To meet you

There are still just two glasses of water on the table when a silence settles over them that Anna is powerless to fill. 

Ice cubes melt. Water condenses. 

Tom's fingers leave trails as they curl through the moisture. Blunted, workingman's fingertips capping the sculpted line of his arms and shoulders. They tap on the glass.

He's from Aberdeen. Two sisters, Maggie and Maia; they live at home. A beagle, Max. Rock climbing after work. Hiking on the weekends. Hasn't been to the movies in years.

Of course, she already knew all of this. 

Maybe that's why she can't think of anything more to say.

He drinks. Anna follows the glass up, up, up to his lips, where the distortion of the water finally allows her to meet his eyes, bright blue, streaked with yellow — the bespoke touches of an enamored painter.

He smiles when he notices her scrutiny. She must say something. Ask anything. Have you always been so beautiful? 

“You have thin wrists,” she says.

A surprised laugh bursts from the shy grin. He sets the glass down and grasps his left wrist, then his right. 

“Let me see yours,” he says.

They lay their forearms across the table, one of Anna's between two of Tom's, skin to perfect, unmarked skin. 

“A tattoo?” he says. 

He slips his hand beneath hers to run a thumb over the figure eight on the edge of her wrist. He does it so gently that Anna shivers. 

“It’s eternity.”

Eternity would be just long enough to be cocooned here with him, drinking nothing but ice water and completing a careful study of his familiar features, nearly perfect, except for the blank wrist. 

But best not drag this out.

She pulls a pocket stunner from her bag and aims it between the hand-painted eyes. They grow wide to process what’s happening. They grow wide with fear.

“Anna,” he says, exactly like her Tom would. Exactly like him. “Why—”

In fury and humiliation, she squeezes the trigger. Blue eyes go blank before his head hits the table with a muted thud.

Ice water pools around the dark curls.

Anna kicks her chair back as she stands. A few prying eyes cut to her from over the shoulders of diners whose dates are going much better than hers.

But no one stops her. The waitstaff watch her leave without a word, their heads bowed in resignation — in something like mourning — for their fellow Replicant. 

Anna crashes out of the stuffy bistro and into one of its petunia planters, tipping the flimsy thing into the sidewalk, sending petals flying like helpless hands.

“Hey!” a voice shouts. 

Anna turns her collar up against its reproach and plunges ahead, into a city that rushes up to greet her in a fugue of light and traffic noise. 

Neon signs dance in and out of her vision as she wipes at the tears with the backs of her hands.

She had watched this Tom for weeks before approaching him, giddy with the certainty that she had finally found him, that the way he raked his hair with three fingers was just like her Tom always had, that no one else would hum Be My Baby while picking up after their dog.

She was sure, so sure it was him, she hadn't tried to catch a glimpse of the tattoos they got in secret before they were parted. They might have erased his memory, but surely no one would have noticed this tiny defect — no bigger than a mole — that would allow her to find him again.

What her Tom would think about the way she treated this not-Tom. 

She stunned an artificial Being like it was nothing — no better than the bloodletters. Sobs held back squeeze her chest like a vise.

She stumbles onto the quieter, darker street that leads home.

With her back against a brick wall, she closes her eyes and breathes until the panic loosens its grip. Dr. E would be so proud, Anna thinks with a particularly forceful exhale.

But when she looks up, there's Tom's face again, like a curse she can't outrun. 

He looms twenty feet in the air, digital and three-dimensional and so immense that Somebody has scrawled across his forehead, “NO RIGHTS FOR REPLICANTS.”

A hundred thousand Replicant models and there's Tom everywhere she looks. The rugged model, the outdoorsman — the first Replicant Anna ever designed, intended for working in the trades and marketing to tradesmen.

The duplication filters must be faltering, Anna thinks. Or whoever’s running them is an idiot. It wasn't like this when she was in charge. She forces her feet onward, eager for her bed, and a drink. 

As she walks, she allows herself a dip into her wildest dreams, where Tom recognizes her first. He taps on her shoulder in the coffee shop below her building. He holds up his wrist, so she knows. 

It's not possible, she says to herself in Dr. E's voice. Before they had her committed, the company said they also wiped Tom's memory.

“How many of you have Replicant side pieces in supply closets around here?” she had screamed at them without an ounce of dignity. 

And they shook their heads soberly, because that wasn't it, of course.

It was the pamphlets, and the secret meetings, and her resistance to the docility settings. When she described Tom's spark, his will to be, she was seeing things that weren't there, Dr. E said.

The sight of her building snaps her from the punishing train of thought. But before she can approach her door, she catches a glimpse of a figure leaning over the parched median with a hoe, and a mop of dark hair falling into his face.

As he rises, he pushes it back with three fingers.

Anna's heart races despite herself. How has she never noticed this one so close to home before? 

Perhaps he knows. Perhaps he's waiting for her. Perhaps he too has played back the memories of a few stolen weeks for the last five years.

But she won't plunge headfirst again. She'll find some reason to shake his hand, and turn it over in hers. She glances at her door, where a lonely dinner and a fitful rest await. Obsession is a powerful fuel. She pulls her coat around herself, and takes another breath, a step forward —

— until she's interrupted by a tap on the shoulder. 

And her first thought is that it's someone who wants a word about the petunia planters.

And her second, as she turns, is that she has no clue who this man is. The lines of his shoulders and neck look just like Tom's. But his eyes glow a deep, warm amber. 

Within them, there's recognition. 

Anna stares at Tom without speaking for the second time that night.

“I wasn't sure why you left,” Tom says, exactly like her Tom would. 

The city around them melts away as Anna's own eyes begin to fill with tears. He doesn't know that she was sent away. He must think she abandoned him — how will she explain the last five years of searching and longing? 

“I can explain. I'll explain everything,” she starts to say, shaking her head. 

He gives her a quizzical look as the tears begin to flow down her cheeks.

As he furrows his brow, the indentation of the mark left by the stunner becomes clear. Anna begins to weep.

“Hey, it's okay,” he says. “I paid the tab. No hard feelings.” 

He pats her upper back while keeping an uncertain distance between them. 

“You left your purse, is all,” he says, as he holds the bag up. 

Anna wipes at her face, red and raw from all the crying. She breathes deeply until she can speak again. 

“I'm sorry. I felt sick,” she says. 

Through her blurry vision she can see the other Tom kneeling in the garden, oblivious to his twin just a few feet away. She glances back at her door, where she could crawl into her bed for days and try to forget this night ever happened. 

And finally, she looks at the Tom in front of her, the night written across his face.

A wild feeling, like a happiness she just found in her coat pocket, roots in her chest.

“Can we — start over?” she says. 

He smiles, gentle and forgiving.

“Certainly,” he says. “I'm Tom.”

“Anna. It's nice to meet you.”