(published in Pulp Modern Flash, August 2021)

“Eyes Like Hers” by Victor De Anda

She’s been dead for three months but you still catch sight of her face in the bathroom mirror. The scent of vanilla perfume in her bedroom closet. The caress of her long fingers on your neck and shoulders after a long day. But these feelings are just echoes. You can make her real again. All it takes is a wispy strand of her auburn hair, pulled from her favorite wool sweater. 

Tonight you stay late after work to get started. A side project no one else needs to know about. It’s all highly illegal and against company policy, but you’ve got nothing left to lose. You tell yourself it’s worth the risk to see her again.

You place the only remaining piece of her into the replicator chamber and snap the door shut. Cherry red micro-lasers sweep across her hair fiber like tiny spotlights, mapping the patterns of her DNA sequence. From these building blocks, you’ll have the chance to get her back, if she’ll let you.

You watch the scanning beams for a few minutes until your eyes get heavy and you drift off. In your mind’s eye, she’s smiling at you from the car’s passenger seat. The dream is so sharp you can almost touch her. So you try.

The fantasy’s interrupted by the din of shattering glass and groaning metal. Her body bounces like a rag doll from the impact. Her scream is as real as that night three months ago. 

You wake up with a startle, the emulator’s kicked into high gear, filling the air with a steady thrum. The sickly fluorescent glow overhead smacks you back into the real world. But the vision of her isn’t gone yet. Like the scratch on a broken record, you feel her die in your arms once again. The glow in her pale blue eyes fading, her smooth skin growing cold. 

Version 1.0 of her looks promising. After bringing her home, you notice she can’t speak. Her vocal cords haven’t formed properly. She dies after five hours so you say a prayer and bury her in the backyard.  

Back at the lab, you pore over the code and find the error. A mismatch at the somatic cell level. You correct it with a few keystrokes and begin a new sequence. 

Version 1.1 appears healthy and babbles like a child when you sit her down at your kitchen table. Eight hours later her lips go blue and she coughs uncontrollably. You do what you can, but her lungs fail and she dies an hour later.  Another grave, another prayer.

Another late night at work. You’re sifting through the code when there’s a knock at the lab door. It’s the overnight security guard. He’s noticed surveillance camera footage missing from the last two nights. You’ve got to cover your tracks just long enough for this thing to work, so you lie to him and play innocent. He leaves and you find the missing lines of code. It’s a quick fix so you fire up the emulator again.

Version 1.2 lives a little longer, but doesn’t make it past ten hours. Her brain shuts down and she collapses on the floor like a marionette with its strings cut. Your eyes are on fire, bloodshot from squinting at endless pages of code. After making adjustments, you start the replication sequence again.

Version 1.3 wakes up at home after sleeping for a few hours. She tumbles down the stairs when you realize she’s blind. Twelve hours later she’s dead. More graves in the backyard, each one another puncture in your soul.

The following night at the lab you tweak the code yet again and start up the replicator. Its rhythmic hum lulls you to nap but you don’t dream of her at all. Instead, it’s a deep, dark sleep that you embrace. 

You’re roused by a pounding on the lab door. It’s the security guard, along with the authorities. They burst in and arrest you for illegal use of company property. The police Mirandize you while they slap on the handcuffs and toss you into the back seat of a cruiser. You’ve violated at least sixteen cloning laws and regulations, according to the lieutenant riding shotgun. It doesn’t matter to you. Nothing does. 

After three hours of questioning they book you and throw you in a holding cell. All you can think about is the night of the party. The crash that took her away from you. How you should’ve grieved and moved on. Instead, you chose to Xerox her memory over and over until the only thing left was a blurry shadow of her former self. 

Morning. You’re sitting on the bed in your cell, back against the wall when a guard unlocks the door. Someone’s here to see you. Minutes later, you take a seat behind the glass window and look at the world outside. Your skin itches and you catch a whiff of vanilla perfume. Then she walks in, scoots her chair closer and stares at you with her pale blue eyes.