[ANAstasia] by Gil & Yenia - The Dazzling Lads

I’d never felt fear more vivid than when I had woken up alone, unable to move, in that small dim room, surrounded by machines, their red eyes flashing at me. They spoke occasionally in ambiguous beeps. An unfamiliar memory briefly crossed my mind and then disappeared, like a dream. I felt my chest tighten, and the beeping hastened. The door opened. The lights turned on. A figure in a white coat steadily approached in unhurried steps and stopped near me. My eyes peered into the deep gentle blue of a young man whose presence exuded a contagious calm. That was how I came to meet Dr Mikhail, who would come visit my room each week to interrogate me on several things that, at the time, I thought held no particular significance. It reminded me of how the ‘cops’ questioned criminals in cells in my father’s old television movies.

At the end of the 5th visit, I had by then been residing for a month there, Dr Mikhail said that I should ‘tell him more about myself’ next time.  I had sufficiently recovered enough to pick up a pen and write. The nurses, who were my only other company apart from Dr Mikhail, would attend to all my requests. I asked for a notebook and a pencil; they handed me a writing gadget and a digital pen. Writing was a hobby of mine. As a child, I would write about the trees and the green mountains I saw in those old movies, or how my day went, if my father prepared fried chicken for dinner, or any mischief Ana and I were up to. My memories were hazy when I first woke up in this white cell, but with each passing day, more and more started to return to me. So by the end of that 5th visit, I could remember enough to chronologise some key events in my past for the 6th visit.

✤

My name is Anastasia Alexandrovna. I’m currently sixteen. My hobbies include diary writing, acting, and watching television movies. For as long as I can remember(not right now), I’ve lived alone with my father in a little house somewhere. It wasn’t big but it was enough. I even had my own room(a bit smaller than this one). My father was a scientist(or was it a researcher). I had always been very sickly and prone to colds and fevers since I was little. I was never allowed outside and so my time was only spent indoors. It was never a problem for me. I never felt alone, but my father always made sure I wouldn’t feel lonely; so when I turned five, he gave me a friend.

Her name was Ana(that’s the name I had given her). She’s like one of those life-sized dolls but she can actually speak and think and looks like a real person(she looked almost identical to me). One of the movies I saw called them ‘robots’ or something. But Ana’s different; she’s special compared to those ‘robots’. She eats. She cries. She sleeps. She even grows. Father told me she’s not human, but that, all the same, I should still treat her as one. She was my sister, perhaps not by blood, but we shared a bond as sisters did; we were twins: Inseparable.

Father upgraded the single bed in my room by placing another one right above it to accommodate Ana. On some nights, I slept on the bottom bed, while on others I slept on the top. I’ll embarrassingly confess that there have been moments when I feared that the top bed would collapse, and it caused needless anxieties that resulted in many sleepless nights. I would tell Ana not to move too much whenever she’s on top. It never did crash. Father was amazing, I thought. If he could stack beds like that without having them crash down then maybe we could even reach the stars. Such were the childish thoughts that occupied our fantasies on those warm, lively days.

One morning when I was eight I passed out while running in circles around the dining table trying to mimic a scene from a movie I had watched recently. Ana carried me to bed. When I came to, Ana explained to me what had happened. I became despondent over my frail health. She comforted me and even started to recreate the scene I had tried to mimic; yet in comparison to mine, she did so with ease and utmost faithfulness. Then she mimicked a few more of our favourite movie scenes. Then she mimicked me with frightening accuracy: her arms sagged forward, back bent slightly, head hung down, and a gait like a zombie’s. The room filled with innocent laughter.

Ana and I loved watching movies together. Father kept his old collection of Blu-ray discs and DVDs(it had belonged to his grandparents from the east) in one large carton box. There were so many we couldn’t possibly watch them all. We would take turns choosing a movie at random then rush to our room(there was a large flatscreen television there) to watch it. There was this one time when I was eleven, Ana and I were watching some movie about giant aliens fighting intergalactic monsters on Earth. We enjoyed it so immensely that after the film, we enacted the climactic final battle. At some point, Ana slipped, causing the television to fall onto her. She calmly told me to get father but I could only stare in horror. Father rushed to the room shortly after. He tended to Ana very carefully, as though she were something so delicate. He told me to stay put and not go near the shards. I obeyed in silence. She ended up with a broken arm and gashes on her skin. That was the first time I ever saw Ana bleed.

After the accident, we were unable to watch any more movies. That flatscreen had apparently been ‘one of a kind’; a relic of a bygone era. That was also around the time when my health took a drastic turn. One chilly evening when I was twelve, we were having supper when a throbbing pain in my chest seized me. I staggered to the sink and vomited blood. Ana seated me while my father gave me some medication. I started to feel a little better. He carried me to my room and held my hand and stayed there with me the entire night. I will never forget my father’s face as he looked at me with a painful smile. I vaguely understood the implications of his expression.

It only worsened from there. I would have periodic chest pains that lasted from anxiously brief to agonisingly long. I regularly vomited blood, and sometimes the medicine wouldn’t work. The time I spent bedridden steadily increased until I practically lived there. Ana served as my caretaker and was always there for me. When the pain was too much, I would cry incessantly, and she’d caress my hair so gently and whisper warm words into my ears. I wouldn’t have been able to make it through those times without her. I felt myself reaching a point of breaking; so I told her all the things that lay dormant in me. Confessions I’d never been able to tell anyone before. Not even to my father.  Perhaps I did so out of the belief that asking for her forgiveness would grant me a sort of salvation from my fate.

My condition reached its most severe peak when I was fifteen. I had been moved to a hidden room in the house(much like this one but more dusty and decrepit) and connected to a machine that aided breathing. Ana never left my side throughout it all; my father had been in and out of the house, despite my declining condition. I knew he had work to worry about too, and that wasn't hard for me to accept; but I felt he was becoming cold and distant. The more these feelings of frustration grew, the more my heart cracked. I only wished he would stay, on some days, even for just a few hours. I lived every moment dreading that the ‘goodbye’ I had parted from my lips each morning would be the last. I would send Ana to ask, and she would always come back with a reply along the lines of: ‘I'm sorry I can't be with you right now. I have very, very important work to do. But I want you to know that I'm doing all of this for you. Because I love you.’ I grew more disheartened every time I discerned that same meaning in his sentences. Even when I asked, he wouldn’t tell me the nature of his work. It’s ‘too dangerous’, but I shouldn’t worry because it’s ‘all for my sake’. It was inevitable then, that my patience would come to completely shatter.

That tipping point came one rainy evening. I was so deep in my depression that I blurted out in a raging protest against him how he would feel if he returned home one day to find me dead. He started sobbing. The next day, he seemed to treat me in an entirely new manner; I apologised for what I had said and told him he needn’t start acting so affectionate with me. Though the entire thing eventually blew over, I felt my words had left a lasting impact, and that a sort of shift slowly began to open up in him. I slept through my 16th birthday. By then I had been struggling to make even the slightest movement and was being fed through a tube. Each breath I took was long and deep. For much of the months after that, nothing of significance happened; and then one day, I went to sleep and never woke up.

✤

After the 6th visit, Dr Mikhail said something peculiar that, when I had first heard it, a sort of realisation washed over me: ‘I wanted you to tell me about yourself, not Anastasia.’ I believe it was due to this that allowed me to recall, bit by bit, my true self floating aimlessly along my memories. Before he left, Dr Mikhail said that he would visit me again next week.

✤

After Anastasia’s death, father locked himself in the lab. He had told me to stay away, but I just couldn’t leave him. I feared the things he would do if he were left alone.

‘I know it’s difficult for you, father. It’s difficult for me too, believe me, but you mustn't lose hope. Please… Get up’

He uttered no reply.

‘I’ve worked hard. All these years, I’ve worked hard; and I believe I can do it. I’ll be her; I’ll become Anastasia, just like you wanted. I may not have learned everything about her, but I’ve learned enough that—’

‘Stop it already… Can we just drop this? You may mimic her voice, her looks, her whatever—but it’s not the same. No matter how much you try to act like her, you wouldn’t be able to replace her. God, why did I even believe that this would ever work? All this time I spent running away from Sofia, from the Apex—from everything, for things to turn out like this? God forgive me. Forgive me for being so stupid. This whole thing was a mistake. You’re a mistake.’

I felt myself beginning to burst; all I could do was hold back the tears.

‘Father…’

‘Don’t call me that. You were never my daughter. You're just a clone and nothing more.’

Overcome with unexplainable emotions, I left and ran to my room to cry until I collapsed in bed. I awoke later that day to my father's voice behind the door mumbling an apology.

Later that night, I remembered a movie Anastasia and I had once watched. It involved transferring memories from one person to another. At that moment, an idea rooted itself. The morning after, I informed my father of my plan. I had half-expected him to shrug it off as an impossibility, but it could apparently be done. Father already had a copy of Anastasia's memories from three months ago. It was only supposed to be for preservation, so father refused the idea. He hadn't before attempted memory transfer between two people, and thus the effects are purely hypothetical; but most of all, he didn't wish to endanger my life. However, I insisted, and insisted, until he caved in. After all, this was my duty—the reason for my birth and my ultimate purpose for living.

The lab was shrouded in complete darkness except for the flashing red lights from the machines around me. Amid the beeping, father spoke:

‘What if… What if it fails, and you don't wake up? I think that would be too much for me. I wouldn't be able to live with the thought of having murdered both of my daughters.’

I reassured him and told him that it will be fine, that things will turn out okay. Those words, though genuine, were spoken out of a fatal ignorance. Indeed, at that time, I failed to consider his own feelings. He hesitated for a moment, and then it was as if my mind left my body and time froze right then and there.

✤

Yesterday, on his 7th visit, Dr Mikhail said that this would be my last week here. The thought of leaving it behind feels kind of lonely to me. I didn't expect to become so attached. Dr Mikhail seemed satisfied when I told him the second story. But I still had some uncertainties that needed clearing up, and Dr Mikhail provided me with very conclusive answers.

After the memory transfer, I didn’t regain consciousness for days; and father lost all hope completely. He phoned to turn himself in. When the enforcers arrived, they discovered he had hung himself in the living room. They found that I was still faintly breathing and brought me here to the hospital.

I’ve also come to learn a little about my father’s background. He worked directly for the ‘Apex Government’ as a researcher in ‘biogenetics’ and to a lesser extent, ‘neuroscience’ and ‘cybernetics’. However, for unknown reasons, shortly after Anastasia was born, he stole classified information and fled with Anastasia deep into the slums.

I didn’t know what to think upon learning these details. I wanted to just shut myself out and never think about it. Dr Mikhail said it’s better this way. He reassured me that by next week things will start to brighten for me. I’ve seen images of the city; its sprawling and high-reaching buildings that extend higher as you approach the centre where the Apex Sky Tower stands. Before that, I had never even glimpsed the full scale of the metropolis. I don’t find it pretty, honestly; instead, I find myself wishing for the calm offered by the tallgrasses on mellow meadows or the lulls of gentle forests by riverbeds like in those old movies.