Synchronisation

I swirled through the mist as consciousness claimed me. It felt nice here, soft and warm, without weight. The distant pinpricks along my skin felt like spider feet. My nerves began to respond and flickered like fireflies. Everything warmed. I crushed my eyes closed. The spider-sensation was biting now, and hot flames licked along my feet. A deep gurgle roiled around me. Then coolness met my face, and I opened my eyes. The workshop was fish-eyed by the tube’s plexiglass. The fluid was draining, and at the consoles, Biddy was flapping her hands. Her swearing was muffled by the double-walled insulation. She never swore, I thought through the brain-fog. The goo cleared, dripping down the sides, and the mesh that encased me retracted, drawing back into its sheaths, depositing me onto the floor. Then the tube opened, releasing a puff of vapour, and the recirculated air of the workshop filled my lungs.

I stepped out of the tube on shaky legs and reached for the over-bleached towel that hung next to the tube. It left red swirls on my skin as I scrubbed off the regen fluid. The tingling eased and my muscles began to respond more readily. The greasy goo had a dense, moist smell, like freshly turned earth after a rainstorm. I breathed it in deeply. A whirring from the edge of the workshop made me look up.

"Shit," said Biddy, still smacking the consoles. She swiped at the screens, not looking up, not looking at me. I watched as a tube slid out of the machine, the body in it curled and primed. Clarity creeped in like daylight, slowly, then flooding bright, almost painful.

"I messed up Claire," she said. I look from her to the tube moving towards the dock, and the body spasming as its mental pattern was loaded and mapped.

"I can see that.” I scrubbed the rest of the goo off through the stinging pins and needles.

"The engagement program bugged," she said, gesturing at the machine.

"And? It does that all the time." I'm watching the tube, wondering if we had been hacked. Had someone used our set up to download some mobster or something? I had heard that the Granters had just lost their cult leader somewhere in the undercity-ether. Were they trying to restart him? Biddy rubbed her face roughly, then keyed through the console screens. The tube came to a stop, the carrier pushed it into the dock, connecting to the network of wires and needles that would condition the muscles to functional levels in about an hour.

Biddy looked up from the screen. "I can't stop it."

"Well, that's a waste of a body," I said, shuffling to the weapon rack and sliding out my favourite Five-Seven and a suppressor muzzle. "Do you know who it’s downloading?" I asked, hefting the pistol in my hands, reacquainting my new body with its weight.

Biddy tapped at the screen, then the colour drained from her face.

"How bad?" My brain was clearing, focusing. It couldn't have been the Granters, too tech-phobic. Maybe the Haverlocks had broken in. That would be our luck, having them raid us to resurrect their 'immortal' god-boss.

Biddy shook her head. Her lower lip trembled.

"Worse?" I asked. I shuffled my new legs over to the console screen.

"No dummy, that's my download stats. Who's in that?" I said, pointing to the tube whose body was currently growing a shock of black hair.

“I don’t know what it means, but that is what is downloading into that body,” A beat passed. The pistol dangled from my fingers before it thunked to the ground. I grasped after it too late.

Biddy's wet eyes were strained at the edges, she'd been looking at this screen for a while.

"You said the engagement program bugged," I began.

Biddy wound her hands together, tightening them to a knot. "It seemed like a normal glitch, so I just reset it all. Then it showed two concurrent processes…" Biddy trailed off. She must have seen the recognition in my eyes. "I've tried everything I know to stop the process, tried to shut down the machines. It's all hardwired to the grid. We did that so they wouldn't know we were drawing from it…"

"It seemed like a smart idea at the time." It had been my smart idea. Tapping into the city's power network without the building infrastructure metering our load. It meant they couldn't trace our usage too. This workshop took a lot of power to run. I hadn't realised this would be the risk—no hard-power reset to save us this kind of wastage.

“What does it mean?” Biddy knotted and unknotted her hands.

"It makes no difference," I said. A bubble of regen liquid popped in my throat, and I heaved. I leaned into the tube, puking the last of the residue out.

“But if you kill her, and it’s your download, isn’t that like suicide?” she said.

"Just go," I said, ignoring the whimper in her voice. "You don't need to see this." I stooped to pick up the pistol, checking the magazine.

Biddy hovered.

"What?"

"You sure, you can… you know, kill her?"

"It. I can kill it. And yes, I'm sure," I said.

Biddy had always been an operator, not an agent. She had the luxury of moral conundrums. I only had time for loss management. The body would set us back fifty thousand, more, if the tube were damaged. It was the kind of loss that could wipe us out, send us to the Haverlocks for a loan we could never possibly repay. We'd be chewed up, and taken into their slum yards, bodies for their use. It would be only a little better than the Department of Bodily Affairs breaking in and smashing up our workshop, sending us to the floating prisons. There was no salvation out there.

Biddy sniffled. She knew all this, and still she asked if I had the balls to put a bullet in the body. I stretched and rolled my shoulders. Biddy opened her mouth, but no sound came out. It didn’t matter who was in the body, it was a glitch, a liability, I told myself. I went to the shelves and pulled a set of clothes down. I waited and listened as Biddy's sniffles retreated upstairs. The clothes were generic, elasta-forming and clean at least. Enough to settle into this new body. The synchronisation process could take hours for a new downloader, but I had done it enough that it usually took me forty minutes or so. I checked the console screen, just enough time left to get through it. I left the pistol next to the tube with its floating body. I didn't look at it, it wouldn't have been like a mirror, but I knew the face well enough. I didn't need to see that.

My synchronisation process had been passed on by my grandmother. I had thought it was just her version of the Tai Chi other, richer grandmothers would do down at the park. She must have suspected I wasn't headed for a corporate job. I didn’t have any siblings, so she had been my play companion while Mum worked.

"You're so strong," she told me. "So opinionated." I had thought these were all good things until school began to tell me otherwise. My strength wasn't the 'right' kind of strength. My opinions were never the 'right' opinions. But they felt right to me.

My grandmother was the body-replication researcher of her generation. Then the New Albion government had stopped all their cloning programs, there was no need for them, no reason to try to better a twenty per cent chance of success. The world had been crashing financially, and no one knew how to save it. They had banned her life's work. Her notebooks said she went to Singapore, then India. Russia had tried to lure her, but ultimately, she ended up on a research vessel that would circulate around the Antarctic, occasionally docking in New Albion. She would stay with us for a few weeks before heading off again. She never said if she was working on the ship. Mum said she was always working. Didn't know how to stop. I guess that ran in the family.

When she stayed with us, I remember skipping school to stay home with her. I would walk down the road, and hide behind the bus shelter, waiting for my mother to drive away. Then I would run back, bursting into the house. Gran would be out the back. On our small ledge of grass. Her blend of dance choreography, martial arts, and recitation of mantras had seemed a strange ritual. But they were soothing, I watched her each morning, and begrudgingly she showed me. She taught me how to breathe in and out through the movements. She showed me which ones were the pushing ones, and which ones pulled. She pinched bits of me that dipped or slipped out of alignment. It stuck in my head like a Christmas carol. She had shown me all her notebooks, the veiled history behind her scribbling. Then one time she went to sea and never returned. My mother wondered if the Russians finally got to her, but by then the world had settled into a collective stalemate, everyone just hoarding the resources they had. No one had the upper hand over anyone else. I knew she had not meant to come back because she left all her notebooks behind.

It had been my first download when I realised how my grandmother had conditioned me with the perfect synchronisation routine. I emerged from the tank, still gripping my stomach where I had been shot. Zeph had sniggered but held out the towel.

"You'll feel better once you sync up," he had said. He had taken me to the mats and started taking me through the movements. Squats, punches, stretches, with some drumming music playing. We were an hour in when I stopped him. My body was still tingling from memory-pain.

"I have a better way," I said. I knew it would work. Zeph hadn't believed me.

"You have to realign your entire mind and body, there are no shortcuts," he said. He was assuming I had watched all the vids on the topic, with avatars spruiking their latest and greatest sync meditation tracks. "It has to be physical and mental; it has to intersect."

"I know." I moved a few feet away and closed my eyes. I began the motions and movements as my grandmother had taught me. It took a few runs the first time, to remember all the breathing and foot positions, get the mantras aligned to the breaths. But by the end, Zeph was nodding. I returned to stillness, feeling full and present in the new body.

"Where'd you get that from?" he asked when I had finished.

"Just a family trick," I said. Zeph maybe suspected, but we didn't discuss family or pasts here. It wasn't our style. We had depended on each other, but only in the here and now. If no one shared their secrets, we had nothing to hold over each other, and nothing to make us vulnerable.

The tube puffed. I returned to stillness. The body stepping out of the tube reached for a towel. There wasn't one there. She looked around, hunched over, gripping the floor with her toes. I wondered if that was really how I looked coming out of the tubes. I picked up the pistol. Her eyes locked on mine as I raised it to her head. I stood to the side of the tube, the bullet would have cleaved straight through the skull, missing the rest of the setup. A flash of light crossed my eyes, searing, stinging. I squeezed.

What are you doing?

Her hand darted up, grabbed my forearm, pushing the pistol wide before it could bite. The shot fired into the tube, puncturing the tank, and making the last of the regen fluid fizz. Shit, that's twenty thou' gone, I thought. I pulled my hand back, down, breaking from her grip. She flipped her hand around, bringing both to the top of my arm and pushing down. The pistol pointed at the floor between us now, and she was pinning my arms, the way I would if someone were trying to shoot me. You're in my head, I thought. Twisting and testing her, testing my grip.

"Yes, I am," she said. Her voice, my voice, sent a shockwave through me. My heart fluttered. You have to die, I thought. Reminding myself that I'm me, that her body was just a duplicate, an expensive mistake. Zeph would be furious. I had to cut our losses.

But I/you don't want to. She thought to me. I tried to not think as I stepped back, dropping away from her pressure. She pre-empted me, stepped with me. We pivoted, her sliding her hands around my wrists, while I tried to circle the pistol around to her chest. She blocked, then we locked our arms together, bent and pointing to the ceiling.

"How is this even possible," I said. No one had reported anything like this happening before, even when people had doubled themselves. No one had ever developed spontaneous telepathy. Surely there would be some report if they had. I had never thought to search for psychic clones because the idea was simply absurd.

"No one, except us," she said, responding to my muddled thoughts. We were working against each other, I was pulling my arms up, and she was pushing them down. Even unsynchronised she was my match for strength. It was too much of a liability.

We're smart, she thought to me. I couldn't be sure if it was my imagination or hers then. The images muddle in my brain, some appearing unprompted, and some rising out of my deep depths of memory. Change my hair, make sure we wear different styles, different colours. It's so absurd that people would rather believe in long lost twins, rather than doubled clones. Was it my idea or hers? We locked eyes, and I see a strange glow around the edge of her iris. Bioluminescence, like algae, as our thoughts tumbled over each other. Already deviating though, shifting, becoming unique patterns. I wondered if my eyes were doing the same. A reflected image blurred in my mind. Yes. She sent her view of me. Where her irises glowed golden yellow, mine was silvery. I had avoided my reflection for so long, this reflection wasn't even a reflection. It was my face, flipped, how others saw it. I blinked hard, shifting the image away.

My double seemed to realise something then. She untwisted our arms and stepped back. My grip on the pistol was still firm, and I held it out, pointed at her forehead. She waited. I waited. It was the same thing. I have to, I thought. We can’t weather this kind of violation. We’ll be found out for sure. The Department of Bodily Affairs, their cameras, their agents are everywhere. They’d notice. We would both be hunted. If not for me, then I had to kill her for Biddy and Zeph, I couldn’t ask them to carry this truth. We'd never be able to trust anyone outside us. We would have to trust each other. Then again, did I have to? My double stood, at ease, her hands clasped behind her back waiting. Cocky, of course, she knew. I knew. My double leaned forward; hands pressed into thighs. She coughed, throwing up the last of her regen fluid.

"Guess you need to rename yourself," I said. I found my discarded towel, and though it was slightly damp, it would do. I handed it to her.

"We always wanted to do a rebrand," she said. I thought through all the ways I had re-imagined myself over the years. Between the two of us we could be the strong opinionated girl our grandmother had seen.

"From now on, we've got to treat you as separate," I said. Our minds tumbled through the same thoughts. It would take us some time to develop far enough from this moment for our brain patterns to be discernible. She walked to the shelf and slid out a clean set of clothes. I joined her on the mat. She had me snookered. I had snookered myself. My arms dipped, and I flicked the pistol’s safety on. A long shuddering breath left my body.

***

I wrote this story as the creative component of my Master's of Research Thesis in 2020.