LIBERTY'S PROFILE

Simulacrum


The clock ticks softly in the dark.

He'll lay there for another four hours until the alarm rings, then listen to the radio news before reaching for the light. It will click on and he will drag himself out of bed. Then he will dress, eat, leave for work and arrive five minutes before the boss. A medical miracle indeed, this life.

There was a time when he had despaired of ever having a normal one. Never a wife, or child to love. To hold and cherish and remember on his death bed with smiles or tears or both. No occupation or hobby to engage his intelligence, to stimulate his senses or alleviate the blankness that comes from sitting in a supposed forever, doing naught but think. Only the dark and the tick of a clock to mark the passage of time.

He scratches his arm absently as he rolls over. A body moulded from the shadows of night blocks his view of the world outside his bed. She sleeps as a child sleeps, soft whimpers and gentle sighs, perhaps a murmur or two when in the grip of a nightmare. So still though, with nary a sign of life.

He places a shaking hand to her throat and feels her pulse beating slow, steady. It has become a ritual, this reaching out during the lightless hours. A charm to keep the memories of darkness and solitude away. To reassure himself that there is more to the shadows than an eternal silence. His fear of being alone in the dark is constant. A remnant of a past that is best forgotten; that has been forgotten.

It wasn't that long ago that he was made real, given a breathing body of flesh and bones, with a heart that beats in constant, if sometimes erratic, motion. A perfect body in perfect health. A perfect wife with a perfect love and a perfect job with the perfect boss.

A perfect life.

All that he had hoped for while dreaming in that dark abyss in that hazily dreamed time of 'Before'.

He can feel now, see and hear and taste and touch and smell.

And know.

He knows more than he ever did while suspended in the darkness. He understands life and love and all the small bits that add together to create everything that is him. The enjoyment of watching a holo-projection with her is not unknown to him, nor the feel of her sighs on his lips and ten perfect fingers clenched to prolong a longing. He knows how to do his job and do it well enough that his boss can share a smile or a glass of wine â€" sweet, sweet Merlot.

And though he may not know the reason behind many things that happen, he understands enough to feel comfortable living in this world he occupies. His perfect world that runs on precision and the tick, tick, tick of clocks.

Sometimes, though, he feels that perhaps he and everything around him is too perfect. If he focus' on that thought too much a sharp pain begins to grow behind his eyes and his face changes, ever so slightly, from the default genial smile he and she and everyone else wears day in and out to something… different. Alien.

So he has learnt not to think about such things, to ignore the perfection and tell himself that all is as it should be.

Still, some nights when he wakes from half-remembered dreams, he is confronted with images and memories that he should not have. Images that make themselves known and repeat their acquaintance over and over. A dead sparrow, three yellow roses and a blue spinning top that stay with him through those moonlit hours until the radio news turns on and he forces himself out of bed. At those times he wonders just what these images mean and whether they are his or something he had seen in a holo-projection during his youth.



Then he wonders if he even had a youth.



Two years ago, during one of these nightly sessions, he entertained the thought that perhaps these strange images came from a time before. Before the perfection. Before his body. Before the darkness, even. Trying to imagine a life, a youth, before the darkness, he had drifted into sleep, only to wake to the face of a strange woman leaning over him. She wore that same smile that he had grown to recognise.

Genial.

Friendly.

Lifeless.

While he recoils slightly she mumbles nonsense words about malfunctions and anomalies. He then becomes aware of another face hovering on the edge of his vision. A face that feels as familiar as his own and yet…

The face is gone before he can remember where he has seen it before and now the woman is smiling and talking to him about having to recalibrate his time and date functions and how his perfect wife was perfectly worried about his perfect health.

He takes this in as well as he can while trying to focus on the face but all thoughts are driven out of his head when she sticks the needle he hadn't noticed until now into his arm. And while he starts to slip into a dreamless sleep from which he will only remember such words as malfunction, anomalies and recalibrations, and go on to lead his perfect life with his perfect love in perfect time, his memory spits out one last thought.

Didn't that use to be me?