Replica

Mr. I sat by itself in a cool bright room humming with recirculated air. To Lyra, Mr. I looked like an open mouth, and the table on which she was supposed to lie down a long pale tongue. The hair stood up on her arms and legs.

“Remember to stay very still,” the tech said, her voice muffled by a paper mask. “Otherwise we’ll just have to start over. And nobody wants that, do we?”

Afterward she was transferred to a smaller room and told to lie down. Sometimes lying this way, with doctors buzzing above her, she lost track of whether she was a human at all or some other thing, a slab of meat or a glass overturned on a countertop. A thing.

“I don’t believe Texas is any further than we are. It’s bullshit. They’re bluffing. Two years ago, they were still infecting bovine tissue—”

“It doesn’t matter if they’re bluffing if our funding gets cut. Everyone thinks they’re closer. Fine and Ives loses the contract. Then we’re shit outta luck.”

High bright lights, cool sensors moving over her body, gloved hands pinching and squeezing. “Sappo thinks the latest variant will do it. I’m talking full progression within a week. Can you imagine the impact?”

“He better be right. What the hell will we do with all of them if we get shut down? Ever think of that?”

Lyra closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted.

“Open your eyes, please. Follow my finger, left to right. Good.”

“Reflexes still look okay.” One of the doctors, the woman, parted her paper gown and squeezed her nipple, hard. Lyra cried out. “And pain response. Do me a favor—check this one’s file, will you? What variant is this?”

“This is similar to the vCJD, just slower-acting. That’s why the pulvinar sign is detectable on the MRI. Very rare in nature, nearly always inherited.”

They worked in silence for a bit. Lyra thought about The Little Prince, and Dr. O’Donnell, and distant stars where beautiful things lived and died in freedom. She couldn’t stop crying.

“How do they choose which ones end up in control, and which ones get the different variants?” the male doctor asked after a while.

“Oh, it’s all automated,” the woman said. Now she held Lyra’s eyes open with two fingers, ensuring she couldn’t blink. “Okay, come see this. See the way her left eye is spasming? Myoclonus. That’s another indicator.”

“Mm-hmm. So it’s random?”

“Totally random. The computer does it by algorithm. That way, you know, no one feels bad. Pass me the stethoscope, will you? I bet its heart rate is through the roof.”

That night was very still, and the sound of chanting voices and drumbeats—louder, always, on the days the Suits had visited the island—carried easily over the water. Lyra lay awake for a long time, fighting the constant pull of nausea, listening to the distant rhythm, which didn’t sound so distant after all. At times, she imagined it was coming closer, that suddenly Haven would be overrun with strangers. She imagined all of them made of darkness and shadow instead of blood and muscle and bones. She wondered, for the first time, whether number 72 was maybe not dead after all. She remembered hearing once that the marshes were submerged islands, miles of land that had over time been swallowed up by the water.

She wondered whether 72 had been swallowed up too, or whether he was out there somewhere, listening to the voices.

She took comfort in the presence of the new addition to her collection, buried directly beneath her lower back. She imagined that the file pushed up heat, like a heart, like the warmth of Dr. O’Donnell’s touch. 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. She imagined the smell of lemon and antiseptic, as if Dr. O’Donnell were still there, floating between the beds.

“Don’t worry,” Dr. O’Donnell had once said to her on a night like this one, when the voices were louder than usual. “They can’t get to you,” she’d said more quietly. “They can’t get in.”

But about this, Dr. O’Donnell was wrong.

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 5 of Gemma’s story.

SIX

LYRA DID NOT SLEEP WELL. She woke up with a tight, airless feeling in her chest, like the time years ago when Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had held Lyra’s head in the sink to punish her for stealing some chocolate from the nurses’ break room.

Side effects. They would pass. Medicines sometimes made you sick before they made you better. In the dim morning light, with the sound of so many replicas inhaling and exhaling beside her, she closed her eyes. She had a brief memory of a birther rocking her years ago, singing to her, the tickle of hair on her forehead. She opened her eyes again. The birthers didn’t sing. They howled and screamed. Or they wept. They spoke in other languages. But they didn’t sing.

She was nauseous again.

This time she wouldn’t risk throwing up inside. She would have to find someplace more remote—along the beach, maybe behind the tin drums of hazardous waste Haven lined up for collection, somewhere the guards couldn’t see her.

She chose to pass through the courtyard, which was mostly empty. Many of the night nurses would be preparing to take the launch back to Cedar Key. She passed the statue of the first God, Richard Haven. It dominated the center of the yard, where all four walking paths intersected. Here she rested, leaning against the cool marble base, next to a plaque commemorating his work and achievements. He’d had a kind face, Lyra thought. At least, the artist had given him one.

She didn’t remember the flesh-and-blood man. He’d died before she was made. The sculptor had depicted him kneeling, with one arm raised. Lyra guessed he was supposed to be calling out to invisible crowds to come, to look here, but to her it had always looked as if he was stretching one arm toward the clouds, toward the other God, the ones the nurses believed in. Their God, too, hated the replicas.