Asymmetry by Thoraiya Dyer

Author:Thoraiya Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press
Published: 2013-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Seven Days in Paris

One

They had her in a room, her wrists kissing under cable ties.

I put my hand to the smoky glass. She was familiar. The frizzy hair. The way her stubby fingers tapered to tiny, nimble tips. Her huge stomach and gelatinous haunches strained the men’s orange prison issue they had given her to wear. Ebony lids kept trying to slide shut over bloodshot eyes.

‘Let her out,’ I said and a current ran down my scalp to the back of my neck.

‘It’s working,’ the white woman behind me said, checking a hand-held device. But I didn’t care about that.

‘Who is she? Let her out.’

‘She’s Marwa,’ the man with the moustache said. He smiled but his lips didn’t move; instead, it was a strange spreading and parting of salt and pepper bristle. ‘And you’re Marwa B.’

My face in the glass was the same as Marwa’s. There was a word for that. When I said it, a shock ran down my scalp again.

‘I’m a clone?’

‘You’re not a clone. You look identical because we need the sensory net to be the same. But Marwa’s natural DNA doesn’t have acceleration capacity. The thing that matters is your brain is a facsimile of hers, only we’ve loosened your synapses. Can’t make connections that are already made, after all. Now go outside. Experience things. Paris awaits.’

Out of context, his gibberish meant nothing to me. I felt overwhelmed by colours and sounds, even in that muffled darkness.

The white woman took my arm.

We passed the door to Marwa’s cell and I stopped to touch the cold keyhole, but something was wrong. I stared at that hole and for a moment I couldn’t remember what belonged inside of it. Pencils? Wakefulness? Satiety? Light?

All I knew was that I wanted it to open.

‘This way,’ the white woman insisted.

She led me through chilly, sun-washed streets. I saw little cars and long buses. I heard laughter. Pigeons cooed in empty stone archways under the eyes of corroded angels.

Everything I saw and heard, I could identify. Little shocks down my scalp each time.

Darkness approached. I smelled chocolate and geraniums in window boxes, their dropped petals crushed underfoot. The white woman led me back to the police station. She put her hand-held machine into a bigger machine.

‘Nothing,’ the moustached man said irately. ‘Tomorrow send her out by herself.’

He popped a boiled sweet into his mouth and sucked on it sharply.

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