A skeleton was beginning to form beyond Lena's ghostly outline. Her feet solidified into white cartilage and toes; her ankle and shin bones took shape. Her spine formed into a long white form and ribs branched off from it; her shoulder blades grew. Seams appeared on her skull, and the outline of her eye sockets formed. I can't say that it was a pleasant sight — seeing your girlfriend's skeleton — but I couldn't take my eyes off it. We were watching something that no one had ever seen — how a machine creates a person!
“With my memory, my memory…” I was thinking feverishly. “But that's not enough. Or has the computer mastered the laws of constructing a human body? From where? I certainly don't know them!” The bones in the tank were becoming sheathed with dark blue strips and coils of muscle, and they were covered by a yellowish layer of fat, like a chicken's. The circulatory system shot red throughout the body. All this fluctuated in the mixture, changing shape and form. Even Lena's face, with its closed lids, behind which we could see her watery eyes, was distorted by horrible grimaces. The computer seemed to be trying on ways to make a person.
I know too little about anatomy in general and female anatomy in particular to judge whether the computer was building Lena correctly. But soon I sensed that something was wrong. The original contours of her body were changing. The shoulders, which just a few minutes ago had been round and soft, became angular and grew in breadth. What was it?
“Her feet!” my double shouted. “Look at her feet!”
I looked at her feet that took a size thirteen shoe — and when I understood I broke out in cold sweat. The computer had run out of information on Lena and was finishing her off with my body! I turned to my double; his forehead was glistening with sweat too.
“We have to stop it!”
“How? Cut off the current?”
“We can't. That will erase the memory bank in the computer. Turn on the cooling…?”
“To slow down the process? It won't work. The computer has large heat reserves….”
The distorted body in the tank was taking on clearer features. A transparent mantle moved over it, and I recognized the style of the simple dress in which I liked Lena best. The computer with an idiot's diligence was dressing its creation in it.
I had to order the computer to stop, convince it… but how?
“Right!” My double leaped over to the glass case, took out Monomakh's Crown, pushed the “translation” button on it, and handed it to me. “Put it on and start hating Lena; think how you want to destroy her… go ahead.”
I grabbed the shiny helmet, turned it around in my hands, and gave it back.
“I can't….”
“Jerk! What else is there? That thing will be opening its eyes soon and….”
He pulled on the helmet and started screaming and waving his arms:
“Stop, computer! Stop immediately, do you hear me? You're not creating a good copy of a human! Stop, you idiot! Stop right now!”
“Stop, machine, do you hear me?” I turned to the microphones. “Stop, or we'll destroy you!”
It's disgusting to remember that scene. We, men who were used to pushing buttons to stop and direct any process, shouting and explaining… and to what? A collection of test tubes, electric circuits, and hoses. Phooey! We were panicked.
We yelled some more in disgusting voices, when the hoses near the tank began shaking with energetic convulsions, and the hybrid specimen in the tank was covered with a white mist. We shut up. Three minutes later the mist cleared. There was nothing in the gold liquid. Only ripples and color gradations spreading from the center to the edges.
“Wow…” said my double. “I somehow never appreciated the fact that man is seventy percent water. Now I've got it.”
We made our way to the window. The humid stuffiness made my body sticky. I unbuttoned my shirt, and so did my double. It was evening. The sky had cleared. The windows of the institute across the way reflected the sunset as though nothing had happened. They reflected it like that on every clear evening — yesterday, last month, last year — when this had not existed. Nature was making believe nothing had happened.
The skeleton enveloped in translucent tissue stayed in my mind.
“Those anatomical details, the grimaces… brrrr!” said the double, lowering himself into a chair. “I don't even feel like seeing Lena right now.”
I said nothing, because he had expressed my thoughts. It was over now, but then… it's one thing to know, even intimately, that your woman is a human being made of flesh, bones, and innards, and another thing to see it.
I took out the lab journal and looked at the last few notes… vague and pointless. It's when the experiment is working or when you get a good idea that you write at length; here I had:
April 8. Decoded numbers, 800 lines. Unsuccessful.
April 9. Decoded extracts from five rolls. Didn't understand a thing. Some kind of schizophrenia!
April 10. Decoded with the same results. I added to the flasks and bottles: Numbers 1, 3 and 5–2 liters of glycerine; Numbers 2 and 7 — 200 ml. of tyomochevina; and 2–3 liters of distilled water to all of them.
April 11. “Streptocidal striptease with the trembling of streptococci.” That does it….
And now I'll pick up the pen and write:
April 22. The complex has re — created me, V. V. Krivoshein, Krivoshein Number 2 is sitting next to me scratching his chin. A real joke!
And then I was engulfed with a wave of satanic pride. After all, this was some discovery! It encompassed systemology, electronics, bionics, chemistry, and biology — everything you could want and then some. And I did it all. How I did it was another question. But the important thing was me, ME! Now I could invite the State Commission and demonstrate the emergence of a new double in the tank. I could imagine the look on their faces. And my friends would have to say: “Boy he really did it! That Krivoshein is something!” And Voltampernov would run over to see…. I had an uncontrollable urge to giggle; only the presence of my double stopped me.
“Who cares about friends and Voltampernov,” I heard my voice say and I didn't realize at first that it was my double speaking. “This, Val, is a Nobel Prize!”
That's right: the Nobel Prize! My portrait in all the papers… and Lena, who treats me a little high — handedly now — and why not, she's beautiful, and I'm not — will appreciate me then. The run — of — the — mill name Krivoshein (once I tried looking in the encyclopedia for famous people with my name and didn't find any; there was a Krivoshilkov and a Krivonogov, but no Krivosheins yet) will resound. Krivoshein! The same….
I was made uneasy by these meditations. My vain thoughts disappeared. Really, what would happen? What should be done with this discovery?
I shut my journal.
“So, are we going to create in our image? A crush of Krivosheins? I guess we could make others if we recorded them into the computer. Damn it! This is… it just doesn't make sense.”
“Hm. And things were so peaceful….” My double shook his head.
Precisely. Everything had been peaceful — “Nice weather, miss. Which way are you going?” “In the opposite direction!” “Me too. What's your name?” “What's it to you?” — and so on right up to the wedding palace, the maternity ward, a licking for killing a cat with a slingshot, and burning the hated zoology textbook after graduation. The chairman of the Dneprovsk Registration Office put it so well in his article: “The family is the method of propagating the species and increasing the state's population.” And suddenly — hail science! — there is a rival method; we pour and sprinkle reagents from the local chemistry manual, pass input through sensors, and get a person. And a mature one at that, with muscles and an engineering degree, with habits and life experience.
“It looks as if we're taking aim at the most human of man's qualities: love, parenthood, childhood!” I was beginning to shudder. “And it's profitable. It's efficient and profitable, the most terrible things in our rationalistic age!”