Duplicate | A Human Code Story

FOURTEEN

"And I helped create them."

*

Memory loop. Playback saved file. Dated: September 10th, 2016.

A woman stood in front of me. Her hand passed over my eyes as she observed me. Her lips dipped into a frown. They opened and my computers awaited commands.

"Processing information. Identifying Bionics personnel," my internal computer said. The voice echoed in my head.

But the woman didn't speak to me. She turned and looked at the android behind her. The disapproving look on his face was the opposite of hers. She was relieved. Smiling.

She reached out to touch him as my internal devices revealed her name to me. "Mary Jordan, twenty-six, Bionics engineer."

"They fixed him," Mary said to the android. I watched as she pressed herself into his chest. There was a pause in reaction. The android didn't move. His head remained low, eyes forced closed, even as Mary lifted hers to look at him again. "Rory, didn't you hear me? They fixed him."

Rory, the android with blonde hair, looked at me with bright blue eyes. My computers would not identify him. I knew nothing else other than his appearance and his name. As he shook his head, I shook mine.

Copy. Learn. Imitate.

"They broke him," Rory hissed, looking back at Mary. "They didn't fix him. They forced him to be this way. They deleted him. They—"

"Ror," Mary moved back, crossing her hands over her chest, "he wasn't supposed to be Javier. This," she looked at me and frowned, "this machine was just a body."

Rory straightened. A light flashed in his eyes. "And what am I, Mary? A body, too? Just an android?"

Mary turned back and looked at me. Her eyes passed over me, observing me in greater detail than she'd done minutes before. Her expression didn't change. She seemed unbothered. Calm. Accepting.

"Mary," Rory whispered.

"No." She faced him, looking up into his glowing eyes. "Don't do this to me. You know why I did this. It needed to be done."

"For what?" Rory reached out to grab Mary as she moved around him, heading towards the door that led out into the hallway. His fingers missed as she pulled back. She looked at him but didn't say a word.

He continued, "For who, Mary? Do you understand what you've done? The damage you've done?"

"Damage?" Mary pressed her hands against the door's frame as she glanced over at me. Again, there was no emotion. And the blank expression remained as she looked back at Rory. "There is no damage. They deleted the data, wiped his waking moments. He's a blank slate ready to be trained for the government. That's it."

"That's it?" Rory repeated what she said. "Is that what you think?"

Another moment of silence. Still, frozen expressions on both of their faces. Rather than respond to Rory's question, Mary turned into the hall. Her footsteps faded as she disappeared down the hall.

I focused on the sound, pinpointing her location on a map saved deep within my files. A dot with her name moved amongst the crowd of similar circles until I couldn't distinguish the difference between them. I tried but stopped when Rory approached me instead of following after her.