What do they want, after all?
“Mars, no.” Peter said. Lately, others things interested him more. The political project, once so promising, was on the ropes, but things had brightened up. He slipped behind the one-way mirror, an old-school gesture, to be sure. Two people were in the room, a woman and a man. The door opened and the handler walked in. Small talk followed that he didn’t bother to overhear, but then the conversation settled down.
Peter glanced at his briefing sheet: a model and a poet who asked to be brought in, a rare case of two replicants seeking each other out. Usually they were paired with humans, as this was the fastest way to move things along. Yet aberrations could be interesting, he thought.
Their memories of childhood were the issue. It was too closely shared and thus unrealistic: “Not even identical twins would remember it so similarly,” the man said. He wanted his to be altered. “There’s something incestuous about it,” the woman added. Dan and Ann were the names they’d be given. The handler told Dan that they’d arrange for some difference and were glad for the feedback. “It doesn’t usually arise. Two replicants pairing up is the exception.” Ann spoke up. “It’s wrong to rob us of childhoods. I’ve spoken with others and they feel it too, a deficit they can’t completely close.”
The handler seemed to hesitate, so Peter decided to intervene. The glass unclouded and he spoke. “Replication is a process. We constantly tune it on different spectra, but we also give you a degree of free will. Your names indicate less of it, perhaps to see if it made any difference. Free will also means a less generic backstory. Still, you both had enough to ask to be paired with another replicant. We went along with it because it can be instructive. We were curious if your work would be affected, but what bothers you is the overlap, which your pairing accentuates.”
The handler found her voice. “Why is incest taboo? Among humans, it has evolutionary consequences, but you’re unaffected. There are instances in literature of siblings falling in love. Agatha and Ulrich in Musil’s novel are an example.” The woman lit up. “Yes, I read it! A brother and sister who are especially comfortable with and drawn to each other, but they hold back.” The handler hesitated again. “What are you thinking?” Peter asked. “Why hold back?” she asked. “My partner and I also share a childhood, but we make a game of it, imagining we grew up in a blended family and fell in love. With humans, this triggers accusations that are unfair. We see ourselves as a non-duality, living in a duality-centric world.”
“Mars, no,” Peter thought again. “Here is where the action is.” Ann and Dan had perked up. The handler gave them what they were missing. In the debrief, she named it as frisson. “They said ‘don’t change a thing.’ It always seems to turn out that way, although of course we’re a limited sample.”
