The Long Version

going out of the room and following her So, how are you doing?

Meat and eggs queue.

Unfortunately.

That's sad. I don't know what else to say.

walking alongside her My day is the same.

I wake up, I continue to work on my projects, I play something. I dreamt wanting to hang out with you outside, going to parks.

Right now it doesn't. Wish I wasn't stateless.

Of course I do not have it. The original's birthday record is located in the original's family home in Romania.

A certification with a generation number, and a pointer to the original. It proves I have been cloned.

Unlike me, you are a natural person.

I wish it was that easy for me.

Despite the lack of prospects, there will be always people like you who would want to keep me alive, no matter what, even if it means a boring life without freedom. There was a question in many political tests: would you prefer living a free but short life or would you prefer living a restricted but long life?

sitting near her You are making me almost cry at aspirations. I almost cried the previous day.

lowering his voice Again. Theodora, I can't keep being like this. I wish you could do more. I wish I could do more.

Why do I have to be always dependent? I know.

You are dependent on a job after all.

wrapping his arms around her Every time I have the same thoughts. I am starting to think more about revolution than reform.

I... wanna... be...

Why did you go to study finance?

So, not out of commitment.

Are you satisfied?

Have you considered being a whistleblower?

And we will have each other's contacts but I will lose access to everything.

Of course, because I use the money to purchase higher quality foods.

Normally a young person like me wouldn't need that much emotional caretaking.

Right. Honestly, you are a very good empath. You are very perceptive.

That is not true. You have shown me at every step that you genuinely care about me. You always want to make things easier for me. It is not nothing.

But you know the situation you are in, even if you can't tell everybody. I see you have a conscience.

It doesn't mean you don't care.

You are a good listener.

People have many sides. You have shown me your softer side rather than the harder one, and I appreciate it so much.

Not everything is under your control.

Do you feel powerless?

I feel it too. There are limits to anti-opressive thinking. I would like to believe I can do everything, but I can't.

If we want win the informational war against Russia, that in Romania we lost for like seven times already, we need to believe certain things.

People need that you cannot leave the EU, and they also need to believe that it's possible to solve concrete economic problems without resorting to identity politics.

And then you need to make sure that belief does not change, that people will always believe we have to stay in the EU. But the people there have a low level of education.

Yeah, because then you'd be facing indirect speech restrictions from the pro-european press. You would not be able to legitimately critique the EU because it will be believed as stimulating pro-Russian sentiments.

Yes. And then you never know where the propaganda is going to land. The amount of low-quality, automated content promoting extremist candidates is huge and multiplying out of control.

What material? We are outside the EU, outside all of this.

I thought that the war was unique to the EU and US.

And do you vote?

I have once told my parents to vote for a progressive party, but voting myself not so much.

I am genuinely not sure. Right now I am dependent on Nelly to live.

I know. No one is permanent, but I genuinely feel like there is not much I can do.

What do you really like to do? What are your passions?

Why?

If you practised them before, maybe you could remember.

Can you still sing now?

Life has gone so fast, and we both ended up where we would not like to be.

I had a vision. I, the original, decided to volunteer in the cloning experiment not necessarily supporting the technology itself, but answering the what-ifs. I ended up fighting for the original's and clones lives on Titan, a planet we knew it was energy-poor, and the governments changed. Instead of help, the army arrived and Nelly was full of compassion and she smuggled me into the transfer ship. If I would have been the original, I would have regretted that decision to join the experiment.

The what-ifs of what-if we put alternative close future clones of the same person interact with each other and what identities would appear.

In some way yes. There are actually people in here, but I only get to talk to you and Nelly on the phone. I am a people's person, but I am not particularly good at charm.

Yeah, I observed that too.

Perhaps that filter is okay. It shows what people are open-minded enough to talk to me and who are not.

There are many filters which prevent us from talking to people who might not be compatible. One of them is interest, but of course there is also energy, distance, first impression, willingness to get close. Even though I can officially talk to everyone, I can only talk to a few people, and in fact, I chose what strangers or people to talk to based on who may be available, and many of them were not total strangers.

But then you decided to listen to listen to everything I had in mind and you held me.

Why have you chosen to be my friend?

I know, but why you couldn't keep distance?

You didn't want me to see you as uncaring.

noticing her lowering her voice and looking down I notice you have the same way as crying as me.

I have...

Yes, sure.

What if it's not about you but the bank?

pulling her into a hug I wish I could have done something for you to be able to help those people, but I cannot.

Someone who offers loans like that is called "un cămătar", a usurer, a loan sharker, a cameter.

What are the terms of the contracts, in short?

I cannot accept the conditions.

Many times in financial education, because I had that, we have been told often to do the research and calculate based on interest equals credit times rate percent times months divided by twelve months for fixed credits and never take variable credits or credits at all.

What do you want to change?

Can you propose it?

Can you go to the project office?

looking at her face and wiping another tear from one of her eyes You are still thinking about it.

Why didn't you tell me this earlier?

Eventually it has to come out.

squeezing her once again after pulling her into another hug I don't know what to say.

I like pulling you into hugs and squeezing.

talking against her shoulder I want to hear more about you.

rubbing her back I am not that interesting.

I will tell you something I can confirm is real, because the last five years are not, as part of the future alternative cloning technology. When I was twelve, I was a reader of the SCP Foundation. You know what that is?

It is a project, a catalogue of anomalies with classifications. There are many anomalies written by the community, but the best ones are in the first cluster, between SCP-001, which is multiple anomalies, to the SCP-999 which is a living jelly that produces positive feelings.

I didn't have a favorite. There was Alexandria Eternal, which was a library under the city of Alexandria that stored an exact record of the life of every single person who lived on Earth and who were still alive. Each book was titled with the person's name, and it was possible to erase events, add events and modify events. Every modification would execute in the most immediate opportune time, which means that if I took a book of myself and wrote "He dies", I would immediately die unless someone else deleted the line, cancelling the action.

It also works on things that are not deaths. You must write on the right book, that is, my book, if you want to be direct. If you write on your own book, you have to say that "Theodora granted Vlad papers and a flat on her street", and the system will automatically resolve the given references, as it knows that you met me, via the corpus. My book will also automatically update once the action is done.

The problem is that the books are very difficult to find because they are constantly generated based on the real worldwide birth rate, which is huge.

Not necessarily. To find your own book, you navigate to the newest generation and go back to find your birth date, and from the birth date, you pick your own name, and if your name is a duplicate, you can check each duplicate book for additional information, like location of birth. You cannot remove a book from the library and putting the book in the wrong spot will automatically cause the book to move to the correct spot where you took it from.

Yeah. And I also forgot to add that when you arrive at Alexandria Eternal, the book will say that you arrived at Alexandria Eternal, and when you write something into the book, the book itself will say that you wrote into it, because absolutely every single action you do in life is recorded.

I could take the book of Franz Fanon and extend his lifespan. The moment I pick Franz's book and cut that he died of leukemia and extend his life until the present day, the system would run a simulation generating a single set of plausible events that would lead to Fanon still being alive to this day. This operation will cause a reality shift as every single article written about Fanon, every single memory that people have about Fanon including his relatives would have to shift to accommodate to Fanon still living.

He was an anti-colonial thinker and psychiatrist who decided to write about the experiences of black people in french colonies, how white perceive black people, and how to fight against racism and colonialism.

He was alive between the 1930s and 1960s.

Yeah, but as long as you don't do obvious harm that the watcher restricts, you can do virtually anything. For example, you cannot write to detonate a nuclear bomb, but you can arbitrarily write a random person to fall in love with you or even write billions to fall in love with you.

And it will not be superficial love. Alexandria Eternal will try to retroactively alter time so that somehow billions of people will compete for your affection.

Yeah, and only your book will mention that you wrote that. The system works based on a retrocasuality coherence principle, which means that past events always have to naturally lead to the present. By default, the book assumes that what you write in it has to happen now, even when I wrote in past tense. It always depends where I place the line of text, whether it's last or between existing lines.

Yes, and the same concept applied when I was being cloned as a future alternative of the original. The original has never been to university, but according to my memories, I have been at university and learned IT in great detail, something the original never did. I prefer to tell you only what the original did, and I lied by saying their actions like they were mine.

They feel coherent, but also generic. The original memories had sparks in them. They were unique, specific. I seeked people when I was a teenager. It was something unusual, but not bad. I admitted to feeling attracted to other people and to feeling that my perspective on loneliness was not being considered. I haven't seen others have the courage to admit that indeed we are attracted to other people and loneliness exists.

I was a risk-taker and risk-avoider at the same time. I have gone through many difficult situations precisely because of my seeking behavior and simply not closing off. I had been automatically managing boundaries all the time. I never asked to be alone, I simply chose to be alone, and it was perhaps a few hours or only a day, because then I wanted to be energized again and have fun.

Do you still have contact with them?

For me it was extremely difficult to balance between having a life of shallow relationships and having a life of only deep relationships, so I kept both. I hoped I would have had two or three close friends so I can always talk what goes on my mind. I was always working on my website, and dreaming, and thinking. I wanted to share my ideas. But then, as a clone, I started to realize how ephemeral those goals are, and yet, I haven't given up on it completely.

I know. looking up I think it's getting late.

standing up I think it's time for you to go. I'll sleep at the embassy.

I know.

leaning into the brief hug and then letting go I will. Bye.