Belgrade Noir

She took him by the hand and pulled him slightly toward her. For a moment it seemed that he’d resist, refuse, and return to the solitude of the photograph to which he had condemned himself, but no — he got up, accepted the grip of her hand, and followed her.

When the orgasm came, he seemed at once like a good old friend and someone completely new. And Warhol’s contours and colors seemed as if they had finally merged, made a complete, coherent image.

Now, after so much silence, it was time to talk.

“It all started with the three-dimensional printing of transplant organs,” Aleksandar said. She was silent, pressing her body against his.

“Top-level bioengineering. Saving lives. Help for people sentenced to death from kidney, liver, pancreas failure… Technology is evolving so fast and the results are here. And now this — the quantum leap forward, artificial intelligence and bio reconstruction merging — is fascinating and frightening. Do you know why?”

She shook her head, embracing him tightly.

“Because now we can — without any obstacles — save someone who is close to us, someone we love, as we save images or sounds, to create it again if we lose it, if…” He went silent. It was too hard for him to continue.

She took a sharp breath and whispered, “All you’ve been doing for years — everything you’ve put into the codes and programs… it was all because of her? Because of our little girl?”

For several moments he tried unsuccessfully to find his voice, and then managed to utter without tears, clearly, slowly, quietly, “Yes. But too late. Too late for her. For us.”

She was silent for a while, playing with the hairs on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. “You know,” she finally said, “we could try again.”

He held his breath and turned toward her, looked her in the eye. “Again?”

She leaned on her elbow. Their faces were only an inch apart. “Yes. With a new child. A new baby. It’s not too late.” She smiled briefly, nervously, as he observed her.

“Where did that come from?”

She shrugged. “I think that’s what we need if we want to stay together at all.”

“Would you be willing to go through everything again, everything we went through with Mina?”

She sighed. “It’s different now. Of course, our genetics are the same, and there’s still the risk. But things have changed. You changed them.”

Aleksandar rubbed his eyes and straightened himself against the pillow. He now had a glint in his eyes that she had not seen for years. “Yes… Now it would certainly be different. Lero deserves recognition for this — even though he only wants money, he’s done something revolutionary, something that will change the game from the get-go. Something that’ll make humankind redefine itself.”

She barely heard his last sentence. She felt as if he had punched her in her stomach. The name he’d uttered suddenly opened a new door, a door she hadn’t even known existed.

Lero. Isak. Her husband’s employer. A polite and attentive lover. The man she’d been seeing for three years.

Učiteljsko Naselje.

Let’s call her… Marija 2.0.

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

I think we are very, very far from it.

The stream of words. Conversation fragments. Someone heard it, some just reproduced it from her own/others’ memory.

We’ll put her back… We will dissolve her into proteins, water, minerals, everything that makes a human organism.

Mombasa.

Was it just a moment or an eternity? She wasn’t sure how long this blinding white light lasted after the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. She became aware that Aleksandar was squeezing her hands hard, that he was trying to get her attention — to bring her back to reality — his face distorted from care and fear.

“Marija! Marija, what’s going on with you? You turned so pale, like you saw a ghost! Say something! Are you okay? Should I call an ambulance?”

Her eyes regained focus. He saw that she really saw him again and the spasm was passing, though despite her tan she was still white as a ghost. He relaxed the grip on her hands and gently lowered her back to the bed.

“Are you okay?” Aleksandar repeated.

She answered him with a smile that looked more like another spasm as she licked her dry lips. She cleared her throat and peered deeply into his warm, worried eyes. “I have to… I need to tell you something.”

She felt like she was walking on clouds.

She had just spent the most beautiful and happiest fifteen days of her life. The future looked bright and perfect.