The Woman Who Died a Lot

Landen said nothing and stared at me. I frowned. It wasn’t a bad feeling—quite the opposite, of course. But it was unusual, and that worried me. Even following the accident, I still wanted him in a “that would be nice if I weren’t feeling so shitty,” sort of way, but this was like being a teenager again—that sort of lusty yearning that is born of fresh discovery and young hearts bursting to be free.

“Say something,” I said.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything. ‘Me, too’ would be good for starters, rapidly followed by ‘Does the Finis Hotel rent rooms by the hour?’ To which the answer is ‘Yes, notorious for it.’”

Landen gave me a weary half smile.

“If I were to say, ‘Nothing should disturb . . .’” he asked, “what would you say in reply?”

“Nothing should disturb us . . . in the Finis?”

“No, it’s a password. The one we swapped on parting less than two hours ago.”

“Oh, yes. Nothing should disturb . . . that . . . No. I can’t remember.”

“And why do you think that might be?”

He said it in a sarcastic manner that he normally would never have used on me. Not unless we were having a serious, balls-out, door-slamming “I don’t know why I sodding married you” row. But then the penny dropped and I looked down. I wasn’t holding a walking stick, I felt no pain, and I was standing upright, without a stoop. No wonder Landen could tell I wasn’t the real one straightaway. I hadn’t walked this well for a while.

“Shit,” I muttered. “I’ve been replaced.” And I looked stupidly around to see if the real me might be somewhere close by. I wasn’t, so I looked back at Landen, who raised an eyebrow.

“This is a novel approach,” he said. “A Synthetic aware that it is a Synthetic?”

“Wait, wait,” I said, knowing only too well what we did with Synthetics. “This is different. I’m me. I’m conscious, I have some of the real me’s memories. Maybe not all of them, but some, and enough.”

“You say you have,” said Landen, placing his hand in the pocket where he kept his pistol, “but that’s what you’re programmed to think. Try to make a run for it and I’ll drop you where you stand. The first time we killed one of you, it was hard to explain—until the second one turned up.”

“That’s what Stig’s coming to do, isn’t it?”

“As divisional chief of SO-13, he’s legally empowered to destroy unlicensed nonevolutionary life-forms, and that’s what you are, my friend. But before we get to that, what do you want? Why does Goliath want to replace my wife with one of their own?”

“I don’t know. Or at least if I do know, it’s not readily apparent to me. You’d really kill me?”

“Without a second thought. Still want to make love to me?”

“In an odd kind of way, yes,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “But listen, if this is me and I am Thursday but weirdly in another body, you might actually kill me for real. And that might be it. This could be the final vessel for my consciousness.”

“Fascinating,” remarked Landen. “You must be a Mark VII or something. None of the others were so articulate.”

“Or knew they were Synthetics?”

“Right. But first things first: What did you do with the real Thursday? It’ll save a lot of time.”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know. They always know.”

“No, I really don’t. I have no recollection of being activated.”

“So you say,” said Landen suspiciously.

“No—to me I’m me.”

“In that case think back to what you can remember. I want my wife back.”

“Okay, okay. I was still in pain and had a stick when I left the library. It can only be between there and here.”

“Did you stop anywhere?”

I paused, deep in thought, trying to figure out when Real Me stopped being Real Me and started being Synthetic Me.

“Nope,” I said. “Nothing.”

“It good likeness,” said Stig, who had just arrived. “But why made no attempt to stoop and limp like real Thursday?”

“It’s much more impressive than that,” said Landen, referring to me as though I were the latest model of car or something. “It’s trying to tell me it has the real one’s consciousness and partial memory.”

Stig peered closer at me. “The craftsmanship different to others. More hurried. It thinks it is her?”

“It is me inside, Stig,” I said. “We met yesterday at the SpecOps office.”

“Anyone could know that. What did we speak of?”

I tried to think of the conversation I’d had with him.

“It’s kind of hazy,” I admitted, “as if the handover between Real Me and Synthetic Me isn’t complete. It’s like when you wake up and you’re not sure who you are or where you are, or even your own name—you know, how rock legends spend the first two hours of each day.”

“That sounds more like Thursday,” said Stig.

“Yes,” replied Landen. “None of them ever had a sense of humor before.”

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” asked Landen.

“I can remember more of the password. Nothing should disturb that condor . . . something. And, Stig, we talked about what I’d been doing that morning, and something about shampoo being in a different bottle.”

“Did that happen?” asked Landen.

“Yes.”