Belgrade Noir

Marija sat back and put out her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. After a minute or so, she sighed and said: “I would love it if Aleksandar found someone… if he cheated on me. To find out. I think it would change everything.”

“Let’s call her… Marija 2.0. All right?”

The director was smiling so broadly that Marija felt nauseous. Or was the cause of that nausea deeper? She felt uncomfortable as she watched her copy sitting silently on a chair in a laboratory glass box.

She was dressed in a simple white nightgown. Bare ankles and feet with nails painted in her favorite color, arms folded in her lap. The eyes of Marija 2.0 were closed, the face completely devoid of expression.

She felt her mouth drying. Somewhere in the back of her head, a hard-core panic was setting in. This was not like standing in front of a mirror. This was something completely different. Marija gulped and moistened her lips with her tongue.

“Her memory now includes your experiences from the last few days to avoid unwanted holes in memory,” the director continued breezily. “Everything we recorded this morning has been smoothly transferred to her personality.”

“Please… please,” Marija said, “I want to… I want to see it… without clothes.”

The director looked at her, raising his eyebrows. He nodded his head and typed something on the tablet. Marija 2.0 opened her eyes, slowly stood up, and pulled the nightgown over her head.

Marija didn’t pay attention to the fact that her body — even if it was just a copy — was exposed to the view of the director and other lab technicians. An irresistible curiosity now prompted her to walk around the naked woman standing in front of her, to carefully see her body from all sides. Suddenly she wanted to see herself as Isak saw her. She was both excited and filled with anxiety.

She remembered yesterday’s conversation in bed, after having sex, when, half-jokingly, she said, You’ve done all this just so you can have a threesome — with two of me

. He’d wanted to answer her, to dissuade her, but he’d only dropped a kiss on her lips that were still hot from his gentle bites and said: You know, I didn’t even think about it, but now that you mention it… well — I think it would be hot to see you make love to yourself. Would you do that for me?

Would she?

As she watched her replica, she felt a flurry of almost pleasurable anxiety. She used to fantasize about lesbian sex — she assumed that all women did — but usually in her threesome fantasies, where she and another woman (sometimes Tamara, sometimes another friend, or someone she didn’t know at all) shared the same lover, there would inevitably be those exciting, forbidden touches. But if the other woman was her, herself? She looked down the upright back of Marija 2.0, to her firm buttocks, sculpted muscles, golden skin with a few tiny spots, and thought about making love to herself — she knows exactly what turns her on, she feels it under her toes and under her tongue, the juices and the warmth that Isak feels every time they sleep together.

She snapped out of it and cleared her throat. “May I… hear its… voice?” she asked.

“Of course.” The director’s face lit up and again he typed something on the tablet. “Tell us your name.”

The creature before them looked at him for the first time and responded calmly: “Marija. Marija Vranješ.”

She couldn’t detect any difference in tone or inflection. It was creepy.

“Please… let it get dressed again.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

After her double got dressed and sat down again following the director’s instructions he entered into the tablet, Marija asked: “So, how are we going to do this?”

He nervously smiled and nodded to the device he held in his hand. “We have already entered the bulk of the instructions, including your usual schedule — going to yoga, pilates, massage and cosmetic treatments…”

“And suntanning. Suntanning is essential — I travel where there is a lot of sun; I’ll be tan, at least on my face, neck, and shoulders, I mustn’t forget that.”

“Yes, yes, certainly, you’ve already mentioned this to us. You have scheduled the appointments already, right? No worries, Marija 2.0 will not miss a single one.”

“I have to ask you — I read a little about… singularity. It seems to me that no one has figured out whether it’s possible if—”

“If artificial intelligence becomes real? Equal to a human’s?” He spread his arms and shrugged. “I think we are very, very far from it. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about that.”

“How can you be sure?”