First Copy


The first is flawed; fatally so. The printing comes out twisted and deformed, writhing and bloody with limbs where they shouldn’t be and mouths … oh, so many mouths. They moan incoherently while it contorts in agony for nine minutes and thirty seconds, and then, like a miscarried foetus, it dies.


Second Copy

We work hard on defining the print parameters for the second copy, hoping to avoid the disaster of the first. It’s weeks before we feel confident we’ve got it right. When the time comes to press print, I hesitate. I look at Alfred, and he reads my thoughts, gently nudges me out of the way, and presses it for me.

Three-dimensional organic printing, or ‘skin printing,’ is a messy business made sanitised. From jets built into the sides of a cylindrical glass chamber, the machine prints marrow and cartilage, nerves and blood vessels, organs, skin, teeth, hair. Even brain tissue. And it does so with a neatness that is mesmerising. One layer after another, from the tips of the toes to the crown of the head, with ruthless regularity. Once the machine is printing, there’s no stopping it. Not until the copy is finished.

I hold my breath as it materialises my mirror image behind the glass. This time, the resemblance is flawless. The finished copy stands naked in the printing chamber, an exact replica of me. It has the same green eyes. The same small breasts. Even the same cellulite on its thighs. It opens its mouth to take its first breath … and can’t.


Third Copy

“We focused too much on the exterior appearance,” Alfred says. “We need to make sure the machine can replicate your organic functions just as accurately.”

This experiment is as much mine as it is his—in fact, I was the one who persuaded the university to let us have the lab and the team for it—but having seen two copies expire in one day, I’m not ready to watch a third.

“I’m going to get beers,” I say, as he presses print.


Fourth Copy

I didn’t see the last one die. I took Alfred’s word that it was deformed. He had to put it down, he said, for its own good. It was gone before I’d returned with the beers.

I cracked open the can and downed it in one go. I couldn’t understand why things weren’t going the way our modelling had predicted. If I’m honest, I got a bit upset about it. After all, we’ve done all the groundwork. We’ve pulled endless all-nighters, calculating and analysing every possible error. Skinprint, at this point, is my entire life. Not to mention the reason my husband left me, and I’m sleeping alone in a tiny student flat, but let’s not go there.

I stand beside Alfred’s chair as he sets up the print parameters for the next copy.

This one will be better, he assures me. He’s been working on it all day and night. Would I do the honours?

I step up to the keyboard. Swallow. Press the button.

The printing is flawless. The copy lives, breathes, walks right up to the glass and stares back out at us. I wonder what it’s thinking. It puts a hand up to the glass, a perfect duplicate of mine.

“I know that palm like the back of my hand,” I joke awkwardly. Alfred doesn’t laugh.

“Speak to it,” he says. “See if it can talk.”

I look it in the eye, noticing the familiar grey rim around the green iris, the way the colour is shot through with gold.

“My name is Dr Stephanie Collins,” I say. “But you can call me Steph.”

It stares at me blankly. I imagine it must be thinking. Processing my words, checking them against the dictionary database its AI has access to, trying to understand. Then it opens its mouth.

“Maaaaa,” it says. Like a sheep.

Alfred says we will try again tomorrow.


Fifth Copy

The fifth copy at least shows the potential for speech. I sit on the floor opposite it in the middle of the printing chamber and show it flashcards, teaching it letters and sounds. It repeats them back to me: Ah, Ah, Ah. Buh, Buh, Buh. Cuh, Cuh, Cuh. I watch its mouth form the sounds and my lips move along with it, involuntarily. That evening when I go home, I stand in front of the mirror and repeat: Ah, Ah, Ah. Buh, Buh, Buh. Cuh, Cuh, Cuh.


Sixth Copy

With each copy, we improve the cognitive functions. Sight, hearing, mental processing. Each new version of the AI builds upon the knowledge of the last. The discarded copies are incinerated. I follow Alfred when he pushes the gurney to the furnace and watch fire light up the window behind the heavy steel door. Did you know that the human body is actually very difficult to burn? It’s not like in the movies, where vampires combust in the blink of an eye. Even at the high temperatures of the incinerator, it takes about an hour to reduce a corpse to ash. I picture the body in there—my body—slowly disintegrating, blackened flesh curling at the edges amongst sizzling fat, like a hog on a spit.

“You OK?” Alfred asks, and I realise I’ve been staring at the flames far too long.

“Fine,” I say. “Same time tomorrow?”


Seventh Copy

“I realise it must feel strange,” says Alfred. “Seeing yourself die over and over again.”

“It’s not me,” I say. “I know it’s not me.”

“Still,” says Alfred, but he doesn’t finish his sentence.


Eighth Copy

I don’t know why we chose me to be the Original. It wasn’t something we really discussed, just an unconscious, automatic understanding between the two of us. I suppose it had something to do with the fact that women appear less threatening, or perhaps because robots in movies are always female. It just seemed natural that it should be me. And so, it was. My husband—my ex, I suppose I should say—hated the idea.

“But why does it have to be you?” he kept asking. “Why do you have to do this at all?”

I would give him the usual spiel about scientific advancement. About all the potentially life-saving applications, like being able to provide organs for transplant patients, and having willing AI servants to do our difficult and dirty work. About how fascinating it would be to raise an artificial intelligence, just to find out what it can achieve. And in the end, he stopped trying to argue. Just looked at me in this way I hated: not angry, just sort of sad, like the place I was now standing was so far away that he didn’t even know how to reach me anymore.

But I have to believe. As we push Eight to the incinerator I think of her short, painful life and tell myself I have to believe in what we’re doing. I don’t have anything else left.


Ninth Copy

This one seems brighter than the others. It’s something I can’t quite place. A thoughtful look in her eyes, a slight, inquisitive cock of her head as she listens to us talk. We keep Nine for several weeks, teaching her, guiding her, letting her connect to the internet in carefully controlled bursts. I really am sure she’s the one. The final one. That there will be no need to destroy her.

Nine is the first copy to survive long enough to be moved from the printing chamber to the observation room we’ve prepared. It’s simple but comfortable, with a bed, toilet, shower, and sink. Three of the walls are decorated with Alfred’s daughter’s paintings, framed against a backdrop of candy-striped wallpaper. The fourth wall is glass. I find myself returning to the lab late at night to talk to her, after Alfred has gone home. I tell her about my life, about my fears and hopes and worries. She doesn’t say much, but she always listens. I find it comforting.

And then I arrive one morning to find her gone. Alfred is there, looking sheepish. The inner glass of the observation room is splattered with blood at about head height.

“She malfunctioned in the night and did this.” He gestures at the stain. “She must have been banging her head against the window. Her face was all smashed up. I had to put her down.” His eyes are apologetic in a way I find painful to see. He knows I liked this one. Knows this will upset me. “I’m sorry.”


Tenth Copy

Once again, I stay late at the lab. Something is bothering me. I want to keep an eye on this one myself, day and night. Just in case. She sits in the observation room, still and silent, her eyes locked on mine through the glass.

“What are you thinking?” I wonder aloud, although the intercom is switched off and I know she can’t hear me. I have to keep reminding myself that she’s not human. Her thought processes are alien to us.

She stares at me. The lights in the lab are dim.

“What are you thinking?” she mouths.

Then, in a flash, she is on her feet, surging towards me, faster than lightning. Slam. She hits the glass full force, right in front of me. Blood splatters everywhere. Her nose is broken and bleeding.


Eleventh Copy

“There’s a problem with the way some areas of the brain are replicating.” Alfred spins a 3D image of a brain around on his computer screen. “This is going to take a few goes to get right.”


Copies Twelve through Seventeen

Slam.

Slam, slam, slam, slam, slam.


Eighteenth Copy

This time, Alfred is convinced he’s smoothed out the issues with the brain function. Eighteen sits quietly in her room with electrodes fixed to her head, her eyes on us as we discuss her test results. There’s no way she can hear us behind the sound-proof glass, and yet I turn my back on her before I speak, the hairs on my neck prickling under the intensity of her gaze.

“I think they can lip read,” I tell Alfred. “What if they know more than we realise?”

Alfred dismisses my concerns with a chuckle. Nothing seems to worry him. His interest is in the technology: how far can we go? What can we achieve? He’s alive with possibility, his eyes bright and excited as he switches on the intercom and starts asking questions. But my husband’s arguments echo in my mind in a way they never did before. Some ever-growing part of me is afraid we’re making a huge mistake.

I stare at the 3D-modelled brain on the computer screen as if I can somehow interpret Eighteen’s thoughts just by looking. Do we really understand what we’re creating?

“Who are you?” Alfred asks, and I know from experience how his voice will sound in the chamber: tinny, echoing.

“Eighteen.” Her voice is mine, but void of all expression. On screen, the 3D brain lights up, synapses exploding like fireworks.

“What is your purpose?”

“To study and emulate human behaviour.”

“Who am I?”

“You are Professor Albert Blake.” Eighteen’s attention shifts to me, and although she has not been asked, she adds, “And you are Doctor Stephanie Collins. Steph.”

“That’s right,” I say. We’ve had this conversation many times before, with every copy that survived long enough. Eighteen must remember it, thanks to the memory downloads from her previous incarnations. Sometimes I feel like she’s humouring us, following the steps of a dance she already knows well.

I go in to talk to her one morning, carrying a plastic bucket chair identical to the one she’s sitting in. I place it opposite her and sit down. As we stare at one another, I imagine how we must look. If it weren’t for her hospital gown and my blouse and jeans, no one would be able to tell us apart.

“How are you today, Eighteen?”

“I am well.”

“Did you sleep well?”

She cocks her head slightly as if processing my question.

“I wonder,” she says after a long pause, “what would happen if I squeezed your windpipe as tightly as I could?”


Nineteenth Copy

For the first three days, we talk to Nineteen only from outside the observation room. Any objects that could cause harm have been removed from her vicinity. At night, I dream I’m lying in her small single bed with its candy-striped duvet cover. Again and again, I dream myself waking up in the observation room, until I hardly know if I am her or myself. When I finally wake for real, in my own cramped student flat, I’m too rattled to go back to sleep. Instead, I get up in the dead of night and head to the lab, still in my pyjamas.

Nineteen is awake when I get there, waiting, as if somehow she knew I was coming. I scan my fingerprint on the keypad and enter the observation room. She stands and walks over to me, her expression—my expression—gentle, full of sympathy. I almost break down, the full force of everything I’ve had to see over the last few weeks hitting me at once. All the copies I’ve pushed to the incinerator. All the times I’ve died. Nineteen looks at me as though she understands. She is like a sister. A twin. Myself.

She comes up close. Touches my face with soft fingers.

“Tell me everything. I want to know everything about you.”

So I tell her.


Twentieth Copy

The previous copy suffered from some lingering imperfections. Overnight, it became delusional. Emotional. Violent, even. It smashed up the observation room trying to get out. We decided it could be improved upon.

Alfred and I sedated it. Rolled it to the incinerator on a gurney. Watched as the flames filled the window.

Twenty, though.

Twenty is perfect.