not be conscious at any moment of that time. Nobody wants to be woken up to be told they are going to die.”
Oliver stares at the floor. The doctor’s voice finds its sympathetic register again.
“Remember, your duplicate will never experience consciousness. He will never know he existed. There are groups who argue that some version of awareness persists in the anesthetic dream state, that in some small way a thinking person dies, and that is why the process is regulated the way it is. Why it is reserved for surgeries like yours. You are actually quite lucky. Your case sits just above the threshold. High enough to qualify, low enough that with two tries, success is close to guaranteed. And the subsidy exists precisely so that no one has a financial reason to bend the rules.”
“I don’t know. The whole thing sounds… strange. I just don’t know.”
“Listen. You need a dangerous surgery you cannot afford, and you are looking at an opportunity to make it far less dangerous and free of cost. Honestly, the decision is simple.”
The scanner is a white tube that hums at a frequency he can feel in his molars. They run a line into his arm, and a nurse with kind eyes tells him to count backward from ten. He gets to seven.
He dreams he is swimming through black water. Far off hangs a pinpoint of light, and he swims for it, and the light refuses to get closer in the way of lights in dreams. His lungs empty. He claws at the black water, thrashing, and somewhere very far away his arm strikes something small and hard, and the dream lets go of him.
Oliver wakes in a room he does not recognize, with a paper gown on his body and glue in his thoughts. An IV line hangs loose at his side, dripping quietly onto the floor tiles. He lies still and waits for someone to come tell him the surgery has gone well. His mouth is dry. Out in the hallway, two nurses are talking.
“Looks like the Jenson surgery was a success. They’re stitching him up now. You should go ahead and prep his duplicate for the practice surgery.”
“Oh, actually, the visiting surgeon called. Scheduling conflict. He won’t make it in time.”
“What a shame. Then the duplicate is just going to go to waste. All right, I’ll euthanize him now and take him down to the morgue.”
Rubber soles squeak off down the corridor. Oliver lies in the bed doing arithmetic that will not come out any other way. He remembers the tube. He remembers getting to seven. The doctor’s voice comes back to him with terrible precision: he would remember going under, and then being told his surgery was a success. Nobody has told him anything.
The door opens. A nurse comes in with her back to him, busy at a steel cart, and fills a syringe with a clear liquid, talking to herself while she works.
“What a waste of a perfectly good duplicate. When I was interning they drilled into us what a privilege it was to get to practice on one. Now they’re just throwing them away…”
She turns and finds him sitting up, looking at her. Her eyes go wide, and her scream rings briefly in the air before being muffled by his hand over her mouth, her back against the wall. He is stronger than she is. He looks around the room, sees his IV dripping into a puddle, and pushes the needle into her arm. She fights him through muffled sounds that break his heart, then softens, then goes slack in his arms.
He lays her in the bed under the covers. He searches her pockets and finds her keys. He stands straight, takes a deep breath. A man twenty minutes into his existence decides who he is going to be. Then he walks out of the hospital room. He tries to look calm as he walks past reception. His hospital gown flares open in the back and he tries to casually press it down to cover his backside. The receptionist glances up at him as he presses the elevator button. He notices her and smiles awkwardly.
The doors open on a doctor riding down with a clipboard, who glances up, finger hovering over the buttons.
“Floor?”
“Garage.”
The doctor presses it, then takes in the bare feet, the gown, the goosebumps.
“Left my wallet in the car,” Oliver says. “They won’t process me without my insurance card. If only somebody would invent a cure for bureaucracy.”
The doctor sighs at his clipboard. “Amen to that.”
In the garage Oliver jogs down rows of cars pressing the fob until a car chirps in response. He gets in and drives out, watching the rearview the whole way, so distracted he does not notice he has run a stop sign as another car is passing. He slams the brakes and screams.
Oliver sits up in his hospital bed. His doctor is standing beside him, reviewing the chart.
“Oh good, you’re awake.”
The doctor motions at someone through the frosted glass on the other side of the room. A gruff-looking man with a severe face walks in. His presence makes the doctor slightly uncomfortable. The doctor turns toward Oliver and smiles reassuringly.
“Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is the operation was a complete success. We were able to cut out all the cancer and the drugs should take care of the rest.”
“The bad news is…”
He glances at the severe-looking man, who nods slightly.
“It appears your duplicate is no longer on the premises.”
“What!?”
“Apparently he woke during your surgery, drugged a nurse, and escaped.”
“What does this mean? Where is he now?”
“We don’t know. We were hoping you could help us find him. With his help.”
The severe man steps forward. Oliver sizes him up.
“Who are you?”
“This is Ash. He has been assigned to help you find your duplicate.”
“Assigned?”
“I’m someone powerful people trust to clean up messes like this.”
Ash goes on. “Understand the position. The duplication program survives on the public believing one sentence: no duplicate has ever opened its eyes. That sentence has been true for eleven years. As of six hours ago it is a lie, and if it gets out, it will cause problems for people who hate problems. With your cooperation we find him quietly, and interested parties will see to it that you are generously compensated. There are papers you can sign to that effect.”
“What happens to him when you find him?”
“Legally he does not exist. He will be euthanized on recovery, as he should have been today.”
“So he could be anywhere right now?”
“Well. He’s you. Where would you be right now?”
Oliver stares, his mind reeling.
At sunset, in the back corner of a strip-mall parking lot, a sun-faded hatchback with a crumpled front end sits facing a Salvation Army donation drop. The man inside has been there for two hours, watching people arrive with the discarded halves of their lives. When a woman deposits a swollen trash bag and drives off, he pulls up, hops out barefoot in his paper gown, throws the bag in the back seat, and is gone inside of eight seconds.
He changes on a service road behind a shuttered car wash, into pleated slacks two sizes big and a t-shirt from a fun run he has never run. He spends the night in the hatchback with the seat back, not sleeping, listening to the engine tick as it cools, doing inventory. He has no name he can use, no papers, a stolen car that will be reported by morning. The scan copied everything. The tumor has a duplicate too.
What he has is twenty dollars in nurse’s lunch money, everything Oliver Jenson knows, a tumor eating him alive, and a day to a year left before one or the other kills him. He watches the parking lot lights burn against the windshield and makes the only plan the arithmetic allows. If the time is going to be short, it is going to be his.
In the morning he walks into a public library with a sun-bleached hat pulled low, Daddy’s Girl in satin cursive across the front, and sits at a computer station. Oliver logs into his email and writes to a name he has typed a thousand times in his head and never once in eight years. Is she free for lunch? She replies in four minutes, with two exclamation points, and says she would love to.
Then he logs into the bank, finds her name in the old transfer history, and moves several thousand dollars into her account, with a second email asking her to withdraw it in cash and bring it along. He is apologetic about the strangeness. He blames the bank.
There is one more piece of business, and it takes him the better part of an hour, working steadily down a list only he could have written.
She is already at the café when he gets there, at a small outdoor table, visibly pregnant, prettier than the eight-year-old picture of her he has been keeping behind his eyes. She waves him over beaming and hugs him, and he holds on maybe a half second too long. On the table she slides him a fat envelope like a co-conspirator, delighted with the intrigue.
“Oliver, what is going on?”
“Oh. Um. I’m fine, it’s a whole stupid thing. I lost my wallet on the subway, debit card, ID, everything. And it turns out the bank won’t let you touch your own money in person without an ID, so I had to cancel the cards over the phone, and now I’m switching banks entirely, out of spite.” He catches the concern arriving on her face and hurries past it. “It’s really not a big deal. I do everything online anyway. It’s just that I’m going on a trip and needed the cash before the new cards come.”
“Where are you going?”
He is reaching for the answer when the café speakers change songs, and her whole face lights up before he has even placed it. “I’ll Take Anything.” Blake Babies. She grabs his wrist.
“Remember how we used to skip school to listen to this on your Walkman? Having to wait for the tape to rewind so we could play it again, over and over. Oh my god, what are the odds this would be playing, we haven’t sat down together in eight years.”
She closes her eyes and sways a little, savoring it, one hand on her belly, unembarrassed the way she has always been unembarrassed. He watches her the way you watch the last of something. When she opens her eyes she catches him at it, and catches the ill-fitting clothes, and the way he keeps glancing at the street.
“Oliver. Be honest with me. Is something wrong? Do you need help?”
He has a lie prepared. He sets it down.
“There is, actually. I’m dying. Cancer. This trip is going to be my last one.”
Her face breaks with sympathy, her hand finds his shaking under the table. He looks away, ashamed.
“I don’t want you worrying about me, that’s the one thing I ask. And if you ever see me again, I’ll probably pretend I never told you this, so let me say it now.” He turns his hand over and holds hers. “I have loved you since the first day of Mrs. Jenkins’ third grade class. I was an idiot when we were together. You deserved better, and I hope you get every single thing you ever wanted.”
The song plays. He is one day old, and of all the things a man could do with the first afternoon of his life, he has chosen this one, the confession his duplicate has owned for eight years and never spent. It is easy. That is the strange part. It costs nothing at all, once the future is off the table.
He kisses her on the cheek, tells her the baby is lucky, and walks away down the street. He does not look back. He can’t.
That night he walks one slow lap around his block, and finds the watcher on the first pass. Dark sedan on the cross street, third space back from the corner, nose out, the one spot with a clean line on the building’s front door. He knows the spot because it is the spot he would have picked. He is, he reflects, the one fugitive on earth whose pursuers have a perfect informant. But if he keeps on his toes, that symmetry can just as easily cut in his favor.
So he goes in the way the sedan cannot see, down the alley, behind the building, where a concrete planter has been slowly dying under the fire escape for years. He tips it and slides out the spare key, his spare key, hidden by his own hand, and lets himself in the service door.
The apartment is dark and smells like home, which stops Oliver in the doorway longer than any alarm would have. He moves through it without a light. In the kitchen he slides the big knife from the block, and stands in the bedroom doorway, and looks at his duplicate asleep in his bed, snoring in the familiar way, one arm thrown over the empty half.
He crosses the room and stands over him, knife raised. Here is the whole problem lying on its back with its mouth open. As long as this man breathes, the world has no vacancy for an Oliver Jenson. They will hunt him with this man’s memories, this man’s instincts, this man’s guesses, and every one of them will be right. One stroke makes the world simple. Dead, buried under his own name in a week, and the bed, the ex, the pension, his whole life, warm and available, one flight of stairs from where the car is parked.
His face twitches in hesitation, before he lowers the knife silently to his side and exhales.
He takes the phone from the nightstand. He puts the knife back in the block. From the dresser he takes the envelope of cash under the socks. From the desk drawer, the passport. From the bowl by the door, the wallet and the car keys, and he is down the stairs and into the car and rolling before the sedan’s wipers have finished their next pass.
Across the street, Ash watches Oliver’s car pull out and drive off into the rain, and frowns, and types.
Where are you going. You need to stay home in case he shows.
At the first red light, the phone buzzes in the cupholder. He reads it and types back with one thumb.
Drugstore. Diarrhea medicine. Don’t ask.
In the sedan, Ash reads it and sets the phone on the dash. He waits. He texts again. Nothing. He checks his gun and crosses the street through the rain.
He pushes open the apartment door with the barrel of the gun. Dark rooms, bed empty, covers thrown. A toilet flushes. He puts the front sight on the bathroom door, and when it opens, the man in the pajamas screams and drops a glass of water.
“Down. On the ground. Hands behind your head.”
“It’s me! It’s me, don’t shoot, it’s me!”
“That,” Ash says, “is the problem.” He comes around behind the kneeling man. “What color is the interior of my car?”
“What? Your car? I don’t, what…”
“The interior of my car, or I put one through the back of your head.”
“Wait, wait, okay, just…”
The safety comes off behind his ear, a small noise that couldn’t be louder.
“Red! It’s red! Black outside, red inside. Red!”
Ash holsters the gun and pulls Oliver up to his feet.
“Where are your car keys?”
Oliver stands confused for a beat, then understands everything at once, and lunges for the bowl by the door and finds it empty. The sock drawer comes out entirely and empties onto the floor, and he churns the socks like a man drowning in them. No envelope. He goes for the desk. No passport.
“He robbed me. He was here, he was in here, while I…” The sentence finds nowhere to go. He sits down at the computer instead, and the bank rejects his password, and then his email rejects his password. The recovery codes go to a phone he doesn’t have, speeding away in a car that is no longer his. He sits silently for a moment in the dim blue light of his computer screen, trying not to feel like he is going invisible. He takes a moment to steady his thoughts. He was here. But not just in his bedroom. He had walked through all the doors of his life, and changed all the locks.
“Get dressed,” Ash says. “We’re going.”
“I know where he’s heading. Give me one second.” Oliver is typing an address into the browser. “I lose my phone constantly, so it reports its location to a website. He’s carrying it.”
The map comes up. The flag sits at the airport, and while they watch, it does not move.
Ash looks at it for two seconds. “It’s in a trash can. He dumped it. That’s nothing.”
Oliver stares at the little flag and feels the strange doubled feeling that will become his whole profession: irritation at the loss, and underneath it, unwilled, a little nod. Correct. That is what we would do.
Ash is already moving him out the door, then stops in the doorway, goes back to the kitchen, and comes out with the big knife and a dish towel.
“Hold out your hand.”
“Why?”
Ash takes the hand, turns it palm up, and draws the blade across it in one short professional stroke. Oliver howls. Ash wraps the towel around the palm and ties it off tight.
“What is wrong with you?!”
“I don’t want any more mix-ups when we find him.”
Ash drags Oliver after him down the stairwell, Oliver cradling his bleeding hand, muttering. “You could have just used a Sharpie.”
“Ink washes off.”
At the airport they stand under the departures board, Ash scanning the terminal exits by professional habit, Oliver scanning the destinations like a man reading his own diary. Ash is on his phone with somebody terse.
“No descriptors that hold up. He looks exactly like the cooperating asset, that’s the whole… yes. I know. Then check the manifests.” He lowers the phone. “Without the phone we have nothing until he surfaces. He could be on any of these.”
“He’s not on any of these. He’s on that one.”
Oliver points at the board. The 11:40 to Mexico City, already pushed back from the gate.
Ash looks at the board, then at him. “Mexico City.”
“He’s flying into Mexico City, and then he’s going east. A little fishing town in the Yucatán called Chelem.”
“How could you know that?”
“Because I’ve been dreaming about it for fifteen years.”
Ash holds his eyes for a moment, then lifts the phone again. “Check the 11:40 to Mexico City. He’s traveling as Oliver Jenson.” A pause. “Yes. On the asset’s passport. Which is technically his face.” Another pause, longer. “I know. Nobody wrote the regulation because nobody ever needed it. Welcome to the first day of the rest of the program.”
They land in Mexico City the next morning on a jet with no livery, and are met on the tarmac by a black car. Ash listens to his phone and relays it in pieces. A rental agency camera near the airport has tripped the recognition net. Economy sedan, paid cash, heading east on the toll road. His superiors have confirmed the match at a confidence level Ash declines to translate.
“East,” Ash says. “Toward your little town.”
Oliver watches the city thin to smears of country streaking past the tinted glass, each bump in the road closing the distance to the town he spent fifteen years escaping to in his mind. Now he is being brought there for free so he can kill the only version of himself who had the courage to escape there for real.
Sunrise on flat water. A small boat, alone against a backdrop of blue. Paint mostly chipped off, rigging patched, riding at anchor off a beach with no name worth printing. The man fishing off the stern has a three-week beard, hair turned rust-brown from a pharmacy box, a burn peeling on his nose. He bought the boat with cash from a man in Progreso who counted the money twice and asked nothing, and he has anchored it here precisely because here is nowhere, because every cove he spent fifteen years wanting is a cove the other one spent fifteen years wanting, and wanting things is now the most dangerous thing he can do. He is learning to love the adjacent. The almost. The water one bay over from the dream.
The line goes taut and he brings in a silver fish the length of his forearm, and laughs out loud at it, alone, the way you laugh when nobody has heard your voice in days. The sun comes up the rest of the way. It is, by any accounting, the best morning of Oliver’s life, and he is the only man alive equipped to know exactly how sad that is.
Then his eyes go wide, and the coughing folds him over the gunwale, a long ratcheting fit that leaves him gripping the rail. He looks down at his hand. Bright red, in the new light.
He rinses it over the side and sits a while. The water turns it pink, then clear. But it isn’t clear, not really.
Oliver sits in a café in a town near the coast, tanned the even brown of a man who lives outdoors on somebody else’s money, hair grown out and tied back, working through a plate of enchiladas suizas with real commitment. His phone rings and he answers it without stopping.
“Yeah. Still nothing. Any luck in Mérida?” He listens, chewing. “Okay. I know. I keep telling you people, he wouldn’t leave this coast. He’s me. You’ll see.” He listens a moment more. “Yep. Bye.”
The hunt has become his life the way any job does, one expense report at a time. In the first months he worked it like penance: sat over marked-up maps asking where he wanted to go, and then sending men to arrest the want. Every lead was a confession. He gave Ash’s people the anchorages he had circled in fifteen years of daydreams, the marinas, the towns with cheap moorage and no questions, and the net came back empty every time. Privately, somewhere inside himself, there was a small room where he was glad. A room that never had a lock on it. They both moved through it silently, pretending not to see each other. His duplicate was avoiding every place they both loved. Which meant he knew. They were playing the same game from both sides of the board, each man betting on how well he knew himself, and a year of stalemate meant they were both right.
What Oliver does not put in any report is the other thing. That he has been issued, at government expense, the life he saved fifteen years for. Coastal town, no schedule, per diem. Every sunset is another chance to enjoy a half life lived for two. And another chance to get the number of Coronas just right, so he does not have to think of the cost to himself.
In the far corner of the café, an acoustic trio has been softly working through American radio hits of a certain vintage all evening, and Oliver has not once looked up. Now he stops, fork in the air.
They are playing “I’ll Take Anything.”
Nobody covers that song. It charted nowhere. It belongs to one old album, and to a girl swaying at a café table with her eyes closed, waiting for a tape to rewind. Oliver sets the fork down and sits very still, and the doubled feeling comes over him stronger than it ever has, because he can feel the pull of the song from both directions at once, and one of the directions is not his.
A waiter comes to refill his water. Oliver catches his sleeve.
“This band. Do they play here a lot?”
“Just Friday nights, señor.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
He gets up, drops bills on the table, and walks out front. The street is ordinary. He stands listening to the song bleed faintly through the wall, and then he walks around back, into the alley behind the kitchen, where the music comes through better, and stops.
Against the wall, in the spill of a kitchen vent, what he has taken for a pile of rags is a man. Sitting with his back to the wall, eyes closed.
Oliver takes out the gun in an unpracticed, awkward motion and points it, his voice flat and hollow.
“Okay. It’s over.”
This is not his face. It is shattered and ruined. The crumpled man opens his eyes slowly, struggling to focus. But then they do focus. The strangers stare at one another across the barrel of a gun.
Then something snaps inside the man like a spring, and he is up, faster than a dying man has any right to be, shuffling hard across the lot and into the road. Horns. A truck’s brakes shrieking. He drops off the far side of the road into the market alley below, careening down off boxes of tackle and crates of ice, through the winding chute of stalls toward the harbor, and Oliver runs after him, shouting his own name.
At the water’s edge his duplicate does not slow down. He goes in flat and swimming, straight at the big floating dock platform anchored off the quay, and under it. Oliver arrives and stands at the edge, seeing it whole: under the platform to the far basin, where the packed row of skiffs means a pursuer has to backtrack to the road, around, over, three minutes at least. A drowning man’s move. A perfect move, provided the swimmer’s lungs are the lungs of a year ago.
The ripples thin out. All he has to do is walk back up to the road. The sea will hand over a body inside a day. The man looks nothing like him. Nobody is going to check the dental records of a homeless bum who drowned in the harbor. The thought arrives fully formed, useful, and he is ashamed of how fast he reached for it.
He kicks off his shoes, sets the gun on top of them, and dives in.
Under the platform his duplicate is swimming through black water. Far off hangs a slit of light, and he swims for it, and the light refuses to get closer. His lungs empty. He claws at the black water, thrashing, and the cough has already taken the air, and somewhere very close an arm goes around him.
Oliver hauls him along the barnacled edge and out into the light, up onto the concrete of the harbor. He kneels over the body and pumps the chest, breathing into the mouth, breathing into his own mouth, until the body convulses and brings up water and rolls onto the side, gasping like a landed fish.
Oliver sits back on his heels and lets his heart slow.
Beside him, his duplicate recovers his breath in ragged installments. His eyes find the gun sitting on the shoes an arm’s length away. He reaches for it, but the exhausted limb only weakly wanders off course and paws the concrete, twice, and gives out, and Oliver watches the whole doomed attempt with indignant sympathy that quickly settles into sadness before leaning over and picking up the gun and pointing it at the man he has just saved.
His duplicate looks at the barrel. Then he closes his eyes, and lays his head back on the concrete, resigned, almost comfortable, a man for whom death has lost the element of surprise.
Oliver’s face twitches, once.
The phone rings in his soaked pocket. He keeps the gun where it is and answers it, dripping, eyes fixed on his duplicate.
“Yeah. No, still no sign of him.” A pause. “Thought I had a lead tonight. It didn’t pan out.” He listens. “Sure. Okay. Will do.”
He hangs up, and lowers the gun, and sets the safety.
His duplicate opens one eye. They look at each other a long moment, two men soaked through on the edge of a harbor, wearing the same face a year apart, and there is nothing to say that the other has not already thought, and both of them arrive at the same place at the same time, the way they always will. A slow sardonic smile spreads across both faces at once, and they begin, weakly, to laugh.
He gets his duplicate up the back stairs of his hotel with an arm over his shoulder, telling the one man they pass that his brother cannot hold his liquor. In the room he runs the bath and eases him into it, and the water goes gray, and he drains it and fills it again. He cuts the matted hair short with the scissors on his multitool. He dresses the sores from the first-aid kit, feeds him soup from the restaurant downstairs and then, when it stays down, everything else on the menu, and puts him in the bed, where his duplicate sleeps fourteen hours without moving, the first sleep in a year with both eyes shut.
In the morning they have breakfast on the little balcony like two retired men, which in a sense they are. Oliver packs a travel bag: clothes, the first-aid kit, a folded chart. He talks while he packs, in the low practical voice of a man committing a crime he has thought all the way through.
“I don’t think they suspect anything, but don’t bet on it. Go straight to the boat and get on the water today. Cuba first, then decide. Stay out of the cities. Stay away from the corporate fuel docks, they run the same recognition net that caught you at the rental. Your face is the one thing you can’t change, so keep it off cameras. They are never going to stop looking. Don’t let your guard down.”
He pulls a thick envelope from the room safe and pushes it deep into the bag.
“I’ve been banking most of my per diem for a year. It should be enough to get you set up over there, and there’s a man in Havana who sells names. Buy a good one.”
“What are you going to do?” his duplicate says.
“What else. I have to go back to work.”
His duplicate looks at him with a mixture of grief and sympathy. Oliver zips the bag.
“It’s okay. You get to live our dream. Not quite the way we planned it.” He hands the bag over. “But it makes me feel good, knowing you’re out there somewhere.”
“Out there somewhere, being hunted.”
“Hunted, but free.” Oliver walks him to the door and stops him there, hand on his shoulder, and for a moment neither man is sure which of them is leaving. “Be careful. But don’t forget to have fun. For both of us.”
Winter. A row of gray lockers in a fluorescent room, end of shift. Oliver, pale again, hair cut, clean-shaven, hangs up his coveralls and sits a moment on the bench with the particular stillness of a man whose body has been at a chemical plant for ten hours. The compensation has come through and gone quietly into an account he does not touch. The searches are winding down, the file going cold, the men in suits calling less. There has been no confirmed sighting in months. He buttons his street clothes slowly and reaches to swing the locker shut, and stops.
Taped inside the door is a photograph he cut from a travel magazine years ago, softened at the corners from handling. A Mexican beach. Sailboats standing off the shore, small and white and free on the enormous water.
He looks at it a while. Somewhere out on the curve of the world, past the reach of the fluorescent light and the net of cameras and the men who hate problems, is a boat that’s his.
He smiles, and closes the locker, and he does not look so tired anymore.
Late afternoon, Athens. In a hospital office with a heavy desk, a doctor looks over a folder of test results and delivers the news in the somber tone the news deserves. The results are back, and he regrets them. The cancer is far advanced. Frankly he is surprised the gentleman is walking around at all. Surgery might still be possible, but it would have to be soon, and he will not pretend it is anything but dangerous.
“I know how it sounds,” the doctor says, finding a brighter register. “But you are actually quite fortunate. A surgery this dangerous qualifies for duplication, fully subsidized, and this hospital has just entered the rotation. The machinery was installed last week, you would be among our very first. I’m not sure how familiar you are with the process. It’s really quite simple. First you are scanned…”
The man across the desk has come in under a name bought for four hundred dollars in Havana, and has signed all the forms in it with a steady hand. Walking into a hospital on the recognition net is a coin flip, but dying men do not get better odds, and he stopped being afraid of coin flips some time ago. He interrupts, smiling.
“I’m familiar with the process, and I agree to all the conditions. I’d like to begin as soon as possible. I have only one request.”
The doctor looks up from the folder, surprised. “And what would that be?”
“Make sure my duplicate is properly anesthetized. I don’t want any surprises.”
“Duplicate” is one of eight stories in Dreams of Earth. Stories that make you question.
You would not feel like the copy.
Neither will the copy.
If you would like to read the rest, please email me at ali@artofali.com.