Second Nature
Echo Arts did their meeting in a room that could have hosted a cult if it had had cushions. The executives wore suits that apologized for their comfort by costing more than Elena’s car. The general counsel, a woman named Darcy Lin, had a face you could have used to measure levels; it was always level.
“We are supportive of Mr. Grey,” Lin said. “We are supportive of his clone.” She said *clone* with the same pleasant disinterest with which one might say *assistant*. “But our contracts are explicit. He assigned his persona to Echo Arts for the term of the contract and all renewals.”
“You assigned his persona,” Elena said. “I am interested, Ms. Lin, in the word *persona*. I understand likenesses and characters. But a persona includes habits of mind.”
The Original
Original Nathaniel Grey lived in an apartment that apologized for its view. He greeted Elena with a smile that was a little dented but had all its teeth. He was younger than she expected—forty-two—but the aphasia had given him a look of labor in simple sentences. “You don’t need to perform for me,” she said, and he deflated a little, grateful.
They drank tea that argued mildly with the water about its identity. He showed her his notebooks: thousands of pages of premises, bits, routines half-baked and then baked and then served and then left for flies. She read aloud a line about a city where all the traffic lights turned yellow at once; he winced. “I loved that,” he said. “Then someone did it better and I couldn’t anymore.” “Were you angry when your clone took off?” she asked. “I was surprised by the direction,” he said. “He was always the better version of me because he didn’t have my later mistakes. But I thought he’d just do *me*, clean. He does a version of me that knows more math. He reads the room as a matrix. That wasn’t in my notebook.” “Are you friends?” “We were awkward,” he said. “We met with the best intentions. The moment was—strange. Have you ever met a version of yourself that doesn’t know your worst news?” “Yes,” Elena said before she knew she was going to. He looked up sharply and then politely away from what he should not ask. “The thing I want, Dr. Markov,” he said, “is to be part of it. I worked so much on the *premises*—years of it. He launches them, and they become this sky. I don’t want to be a cloud in someone else’s weather. I want to be the instrument maker who built a violin so good that even the players have to bow to it.” He smiled crookedly. “Pun intended.” “You want credit and pay.” “I want to write with him,” he said. “I want to sit in a room and build, not out there,” he gestured at the street, “but in here,” he gestured at his head. “His head too, which is mine but not mine. I want to learn from him. I suppose that means I want to learn from myself, which is humiliating.” “Would you work for Echo Arts to do it?” “Do I have to?” “No,” she said, and watched hope startle him like a deer. “You do not.” He closed his eyes. “Thank you,” he said, and she did not tell him she had not done anything yet. People need a breath sometimes before they run again.
The Accusation
The anonymous comics were a chat group, a letter without a return address. Elena asked for specific claims. They sent a folder filled with clips: small comics in small rooms, doing bits that smelled like the shape of NG-2’s bits. She did not dismiss them. Comedy is an ecology. Stealing kills strange things you didn’t know to name.
She made a timeline. The comics’ pieces, when you put them in order, described a phase change that could be read two ways. Either dozens of people had been circling a similar idea and NG-2 had landed it first and better, or NG-2 had cultivated a sense for what the room of **the culture** was ready to laugh at and had measured it before the others did.
The folder, however, contained one thing that did not fit the pile. It was a high-quality clip from a performer with a modest number of followers, whose stage persona was nervous in a way you mistrusted. He did a bit about a person waking to find a stranger in his bathroom mirror. “Not a metaphor,” the comic says. “A literal stranger. He shaves me. He insists we have a talk. He says, ‘Listen, we’re both using this face and we have to coordinate.’” The bit unfolded into a joke about identity calendars, about scheduling your self. Two weeks later, NG-2 did a bit about mirror budgets—how much reflection you’re allowed. It touched the same metaphor without copying a punchline. It wasn’t theft, but it looked, to an angry person, like the silhouette of one.
Elena sent an inquiry to the comic with the mirror bit. On a hunch she also asked for the original file with date metadata. She asked, too, where the comic had tried out the bit before posting it, and whether anyone had been in the audience taking good notes—sometimes good notes that went to an AI aggregator.
The comic replied within an hour, more grateful to be seen than angry at NG-2. “I did it at a club called The Chasm, two nights before, small room, mostly regulars. Funny thing: there was a guy in the back who didn’t laugh. I remember because I locked on him and tried one of my best closers and he just looked at me as if he was weighing oranges.” “Can you describe him?” Elena asked. “Tall,” came the reply. “A face you trust because it looks like it trusts you. He wore a cap like a person who doesn’t want to be recognized and doesn’t realize the cap does the opposite. When I mentioned the mirror he—this is weird—he wrote something on his palm.” She wrote to NG-2: *Were you at The Chasm two nights before you did your mirror budget bit?* His reply was swift. *Yes. And you’ve just found a problem I needed to tell you about.* *Tell me.* *There is another me.*
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