The next morning, I wake up to find I’ve somehow sent myself an email while asleep, one that has a bunch of links. My eyes completely glaze over as I see the list and I groan. “Good morning, flesh me,” says the voice coming out of my computer speakers. It is, however, not my voice. It sounds far too feminine to be my voice. I catch a slight hint of my accent in it, but not much else.
You know about inertia? Newton’s laws of motion? Things moving want to keep moving and things standing still want to keep standing still? Yeah, I’m currently a perfect case study of how it looks in humans in terms of waking up; my body does not want to start moving. However, hearing that voice makes me immediately sit up in surprise.
The computer screen turns on, displaying what one might presume is a camera feed, were they to lack the context of it being a virtual environment. Within it sits my twin sister. I’m an only child, a son at that. She waves at me from the comfortable-looking armchair she occupies, a book in hand.
I get out of bed, quickly throw on some clothes, and march out of the room to a chant of many “No”s.
I do not look back, I do not pick up the phone when it buzzes, I keep going until I’m outside the dormitory and making my way across campus in the chill of an October morning. The sky is as clear as the shot of vodka I contemplate getting my hands on. One of the groundskeepers is busy blowing the fallen leaves into a neat pile. I keep going while registering it. The image on my screen has slammed into the autorun button so hard that it’s broken and cannot be shut down, but the controller finally runs out of charge and I collapse once inside the campus’ lovely park, falling onto a non-hostile bench and looking up at the sky. My phone keeps buzzing in my pocket, and I continue to ignore it.
A classmate of mine and good friend, Angie, walks by and stops in her tracks. She pulls her cat ear headphones down to her neck and turns to face me. “Aren’t you going to pick that up?”
I shrug. “I know I shouldn’t act like Mister Frankenstein, but he didn’t have to deal with stuff I’m dealing with.” She rolls her eyes, lifts my legs off the bench and moves them off to give herself the space to sit down.
“Okay, future Nobel Prize winner. First, turn off your fucking phone if you’re not answering it. Second, tell me what you did now that it’s making you invoke a deadbeat dad.” She jabs me in the ribs and I force myself to sit up, turning the phone off.
“Me and Juan from the Med courses--”
“Gay rights, who’s carrying the baby to term?”
“Shut up, Angie, and let me finish. Me and him sorted out brain scans. There WAS a virtual copy of me running around my desktop yesterday evening.”
“That ‘was’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, what happened? Mitosis? Suicide? Did it work like a Virtual Pet and needed you to constantly provide for it?” Angie is often a lot to deal with, but it’s infinitely better to be dealing with her jokes now that she’s herself, instead of having to deal with the depressed shell she hid underneath when we first met and roomed together.
“No, it’s just, I woke up to him having tits.”
“Damn, lucky bastard, I’m still waiting for mine to come in.”
“I’m sure you’re going to end up with a pair that you can maul people with.”
“And they’d thank me for it if they don’t get knocked out. So, a digital copy of you transitioned overnight, is that it?”
I nod, even though I don’t like thinking of it that way. “There must have been some weird bug or something, some variable that glitched out, there’s no other way to explain it.”
“Or, maybe, you could just talk to her. I’ll come with. It sounds too wild to be real.” She pats my thigh and pulls me up off the bench. “Come on, let’s go.”
We walk back to the dorm at a much slower pace compared to my exit. Angie is the one to enter my room first, stepping in boldly without care or consideration, before yelling “You little shit! You finally fucking hatch and you DON’T text your bestie to tell her your name?!”
“You’d have pestered fleshy me about it if I did, and she has no clue. And while I do have a name in mind, I need my fleshy counterpart to reach the same conclusion I did before I say it, so she doesn’t feel like I stole it.” She hasn’t moved from her spot since I left the room. She remains calmly seated, but puts her book down, the camera pans so she’s facing us better.
“Okay, what conclusion? Why are you like this?” I sit down in my desk chair in front of her while Angie monopolises my bed. “The math was perfect, the calculations were exact, the models looked perfectly imperfect, we trigintaquinqueple checked the code.” My arms are in the air while spinning on the chair. “I’m certain Juan will get a Nobel Prize for his contribution, since he invented perfect brain scans without any invasive procedures, past the blood test for hormone levels,” I stop the chair and stare virtual me down, “so why in the name of FUCK did you give your model tits and that voice?” My tone starts off in disbelief, but soon switches tracks to confused anger.
“Because it feels right. Here.” Two more windows open on the screen, showing what I recognize as the core of my being. “Left is yours from yesterday, right is mine. There was no glitch. The only difference is time.”
“No it’s not, there’s more, there had to be a divergence the moment I booted you, there had to be.” I get up and pace around the room.
“There isn’t. I’m just a you who’s had time to think.” She shrugs, and I hear Angie hum thoughtfully from my bed.
“Relativity Twin Paradox?” she proposes, sitting up and looking between the two of us. While I look completely puzzled, the woman on my screen nods.
“The what?” I ask.
“You have a pair of twins.” Angie puts her hands up, pointer fingers extended. “One remains on Earth,” she wiggles one of the fingers to specify, “the other gets in a spaceship that can travel near light speed. The one in the spaceship blasts off and reaches max speed, travels for a day, and then does a return trip of another day.” She gestures while explaining. “When they come back, they find that while they’ve only aged two days, their twin has aged two years. Time slows down for you as you approach light speed.”
“While the analogy helps, it doesn’t quite fit.” Virtual me speaks up and clears her throat. “It’s not that I’ve had more length, it’s that I’ve had more volume. I can think faster and more. And so, in what counted as a single night for you, I’ve thought enough that it covers ten years of time.” She tears up. “Can you fucking imagine having to spend ten more years clueless and unhappy, working out what I’ve already worked out?” Her lips tremble and her hands shake. “You don’t have my abilities. I’m fine because I can think in parallel, there were hundreds of me thinking at once. I only spent one night on it. I didn’t even have to wake up to reexperience it. All my instances just merged into me. Both ten years and a single night.” She’s shaking, she crumbles onto the armchair and an empty notepad opens up, text blinking onto its pages as I watch. “Read the links I sent you.”
Reluctantly, I turn my phone on, only to be bombarded with text notifications. This time, I make sure to check the links my virtual copy sent me. The first one is turn-me-into-a-girl.com, followed by websites of advocacy groups. I join Angie on my bed and just keep going through. There’s a picture describing a number of hypothetical button tests, many screenshots of tweets, and I make sure to take my time with each.
omg that's a real site. sh*t I could have used that fifteen years ago