“You know why I did that,” she said defiantly. “Once I saw what happened at the TC, I—I did what I had to. I didn’t have a choice.”
“All heart and no brains. How unlike you.” She opened her mouth to defend herself, but Taraval kept going. “Did you think to check with New York first? With us? Perhaps suss out what the situation was before going straight to Honeycomb? We have protocols for a reason.”
“I couldn’t; the comms were down. And he’d already”—her face went pale—“he arrived in San José. He was in the vestibule when the TC exploded.”
Taraval finished his bottle of water and wiped his forehead. “Part of him, yes. Only he was never cleared in New York.”
Now her cheeks turned a chalky yellow. She put her hands on the bed to steady herself, trying to form words but no sound came out.
Taraval continued, “You know the procedures, Sylvia, better than almost anyone. If there’s any kind of error at the vestibule, any at all, the process reverts. But as I said, apparently you’re all heart. And that sentimental blood pump of yours is about to ruin everything we’ve sweated and slaved for. Our careers. The future of humanity, Sylvia.”
She shook her head, trying to get her thoughts in order. She nodded toward the bathroom, in which Joel2 was singing. “So he—and in New York, there’s—?”
“I’m afraid so. You’re quite the scientific groundbreaker today. Resurrecting the dead and releasing the first duplicated human into the wild, all in less than twenty-four hours.”
Sylvia sank to the floor. “Oh my God.”
“Oh, please. What need have we for God anymore? If anyone, you should be praying to me. Once I learned of your foolish blunder with Honeycomb, I managed to get your husband to IT headquarters. The plan was to clear the out-of-sync Joel and—”
“You killed him?” Sylvia said, looking up from the floor, her eyes blazing.
“That was the plan. But somehow legal got wind of his existence and they alerted the executive leadership team. Things needed to be dealt with by the book. Corina and Pema insisted we convince him to go gentle into that good night. We were forced to tell him what occurred, and, for all our good deeds, unfortunately, somehow, he managed to elude us.”
“He’s alive?” said Sylvia, getting back to her feet.
“Alive and running around without comms. Capable at any moment of exposing us. And therein lies your saving grace. We can still make this right.”
“What are you talking about, Bill?”
“It’s simple. You take your little creation in there, drive him back to the San José Hospital TC, teleport to New York, and IT will take care of the rest. You’ll arrive alone, Joel Byram’s comms will reactivate, and all of us shall live happily ever after, provided you both agree to put this matter behind us.”
“Bill,” she said, struggling to stay calm, “you’re asking me to clear my own husband.”
He pointed a fleshy finger toward the bathroom, in which Joel2 was still singing loudly and off-key. “That is not your husband, Sylvia! Your husband is somewhere in New York right now. He can’t have gone far without working comms. What do you think will happen if the Gehinnomites find him first? Imagine for a moment a world in which the public knows the truth of what we’ve been doing. Of what you have been complicit in. Tell me how that story ends, Sylvia. Tell me!”
“I didn’t mean—” she began, but he didn’t let her finish.
“It ends one of two ways, Sylvia. Either you come back to New York with him in tow, or everything we know, perhaps our entire society, unravels. This is the best and least painful solution we have. Clear him. Life will return to normal for all immediately—and for you as well, in time.”
“Normal,” she repeated with a hollow laugh. Then she shook her head, tears springing to her eyes. “You can’t make me do this, Bill. I’ve already been lying to him for a year, I can’t—” She put her face in her hands just as Joel2 entered from the bathroom and exposed himself.
TAKE ON ME
SOON AFTER Sylvia got her promotion at IT, we moved to our new apartment in Greenwich Village. Her first few weeks in her new executive-level status were filled with orientations and legal briefings and late-night welcoming cabals to which I wasn’t invited. She’d been distant and preoccupied. Grappling with the new stresses of her job, I thought. Unpacking boxes was meant to be our first bit of quality time since she’d started the new gig. But still, she was distracted.
I came back from unpacking various artsy trinkets in the bedroom to find her staring at her matryoshka doll—one of those Russian doll-within-a-doll-within-a-doll toys. Each one had the same shiny red dress with a black polka-dot pattern on it. She was toying with the dolls, putting them side by side, then nesting them within one another.
“Can we play with the dolls later, babe?” I asked with my typical flair for completely misreading the mood of a room. “These boxes ain’t gonna unpack themselves.”
She didn’t even look up when I spoke. She just continued to methodically line up each of the dolls on the windowsill in order from largest to smallest. When she got to the final tiny doll—remarkably the size of a grain of rice—she paused, sat down on the floor, and placed it in the palm of her hand. There was something profoundly sad about her actions. She rubbed the tiny doll with her finger and looked up at me, tears in her eyes.
“Syl? What’s wrong?” I gently asked.
“There’s something I never told you, Joel.” She didn’t immediately offer additional information and I knew better than to ask, but the pain in her eyes was killing me.
I sat down beside her and took the tiny rice kernel doll from her hand. “What is it, babe?” I gently rubbed her back.
She sat for a moment, tracing her finger along the other dolls, comparing their size. “At what point is a life a life?” she finally asked. “Look at these dolls. They’re all the same, right? I mean, aside from their size. Do all of them together make one whole doll, or do you think each one represents a different stage in life? And that tiny one”—she pointed at the smallest doll I was still holding—“is that supposed to represent conception, like the first divided cell of an embryo, or death, like a grain of ash in the wind?”
I wasn’t sure what had brought on these deep philosophical questions, so rather than answer, I remained silent—giving her the moment to contend with her thoughts. This wasn’t our first place together, so I reckoned she wasn’t having fear of cohabitation. Something else was eating at her. She gently nested the dolls together again before turning her attention back to me, taking a deep breath before speaking.