The Spreadsheet
first draft – Multiplicit universe
22 minutes
The suit’s been beeping for fourteen minutes. I know because I’m counting, which is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. It’s what I was literally made to do, and I mean that in the most precise way possible.
The O2 readout says four minutes, but that’s an estimate based on a resting breathing rate, and I have not been resting. I’ve been walking, which was part of the plan – walk until it’s too far to change your mind – and also breathing hard, because it turns out the body has strong opinions about being suffocated.
My lungs are staging a protest. There’s a part of my brain, the old mammalian part, that isn’t interested in cost-benefit analysis. It wants me to turn around. It’s flooding me with adrenaline and panic and the conviction that I am making a terrible mistake. The suit’s voice, calm and female, agrees. “Return to nearest shelter,” she says, and she’s been saying it for fourteen minutes, and I’d feel worse about ignoring her if she weren’t just an algorithm.
I keep walking. On my visor, the suit is painting a helpful little map – a dotted line back to the hab, distance in meters, estimated travel time. I can see the hab itself if I turn around, a squat white cylinder against the plain, its running lights on, the green dot of the airlock blinking. It looks like a lighthouse seen from a lifeboat. I don’t turn around.
Here’s what the spreadsheet said about methods. Pharmaceutical: clean, painless, requires supplies I don’t have. Depressurization: fast, but involves the word “ebullism,” which I looked up once and wish I hadn’t. Blade: fast, effective, and entirely out of the question because I’ve never been able to stand the sight of blood, mine or anyone else’s. This is not a brave thing to admit while dying.
That left walking out with a short tank. I calculated thirty minutes of air at a normal breathing rate, figured I’d walk twenty minutes out and have ten minutes of increasingly poor decision-making before it was over. The sunset would be to the west. Mars has sunsets. They’re small and blue-tinged and nothing like the ones on the screen savers, but they exist.
What the spreadsheet didn’t model was the panic. Turns out you can know – intellectually, with absolute numerical certainty – that this is the right financial decision, and your bloodstream will still dump every chemical it has into the project of keeping you alive. I’m shaking. My fingers are tingling. I can feel my heart hammering like it thinks there’s somewhere to run to.
There isn’t. The nearest shelter is twenty-three minutes behind me and I have maybe two minutes of air. The math is settled.
I sit down on a rock. Not because I’m tired, though I am. Because this is as far as I need to go, and my mother raised me to sit down for important things. Also because my legs are shaking badly enough that sitting down is becoming less of a choice than I’d like to admit. She raised him too, of course. The other me. The one who’s on Earth right now, probably sleeping, twenty light-minutes away in a bed I used to own.
I wonder if he’ll feel it when I stop. Probably not. We’re well diverged now. Nine months of it. He’s Joe and I’m Joe but we’re not the same Joe, and that’s the whole point, and I should probably stop talking and let the math finish.
The suit stops beeping.
I think it’s given up on me.
That’s fair.
20 minutes
The last message I send to Earth takes twenty minutes to arrive. I know because I timed the round trip last week – forty minutes total, twenty each way. The planets have drifted about as far apart as they get. Appropriate, I suppose.
“Job’s done,” I say to the camera. “Files are uploaded. Client should have everything by Thursday their time. I’m going to clean up the hab and settle accounts.”
Settle accounts. That’s what we agreed to call it. Here’s what settling accounts looks like when both accountants are the same person:
RENNER AUDIT -- MARS ASSIGNMENT -- FINAL COST SUMMARY
Prepared by: Joe Aldric / Joe Aldric
Option A Option B Option C
(Return) (Terminal) (Remain)
Clone procedure 300,000 300,000 300,000
Transit, Earth-Mars 180,000 180,000 180,000
Hab/life support 72,000 72,000 72,000
Transit, Mars-Earth 1,400,000 -- --
Re-clone next job -- 300,000 300,000
Suit salvage -- (12,000) --
--------- --------- ---------
Total expense 1,952,000 840,000 852,000
Contract revenue 1,200,000 1,200,000 1,200,000
--------- --------- ---------
Net (752,000) 360,000 348,000
Option C: post-contract hab 96,000/yr. Projected income 0.
Net negative in 3.6 years. No one to audit on Mars.We built it together, Earth Joe and I, six weeks ago when the audit wrapped up and we both knew what came next. Took us about an hour. Most of that was signal delay.
He asked if I needed anything. I said a knife with a sedative built in, and he laughed, and I laughed twenty minutes later when I heard him laughing, and that was as close as we got to discussing which column I’m in.
I send the last message and don’t wait for a reply. There won’t be one. We agreed on that, too. No goodbyes. Goodbyes are for people who are different from each other.
14 minutes
There’s a moment, about five months into the job, when I stop thinking of Earth Joe as “me.”
It happens during a message about the Renner audit – the actual work, the reason I’m here. Forensic accounting requires chain of custody on the evidence, which means someone has to be in the room with the servers, not twenty minutes away on a video call. The delay is up to fourteen minutes each way now, the planets drifting apart, so each exchange takes the better part of an hour. He’s walking me through a discrepancy in the client’s supply chain records, and I’m listening, and I realize I’m evaluating his analysis the way I’d evaluate a colleague’s. Not bad. Solid methodology. A bit conservative on the error margins.
A bit conservative.
I would never have said that about myself. I was the conservative one. I was the one who triple-checked because getting it wrong meant someone went to prison or didn’t. But five months on Mars has done something to my thinking. When your daily existence depends on systems that either work or kill you, you develop a different relationship with error margins. You learn which ones matter and which ones are there because someone was afraid.
I send back my analysis and it’s better than his. Not dramatically. Not in a way he’d notice, probably. But I notice. I notice because I know exactly how good he is – I used to be exactly that good – and now I’m slightly more than that, at the one thing that matters to both of us.
I’ve always had this trick where, if someone’s better than me at something, I downplay the thing. Cooking? Who cares. Sports? Waste of time. It’s a good defense mechanism. Keeps the ego intact. But I can’t downplay this. This is forensic accounting. This is the thing. Our thing.
And if I’m better at the thing – even slightly, even only in this one narrow way – then I’m not the lesser copy.
Which means the lesser copy is the one who gets to live.
I sit with that for a while. The hab hums. The air filters overcompensate, as always. I look at the spreadsheet – the real one, the one that says what I cost per month, the one with the column marked “terminal date” – and for the first time, the numbers don’t feel like math.
They feel like someone else’s decision about my life.
Then I remember: they’re my decision about my life. I made them. Before I was me, I made them. The Joe who sat in the clinic and signed the forms and checked the boxes – he knew this was coming. He just didn’t know what it would feel like to be on this end of the spreadsheet.
Nobody does, until they are.
4 minutes
The first message I send from Mars is stupid. I know it’s stupid while I’m recording it, and I know Earth Joe will know it’s stupid, and I send it anyway.
“So,” I say. “Mars.”
Four minutes later: “Mars.”
“It’s brown.”
“I’ve seen photos.”
“The photos don’t capture the smell.”
“Mars has a smell?”
“The hab does. Smells like a new car crossed with a hospital. Very clean. Aggressively clean. I think the air filters are overcompensating.”
This goes on for an hour. Each exchange: eight minutes of silence punctuated by thirty seconds of two accountants being awkward at each other. We’re the same person. We share every memory, every joke, every reference point. You’d think conversation would be easy.
It’s not. It’s like talking to a mirror that talks back – technically responsive, but you can never forget that the only reason it’s there is you. Every joke I make, he’d have made. Every observation, he’s already thought of. The delay helps, actually. It gives each message time to age, to become something he sent rather than something I would have said.
After a week, we settle into a rhythm. Morning briefing, Mars time. At first that means morning for both of us, but the time zones drift – Mars days are thirty-seven minutes longer than Earth’s, which doesn’t sound like much until it stacks up and my morning is his midnight. We stick with my mornings. He adjusts. He sends case files. I send observations. We don’t chitchat much because chitchat with yourself is either boring or unsettling, and we’d rather not find out which.
After a month, something shifts. His jokes land differently. Not funnier or worse – just different. I say “Good morning” and he says “Good evening” and I can hear the fatigue in it – he’s staying up for me. We’ve always been a morning person. He mentions a restaurant I’ll never eat at. A movie I’ll never see in a theater. Small things. Divergence, doing what divergence does. And for the first time, talking to him feels less like talking to a mirror and more like talking to a friend. A friend who knows me completely, who doesn’t need context or backstory, who laughs at things that aren’t even jokes because he knows why they’re funny.
I hadn’t expected to like that. The loneliness of Mars I’d budgeted for. The companionship of myself I hadn’t.
0 minutes
The shuttle terminal is worse than the clinic.
At the clinic there was only one of me, and the fear was abstract. Now there are two of me, standing at a departure gate, and the fear has a face. My face. He’s wearing the same jacket I am because of course he is – we bought it together, or rather, we were one person when we bought it and now we’re two people who both think it’s theirs. We’ll need to sort that out later. We won’t.
We’ve had three days together since the split. Three days of being two Joes in the same apartment, bumping into each other in the kitchen, reaching for the same mug, laughing at the same moment at the same joke on the same podcast. It should have been comforting. It wasn’t. It was like hearing your own voice on a recording – technically accurate and deeply wrong.
We haven’t decided which of us is which. That’s not how it works. The contract says one copy goes to Mars and one stays on Earth, but it doesn’t specify. We tried to make a spreadsheet. There was nothing to put in it. Every skill, every preference, every qualification – identical. Obviously. We’re three days old.
So we flipped a coin. Heads I go, tails he goes. It came up heads.
That should bother me more than it does. My entire future – the Mars job, the hab, the self-culling clause – decided by a quarter bouncing off a kitchen table. But that’s the point, isn’t it? If we’re truly the same person, it doesn’t matter which one goes. The coin flip isn’t random. It’s a statement of faith: we are interchangeable. Either of us would do the same work, make the same choices, run the same spreadsheet at the end.
It’s different when you’re the resource.
The gate announcement calls my flight. We stand there. Two identical men in the same jacket, same shoes, same haircut that needs a trim, same expression that is trying very hard to be professional about this.
“So,” he says.
“So,” I say.
A long pause. We both know what the other one is thinking, because we are, at this point, still essentially the same person thinking it. There’s nothing to say that the other one doesn’t already know.
“The mug is yours,” he says. “I’ll get a new one.”
I almost laugh. Of everything – the apartment, the savings, the client list, the life – he picks the mug. But I know why. It’s the only thing small enough to give away without it meaning something. Everything else means something.
“Thanks,” I say.
I pick up my bag. It’s light. Mars doesn’t require much, and anything I need can be shipped cheaper than I can. That’s sort of the whole problem, when you think about it. Everything is cheaper to ship than I am. Including a replacement me.
I don’t hug him. We’re not huggers. We’ve never been huggers. But I notice that he takes a half-step forward and then stops, and I know he noticed me notice, and we both file that away in the place where we keep things we don’t talk about.
“Four minutes,” I say. “That’s the delay when I land. Practically a phone call.”
“Practically,” he says.
I walk through the gate. I don’t look back, because I know exactly what I’d see, and there’s no information in it.
N/A
The clone clinic smells like a dentist’s office, which is not reassuring.
I’m sitting in a chair that’s too comfortable – the kind designed to relax you, which has the opposite effect because you know they’re trying to relax you, and that means there’s something to not be relaxed about.
The intake form asks: “Do you understand that upon cloning, both resulting individuals are legally and ontologically equivalent? Neither is the ‘original.’ Neither has priority. Do you accept this?”
I check yes. My pen hovers, but I check yes.
The form asks: “In the event that one copy is to be terminated per contractual agreement, do you accept that the determination of which copy fulfills which role is made at the moment of splitting and is thereafter irrevocable?”
I check yes.
The form asks: “Do you have any fears or phobias that may be relevant to future medical decisions?”
I write: “Blood. Needles. Knives. The usual.”
The technician reviews my file. She’s a multiple – I can tell because she refers to a conversation “one of me” had with my employer. She doesn’t think this is strange. To her, I’m the strange one. A thirty-eight-year-old singleton who’s never split, sitting in her chair like he’s about to get a root canal.
“You’ve done the financial analysis,” she says. It’s not a question.
“Thoroughly.”
“And the psychological screening?”
“Passed.” Barely. The screener flagged my “competitive tendencies” and “avoidant coping strategies” and suggested I might struggle with divergence. I told her I’d already modeled for that. She said that was an example of what she meant. I didn’t have a good answer. The final evaluation was strange – I woke up in a fog and saw myself and felt nothing I couldn’t explain. Apparently that’s the part most people fail.
“Any questions?”
I have a thousand questions. I have a spreadsheet of questions, organized by category, weighted by importance, color-coded by how likely I am to get a satisfying answer. I’ve stress-tested every scenario. I’ve modeled the financials forward and backward. I know what the Mars job pays, what the clone costs, what the return trip costs, what self-culling saves. I’ve read the case law. I’ve reviewed my own audit of the Hendricks clone-fraud case and noted every point where things went wrong and someone stopped being a person and became a liability.
I’ve done the analysis. The analysis says clone.
The analysis doesn’t say anything about the moment itself. The moment where there’s one of you and then there are two, and one of you is going to Mars, and one of you is staying, and neither of you is the real one, and one of you is going to die.
“No questions,” I say.
She nods. “Count backward from ten.”
I get to seven.