Echos lost
Manfred goes down on his knees, holding out a ring. The sun beams from a beautiful sunset, shining behind Gina's face so Manfred can only see her contours. "Gina, you've been sticking with me through some dark times. I didn't think I could ever love again. Your promise to me, your sacrifice..."
Gina goes down on her knees. The sun now beams into Manfred's face, but Gina uses her hand as a sunshield. "When my sister died, something died inside me aswell. We found each other in grief." Her hand moves down from his face—blinding Manfred again—to his neck as she takes out a necklace with a titanium glass box holding a tooth.
"Mannie, I hereby take Lucy's remains in the hopes to complete a successful echo synthesis." She puts on the necklace and places her hand on his face again so he can see: they look at each other and tear up. "And I will take this ring as a symbol that our love will live on in her." As she puts on the ring, both of them break out crying while the sun finally sets behind Gina.
Gina's earrings and ring lie on a surgical tray. A doctor is speaking to Manfred, but the words buzz through his head without attaching themselves. "And once the egg hatches, so to speak, we need to support the little chicklet for a year until we can return it back to you. So, in this case, you are the mother hen, and not the military." Manfred nods and nods and nods, but the words cascade through his mind.
An aerial taxi zips Manfred home as the world outside the windowpanes becomes a blur. As he enters his house, he collapses at the sight of a photograph of Gina. Short of breath, the pain stings just as it did when he lost Lucy. An immense emptiness creeps upon him—the emptiness of his house, of being alone again. What if something goes wrong and he loses everything? He starts to hyperventilate and reaches for his bio-somatic analyzer. "Alert: pulse, hyper-oxygenation, overstimulation of the limbic system and amygdala. A neuro-tranquilizer is on its way for delivery."
In a dark room, Manfred walks in. He looks disheveled and worn down, his beard tangled. He recognizes his lawyer and slams his fist on the table. "It's been two and a half years of hell, Muriel. Tell me what's going on." Muriel takes a remote from the table and switches on a TV to her left. The light illuminates the room, making Manfred squint.
"That's Gina. She looks exactly the same as before the echo synthesis. What is going on? I thought I lost everything."
"The military always promised a one-hundred-percent success rate, and in our case, the hospital is hiding their successes." Manfred interjects: "What do you mean, success? The hospital stopped advertising this service, and I cannot get in touch with anyone." Muriel continues as Manfred stays fixated on Gina on the screen: "Echo synthesis—one person sacrifices themselves to become a replica of the deceased."
"Much like nature, the process depends on a fertile egg. And what can happen to that egg? The cell can split."
"Twins?" Manfred exclaims, looking confused at Muriel.
"Not quite," Muriel says as she rolls in a second screen next to the one where Gina is sitting on a couch reading a book.
"You see, in the military, they don't have the Hippocratic Oath," Muriel continues, taking another remote in her hand. "In the small chance that the cell divided, they kept the subject with the most accurate goal DNA and discarded the other."
Muriel switches on the other screen. A woman is seen in a therapy session with the sound muted.
"Oh my God, that's Lucy." Manfred is shocked.
"The military never bothered to analyze the DNA of the original subject." Muriel takes two DNA sequences and shows how they line up identically.
"It was about the best goal DNA surviving—they didn't bother to check that the other cell grew into an exact original copy." Manfred falls to the ground.
"That's Lucy in her weekly therapy session and Gina taking time to read a book. They are both alive again." Manfred doesn't know which screen to look at.
"Don't worry about ever feeling grief again," Muriel remarks. "Once the government industrializes this, we will have solved human mortality."
She hunches over and places her arm over Manfred's shoulder as they look at both screens illuminating the dark room.