Part III
It took Lab Three just under five weeks to complete Uni's clone, almost a fourth the time the original. Much of the time saved came from not needing to place orders and wait for new manufacturing equipment to be delivered to their lab in Okayama. Familiarity with the process and building on experience accounted for the rest.
The second synthetic was named Anna, after Vasilyev's eldest daughter. He had objected at first, favoring a name voted on democratically, but Matsumoto insisted she'd already had her strike with Uni, and Zheng thought it a lovely follow-up. "Anna and Uni," the two repeated, as though the words tasted good to them. Vasilyev soon relented.
As requested, Anna was an exact duplicate of Uni. She stood 1835 millimeters tall barefoot, with an identical face and body. Her hair even took on the unkempt, even wild quality of Uni's long strawberry blond mop. Without the use of high-end instruments, a single feature distinguished the two units physically.
"I told you the molecules were up to no good," Vasilyev told them on an early inspection of Anna's eyes. The pigment in her irises, originally uniform, had settle a week later, resulting in the same heterochromia that Uni possessed, with one blue and one green eye.
Zheng took a close look. "…it's reversed, isn't it? From Uni?"
Vasilyev gave a defeatist sigh and Zheng took the penlight from him. "You really need to be less of a perfectionist, my friend."
Mismatched heterochromia was the lone physical distinction between the two, and that was difficult to ascertain even for their creators. The next step was to make them behaviorally identical. With the help of a one of Zheng's programming colleagues, the members of Lab Three carefully duplicated Uni's AI routines and subroutines into Anna's brain. "Dubbing", and the process was called, not only saved them time and money, it further linked the two into an inseparable duo, acting as though they each possessed a hemisphere of the same brain—at least, in Zheng's opinion. From Anna's "birth" onwards, the two would have necessarily divergent experiences, but an inerasable commonality made up the foundation of both their personalities and their entire perception of the universe.
"Does that answer the question?" Yoko asked Zheng.
"Which question is that?"
"Do either of them have 'ghosts'?"
"No, I guess it doesn't. If one does, so must the other, but I'm not sure they do. Not yet. Technology says they shouldn't, but technology changes."
"But right now?"
"No, not right now." He paused before adding, "I think."
Anna awoke six weeks to the day after her elder sister, as Vasilyev had taken to calling Uni. Matsumoto pointed out that it was just as accurate to call her Uni's daughter as well as twin, but quickly found herself using the same terms, almost unconsciously. Aside from their shared appearance, something about how the two carried on closely intimated siblinghood over anything else, though no such notion had been added to their programming. Upon their first meeting, the two spent an hour moving in perfect mirrored symmetry before abruptly stopping and engaging one another in a familial, even intimate manner in unspoken body language.
"It's possible they'll be closer than any human pair could be—they shared the same mind, after all," Vasilyev disclosed after the first few days of observation.
"Let's hope that's Locus-Solus wants."
He shook his head at Yoko. "No. I say let's hope that's what they want."
A thrilled Locus-Solus took delivery of them, before immediately handing them over to Hanka Precision Instruments, who eagerly sought to use them on the convention circuit. More than Locus-Solus, Hanka knew exactly what they wanted from the pair: they put Anna and Uni in brightly colored, logo-emblazoned one-piece swimsuits with frilly trim that rose high on their tall hips, and had them sit seductively on new hardware at their corporate booths on the North American convention circuit—just as Lab Three expected them to. Vasilyev had gone as far as to warn Locus-Solus that neither Uni nor Anna could be easily programmed like the lifelike androids and gynoids Hanka Precision were promising down the road, but was assured that this wasn't an issue. Locus-Solus appeared to be right: when Lab Three attended the world-renown BI*Con in San Francisco later that year, they found their presence largely unnecessary, as both synthetics flawlessly performed their duties as tantalizing décor/technology demonstrators. On a typical day, Uni would lie on her stomach looking up, showing off her lean, muscular back and posterior in her rather skimpy one-piece, while Anna sat nearby, one leg propped up, sticking her large chest out and arching her shoulders. Unlike human models, the two only moved when they needed to—they might remain in a given pose for an hour or more on the showroom floor, almost entirely motionless. More surprising than their obviously-learned behavior, though, was how the two had mastered emotional displays.
"Look at that smile," Yoko said from behind the crowd. "I'm being serious, look at their smiles." Uni, and by extension Anna, had only been programmed with a much more sexually-neutral, friendly smile. Since then, they mastered a whole arsenal of different smiles for the audience.
"You think it's learned?"' Zheng asked.
"It has to be, Hanka Precision doesn't have access to the programming routines, and Locus-Solus doesn't know how to use them."
"You're right."
The pair did do more than serve as living eye-candy—in front of larger crowds, Hanka put them through some basic demos of strength, having Anna smash a cement block to fragments with her bare fist and Uni easily lift a 1400cc sport bike onto her shoulders like it was a barbell. Those were enormous crowd-pleasers—less impressive were their rather simplistic social skills. When interaction went beyond seductive eyelash-batting or pushing their cleavage into view, the two maintained very basic social skills, and few industry experts were impressed by walking calculators and encyclopedias that each cost as much as much as a business jet each, though there were exceptions.
The children and grandchildren of executives at Hanka Precision Instruments, as well as Holland-based Serano Genomics and Tokura Electronics, came on the last day of the convention. Vasilyev, still on his post in the unlikely event of some sort of technical malfunction, watched as a pair of very small but well-dressed children, having escaped the attention of their guardian, spotted the two bio-gynoids taking a moment to adjust their skimpy advertising attire from riding up on them. Momentarily worried, he called his partners to come to the booth; when they arrived, they found him grinning from ear-to-ear.
"Look at that!"
Anna, her voice imitating the saccharine tone of a television series nanny, had leaned down, hands on her knees, to cheerfully chat with a six-year-old boy clutching a plush panda bear. Next to her, Uni sat on the floor, legs crossed, while his eight-year-old sister began braiding a length of hair as long as she was tall. Most surprising of all, the two were sporting remarkably humanlike expressions of friendliness and openness, in place of their static "come hither" looks.
"They have a way with children, don't they?" Vasilyev marveled as an arriving Matsumoto took out her camera.
"Well, they can never have their own, can they?" Zheng pointed out.
Vasilyev stared at him momentarily as his eyes filled with realization before he shrank a little. "Oh my. I'm sorry, old chap. I didn't…"
Zheng laughed instead, shaking his head. "What are you sorry for?" he assuaged him, giving him a friendly jab of the elbow.
Gradually more executive children flocked to the giant talking, breathing toy dolls, while Anna let them climb up onto her shoulders and Uni continued to be braided. Their musculature had changed subtly too—the firm, lean frames they'd been "born" with had grown a little softer, a little more curvaceous, the consequence of a low level of physical activity, another humanlike quality they possessed.
BI*Con was the last convention Lab Three attended in support of the two—after that, what technical expertise they offered was done through reports and emails. The pair went on to function nominally in their advertising role. Matsumoto was mildly disappointed: she'd genuinely hoped for more erratic, unpredictable behavior from the two over time, none having manifested yet. The companies that had footed the bill had no such interest; they were more interested in the possibility of aftermarket mod packages in the future. Vasilyev couldn't understand why when either sister cost as much as an attack helicopter.
"You might as well add underbody lights to a Ferrari!" he grumbled. "Or more accurately, a Bombardier Learjet!"
A few weeks short of a year after Anna's activation, Locus-Solus approached Lab Three about the possibility of a derivative design—mechanically similar but simplified, and with less advanced cognitive and neurological functions. The members, particularly Zheng, were unenthused with the request but agreed to consider the new project. A new design statement would be sent to them within the next few days. It did not come.
Half a world away in Amsterdam, wearing logo-emblazoned bikinis and ball caps, Uni and Anna were advertising a pair of phenomenally expensive motorcycles the otherwise-unremarkable summer day the Third World War broke out. It was the last anyone in Lab Three heard of their original creations.
It was the international spats of the year before that abruptly resurfaced following a naval skirmish in the problematic South China Sea between the United States and People's Liberation Army navies. There was little warning of such a showdown, aside the abrupt collapse of the U.S.-led collective defense pact between itself, South Korea, and Japan in the preceding months. The three-state triangle, a product of the aftermath of the Second World War, was intended to form an East Asian equivalent to NATO—it instead folded abruptly and catastrophically in the face of reconciliation between Beijing and Seoul, inflammatory rhetoric between Seoul and Tokyo, and an absence of activity from the youngest regional power, the Union of Eurasian Republics.
The United States had counted on the Union State, in the style of the Soviet Union, to take a strong, antagonistic stance on Pacific politics. Whether out of fear or just apathy, it had failed to do so. Simultaneously, the People's Republic of China had economically courted South Korea to great effect, benefiting from political hostility with Japan over disputed island territories and controversial historical revisionism. North Korea exploded its first nuclear device, upsetting the situation further. A politically-weakened Japan desperately sat out, and managed to do so, reneging on its past promises to the United States—something hawkish leaders in Washington would remember. The tiny Republic of China, dwarfed by its neighbors on all sides, staunchly announced its noninvolvement, another thorn to the United States: it had counted on Taipei to seize the initiative against the ruling Communist Party in Beijing, but had failed to appreciate that Taiwan's own South China Sea claims meshed with China's, reunification or not.
China and America found themselves facing-off, alone. Unlike Asia, NATO moved to honor its treaty obligations, a fatal move for precariously-poised alliance, and the Union State publicly condemned what it termed "American aggression" against its regional sometimes-partner, sometimes-rival China. For some time, it seemed the whole affair might ultimately by a more-tense repeat of the political posturing that had become a familiar fact of life a decade after the end of the Cold War.
The limited nuclear exchange that followed, consuming millions of lives in a matter of days, dismissed that.
Lab Three, and practically all the technology programs at Okayama University, were hurriedly evacuated in the days after it became apparent that what had begun with Chinese submarines and American carriers going from standby to full war operations was only going to escalate. Zheng, Vasilyev and Matsumoto remained together briefly in Nagoya before Zheng and Vasilyev received permission to return to their respective homelands and their families. They parted with Matsumoto, leaving fond memories and promises to stay in touch, promises they couldn't keep. The ceasefire came in a matter of weeks, after a world, apparently shocked back to its senses by thermonuclear explosions, clamored for peace. Through a fellow student in her PhD program, Matsumoto Yoko became one of the first people to witnessed what the world media latter dubbed the "Japanese miracle" in action, a revolutionary new technology that effectively counteracted the harmful radioactive fallout left by even the high-efficiency thermonuclear weapons used in combat. The tiny micromachines almost single-handedly secured Japan's position of influence in the postwar world, from their first successful use cleaning the aftermath left from American hydrogen bombs exploded in northeast China.
If Japan had just barely managed to be a winner of the Third World War, it was the United States who seemed its primary loser. Even the Chinese leaders who had ordered their nuclear response to their enemy had not predicted the sudden fracturing of the dominant superpower. The United States of America had entered the war in an unparalleled level of political division—many had privately hoped the war would rally the people behind a common banner, against a common enemy. The costly and politically-devastating truce, with neither side particularly advantageous over the other, had the opposite effect. The conservative political establishment, and the majority of the American defense industry that it closely controlled, exerted complete political will over the majority of southern states, from New Mexico to Virginia—territory it had de facto political control over for decades in the fractured legislature. In response, the left-leaning rival party, itself well-established in the American northeast and west coast, formed a competing establishment in California and the surrounding states, as well as from Illinois to New England. Infighting only started after Chinese thermonuclear weapons cratered strategic military centers between the two, as both sides charged the other with collusion. It only took a few covert military campaigns, the so-called "Fake Wars" to split a 200-year-old nation apart at the seams. The United States, and its indisputable suzerainty over the western hemisphere, stopped being.
When the fighting ended, a relatively low number of casualties had cemented the reality: there now existed two functioning nations, with completely independent military and economic establishments, both claiming the title of United States of America. With the formalizing of a ceasefire, they were joined by a third that included the largely-abandoned areas of Arizona, Utah, and running from Washington to Wisconsin, a national reminder of the inability to reconcile. For a few months, they sat as if in purgatory, before the rightist state, the strongest militarily, moved to secure its porous border with economically-collapsed Mexico.
It was Eurasian politicians from the Union who devised the two names that the whole world would eventually adopt, starting with the words uttered offhandedly by the Russian-speaking Eurasian Chairman of Ministers: Американская империя, Amerikanskaya imperiya, a nod to both the Tsar's historical Rossiyskaya imperiya and the western political cliché of the "Soviet Empire." To her surprise, the initial indignant response from the White House was replaced by a begrudging acknowledgement and then an enthusiastic embrace: by the time her successor took the office, he would find himself in delicate negotiations with a rising world power self-identified as Imperial Americana and the heir of the pre-war Pax Americana. At the same time, his tired predecessor spoke of a left-leaning "American Alliance," in whom Moscow had found an amiable partner, alongside a militarized, resource-rich Canada. Sandwiched between them, the supposedly-centrist sick man of North America, still called the United States, eked out a living, playing the two rivals off one another and acting as a needed buffer.
In the outright chaos after the thermonuclear bombs fell, a billion people alone were displaced in the first year. The two synthetic sisters were among them, either sold-off or traded between different high-tech firms, not all of which survived the war, before being stolen outright. Their value forgotten or inconsequential, they quietly fell into the crowd of stolen second-hand gynoids sold for any number of functions and trades, industrial, sexual, criminal and more. Though inseparable themselves, they passed briefly through Russian organized crime before being given to Texan cartels as payment for narcotics. From the cartels they were seized by Californian smugglers and put on black market for hard currency, just blocks from the San Francisco convention center they'd once appeared in. Purchased by the Yakuza, they were cargo along with a hundred other grey market androids delivered into Niihama on Osaka bay.
It was there the two did something they could have done at any point in the past year since the Third World War ended: they escaped.