The Expanding Woman
I have a theory. I believe the expanding woman submits to extensive liposuction during each new moon. The fat that is removed is used to fry the chips. Also, she sustains herself by eating the garbage in our bins. This may explain why the expanding woman is so confident of taking early retirement. She has no need to buy cooking oil or food. If the operation is performed with makeshift equipment, bicycle pump and garden hose, for example, the savings must be substantial.
Laura nodded and we descended through the nettles, over a wall into our yard. The rusty swing cast an ominous shadow across the untidy lawn, telling the time with its relative slant. NARCISSAT has largely replaced the sun as the luminescence of choice for outdoor timepieces, though the recent adoption of metric minutes means we have less opportunity to idle in our gardens. I unlocked the rear door and we entered the kitchen. The house was playing up again, nervous-system sparking. I have doubts about the benefit of printed circuit wallpaper.
While I watched teevee, Laura set about reprogramming the scrambled domestic functions. The News Channel offered an account of the Esperanto rebels and the battle. The report was in English with Klingon subtitles. Soon it would be the other way around. A journalist in a pale suit stood outside the Institute while faint explosions echoed from within. Tatters of green flag whipped his ankles. The walls were daubed with messages in clotted blood, something which neither Laura nor myself had seen. As the story progressed, I grew increasingly concerned. Helicopters circled and settled on the roof, disgorging soldiers.
“Laura, come and look! We’re being interviewed.”
She joined me on the sofa and frowned. “That’s not right. We didn’t talk to anyone. They must have generated computer doubles!” She was more infuriated by the fact her doppelgänger had the wrong accent than by the process itself. I snapped the teevee off.
“What happened to reality after the millennium?”
She shook her head. “We had to make it different, you know. How can we go on otherwise? It’s a joint effort.”
“I suppose so. But living constantly in the future is exhausting. I just hope it’s worth it in the long run.”
Laura chuckled and went off to brew a drink. She knows I will never regress, despite my complaints. There are communities who have reverted, but they hold no interest for me. She returned with a pair of peppermint tea-bags dangling from her earlobes. The joke depressed me. I decided to retire to the spare bedroom, the one which overlooks the hovertracks. If a mysterious creature really was loose in the neighbourhood, I wanted to make certain it left my vegetables alone.
Laura removed one of the tea-bags and popped it into her mouth. She will never allow a malfunctioning kettle to deprive her of a nightcap. I turned away and wearily climbed the stairs, glad to be free of her vice. I was once addicted to her fresh wit and menthol sense in a similar way, but something had happened. She was no longer the female I knew. Perhaps my earlier doubts about her identity were based on subconscious insights rather than my nurturing of neuroses in preparation for learning Klingon grammar. But if she had been an impostor since the day we first met, how would I be able to verify the difference?
News Channels were able to create convincing replicas, so there was no telling what governments were capable of doing. I had often suspected the majority of Londoners were copies rather than originals but it never seemed important. Now, in my own house, the possibility was chilling. In Laura’s case, there was an extra dimension to her disparity, elements of unearthliness which suggested an alien source. I imagined the population split between official doubles, sanctioned by the Federation, and agents planted by extra-terrestrial authorities.
Having worked for the Environment Ministry in the Somerset lagoons, tagging bison with radio-collars, I was acutely aware of the attachments affected by my fellow humans. Naive visual statements were not enough to explain the continued popularity of body-piercing. Nobody could remember why the trend had started, so many decades ago, though some cited tribal instincts in revolt against the present. What if Laura’s nose-rings, and those of her kind, were monitoring tags for intelligences from a distant galaxy? Control through fashion, a trick.
NARCISSAT was already setting, tumbling toward the flooded counties of the west. I stood by the window and watched the mirror dispensing bad luck all the way to the infected towns of Wales. When the light was gone and the shadows thickened on the embankment, I detected a vague movement in the thistles. Was this Laura’s monster? I could hardly deny something ravenous had been at our bins, yet the expanding woman was reason enough for the disorder. I had no desire to multiply entities beyond necessity, especially when the entities were horrid.
