The Same But Different

"Of course you were able to hide it," she said airily. "With enough money, you can hide pretty much anything, can't you? But this... Dad, this is... world-changing. You and your... what was she to you? Your mistress? Your girlfriend?"

"Fiancé and partner. Head of research, actually. Without her discoveries, you wouldn't exist," I croaked out. "She died before we could get married."

Helena's lips thinned out, but she nodded with satisfaction. "Sensible," she said. "So, anyway... I was able to piece together most of the story just from the research notes. I'm not a biologist, but I know enough to understand the basic gist of it all. What I can't understand is why you..." she thickly choked back her own tears, which hadn't fallen yet but were welling in her beautiful eyes. "Why you didn't tell me. Why you raised me as... your daughter." With a single stroke of her fingers, the holoscreen went blank, the outlined "frame" of the screen floating in the air between us but nothing to obstruct our view of each other. "When, really, I'm her."

"It's not so easy to explain," I started.

"Try." There was a hardness to her voice that I hadn't heard from her before. From her mother, yes, but never from her.

I leaned back in the chair, closed my eyes and tried to sort it all out while she patiently waited. After a moment, I opened my eyes and just let it all out.

"I met her in college, like lots of couples, I guess," I told her. "The attraction we had to each other was instantaneous. She was a genetic biologist and I was just finishing up my degree in nanorobotics. It was like we were meant to find each other, you know? The perfect marriage of two different disciplines, working together to create something new. She'd figured out a way to clone the human genome without breaking any conventional laws. What she lacked is what I had: knowledge of nanorobotics. Together, we used nanobots to create identical strands of existing DNA at the molecular level. It was revolutionary, something no one else had figured out how to do. It took us a few years, but our first actual prototype... it was like doing backflips in the lab, surpassing even our wildest expectations. The second one was just as stable. And the third."

"How many did you do?" Helena asked, already knowing the answer.

"Seventeen, all of them perfectly stable and viable," I answered. "All we needed to do was splice them into blanks and let nature take its course. We hadn't done it yet, though. Then she..."

"She died," Helena finished for me.

I nodded silently. It had been a terrible blow to me, learning of her death. A drunk driver on St. Patrick's Day. Of all the stupid ways for such a brilliant mind to be taken away from the world! "It nearly drove me insane with the loss," I said hollowly. "We'd been so damned close to making one of the greatest biochemical advancements of the century. A few small experiments and we'd be ready to reveal it to the world. But... after she was gone, things just... fell apart. I got distracted and couldn't continue the work. Funding started to fall through. Interest was drying up. I couldn't afford to keep our staff paid. Eventually... I had to put it to rest, just like her."

Helen narrowed her eyes. "But you didn't quite, did you?" she asked pointedly.

"No," I replied truthfully. "I took my own portions of our joint research, tweaked a few applications for it and started something completely different. Returning to our work was just too... difficult for me at the time. I needed something new."

"So you started your new business venture, which took off like a rocket," Helena prompted.

I nodded. "And, for a while, it worked. It was the distraction I needed, for a few years. But it wasn't enough. I was alone. I didn't have anyone to share it with. Not the right someone, anyway. The company was raking in billions a lot faster than I expected, so... so I started investing in a personal project."

"Very quietly," Helena said matter-of-factly.

"I couldn't have anyone looking over my shoulder," I explained. "What we were doing, it was still technically illegal. With the resources I had available to me, though, I could afford to keep it quiet and do the work alone."

Helena returned her attention back to the computer and brought up a single photo. It was, technically speaking, a picture of her. To be more precise, the picture was of her as little more than a small conglomeration of cells in the throes of rapid mitosis, growing into what she would eventually become. The timestamp on it showed October 3, 2031. "Didn't take you long, did it?"

I shook my head. "Not as long as I would've thought. Some of the advancements I'd made at BioBotz were instrumental in streamlining the process," I told her. "I thought it'd take years, but I had a viable, growing embryo within two weeks."

"Me."

I looked at her and held her gaze for a moment. "Yes, you," I agreed. "She- you were identical to her in virtually every way that mattered."

"With the exception that the sperm you used was your own," Helena supplied. "You recreated the love of your life with your own sperm as a blank and used one of her own harvested eggs for the catalytic shell. The major parts of your own DNA were overwritten, but it still came from you." She paused. "There was just one problem, though, wasn't there?"

I took a deep breath. "Yes."

"I look like her, am her in every way but one." Then she pulled up an image that, though I had kept, I utterly despised. It was a picture of the wreckage. It was gruesome, but it told a very stark and final tale: my beloved's brain was beyond repair. It had been all but decimated in the crash.

"You can't know what it's been..." I started, but trailed off.

Helena shut down the computer screen quickly and cut me off. "Can't I?" she asked. "Every day of your life, you saw her in me. Heard her voice. Felt her touch. But I'm not her. Can't be. All of her knowledge and experiences are gone. The ones I have are completely different from hers. No amount of manipulation or staging could reconstruct every experience of her childhood to recreate who she was," Helena said. "So what am I to you? A ghost? A reminder of something you'll never have?"

I buried my face in my hands and began to sob. I knew this conversation would be difficult, but I had always assumed that I'd be the one in control of it, that I'd be able to direct how it would go. Helena's discovery of the truth had blindsided me and left me unprepared, unable to anticipate how to react or respond to the questions she rightfully deserved to have answers to. A moment later, my daughter was kneeling at my side and reached for my hands, pulling them away from my wet face. I blinked at her in my misery and shame, but she held her steely gaze on me. Her eyes, just like her mother's, were an ice, cold blue and filled with a sort of inner knowledge that had drawn me to her mother so many years before. "Why would you torture yourself like that?" she asked in earnest concern.

"I... at the time, I didn't know what I was getting myself into," I said plainly. "I didn't..."

"You didn't think," Helena said understandingly. "You didn't realize that I wouldn't grow up to be her, the woman you fell in love with."

I soberly nodded. Thinking back to the day I came to that understanding, I recalled the frustration and misery I'd felt. It was almost like losing her a second time. But, by then, Helena was growing into a full infant within her embryonic chamber. She was a living human being at that point. And that's when I decided to charge on, let her grow to fruition. That's when I started to lay the foundation for the lies I'd have to tell, the lies that would explain Helena's existence, how an infant could seem to suddenly appear in the world as though pulled from the ether.

I had convinced (to the tune of several thousand dollars) a down-on-his luck neonatal surgeon to back up my story about transferring Helena from her mother's womb into a growth chamber. Selling that story had been made easier due to the fact that, before she'd died, she'd named me as the executor of her estate and I had full authorization for any and all medical care, should she become incapacitated. Using extraordinary means to save a fetus fell under that authority. That the aforementioned fetus came into existence several years after her death was a mere technicality which had been dealt with by some very discreet hackers I'd employed- they proved very handy in changing the dates of death.

The other half of my lie was a little trickier. Using some closely-held genetic manipulation techniques which were considered proprietary to the company, I tweaked my own ability to age. Since then, I hadn't aged hardly at all. The anti-aging process wasn't true immortality, however. I would still get older, as nature intended; I'd just age at a considerably different and slower rate than everyone else on Earth. Cosmetic changes had to be made to my appearance so that no one else would figure it out, but beneath the "mask" of a man in his early fifties, I was actually closer to a man about 36 years old. I hadn't done it for any other reason than to ensure that I'd be able to raise Helena like a proper father should. If I couldn't have my beloved back, then at least I could do right by her progeny. Our progeny. Our daughter.

"I can't begin to tell you how many times I wanted to..." I started. I sniffed and took a deep breath. "I was going to tell you last night," I confessed. "I'd planned everything." I sniffed again. "You deserve to know the whole truth."

She paused to consider this. "Is there anything that I don't know?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Not really, Sweetheart. You've pretty much got it all figured out. I'm just sorry that you had to find out on your own. I wanted to be the one to tell you, to... make it right."

My daughter stared at me with shrewd eyes. "There is something you're not telling me," she declared. "Come on, Dad. Out with it. Tell me everything." I returned her stare for a moment. Finally, I told her about what I'd done to myself. She took it all in stride. "Does anyone else know about it?" she asked.

I shook my head. "No one knows," I answered. "About any of it. Hell, as far as anyone is concerned, you were adopted."

She looked down at the carpet for a moment in deep thought. Finally she looked back up at me. "Good," she said. "Then maybe they won't twig."

I scrunched up my eyebrows at her. "About what?"

"About this," she said. Then she leaned up and kissed me full on the lips. It wasn't the kind of kiss a loving daughter gives to her father. At first, with her lips pressed to mine, I was frozen in shock, but after a few seconds it was like a switch had been flipped and I could suddenly recall the taste and texture of her mother's kiss. With an explosion in my own mind and heart, I found that I was a thousand times hungrier to feel those lips against mine than I'd ever suspected.

For a moment, I found myself lost in that kiss, but I woke to my senses a few seconds later and pulled back. I fixed Helena with a shocked look. "What... why did you do that?" I asked her.

Her eyes widened, but her face softened. "Isn't that why you created me?" she asked reasonably. "Isn't that what I'm supposed to be, a recreation of her?" My mouth worked to form a response, but no words came out. She charged on and sat back on her heels. "I'm no fool, Dad. It didn't take a massive leap of logic to figure it out. You made me so that you could be with her again. Otherwise, why would you have made me look exactly like her? What's wrong with fulfilling my purpose?"

I shook my head in denial. "That... I lost hope of that years ago, Helena. Maybe, in the beginning, that might have been my motivation-"

"Maybe?" she interjected with a perked eyebrow and a coy smile. Dear God, she looked absolutely captivating and so much like the woman I fell in love with that it almost hurt to look at her!

I paused. "Okay. There's no 'maybe' about it. That was my plan. But, as you noticed, you aren't her. Maybe in form, but not in function. You're a completely different person. And you're my daughter. I hadn't considered any of the consequences when I started this... madness."

She shrugged. "What's done is done. It can't be undone, can it? I'm here. I exist. And I exist to be a replacement for her."

Without sounding harsh about it, I replied solemnly, "Sweetheart, no one can replace her. Not even you."

She stared at me in that hauntingly familiar way, the way her mother would, for several seconds. I could see her mind whirring. "Tell me about her. Tell me how we're alike and how we're different," she said finally.

I took a deep breath in through my nose as I considered it. The truth is, as Helena had gotten older, she'd become more like her mother than I could account for. I said as much. "In a lot of ways, it really is like you're her clone. You even have her accent and most of her mannerisms, things that I certainly never taught you. They just sort of... manifested."

Helena nodded understandingly. "In a way," she said, "that makes complete sense. I can't quite describe it, but I sort of... feel her inside me somehow. I never knew her and the few video logs you kept don't really tell me much about her personality, since most of them were technical reports, but there's this sense of her inside of me that I just can't shake. I sometimes have a hard time figuring out how much is her and how much is me."

"Yesterday you said something," I told her. "About worrying about things I can't control. She used to say that to me a lot, in the early days of our research. We had a lot of early failures which drove me to frustration. She always kept me focused by reminding me that, sometimes, I couldn't control things and that I needed to learn from our failures rather than take them personally. But when you said that yesterday... where did you hear that from? Because I certainly don't recall ever teaching you that." Then I muttered, "Probably should have, though."

She blinked at me owlishly and then got a far-away look in her eyes. "I... don't really know," she answered. "It just felt right, like it was the right thing to say, I guess. The words just kind of spilled out of me without really thinking about it. All I knew was that you were stressed out and saying that would calm you down." She gently laid a hand on my thigh. "To be honest, I've always been kind of compelled to do things like that for you, ever since I was little. I've always had this need to... care for you. Not in the way a daughter takes care of her father, but to actually care for you. You know?"

I felt the conflicting emotions caused by her kiss begin to well up in me again, but I tamped them down. "You know we can't... go there, right?" I asked her.

Again, she blinked at me, this time with a confused look on her face. "Why not?" she asked, her tone hard and demanding. "I mean, what was it all for, then, Dad? The private schooling? Not once did I ever go to a normal school. Oh, sure, I have some friends and I get out some, but I mostly keep to the house, with you. Are you sure that wasn't by design?"

I sighed. "Partly, yes, but not for the reasons you might be thinking."

"Explain it to me, then," she said.

"Look, at the time you were born, I was already extremely rich. Money is great for making life comfortable, but it also makes a person a target for all kinds of abuses. And the nature of your, well, conception was a little murky, at best. I didn't want you to get teased by your peers, many of whom would probably come from rich families themselves. Would they really accept you, knowing that you were adopted? Would they not buy the story and start looking into the truth, which was a thousand times worse? What about kidnappers? That happens more frequently than is known- children of rich parents being taken for ransom. So, yes, I had you privately schooled and educated. But it wasn't because I wanted to keep you a prisoner in your own home. I never wanted that. I just wanted to keep you safe." Then I added, "And, in point of fact, you do have friends who you do spend time with outside of the house. You have free reign and are allowed to go anywhere you like-"

"With a protective detail on my heels," she cut in. "Don't think I haven't noticed them, Daddy. They're discreet, but I'm not stupid. They can try to blend in and usually do a good job of it, but when I see the same faces everywhere I go for a few years, I can put two and two together."

I stared at her with frank surprise. I'd paid that security company quite the hefty sum to ensure her safety and not make her feel like she was being stalked. They had assured me that they were the best at such surveillance techniques. I'd need to have a pointed conversation with their team leader soon.

She waved the issue away. "Not that it matters. They never interfered, which is something I appreciated. So I let both you and them go on with the belief that I was unaware of their presence in the background. I understood that they were there to keep me safe. But from another perspective, it's easy to see how I might've concluded that I was a kept woman. Girl. Whatever."

I chewed on that. "Is that how you felt?" I asked.

She nodded slightly. "I'm not going to lie. Sometimes, yes, that's exactly how I felt. And I couldn't figure out why. But when I found out about..." she waved over to my desk and computer, "that, it started to make a different sort of sense to me." She paused a beat. "Then I began to wonder if you were protecting me from the world or if you were protecting me for yourself."

"For myself?" I asked skeptically.

She stood up and waved her hands down the length of her body with a flourish. "Look at me, Dad. I mean, really look at me. Do you see me or do you see her?" I did look at her. She looked, as she said, exactly like her mother. Just over five feet tall, lithe arms, beautiful pale skin, full pouty lips, gloriously blue eyes, long straight hair, soft cheeks, pleasantly plump bust (36-C, just like her mother), the thin waist of a young woman, strong and supple legs... as far as I was concerned, she was the personification of beauty, strength, intelligence and grace. And what for all that I saw of her mother in her appearance, I also saw the daughter I'd raised alone. I thought about it for a second, decided to hedge, and was about to answer when she held her hand up to silence me. "Don't bother," she said. "I know you. I know you're going to say something like, 'I see you and you merely look like her.' Which is a cop-out."

Dammit, she was right! That was pretty much exactly what I was about to say.

She went on. "And it's true only so far as it goes. I may look like her, but, in some ways, I am her. Maybe not in the ways you remember or expect, but there's qualities that she and I share. We're probably more alike than we are different. One thing we have in common, besides our name, is that we both love you. Deeply." She stared at me searchingly. "Do you hear me? I love you. I love you in ways that a daughter shouldn't. And for years I've felt guilty about that because I didn't know why. Now I do. Now I... now I have context. Since I found out about her, Dad, do you have any idea how truly and deeply self-possessed I've felt? I feel like the mysteries to every weird thing in my life have suddenly been unlocked!" Her hard look was back, almost accusing in its weight. "I know what my purpose in life is now and you... you want me to pretend I don't!"