No Backup Plan

The morning of her interview, Megan donned the floor length black dress that she had worn to Ben’s funeral. It was Ben’s birthday. He would have been 13, at the start of 8th grade, but taking college courses at night since he was so advanced. What medical advancements, inventions, and discoveries would never be made now that he was gone? What girls would he have kissed? What children would he have had? It was all a blank nothingness, the future from which he had been robbed.

Megan called her mom, whom she hadn’t spoken to in a few weeks, not since moving to college. Her mother picked up immediately, her video popping up on Megan’s screen.

“Hey honey,” she said. “How are you doing? I meant to call you to ask how school is going, but I’ve just been so busy with Ben’s schedule. I have to ferry him back and forth everywhere: soccer practice, debate practice. I don’t remember you being this busy when you were his age.”

Megan bit back a sarcastic comment. This was exactly why she hadn’t spoken to her mother in weeks. She couldn’t talk to her mother when she was in this state. And she was always in this state.

“We were pretty busy taking Ben to the hospital for treatments when I was his age, so I didn’t do many extracurriculars, remember?”

“Of course,” Megan’s mom replied. “It’s such a relief to have that all behind us, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is,” Megan said, trying to keep the tone of her voice even. She didn’t want this phone call to devolve into a shouting match. This is the last time you have to do this, she thought, and forced herself to play along.

“Speaking of extracurriculars,” Megan said. “I have an interview today. Wish me luck.”

“That’s great, Megs,” her mom said. “Ben and I will be cheering you from afar. He misses you. Call me back this evening for his birthday dinner, OK? I am making his favorite: fancy mac’ n’ cheese with gruyere. I can’t believe he’s going to be a teenager.”

“Nor can I,” Megan said. “Tell him I miss him, too.”

She switched off the call before any tears arrived. Not just tears of sadness, angry tears. As far as her mother knew, Ben was right there with her. Sometimes Megan hated her mother for believing this, though she knew it wasn’t fair to feel such resentment. Her mother couldn’t help it. Still, Megan would give anything to see Ben again. 

The real Ben.

As Megan took the bus to the lab, she reassured herself she was making the right decision. It would be easier this way, for both her and her mother. She didn’t think her dad would agree, but he was too busy with work, and ever since he moved out, he talked with her mother even less than she did. He would never know. Today was just the intake interview, to make sure she was mentally stable enough to qualify for Reversed Engineered Personality duplication, or what was commonly known as REPlication. She had seen Ben go through the process when he first got sick. It was the standard practice now, what they did with sick kids, a backup plan in case all else failed.

Megan didn’t want the premium package that included the robot body. Her mother had secretly purchased that one before Ben had even died, when he was still in the hospital, a shadow of the robust REPlica boy living in his place. After seeing how disturbed Megan and her dad were by the REPlica, her mother claimed she had destroyed it. But every night when Ben was in the hospital, she would sneak into her office to talk with it for hours. Eventually, she refused to go back to the hospital to see Ben. This led to her divorce from Megan’s dad. REPlica Ben would grow up without his dad around. Megan wondered if REPlica Ben missed him. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. REPlicas can’t feel.

She signed in for her appointment, and arrows on the floor lit up to point her down a long brightly lit hallway filled with spiky air plants hanging from glass vases. The arrows directed her into one of the lab’s private rooms, which was also filled with plants in pots, this time waxy succulents that covered nearly every square inch of the floor that wasn’t occupied by the lab equipment. She reached out to touch their spiky leaves to check if they were real. They were. 

It struck her as odd how a place for creating fake lives would be filled with living things, but in a way, she thought it made sense. It was a place of rebirth, where people could come in by themselves and leave REPlicated. Most of their customers were probably not like her. They were hopeful, excited to see what their REPlicated twins would achieve in the world. Megan didn’t care about any of that.

She had opted for the 2-D version only, a REPlica limited to video calls and text interactions. They didn’t need to do the whole-body scan for that one, so her appointment slot was brief, only thirty minutes.

She first had to run through a series of scenarios with the automaton lab assistants who drew her blood and asked her questions about her sleeping habits and whether she was taking any medications. The technology was still crude enough that unless you squinted, you would not mistake them for real human beings. They were designed to be clunky. There were strict regulations around how realistic REPlicas could be.

At the end of the interview, and after she had submitted all her biomarkers, a man in a lab coat strode into the room, carrying a clipboard. Megan jumped, doing a double take. He had the same broad shoulders and gray speckled beard of the REPLica who had taken her blood. He was identical in almost every way, except there was light behind his eyes, and his movements were smooth and purposeful.

“Very good,” he said. “You can tell the difference.”

“What would happen if I couldn’t?” she asked.

“We can’t make REPlicas of people who can’t distinguish inanimate from animate,” he said flatly. “That way we ensure that the REPlica doesn’t think it’s animate.”

“Is there a cure?” Megan asked. “For people who can’t tell the difference?”

He smiled sadly.

“Duped? Someone close to you?”

She nodded but didn’t elaborate. How could she explain that her mother, Angelina Ko Walsh, once a brilliant engineer, had been Duped by her dead son’s REPlica? Those things weren’t supposed to happen to people like her mom. She remembers when whispers first began to spread of the condition, an affliction so new it didn’t have a name yet, and people just called it “Duped.” She and her mother used to make fun of it all, of all the talk of Duped and the superstitious people who thought REPlicas were so real they were going to stage a takeover. It had all been a big joke, but now, it wasn’t.

No links have been found between her mother’s condition and schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or any other mental illness. It was just something that struck some people, but not others, a sudden conviction that the REPlica in front of them was real. Megan had been studying cases like her mother’s in her psychology class, and the only thing they had in common was that the Duped person had to experience some sort of trauma. But hadn’t Megan been traumatized too? And she hadn’t become delusional. But that was how these things went. There was no logical explanation, no reason why one person was affected and another going through the same thing was fine.

“The only cure we’ve found is direct exposure,” the man said. “To the replica and the replicated. It doesn’t always work though.”

They had tried. Megan’s dad, Gary, had tricked his wife into getting out of the house, convincing her she had a mandatory physical that she had been neglecting. Ben was sleeping when they had brought her to his hospital bed. On seeing him, Angelina’s pupils dilated, and she started to shake her head and hyperventilate. “Not my son, not my son,” Her mother muttered under her breath as Megan gripped her arm to keep her from fleeing Ben’s hospital room. His cheeks were gaunt, his head bald, his limbs stick-like and fragile as a bird’s. “Take me back home. My son is there. Not here. Take me back home!”

“You have to say goodbye to him,” Megan’s father said. “You might not get another chance.”

“Mom?” Ben said, stirring awake. He had winced as he sat up in his hospital bed. “Is that you?”

“Tell him you love him,” her father ordered. “Tell it to him, or you will always regret it.”

Reluctantly, Angelina had sat next to him on the bed. She seemed to have accepted that they wouldn’t leave until she did as Gary asked. She took his hand and closed her eyes, listening to him breathing.

“I guess I’ll stay here with you for a little while. Since you’re so sick. Ben would like that.”

Ben, though he was barely able to speak, was lucid, more lucid than his own mother. He could tell immediately what was wrong without anyone explaining to him. He pleaded with their mother to remember him, trying to convince her that he was, in fact, her actual son. But it was no use. She even admitted that he sounded a lot like her Ben, but she refused to accept the truth. She told him that she loved her Ben, and that Ben wouldn’t want to see him like this, sick and weak. Her Ben was a sensitive boy who couldn’t stand to watch others suffer.

She spun a tale for Ben of what his alter ego was doing. How he got in trouble at school for hacking into the servers and flagging anyone who cyberbullied, how he had won the soccer championship last season. Ben seemed to relax to these words, drifting off to this bedtime story of what his life could be if he were not in the hospital. Once he fell back asleep, Megan and her dad took Angelina home. The next day, Ben passed away. They tried to tell Angelina, but the news just seemed to pass straight through her. She barricaded herself in her office with her replica son, leaving Megan and her dad alone in their own siloed grief.

The weeks after Ben had died passed in a blur. These were supposed to be the happiest times of Megan’s life — her prom, her graduation. She watched as her friends received cars, hosted graduation parties, lit bonfires at the beach. All the while, she hovered on the sidelines, feeling like she was the ghost, not the REPlica haunting her house. When she found out one of her friends, Demitra, the oldest of three, had a REPlica made of herself to keep her siblings company after she left for college, Megan had wanted to shake some sense into her. Don’t do it! She wanted to tell her, as if somehow Ben’s death was the REPlica’s fault. 

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” asked the doctor, who was finalizing the paperwork to create her REPlica. “If you do, there’s no going back. Even if you delete her, you will never get back the memories you would have made, the life she lived in your place.”

He explained that some people programmed their REPlicas to send a summary of their interactions with their friends and family to them, like an assistant. Or they even recorded conversations so they could review them later. Some people tried to use the REPlica to be in two places at once. But Megan shook her head. She wasn’t interested in any of these features. Once her REPlica was unleashed into her mother’s world, she didn’t want to know what it would say or do. 

She thought of the phone call she needed to make when she got home. She would pretend to sing happy birthday to a Ben who wasn’t really Ben. She thought of her mother, her whip smart, caring mother, her sick mother. Too sick to be REPlicated. When she said goodbye to her tonight, it could be for the last time. The REPlica would replace her in her mother’s eyes, and when she talked to the real Megan, she would think Megan was the imposter. Maybe that was for the best.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “What you’re requesting … it’s rare. I have to ask again. Are you sure?” 

She would make a note in the file, she thought, to ask the programmers to make sure her REPlica believed that the REPlica of Ben was real too. She didn’t know if REPlicas had true feelings, but if they did, she would make sure to save hers from having her heart broken over and over again. No one should have to experience that, not even a REPlica.

“I’m sure,” she said. “She can take that life. I don’t want it.”