God! — it should be worn only in the closet.
My second thought: “Should I say hello or walk by indifferently?”
And then everything around me no longer existed. I tripped on the flat pavement and stood stock still. The person coming toward me was me.
My third thought (edited): “What the….”
The man stopped in front of me.
“Hello.”
“H — h — hello….” A thought sprang up from the chaos that ruled in my brain. “Hey, are you from the film studio?”
“The film studio? I recognize my independence!” My double smiled. “No, Val, the studios aren't planning a movie about us yet. Though now, who knows.”
“Listen here, I'm not Val to you, but Valentin Vasilyevich Krivo — shein! Some pushy guy like you….”
The man smiled, obviously enjoying my anger. I could tell that he was much more prepared for our meeting and was relishing his upper hand.
“And… be so kind as to explain: who you are, how you come to be on institute grounds, and why you are wearing that makeup and outfit to look like me?”
“Sure,” he said. “Valentin Vasilyevich Krivoshein, head of the New Systems Lab. Here's my pass, if you like.” He displayed my worn, used pass. “And I came here from the lab, naturally.”
“Ah, so that's it?” It's important not to lose your sense of humor in situations like this. “Very nice to meet you. Valentin Vasilyevich, you say? From the lab? I see… uh — huh.”
And then I realized that I believed him. Not because of the pass, of course. You could fool anyone with a pass. Either it was the realization that the scar over my eyebrow and the brown birthmark on my cheek, which I always saw in the mirror on my left, actually were supposed to be on the right side of the face. Or it was something in his behavior that absolutely ruled out the possibility of a practical joke. I was scared. Had I really gone mad during the experiments and run into my split personality? “I hope no one sees us. I wonder, to anyone else, am I here alone or are there two of us?” I thought.
“So — from the lab, you say?” I tried tricking him. “Then why are you coming from the old building?”
“I was in accounting. Today's the twenty — second.” He took out a roll of five — ruble notes and counted off part of it. “Here's your cut.”
I took the money and counted it. Then:
“Why only half?
“Oh, God!” my double sighed expressively. “There are two of us now, you know.”
(That exaggerated, expressive sigh — I'll never sigh like that. I didn't know you could demean someone with a sigh. And his diction — if you can call the absolute absence of diction diction! — do I really spit out words like that?)
“I took the money from him, and that means he really exists,” I thought. “Or are my senses tricking me? Damn it, I'm a researcher, and I couldn't care less about senses until I know what's going on here!”
“So you maintain that… you've come out of a locked and sealed lab?”
“Uh — hum. Definitely from the lab. From the tank.”
“From the tank, my, oh…. What do you mean, from the tank?”
“Just that, from the tank. You could have set up some handles. I barely managed to get out.”
“Listen, drop this! You don't think you could really convince me that you were. that I was. no, that you were made by the computer?”
The double sighed once more in the most demeaning manner possible.
“I have the feeling it's going to take you a long time to get used to the idea that this has happened. I should have known. After all, you saw that there was living matter in the flasks?”
“Big deal. I've seen mold, too, growing in damp places. But that didn't mean that I was present at the conception of life. All right, let's assume that something living did arise in the flasks. I don't know. I'm no biologist. But what do you have to do with it?”
“What do you mean?” Now it was his turn to get angry. “And what did you think it would create: an earthworm? a horse? an octopus? The computer was collecting and processing information about you. It saw you. It heard, smelled, and observed you. It counted the biowaves of your brain! You were around so much you callused its eyes! There you are. If you have motorcycle parts you can only make a motorcycle, not a vacuum cleaner.”
“Hm, all right. Then where are the shoes, the suit, the pass, and the raincoat from?”
“Damn it! If it can create a person, how hard do you think it is for the computer to grow a raincoat?”
(The victorious glint in the eye, the clumsy gestures, the arrogant tone of voice. Am I really that obnoxious when I feel I'm right about something?)
“Grow?” I felt the fabric of his coat. A shudder ran through me. A raincoat wasn't like that.
Major things don't fit into the brain immediately, at least not in mine. I remember when I was in school I had to take charge of a delegate to a youth festival, a young hunter from the Siberian tundra; I showed him around Moscow. He took in the sights implacably and calmly: the bronze statues at the Economic Achievement Exhibits, the subway escalators, the heavy traffic. And when he saw the tall building of MSU, he simply said, “With poles and skin you can build a small hut — with rock, a big one.” But when we were in the lobby of the Nord Restaurant, where we had stopped off for a bite, he came face to face with a stuffed polar bear with a tray in its paws — and that amazed him! That was what happened to me. My double's raincoat resembled mine very much, down to the ink spot that I had added one day trying to get my pen to work. But the fabric was more elastic and almost greasy. The buttons were attached to flexible outgrowths, and there were no stitches in the fabric. “Listen, is it attached to you? Can you take it off?” My double was driven to a frenzy.
“That does it! It's not necessary to undress me in this cold wind to prove that I'm you! I can explain it without that. The scar over the eye — that's when you fell down when your father was teaching you to ride a horse. The torn ligament in the right knee happened during the soccer finals in high school. What else do I have to remind you of? How you used to secretly believe in God as a child? How as a freshman you used to boast that you had known many women, when actually you lost your virginity in Taganrog just before graduation?” (That son of a bitch! The examples he picked!) “Hm, all right; but you know, if you're me, I'm not so crazy about me.
“Neither am I,” he grunted. “I thought I had some smarts….” His face tensed. “Shhhh, don't turn around!” Footsteps behind me. “
“Good day, Valentin Vasilyevich,” said Harry Hilobok, assistant professor, sciences candidate, scientific secretary and institute busybody.
I didn't get a chance to open my mouth. My double grinned marvelously and nodded:
“Good day to you, Harry Haritonovich!”
A couple walked past us in the light of his smile. A plump brunette clicked her heels merrily on the pavement and Hilobok, walking in step, minced along as though he was wearing a tight skirt.
“Perhaps, I didn't quite understand you, Lyudochka,” he buzzed in his baritone, “but I, from the point of view of not understanding completely, am only expressing my opinion.”
“Harry has a new one,” my double announced. “You see, even Hilobok accepts me, and you have doubts. Let's go home!”
The only explanation I can think of for following him so quietly to Academic Town was that I was completely flabbergasted.
In the apartment, he headed straight for the bathroom. I heard the shower running, and then he stuck out his head:
“Hey, sample number one, or whatever your name is. If you want to make sure that I'm all in order, come on in. And you can soap my back while you're at it.”
So I did. It was a living person. And he had my body. By the way, I didn't expect such thick folds of fat on my stomach and sides. I have to work out with my barbells more often.
While he washed, I paced the room, smoked and tried to accustom myself to the fact that a computer had created a man. A computer had re — created me. Oh, nature, is this really possible? The ridiculous medieval ideas about a homunculus, Wiener's idea that the information in a man could be decoded into impulses, transmitted over any distance, and reordered into a man again, in the form of an image on a screen, Ashby's assertion that there was no major difference between the work of the brain and of a computer (but of course, Sechenov had maintained
