1. The Magus

The warm woman I held in my gloved hands at least looked perfect. But this was not the first time I had made a seemingly "perfect" recreation, and I was certain that this would be another failure because she did not scream. Any clone I had created with any vitality at all had at least screamed before they died. The only other silent ones seemed to refuse to breathe the moment they were out of their incubation tanks. They had blinked at me, uncomprehending, with unfocused eyes before their skin faded to blue as if blue were the color they were meant to be all along. Like stones darkened black with water fading to gray as the sun scrapes them dry, it was as if, though totally human, they were born empty, with no soul. I was starting to think that I needed to change my method—that there was something more that a human required in order to develop the will to live. Some organic stimuli that my hard, crystalline tanks, which, as far as I could see, were technically perfect, could not provide.

The two who had screamed the hardest had lived the longest (though not nearly long enough.) Thus, I was certain this latest attempt would not survive the hour. I lay her down on my wooden worktable and watched her. I waited for her to stop breathing. I was habituated to failure. A few hours later, she was still alive, so I poured nutritional gruel down her compliant throat and wrapped her in a freshly cleaned quilt.

When she was still alive the next day, I carried her upstairs out of my basement laboratory and into the manor's master bedroom. I placed her on the expansive bed, tucked a quilt around her, then I resumed watching her in her bed. She looked too vulnerable. Too weak. Too empty. Nothing like the original Eva.

Her eyes roamed the room so like the original Eva's but unseeing, uncomprehending. A confused animal, hardly more than a plant in an adult woman's body. All she was, was electrical impulses and flesh. If she survived, would she be more than the sum of her parts? Maybe. Maybe not. If she survived, it would take her a few more days for her eyes to relay the signals of what she sees to her brain–if I were lucky. If I were unlucky, this was as far as her development would go.

Thus, the thirteenth Eva survived the week and then the year. In that year, she learned to see, to think, to talk, to walk. I was the one that taught her these things. I taught her all I thought she would need to know, while I hired others to look after her physical and emotional needs. I wanted to teach her to think and walk and talk like Eva. I needed her to be Eva.

I did not allow myself to like her for the first five years—until she had well out-survived all her predecessors but the first, the original. Then, and only then, did I allow myself to become attached and allow the terror that comes with attachment to sink into me.

Three-thousand, four-hundred, and sixty-seven days have passed, and she is still breathing. Her breaths fill me.

I am no longer bored. But I never stopped being certain that each breath she takes will be her last. Any moment now, her lungs will stop hungering for air while she's sleeping. She'll choke on her breakfast. Her heart will tire of beating while she's walking. Or perhaps a blood vessel in her brain will explode while she's brushing her hair. She will fall down the stairs and break her neck. Now. Now. Now. Each moment she lives makes me more certain that this moment is her last moment.

My anxiety over her encroaching death has been building all her life. Sometimes, I think it would have been better if she had died before her first breath. I would do anything to keep her alive, and yet each moment she lives makes me more agitated. I am terrified of the invading future where she dies, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. Miserable, I think, is the word. She is all my misery and all my joy. I can only exist through her—she is the only thing that is real.

For now, she is alive. I try my best to savor her every instant. I try to pin her every second like a butterfly, so I can study them at leisure when she is gone.

But I am finding it increasingly unbearable even to look at her. Being in the same room is torture. Soon she will not be there to look at. She is fragile. She is transient. She is a mayfly. She is the last autumn leaf balancing on the edge of winter. She is a snowflake on the tip of a hot finger. And she will regret melting no more than a snowflake does. This life is nothing to her. I am nothing to her. A sport. A pastime. She is a traveler passing through and stopping for tea; death is her final destination. She does not fear me. She should, but she does not, because she is not normal. She is flawed like none were before her.

I do not know if I should be grateful for or curse her defect. Because she is defective, she has smiled at me. Because she is defective, she has let me hear her laughter (it bursts out of her glittering like bubbles popping.) Because she is defective, she has made me feel more happiness, more pain, and more longing than I have in a thousand years. Because she is defective, I know she will not fight death when it finds her. She will leave without a backward glance. She will leave swiftly. She will leave me alone.

I am afraid. She frightens me.