Second Nature
The first thing Elena noticed about the man on stage was that he didn’t laugh.
He made five hundred people laugh: they roared, choked, clapped, hiccuped through tears. He tightened silence as though polishing it with a cloth, then tickled it open with a remark so casual it seemed accidental. But he himself did not laugh, not even at the edges, not even when the laugh would have been a balm for his own timing. His mouth held a patient half-smile, like someone measuring a recipe with his eyes.
“That’s the trouble with identity insurance,” he was saying. “If you’re me and I’m me, and I crash your car, do we both lose our premiums or do we split the existential guilt? Because—” He paused, letting the audience fill the blank with their own guesses. “—because last week I paid a deductible for a nightmare.”
The line was nothing special on paper. It was in the pause: in the way he watched the crowd as if their breaths were a metronome he could hear and they could not. He shifted his weight a quarter-degree and chose one woman in the second row to look at for exactly two seconds. The room’s laughter tilted toward her and, like marbles, the rest rolled after. He had read not merely the crowd, Elena thought, but the dynamics of contagion. He was a modeler—of humans.
The light clipped him clean: tall, compact, an honest face. His hands were quick in the glow, drawing shapes in space. The club’s name, **The Variance**, glowed in violet. The man’s name, on the posters and feeds, was Nathaniel Grey.
Elena had read the public file before deciding she could not afford not to come. Nathaniel Grey: once-promising comedian, modest career, a few late-night appearances nine years ago, nothing everyone could quote. Two years ago he signed the standard Consent and Contingency packet to undergo cortical duplication by licensed clinic and to register any duplicate with the Bureau of Bio-Identity. He had a small stroke six months later—recovered physically but with word-finding difficulties that, for a comic, were a cliff with no rail. His duplicate—**NG-2** in the registry—was certified as an independent person three hundred and eight days ago. Seventy-four days after that, NG-2 stood on this stage and became a phenomenon.
Elena had not come to laugh, though she laughed—she couldn’t help it. She had come because the Bureau had received three incompatible complaints, each of which could have teeth, and the three together could chew a person to the bone.
**Complaint One** was from a production company called Echo Arts, claiming that NG-2 was performing material owned by the company under the original Nathaniel’s previous contracts for television, streaming, and specials, and that any derivative “mindprint actor” was bound by the same work-for-hire clauses. Echo Arts demanded injunctive relief: shut him down.
He closed with a bit about black-box cars. “Your car reports everything now—braking, swerving, the number of times you whispered, ‘We’ll be fine,’ like you’re trying to reassure physics. Mine sent a notification to my mom: ‘Your son drove past a donut shop seven times and did not go in, recommend wellness check.’”
The crowd stood. Elena stood too, because it’s hard to write a report about performance if you deny your own body’s reaction to it. He bowed, thanked them too earnestly to be a persona, and left the stage in the peculiar economy that characterized him, the absence of unnecessary movement.
No agent came to shield him; no burly man to block the hallway. Only a club employee was there, a woman with a headset, half-smile for everything, who ushered him toward a door with a handwritten sign: **Nathaniel G.** Elena presented her Bureau badge, which was a small rectangle that mostly meant you were allowed to ask a question and people were allowed to say no. The woman nodded. “He’ll see you.”
Inside, the dressing room was an apology for itself: a mirror studded with bulbs, a fruit plate incongruously heavy with figs, a foldable chair. Nathaniel Grey—no, NG-2—sat on the chair as if it were making a formal argument and he was trying to be fair to it. He untied shoes that looked new but inexpensive. He looked up, and his eyes did something strange. They assessed the arrival of a person; then, at the precise moment when most humans would supply a social filler smile, his eyes instead **calibrated**. The smile came a beat later, authentic but rationed.
“Dr. Markov,” he said. “The Bureau. I’d say this is a pleasant surprise, but it suggests I have a peculiar definition of surprised.” “You applied to register your stage name last week,” she said. “I processed the application.” “So you’re here to congratulate me?” “I’m here because three different parties would like me to be the kind of Bureau that keeps you off stage.” He nodded. “Echo Arts. Original me. And the comics.” “You follow your own press.” “I hire someone to summarize it and then I try to forget the summary before I go up. Not laughing is easier if you don’t know what they said.” There are people who hide behind humor; Elena had met many of them. He wasn’t one. Humor for him seemed to be a tactic of attention management—not his own, the audience’s. He wielded attention like a precise, dull knife. No flourish. Just incision. “May I ask you a question, Mr. Grey?” she said. “As many as you like. I try not to make more than one enemy per day, but apparently I’m unlucky.” “You didn’t laugh once.” “I very rarely do.” “Before activation—before the neurograph—you laughed?” “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was loose and irresponsible with laughter. I squandered it. After activation something about the loop changed. I can see the joke, entirely; I can feel the architecture of it. But the reflex that couples recognition to explosion—” He made a gesture, as if flicking something invisible that was meant to fly and hadn’t. “It’s attenuated.” “Is that distressing?” “For a person, yes. For a comedian, only if you believe comedians have to be the audience. I don’t. I believe comedians have to be the conductor of an orchestra whose instruments think they’re just people enjoying themselves.” “That’s cold.” “It’s precise,” NG-2 said. “Precision feels cold when you’re used to warm fog. Forgive me, that sounded sharper than I meant.” She watched him. “The complaints. Do you want to tell me why they are wrong?” “I’d rather show you,” he said. “Come to tomorrow’s late show. Bring a friend who thinks stand-up is beneath them. Sit them near the stage.” “Is there a punchline?” “There’s an experiment,” he said. “And in answer to the anonymous comics: I do not steal. But I am able to predict what **will** seem stolen to someone who wants to believe it. That distinction matters when we make law about minds.” “And Echo Arts?” He smiled now in a way that could be called sad, if sadness could admit respect. “Echo Arts thinks it owns my brain. We are going to have to explain to them what a brain does.” “And original Nathaniel?” “My friend,” he said simply. “We’re going to have to explain something to him too.” He stood. He tied his shoes again with exact pulls, as if testing tension. “Come tomorrow. I’ll send the tickets. Bring your friend who doesn’t believe in this.” “I don’t have such a friend.” “You will by tomorrow,” he said, and Elena suspected for the first time that he wasn’t guessing.
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