The Clone Who Walks Away

second draft – Multiplicit universe

The subpoena arrives on a Tuesday, which is the day I do payroll. I read it at my desk with a cup of coffee that cost four dollars and was made by a person I employ, and I think: finally.

Not dread. Not guilt. Just the recognition that a thing I’ve been expecting has arrived, the way you expect a bill for a service you used and don’t regret using.

My name is Margaux Linden. My myother’s name is also Margaux Linden, although the state calls her Inmate 2187-L and has for seven years. The subpoena says I’m required to appear at her parole hearing and answer questions about the nature of our pre-split agreement. It says this in language that tries very hard not to acknowledge that the agreement was made by one person, because the legal system still hasn’t figured out how to talk about that.

I finish payroll first. Eleven employees. Direct deposit. Then I call my lawyer.

The thing people want to know — reporters, ethicists, the woman at my gym who recognized me from a documentary — is whether I feel guilty. They ask it in different ways, with different levels of sophistication, but the question is always the same: how do you live with it?

I live with it the way anyone lives with a hard decision that worked out in their favor.

Before the split, I was one person. That person had a plan. The plan was a crime — securities fraud, specifically, a short position built on insider information about a pharmaceutical trial that was going to fail. The profit would be large enough to matter. The prison sentence, if caught, would be long enough to ruin a life. One life.

So I split. The plan was explicit: one branch takes the trading position and the criminal exposure. The other branch takes the proceeds and builds something legitimate with them. If the crime is never detected, both branches benefit eventually. If it is detected, one branch goes to prison and the other branch has a clean life funded by dirty money.

We flipped a coin. I won the flip. She didn’t.

That’s the part people can’t get past. The coin flip. As if the mechanism of selection is the moral problem, rather than the agreement itself. The coin flip offends them because it makes the arbitrariness visible. I think the arbitrariness is the most honest part.

I built a business. Not a hedge fund, not a shell company — a landscape architecture firm. Twelve people now. We design public parks, corporate campuses, residential gardens for people who want something better than lawn. The work is real. The clients are real. The tax returns are real. The seed money was not.

The money from the fraud became payroll, became health insurance for a woman named Diana who has lupus, became a public park in Astoria that children play in. The money changed. It went through the alchemy of labor and time and became ordinary. That’s what money does.

My apartment is nice. Not extravagant — I’m not an idiot. Two bedrooms in Carroll Gardens. A kitchen with good light. The kind of place that says: this woman makes a decent living.

I date. I have friends. I go to a Thursday evening figure drawing class because I like it and because it’s the kind of thing a person does when her life is stable enough for hobbies. My friends know, most of them. It was in the news. They’ve made their peace with it or they haven’t, and the ones who haven’t aren’t my friends anymore, which is a natural sorting that I don’t resent.

When the case went public, my business insurance was re-rated. Not because of the fraud — the fraud was hers, legally. Because underwriters have started pricing in “walk-away exposure” for clients with known clone-split histories. There’s a surcharge now. It’s small. It exists.

The hearing is in a federal building in lower Manhattan. My lawyer meets me outside. His name is Paul. He’s been my attorney for five years. He knows everything.

“The board is going to ask you about the original agreement,” he says. “Whether it was coerced. Whether the imprisoned branch consented freely.”

“She did.”

“They’re going to push on that. The argument from her side is that pre-split consent is inherently coercive because the person who consents doesn’t yet know which branch she’ll become.”

“That’s not coercion. That’s uncertainty.”

Paul looks at me the way he sometimes does, which is the way a lawyer looks at a client who is technically correct and socially radioactive. “Just answer what they ask. Don’t volunteer your philosophy.”

I know what he means. He means: don’t be yourself in there.

The room is plain. A long table with five board members. A camera for the record. Two chairs facing the table — one for me, one for her. She’s not here yet.

I sit down and wait. I’ve designed enough spaces to read the intention in a room. This one says: suffer politely.

They bring her in.

Seven years. She’s been in federal custody for seven years, and the thing that hits me is not how much she looks like me — of course she looks like me — but how specifically she doesn’t. The weight is different. The posture is different. She holds her shoulders the way people hold their shoulders when they’ve spent years in a space where taking up room is a negotiation. Her hair is shorter. Her skin has the particular quality of someone who hasn’t chosen her own soap in seven years.

She sees me and her face does something I recognize from the inside — the micro-expression I make when I encounter something I expected and still find difficult.

“Ms. Linden,” the chair says. To me. “Thank you for appearing.”

“I was subpoenaed.”

“Nonetheless.” He shuffles papers. “We’re here to evaluate Inmate 2187-L’s petition for parole. As part of that evaluation, we need to understand the nature of the pre-split agreement between you and the petitioner. You understand that you’re under oath.”

“Yes.”

“Before the cloning procedure, did you and the petitioner discuss the plan that led to her conviction?”

“There was no ‘me and the petitioner.’ There was one person. I discussed the plan with myself, in the way that anyone discusses a plan with themselves before executing it.”

The board member to the chair’s left, a woman with reading glasses, leans forward. “When you say ‘one person’ — you’re saying the plan was made before the split?”

“The plan was the reason for the split.”

The chair writes something. The woman with reading glasses takes hers off.

“And the allocation of roles — who would take the criminal exposure, who would take the proceeds — that was decided before the split as well?”

“The method was decided. The allocation was random. We flipped a coin.”

“Who flipped the coin?”

“I did. The one person who existed at that time flipped a coin and then split.”

“And you — the branch we’re speaking to now — you received the proceeds.”

“Yes.”

“Did you at any point offer to share those proceeds with the branch who received the criminal exposure?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because that wasn’t the agreement. The agreement was that one branch takes the risk and one branch takes the reward. Sharing the proceeds after the fact would have meant the crime served no purpose — we’d both have partial funds and one of us would still be in prison. The whole point was that one of us would be fully free to build something with the money. That’s what I did.”

They ask me more questions. They ask about the coin flip, about whether we considered other methods, about whether the pre-split person understood what prison would actually mean. I answer all of them.

Then they ask: “Do you believe the petitioner consented freely to the arrangement?”

“Yes. As freely as anyone consents to anything. She — the person who became her — understood the odds and accepted them. She didn’t consent to prison specifically. She consented to a fifty percent chance of prison. The coin made it specific.”

“Some legal scholars argue that pre-split consent is fundamentally different from ordinary consent, because the consenting party ceases to exist and is replaced by two parties, only one of whom benefits.”

“I know the argument. I think it’s wrong. If pre-split consent isn’t real, then no clone can make a binding agreement about anything, because every agreement made before splitting is made by a person who won’t exist afterward. That would make cloning itself a form of legal incapacitation. Is that the board’s position?”

It isn’t. I know it isn’t. The entire parole system for clones depends on pre-split consent being valid. If they rule that my agreement with myself was coerced, they undermine the legal framework that allows any clone to sign a contract, take a job, join the military, or agree to self-cull. They won’t do it. Not for one case. Not for her.

The woman with the reading glasses tries a different angle. “Ms. Linden, your refusal to share proceeds has been sustained and consistent over seven years. Does that sustained refusal constitute evidence that the original person intended an unequal outcome regardless of the coin flip?”

The question is precise and terrible. She’s asking whether my behavior after the split retroactively reveals what the pre-split person really wanted — whether the coin was theater.

“No. It constitutes evidence that the branch who received the proceeds honored the agreement. If the coin had gone the other way and she were sitting here, she would have done exactly the same thing. You can ask her.”

The board looks at the imprisoned Margaux. She says nothing. Her silence is the most honest thing in the room.

They give her a chance to speak.

She stands. The shackles are gone — they removed them before the hearing, a concession to dignity — but she stands like someone who remembers them. She doesn’t look at the board. She looks at me.

“I want to ask her one question.”

The chair nods.

“Would you do it again?”

She means: knowing now that you’d be you. Knowing I’d get this room and these clothes and this version of our face.

“Yes.”

She doesn’t flinch.

“Even now?” she says.

“The agreement was sound. It was sound before the split and it’s sound now. One of us was going to lose. I’m sorry it was you. Being sorry doesn’t make the agreement wrong.”

“It makes you a person who profits from another person’s suffering.”

“Yes. It does. And you would have done the same thing, because you are me, and you know you would have, and that’s the part you can’t forgive — not that I’m free, but that you would be exactly where I am if the coin had gone the other way.”

The room is very quiet.

She sits down. Her hands are flat on the table, the way our hands go flat when we’re preventing them from shaking.

The board deliberates. They’ll notify both parties within thirty days. Paul walks me out through a side exit to avoid the reporters at the main entrance.

In the elevator, Paul says, “You were very clear in there.”

“I know.”

“The board may grant parole regardless. The sentence was served. The behavior record is clean. This hearing was a formality.”

“I know that too.”

“If she’s released, she may contact you.”

“She won’t.”

“How do you know?”

Because I know her. Because she is me, the version of me that lost, and I know exactly what I would do if I were her: I would walk out of that building and never speak to the other Margaux again. Not out of anger. Out of the same clear-eyed practicality that made the plan possible in the first place. The relationship has no utility. The shared history is a liability. The clean move is severance.

“She’ll want her own life,” I say. “She’ll want to stop being the other one.”

Paul holds the elevator door. “And you? Do you want to stop being the other one?”

“I’ve never been the other one. That was the whole point.”

Outside, it’s April. The kind of day where the air in lower Manhattan smells like river and concrete warming in the sun, and the trees along the courthouse plaza are just starting to leaf.

A woman on the courthouse steps recognizes me. I can tell by the way she adjusts her grip on her phone — not raising it to record, not yet, just readying it, the way you ready a weapon you haven’t decided to use.

“Ms. Linden?” she calls.

I keep walking.

“Ms. Linden, do you have any comment on the hearing?”

I keep walking.

She calls after me: “How do you live with yourself?”

My phone buzzes — a client, asking about the drainage plan for the Astoria project. I answer it.

On the sidewalk, a man in a good suit falls into step beside me. I don’t know him. He says, quietly, without breaking stride: “I understand the logic. For what it’s worth.” He peels off at the next corner.

That is almost worse than the woman with the phone.

The coffee shop on the next block is the one I go to when I’m in this neighborhood. I order a cortado and drink it at the counter and watch the street through the window.

I finish the coffee. I go back to work. The day continues.

It’s mine. That’s all.