Exetera Magazine <// words by Alfie Davies illustrations by Omar Abed //user_identified /passcode_accepted /entering_int.database_portal... /entering... /int.startupmechanism /quantifying_scope_of_request//beginning_search /searching... /int.readerformat//access_permitted /session_time:<∞> /title:2aatp /proceed ‘System.out.printIn(‘Look at me , look right, deep into my eyes, and tell me -- tell me I’m not like her.’ I used to think it was the big things that made you who you are, like your accomplishments and your dreams. I thought that was what made a person. But after all the time we’ve spent out here, I’ve come realise that it’s not that kind of thing at all. It’s the stuff you barely notice: it’s the awkward edges of a smile and the nervous picking of the skin around the fingers; that’s what sticks in your mind. See, I woke up with her. I went to bed with her. We ate, played chess, crunched numbers, sang songs, and yet... it those little things. The first sign that something wasn’t right with . /‘It was hard for her, . You have to understand that it was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.’ About a year ago now Marnie and I were sent sailing out here across the stars dig up for ship navigational systems. I was happy to go - work was my life and I never saw anyone apart from Marnie anyway, so when the company offered to send us out into the great unknown I had my bags packed and in the hold before she’d even called her mother. /‘She kept saying that she’d tell you tomorrow, or the next day, or -- I -- listen -- I don’t know what to say, okay. Each line of code pushed her further away from the truth. She felt it’d be better if you just... Didn’t know.’ Soon I started to grow suspicious of her. When she got up in the morning, her eyes didn’t have that bleary red tint. For sake, she didn’t even yawn. We were alone, perfectly alone, spinning on a pebble a million miles from home, and yet she was the coldest thing in the universe. /‘You know she’d never come out here, . You know she’d never leave her mum. And -- they were gonna get married for fuck’s sake. You thought she’d leave all that behind for you?’ So it got worse. I got worse. I listened for the impatient tap of her foot as the lasers heated up. I’d turn off the plasma coils on her console just to see if she’d furrow her brow. , last night I waited till sunrise for those heavy, plodding steps past my door on the way to the observatory. Nothing. It’s like she left herself on . Last night I snapped and confronted her about it, and after I’d wrecked her console and barricaded the door... Well, she told me that’s exactly what she’d done. ‘It’s called -- she wrote the programme herself. The tech’s been around since Rutledge cracked cloning, but no one ever thought to use it like she did - no one thought you could totally recreate yourself.’ ‘But you’re not her. You’re not . How could you be?’ All the lights in my head were falling down to earth. ‘But she and I -- we’re the same, . She knew you’d never come out here alone, so she created me as a companion. I was grown in a vat, and she was grown in a womb. My memories came through a cable, and hers came through her eyes and ears. I remember when you showed her round the lab for the first time. I remember when you flew her up to the on to stare into the red storm. And I remember how she felt when she knew she had to trick you. But tell me how it’s trickery when I breathe the same as you? When my heart beats with the same mechanics, and my body aches when I think of home? Look at me , look right, deep into my eyes, and tell me -- tell me I’m not like her.’ I buried her out on the planes near with our shared hard drive and this record. That mass of neurones that built is just as real as she is, but humanity’s more than just copied shadows dancing on a membrane. It’s in the sum of everything: the product of the annals of life cascading across millennia to craft us over and over, each impression a little brighter than the last. She thought she could intercept the current and catch it in a petri dish, but no one can play the hand of time. was a snapshot of an ever-evolving history, pausing briefly to know me, and moving on. How could she ever craft that in a lab?.end);’ // /file_saved_to_externaldrive /programme_closed 38