I’ve no idea if she went through with it. At breakfast the next morning she seemed especially affectionate toward Harry, wrapping her arms around his neck for an impromptu hug during a short trek to the refrigerator for juice. He kissed her and watched her walk across the kitchen, but I didn’t get the sense that they had entered some dramatic new phase of their relationship.
In fact, if anything, Harry seemed more focused on hurrying through breakfast, shoveling bites of waffle into his mouth.
“Today’s the day,” he told all of us as Madison sat down with a bottle of pomegranate juice. “I reran the numbers last night to be sure, but we’re ready.”
I glanced at Madison, a bit confused.
“We’re done?” I said. “Was my end finished?”
“Sweetie,” Madison said to Harry, a nomenclature that seemed to throw him a bit. “I didn’t even know my organics were matured.”
“I’ve done a lot of the work myself,” he said. “but not to worry, you’ll both still get full credit.” He looked to each of us, then beamed. “Let’s go! She’s waiting,” he said. “History, I mean.”
***
I helped Harry wheel a hibernation bath from his private storage off the main lab. The cover was too opaque to see inside. He nodded to Madison, and she began connecting the unit to the laboratory’s power grid.
“Main, auxiliary, backup generators,” Harry said. “I’ve even wired every car in the garage up to the house for a little extra.” He looked toward Maddie. “Keys are in the ignitions, if you don’t mind.” She glanced at me then hurried upstairs.
“Brain waves will be a little different this go around.” He handed me a compact disc. “We won’t need any alignment, we just need a complete override.”
“That’s tricky,” I said. “If it doesn’t work?”
“Then we shut the whole thing down and retool. That disc is the priority.”
As Harry rushed about the room checking monitor after monitor, I watched Madison follow him with a slight look of worry I couldn’t quite place. She looked as though she wanted to say something at one point as he passed her, but he kept walking, too preoccupied to notice her, so she didn’t speak.
“Madison!” He shouted.
“Sir?” She said.
“Keep an eye on your end. If the body isn’t reacting to the new inputs then do what you can.”
“Understood.”
“But the body is not the priority,” he stressed. “We can always grow another.”
He tested the oxygenators. He pumped in coolant water. We slipped last minute nutrients into the distribution channels, flushed and rehydrated the sustainability tubes. Then he flipped a breaker and the cathode tubes hummed to life.
“Immortality,” he said. “Digitized memories of the deceased, but more than that. If you know their brain wave signature then their new double will continue to behave, continue to live, just as if they never died.”
As the overhead lights flickered, I thought I saw a tear in his eye, a tear of mourning.
The lights bucked. We all stood in darkness. I felt my way toward the circuit breakers, and in brief flickers of light from a sparking cathode, I could faintly make out a new figure in the room.
I jerked the switches, and as my eyes adjusted to the overheads, I saw a stunning woman standing before Harry. Her dark hair was slicked back, wet from the bath, and hung down across a towel Harry had wrapped around her. He looked at her as if looking at life itself, as if science had never been about anything but time.
“Madison,” I whispered, concerned about the fire. She stood, distracted with that same look of worry. “Madison,” I repeated. She turned, I nodded toward the fire, and she hurried for the extinguisher.
The woman—in her mid-thirties, perhaps—studied Harry with an odd kind of recognition. The way a sparrow might recognize its nest though the tree has grown. She ran her hands across his shoulders, his chest, his face.
“Harry?” she asked. She looked down at herself. “What—I fell asleep and now you’re young, and large, and I’m young, and your lab is enormous, and—”
“Clara,” Harry said, stroking her hair. “My darling Clara.” And then he started to cry.
Madison extinguished the fire, and in the lingering mix of gas and smoke, I saw her numb expression. The kind of face you’d make as the ground fell out beneath your feet.
***
I tried to explain to the professor that he had not, in the strictest sense, invented immortality. This woman was not, lovely as she may be, Clara. Only a convincing copy. The professor brought up the ship of Theseus, which I found annoying and sophomoric. I said this didn’t apply, that the gradual replacing of boards on a ship was a metaphor for ordinary human aging, not cloning. This woman wasn’t an updated version of Clara; she was a replica of the original ship. But the professor insisted. He said with the human body’s propensity to shed and grow cells, none of us remain the same person for long. That we all grow entirely new bodies every decade or so. That we constantly take in new ideas and encounters that gradually reshape our personalities, our very sense of self. No one is the same person, in body or in mind, that they were 10, even five years prior. We are all copies of ourselves. And thus, the only thing truly forming a unique identity is memory, the collection of lived experiences which shape new decisions. I pointed out that even if this had been true before, the professor had just disproven his own thesis; to copy a unique identity, definitionally, makes it no longer unique. To which the professor said I was being pedantic and left for a date with his wife.
Harry, the professor, our host and friend, suddenly resented our presence. We were tolerated, of course, since he needed me and Madison to continue monitoring Clara’s vitals for the first few weeks, but he made it clear that the bulk of his time was to be spent with his wife, alone.
This meant little to me. My relationship with the professor had already been strained by, frankly, this entire experience. But Madison became sullen and withdrawn. When she finished her work in the lab each day—often tasked with the therapeutic work of massaging Clara’s muscles to ensure circulation—she retired to her room and ate alone. She took long walks on the estate or spent hours in the gym. I never saw her speak with Harry, and to the best of my knowledge they never officially ended things. The professor simply moved on wordlessly from his past infatuation, as if Madison had been nothing more than a fling, a summertime peach too tempting to resist, just as she’d feared.
I assumed the professor had no interest in introducing his young wife to his original body; Harry and Clara always retired to a guest bedroom in the east wing rather than the professor’s master. Still, considering the degree of the professor’s new obsession, considering the vigor he must have been eager to show off, the house was eerily quiet; neither the halls nor vents echoed any cries of passion the way they had during his affair with Madison.
“Let’s invite her,” Maddie said, taking a bowl of popcorn from the kitchen microwave in preparation for our date night in the screening room. “Madison should know she’s not alone.”
I thought briefly of the old fantasy. Maddie and Madison together. “What if I wasn’t planning on watching the movie?” I said, pulling Maddie against me.
She rolled her eyes. “I want to watch it. And she might, too.” Then she gave me a dismissive peck on the cheek and sent me in search of Madison.
I found her in the library, wrapped in a blanket on the couch with a cup of tea, her face tucked into a copy of Wuthering Heights.
“Any interest in movie night?” I asked, sitting next to her, draping my arm across her knees.
But when she lowered the book, I saw that it wasn’t Madison at all, but Clara.
“What are you watching?” she asked.
I jerked my arm away. “Mrs…”
“Clara, please.” She smiled.
“Beg your pardon, Clara, I thought you were Madison. I assumed you were with the professor.”
“He was a little tired tonight and I felt like reading,” she said. “What are you watching?”
“To tell you the truth, I have no idea. I just let Maddie decide.”
The mention of Maddie solicited a curious look from Clara. Maddie was an obvious double—or, as far as Clara knew, the genetic source of the double that was Madison—and evidence of the strange happenings about the mansion prior to Clara’s existence.
“Good of you,” she said. Then, reigning in her introspective expression, she smiled again. “Well I’m not dressed for company, anyway.” She held the blanket up over her chest, but I could see she wore a thin black robe underneath by the fabric over her shoulders. Beneath that, I had no idea. “And anyway you weren’t inviting me! You were looking for Madison.”
I laughed. Ordinarily I would have said that of course she was welcome, but there was something improper about fraternizing with my professor’s wife. Especially the way I was looking at her mouth. She had a warm, girlish quality about her smile that was alluring in its innocence. Innocent despite the richness of her lips as she slipped them over the rim of her cup.
“Can I ask you about Madison?” She asked just as I was standing to leave.
Why had I looked in the library first? Why had I not gone straight to Madison’s room? “Of course,” I said.
“She seems sad,” Clara said. “Sad in a way I’ve been sad before. In my memory, at least. And she hasn’t said very much to me.”
“I think she’s just overworked,” I suggested. “The professor was eager to see you. Understandably. Understandable that a man would be eager to be reunited with his wife, I mean.”
Clara looked away for a moment, then back at me.
“Was she…with my husband?” She asked.
“With?” I asked, feigning ignorance of the insinuation.
“Charlie,” she said.
While I wanted to avoid any involvement in the drama, I saw no reason to lie for the professor, in part because the truth seemed so blindingly obvious. The professor had been so cavalier about his romance that I never imagined he would even consider it illicit.
“A brief fling,” I confessed. “It was before you were…you had died. It was when you were still…deceased.”
Clara glanced toward a bookcase, then took a sip of tea.
“I don’t remember being dead,” she said. “I know what I am, I have no illusions. I know there was a significant gap between my death and my…rebirth. But I didn’t experience that gap.”
I was beginning to regret having not lied for the professor.
“For me, I went to bed next to my husband one night, and woke in a hibernation bath with a younger husband I frankly don’t recognize. In an enormous house. With roommates.”
I remembered her wet hair, now falling in soft waves around her face.
“All of which is to say,” Clara began, “that I understand the shock she must be going through.”
I left Clara to enjoy her book, closing the library doors behind me, and went to knock on Madison’s door. When she didn’t answer, I went to check the mirror in my room. I saw her on her bed, an oversized t-shirt stopping just shy of her waist and her pink thong, a towel wrapped around her hair, and an exfoliating mask pressed to her face as she scrolled through her phone.
With everyone settled in for a quiet evening, I returned to Maddie in the screening room, where we both fell asleep in the back row.
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/11l9k8r/forever_hung_part_14_scifi_slow_burn_all