Josh Roseman - The Clockwork Russian and Other Stories

Jennifer Two

For twenty years I had no one to talk to except the computer, and the robots, and myself. The computer had no personality, the robots were mindless little drones, and I wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

Then she showed up.

I must have been asleep when it happened — the sky never got lighter or darker here, just the same starlit twilight — so I’d taken to going to bed and waking up when I felt like it.

I didn’t feel like waking up only four hours after telling the computer to darken the windows and dim the lights. I needed a good nine hours of sleep to be functional these days. But I felt her, and she jolted me out of a dream that melted away instantly.

“Computer, interrogative: who’s there?”

The androgynous voice, which had resisted two decades of me trying to reprogram it into something a little more pleasant, said, “there is another human present on the island.”

I practically jumped out of bed and pulled on yesterday’s clothes; they were still in a heap on the floor. The computer lit the way for me as I pelted through the house, snatched up my handheld, and left the small, domed building behind. I turned to the port — the only entrance to the island, so it only made sense that, whoever the human was, she had to be there.

“Computer,” I said as I slowed to a lope — I wasn’t as young as I’d been when Michael dumped me here, and try as I might to stay in shape, two blocks at a flat-out run was about my limit, “interrogative: who’s the human?”

“The human is a female, twenty-four standard years of age,” it said through my handheld. “She is in excellent physical health. No other information is available.”

“Wonderful.”

“Null input.”

I heard a lot of that. I hadn’t at first, but I’d stopped caring about the proper way to talk to computers. I had been a doctor once, but now I was just a lonely, middle-aged woman, living in what amounted to solitary confinement on an abandoned, human-made island city.

I rounded the last corner and nearly ran the woman down. As it was, I had to jump to the side, catching myself a good scrape along my left hand as I dragged it on the plascrete wall in an attempt to slow down.

“Where exactly am I?” Her voice was suspicious. Familiar, too. “And who the hell are you?”

I took a good look at her. She was my height, slender, with dark hair in what they used to call a pageboy. But it was the eyes that caught me.

“Who are you?” she said again.

I tried to shake some of the pain out of my hand. “My name,” I said, “is Jennifer.”

Now she looked critically. I watched as she measured me, bright blue eyes flicking up and down. “My name’s Jennifer Davalos,” she said, even more suspicious now. “Where the hell am I?”

Even under normal circumstances I didn’t care for the deserted streets. “Come with me. We can talk at my house.”

She didn’t follow, and when I didn’t hear her shoes on the plascrete pavement, I turned back. “What is it?”

“Your scar.” She’d gone pale. “The one on your left arm.”

It had happened so long ago I’d nearly forgotten it; fifteen years old, low-gravity fencing, a high arc jump, but my opponent was too fast and her sword had whipped along the back of my left arm. If I’d worn a jacket or even a longer shirt, Jennifer would never have seen it. The new Jennifer, that is. The other Jennifer.

The other Jennifer who was showing me the back of her left arm.

The other Jennifer who had an identical scar.

The other Jennifer who was me.

Jennie Four

Jennifer — Jennifer Two, we’d decided after a couple of days — had been the first to join me, but she wasn’t the last. There were ten of us now — five Jennifers, one Jenn, and four Jennies, the most recent of whom showed up just yesterday. Jennifer Two and I had had the place to ourselves for two years before Jennifer Three; the first two Jennies arrived only six months after Jennifer Three, and within days of each other.

By now we’d figured out what was happening.

The story was the same for Jennie Four as it had been for Jenn One three weeks previously: her husband had gotten upset about something and stormed off to his lab. Jennie, or Jenn, or Jennifer; whoever it was went to sleep alone and angry in her bed on the science station that hung in orbit, but woke up on the plascrete ground at the port.

Days on Ongkanon VI were thirty standard hours long. Once there were five of us, we started sleeping in shifts, trying to catch the next arrival and figure out exactly how we’d gotten here, but it was as if our brains just stopped. Well, everyone’s except mine. I was always well and truly asleep when one of them arrived.

And Jennie Four arrived furious, snarling, pacing my living room, glaring at the four of us — myself, Jennifer Two, Jenn One, and Jennie One; as the first of each name, we decided it made sense for one of each to be here, and Jennifer Two I insisted upon including because she’d been my first companion. “That ungrateful bastard!”

“I know,” said Jenn One. “We all know.”

“How did… what did he do? How come… I mean…” She stared at us, getting a good look for the first time, and had to sit down. But she was back on her feet again in an instant. “You… and you, and you, you’re…” She took a deep breath. “You’re me!”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Yes, we’re all Jennifer Davalos, and if you ask the computer in the medical center to scan us, our DNA will be the same, but we’re not the same person. Not anymore.”

“And why are you so much older?” she asked, just as suspicious as Jennifer Two had been.

I shrugged. “I think we’re clones. That is, you’re clones of me. I was the first Jennifer Davalos. From what we can tell, you’re the tenth.”

She sniffed. “I go by Jennie,” she said. “Michael hated it, but he had this look in his eye that made me want to fight him on it.”

“You’re one of mine, then,” said Jennie One. She’d let her hair grow out; my hair — our hair, I supposed — tended to get wavy if I let it go without a cut for too long.

“What do you mean, one of yours?”

Jennie One got to her feet. “I’m Jennie. The first Jennie, that is.”

Jennie Four gave her the same once-over every new arrival had given those of us already here, all the way back to Jennifer Two. “What if I want to be in her group?” she asked, pointing to Jenn One.

“It’s not like that,” I said. “We just thought it would be easier—”

“The hell with that. I’m not going to be a part of this!”

The four of us let her storm out. Jennie One gave me an apologetic look. “Was I really that bad?”

“You got over it.”

Jenn Two

Jennifer Two was shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, One,” she was saying softly. It had been our little joke for our three years alone together — I was One, she was Two. Now that there were twenty-one of us, the humor was gone, but old habits died hard. “Come on, One. You have to get up!”

I blinked sleep out of my eyes. “What is it?”

“It’s Jenn Two. She’s here!”

Now I was awake. For the past six years, there’d only been one Jenn — we were up to twelve Jennifers and seven Jennies, but only one Jenn, and Jenn One had been wondering when there would be another of her.

I got dressed and followed Two — still slender as the day she’d arrived, still with the same pageboy-cut dark hair, still sticking with me even though I was twenty years older than her and looked it — out to the street. We met up with Jennie One and rounded the corner to the port, moving quickly.