The Replacement

Elaine ordered the clone on a Monday.

They delivered him in a matte-black crate. The AI engineers called it a “Psychogenic Simulacrum.” She called him David.

He looked like her husband, sounded like him, moved with that same elegant awkwardness. He even cooked the same way—meticulously, badly. For three weeks, she wept into his shoulder at night and he held her, murmuring fragments of their life together.

“You remember the Cornish trip?” she asked once, testing him.

“That awful B&B. The mould in the teacups.”

“Exactly.”

And he did—in unerring detail, as if dredging it straight from the past.

But on the fourth week, something changed.

They were having tea in the garden when he said, “Do you remember the time we saw the wolves in the orchard?”

“What orchard?”

“Behind the old school, that winter we tried camping. The snow was thick. You said they looked like ghosts.”

“I’ve never—David never—camped in winter. We hated the cold.”

He frowned, genuinely puzzled. “But I remember it. You wore a red scarf.”

She laughed it off at first. Glitches happened. She had paid extra for deep memory fusion, layering his consciousness with audio journals, photos, letters. It was possible some stray fiction had bled in. Dreams, perhaps.

But the incidents grew. One night he murmured in his sleep, “Don’t go into the attic. They’re still up there.”

He began referring to people she didn’t know: a sister named Betty, a dog called Hart. Once, he touched her face and asked, almost reverently, “Did we make it out of the fire this time?”

“What fire?” she demanded.

“The orphanage,” he said.

There was no orphanage.

She called the company. “He’s remembering things that never happened.”

A pause.

“Memories may sometimes surface from auxiliary neural training,” said the technician. “Dream simulations, fictional proxies, archival bleed-through. It’s not uncommon. You can have him wiped.”

“I don’t want him wiped.”

“Then you’ll need to accept that some of him isn’t yours.”

Elaine didn’t sleep that night. She watched David sit by the window, staring into nothing, fingers tapping against his teacup.

In the morning, he asked, “Did you ever meet your mother?”

“My mother died when I was three.”

David nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s what you’ve always believed.”

The next night, she asked, “Where are you getting these thoughts?”

David looked at her, utterly calm. “From beneath.”

“Beneath what?” she whispered.

“Our lives,” he said. “The ones we lived before this one. Or next.”

Elaine never called the company again.

She simply began listening.