Sometimes I work too hard. I stay up late pouring over my notes. I’m so close to a breakthrough that I’m sure I’m missing something in plain sight. The smallest algorithmic error. An obvious biochemical oversight even an undergrad would catch. But no matter how hard I work, my Clara, my sweet, ever-patient Clara, reminds me who I do these things for. She brings me a tomato sandwich when I forget to eat, a glass of brandy when I’m high-strung. On some occasions, when my tunnel vision becomes especially narrow, Clara will walk into my lab wearing nothing more than a short black robe. Then she’ll take my hand, nod, and pull me gingerly toward our bedroom.
“You’ll have it soon,” she said in bed one night, half asleep with one leg draped across mine.
My darling Clara, her voice so understanding, her lips parted every so slightly at rest. I brushed my hand across her dark hair and made a promise I perhaps shouldn’t have.
“One week,” I said.
She lifted her head from my chest, suddenly awake.
“That soon?” she smiled.
“Well, I believe so,” I said, immediately eager to walk back my estimate. “It would mean an intense week. Sleepless nights. And even then there’s a possibility the neural interface won’t connect, or the hibernation bath will freeze. Or overheat. And there’s myself to consider. I’ll need to drink enough coffee, but also not forget water, and—”
It was too late. Already counting down the days, Clara pulled me on top of her for the second time that night.
All week I checked and rechecked metrics. The oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon levels were all steady. Same with calcium and phosphorus. I brought in two crates of bananas since potassium was a little low, but correcting this issue didn’t solve the broader problem.
I thought maybe it was a power shortage, that the initial spark just needed more juice. One early morning I drove around town stealing batteries from parked cars. I collected a baker’s dozen in this way, and when I got home I took the battery from my own car and lugged it inside without even closing the hood. The extra power seemed to help. I thought I even heard the faintest thump of a heartbeat. But time and again my computer monitors would flash red, an emergency shutdown would cause a neighborhood blackout, and I’d be left in the dark with only the sounds of dogs barking in the distance.
All week I slept in my lab and woke to find a tray of fresh coffee and muffins left on my desk.
A week came and went and I had no more to show for my work. At midnight of that final night I was asleep, my head resting on an open anatomy book. Clara shook me gently. “Let’s go to bed,” she said, and I nodded.
She led me into the bedroom wearing that same robe. Black silk with a white floral print, barely long enough to reach her thighs. With only the moonlight through the curtains, she began to unbutton my shirt.
“Another week,” I mumbled, half-asleep. “Maybe two.”
“My brilliant, Harry,” she whispered sympathetically. She undid my pants, let them fall to the floor, but instead of guiding me to the bed, she lowered me into our wingback chair. Where she typically sat to slip on her shoes. She held my hands against the chair arms and leaned down to kiss me softly. Her hair shone in the moonlight and smelled of hibiscus. My patient, darling wife. And from there, the night becomes more Clara’s story than mine.
She told me later that she felt my hands begin to slide up her thighs as she leaned over more to kiss my chest. That my hands rose higher and higher until they met the hem of her robe. That I lifted the robe in my fingertips and rested it carefully against her lower back. Except, she realized then, both of my hands were still pinned to the chair. She stopped kissing as she approached my navel, as she felt a hard shaft against her ass, sliding slowly up and down between her cheeks. “Harry,” she whispered. The shaft began to slide inside of her. I felt her squeeze my wrists. “Harry,” she moaned quietly. She leaned over further. “Harry,” she moaned again, slightly louder.
In my drowsy state, I began to hear a rhythmic pounding. It grew faster and louder. Her third moan, deep and urgent, brought me fully awake. I opened my eyes to see a reflection of myself. My chest, my shoulder, unmistakably my face, panting behind Clara.
“Harry, you’ve done it!” she moaned. She took my cock in her hand and pulled me into her mouth.
***
At breakfast the next morning, Clara’s hair was like I’ve never seen. Extremely unkempt. Buoyant on all sides and wild at odd angles.
“Is that from last night?” I asked
Clara looked to the side shyly, took a bite of her second danish, then giggled.
“The pillow didn’t flatten it while you slept?” I took a sip of coffee and then scooted my chair to take a look at the back. “At all?”
Beaming, Clara shrugged. “Okay, I may have…tousled it a bit this morning.” She ate a strawberry and reached for an orange. “I thought it would be a little fun. To look a bit ravished. On this morning of all mornings.” She grinned at me.
“I’m worried it’s going to get caught in the fan,” I said.
She hit me with an orange peel.
“He’s resting?” Clara asked. “He? You? Should we give him a name?”
“It is resting,” I said. “And no, we should absolutely not give it a name.”
Clara bit her lip as she smiled, letting a banana peel swing from her fingertips. “Can I give him a nickname?”
I got up to refill my coffee and Clara eagerly asked for more grapefruit juice.
“Last night was obviously a huge step forward,” I said, taking her glass. “But just like I said would happen, the neural interface isn’t there yet.”
“You’ve tested it? This morning, I mean? It’s not like you had time to turn it on last night.”
“I ran full diagnostics when I put him back in the bath this morning. While you were…doing your hair, I suppose.”
Clara looked up and to the sides to admire her handiwork. “And no interface?” she asked.
“No interface.” I set her juice on the table and took a seat. “Well you’ll get there. Take the morning to enjoy your progress, I mean my god.” She reached for a third danish, took a bite, then offered it to me. I took a small bite but left the rest to her.
“Is he…” she began after a moment.
“It.”
“It, exactly. Is it…bigger?”
“Bigger?”
“Thicker?”
“No no no,” I said. “It’s my exact duplicate. That’s the whole point.”
“I know, I know. It just felt a little…”
“Thicker?”
Clara held up her finger an inch from her thumb.
I looked toward the window and blew on my coffee.
She laughed and threw another orange peel at me. “How can you be jealous of yourself?”
“It’s not ‘myself’ until I’m running it.”
Clara rolled her eyes. She stood up and slunk around the table to sit on my lap. “Then we’ll just pack him back in the box until Christmas.”
“It,” I corrected.
“It, too,” she said.
***
Is it a robot, you may wonder? Alas, I wish. The neural interface would be a lot simpler if it were only an electric machine. A more accurate descriptor would be “clone,” in that it’s a flesh and blood duplicate of myself. Except it doesn’t possess sentience, only an AI modeled on my personality. Once the interface is up and running, it will become an extension of myself. A tool, part of a hive mind. I would soon, in other words, possess two bodies with which to pleasure my wife.
I returned to my lab at every free moment. I suspected the problem rested with the cranial transistor, a key bridge connecting the artificial electrical components in the brain with the natural, organic body. The transistor itself was also organic, so I spent most of my time analyzing the body’s chemical balance. It needed more iron than I, for instance. More electrolytes. But the levels seemed fine.
It, my double, remained submerged in the hibernation bath. I grew tired of seeing the naked body, so I draped a towel over the tub to hide the waist-to-thigh region.
And all the while the damn potassium levels kept dipping, so I began each day mashing up bananas for the absorption chamber.
Clara brought me lunch one day, but instead of leaving it on my desk, she lingered a bit. She wore a thin top that exposed her shoulders, despite it being winter. She rubbed lotion along her arms, shoulders, and chest. She took a banana from the crate and wrapped her lips around tiny bite after tiny bite.
“Does he need to be, I don’t know, bathed?” she asked.
I said it did not.
“Rotated? Something to keep his muscles stimulated?”
I said it did not.
“Haircuts?”
I said it did not, that it was very well taken care of, though I asked her to please not eat all of its bananas.
I left her alone briefly to go to the bathroom. I could swear its towel was askance when I returned.
The next day I went for a walk to consider the problem from a fresh perspective. When I returned, I found it lying ass-up in the hibernation bath.
“Clara,” I called.
She leaned through the doorway after a moment.
“Clara, darling, please please keep your hands out of the bath. You’re adding new chemicals and acids and cells…”
‘I haven’t touched anything,” she said.
“It’s in deep hibernation. It didn’t roll itself over.”
As we stood, it, my double, began to bob to the side, rotating beneath the water. As it came to rest face-side-up, it’s penis rose above the surface of the water, fully erect.
Clara looked away.
“I thought he might have been bored,” she said. “So I came in to talk to him a little bit and I talked about the other night and how good…I don’t think his hibernation is as deep as you think.”
“He could hear you?” I asked. “And his body responded?”
“Must have thrown him off keel,” Clara said, biting a nail as she glanced down at the bath. “But I never touched him or the water!”
She still came in to usher me to bed occasionally, but while her cues used to be more subdued, they began to be more verbal.
“Why don’t you come play with me?” she said one night. “This house is too cold to lie naked alone,” she said another. “I want you to bend me over that chair again,” something I’d never personally done. I always went, of course, and she always let the bottom of her robe glide over the tub as we left.
When I returned from work one day—it may come as a surprise that I am, in fact, a banker; science is only a hobby—I heard Clara call from the lab. I entered to find her backed against the wall, her white sundress wet and transparent, and my double standing over her with water dripping from his hair. His eyes were closed, but he was again fully erect. Clara turned to me and smiled apologetically.
“We were reminiscing again,” she said. “But I haven’t touched him!”
I helped it back into the bath and increased the sedatives.
A month passed and Clara’s birthday was approaching. I was still no closer to solving the interface, but it was clear the gift she wanted. She’d left hints; magazines left open to articles about threesomes. Pancakes with highly suggestive whip cream patterns. Comments about her own potentially low potassium levels. I reminded myself what this project was about—had always been about. Not my pleasure, but Clara’s. Clara, my darling. So I decided to bite the bullet.
We had a romantic dinner at home the night of her birthday. Chicken piccata with red wine. For dessert: two cannolis, hers longer than mine and pierced by a blue candle. And when dessert was finished, I took her hand and guided her into the bedroom.
A single candle burned. Enough light to see Clara stifling a smile, searching the room for any sign of my double.
“You seem nervous,” I said.
She swallowed heavily. “Me?”
“Well who else?”
“Who else, indeed?”
I took the straps of her dress in my hands, lifted them slowly from her shoulders, and let the dress fall to the ground. Her gold necklace fell between her breasts and she stood shyly with her hands clasped in front of her pink lace panties. I looked down over her body, unbuttoned my shirt, and took off my pants as she snuck glances around the room, giggling.
“So nervous,” I said.
I pulled her closer. I took her hand and placed it on my hard cock. I felt her begin to stroke.
“I’m not nervous,” she said.
“No?”
She shook her head.
I looked toward the door and motioned for my double. He entered slowly, silently, and then pressed his naked body against Clara’s backside. I felt her begin to shake.
“Harry,” she smiled at me. She glanced over her shoulder and slowly groped behind her in the dark, taking his cock in her other hand. She turned so she could see us both.
“Okay,” she said, stroking us in the same rhythm. “Maybe I’m a little nervous.”