I couldn’t help but feel this was a step backward in my research. I’d spent months perfecting the cranial transistor, the key component for control of multiple bodies, a technology with so many practical applications outside of the bedroom. Military applications, educational applications. Medicine, probably. And now I was stripping away this accomplishment to make a glorified clone.
I lugged crate after crate of bananas into my lab, dropping them into the bath’s absorption chamber. High potassium levels, after all, had disrupted the transistor in the past. I checked and rechecked the double’s brain wave patterns, digitally decoupling them from those of my wife—a laborious process that required working lobe by lobe. I programmed new personality traits into her biochemical software. After a week of tinkering, I reached into the hibernation bath and, as clinically as possible, massaged the double’s left breast.
“Clara, darling, can you feel that?” I shouted.
“Yes,” she shouted back. “Please stop.”
Was this even feasible, then? To sever a connection with an active double? I pondered the question for hours, took too many dinners at my desk. But new ideas are hard to come by—I called my grocer and asked when they expected their next banana shipment.
I decided to clear my head in our back garden. I sat back in my favorite sling chair, listened to the lilting house sparrows, the goldfinches, and soon fell asleep.
Sometime later I felt Clara sit sideways across my lap, the weight of her delicate frame.
“Clara, darling, I’m hitting another low.”
She caressed my neck, led her fingertips across my stubble.
“Am I trying to accomplish the impossible?”
I wrapped my arms around her; she wasn’t wearing any clothes.
“Am I a fool?”
She squirmed lightly against my lap.
“Am I a bad scientist?”
She kissed me. I felt my bottom lip grow wet between hers. I felt our top lips bend and curve against each other. I felt her tongue, halting at first, not yet ready to breach the brim of my mouth, but then bolder, gliding against mine before retreating again. She held my face with both hands and tilted her head first one way, then another, and then, eager for more, then more still, she sealed the corners of our mouths together and moaned urgently until I gave her my own tongue to play with.
I heard a throat clear. With great effort I pulled away from Clara’s lips, only for her to continue along my neck. Except there Clara was, as well, standing before me in sunglasses, a white floral bikini, and holding a crate of bananas.
“These just arrived,” she said. She raised an eyebrow, dropped the crate to the ground, and stormed back toward the house.
* * *
“Try to lay out in my own yard,” Clara mumbled to herself, pulling a white t-shirt over her bikini. “Where is she?”
“I covered her with a towel, she’s still outside.”
“Deepthroating bananas?”
I rolled my eyes but it wasn’t impossible.
“You didn’t feel a thing?” I asked. “My lips, my tongue, my—”
Clara glared at me.
“Then it worked! You’re decoupled! This is what I’ve been working on all week.”
“And now she’s up and running and not wearing any clothes and if I’m not in the mood one night you’ve got a backup to bend over your desk.”
“We have our rule,” I reminded her. “No sex with a double unless we’re both involved.
Clara smiled, but seemed unconvinced, perhaps remembering how many times she’d bent that rule with my doubles.
“And we don’t have to start now,” I added. “We can wait until you’re ready”
She sighed, but then nodded and gave me a hug.
But her double was less patient. Clara leant her some clothes, an older orange sundress she found unattractive, but which I secretly found very appealing. Her double cornered me in the library one day wearing this dress. She slipped the straps from her shoulders and let it fall to her waist, revealing a strapless pink pushup bra. She pressed herself against me, her generous chest rising and falling as she took long, deep breaths.
She looked me in the eyes, then down at her own panting body, her mouth open slightly, as if realizing for the first time just how alluring her cleavage must be.
An incredibly difficult proposition to reject, but I asked her to excuse me.
One day, while cooking breakfast, I saw her amble into the pantry, that light dress twirling just enough for me to catch a glimpse of her pink panties. She stood for a moment, studying the top shelf, then stretched on her tiptoes toward the all-purpose flour. The dress, short to begin with, creeped higher, and when she caught me looking, she pushed the door closed with her foot.
I sighed. I knew I needed oregano for the eggs. It was pitch black when I entered. I felt her place something in my front pocket, and when I turned on the light I realized it had been her dress. She stood in her matching underwear with her back against the door, her hands behind her back, her legs crossed at the ankle. She looked me over, saw the unmistakable interest in my pants, and slowly turned. She looked back over her shoulder. She arched her pelvis away from the door. She began to slide the panties from her hips.
I scanned the shelves. I grabbed the oregano and a jar of hoisin sauce for some reason, then insisted she let me pass.
One day she followed me into the shower and immediately took my soft loins into her soapy hands. I let her, partly out of need as I felt myself stiffen, felt my responsive tip graze her belly button, but partly because I only realized that she wasn’t my wife after Clara entered to brush her teeth. Her double and I were both caught off guard when Clara tore open the shower door.
An obvious misunderstanding, I said. How could I have known? Then, unwisely, I begged, begged, begged Clara to finish me, any way she liked, lest I spontaneously combust from the tension.
Clara looked us over as she scrubbed, especially focused on the fact that her double’s hand was still washing my cock. Then she leaned forward, spit a mouthful of toothpaste toward the drain by our feet, and closed the door.