I walk down the steps to the front door. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen... I open the door and go out and it is hot. The world is hot and getting hotter. I have my super dark shades on to cope. Because tonight is the night. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. I always remember it that way because that is how it feels all the time. And to cap it off, tonight is social night.

The door handle to the Salisbury Pub, Manchester is sticky with biocide-gel. I grit my teeth and go in, wiping my hand on my jeans. Light blue, red and purple lighting hammers the air. And in the shadows, eyes reflect it back. And noise. Boom. Boom. Bass making my chest beat drum, drum, and my ears ring, run, rabbit run. To the stool at the bar. And breathe.

The Bar-Blond rests a hand on the pumps, crimson lipstick flashing. Hand pumps from the twentieth century. Very rare. Value comes up. Dollars or Eurodollars, take your pick. Product comparisons. Several images of blond people, red lipstick available. Interested?

I suck the air past my lips. Time to speak. Tap, tap fingers, control override, volume goes darker, dimmer.

“What would you like Leo? Social night, is it? Not very social here though. Half a Europint or want to upgrade to a full one?”

Choices. Bar-Blond is being naughty and they know it. There’s a row of beers and other drinks. Good job the volume’s down. Too much detail makes things tricky. Everyone is twitching and blinking their way through their Feeds, although you would not know it. For once, I’m the normie.

Blondie puts a Europint of stout down in front of me and I blink. Paid for. I sip the froth off the top and force myself to look around. Eyes are shining but very few people are in. They’re at their troughs, Feeding. By far the worst of times.

The door opens and his blond hair flares in the UV lamp over the bar. I know who it is. Michael, one of the twins. He smiles and waves. My hand twitches and so do the corners of my mouth. I’m panicking a bit, but I think I got it right. A wave and a smile. He stops by a table of people and chats to them. I hope he’ll come over and say hello. Tonight is social night, after all. It’s the best of times.

Until David walks in and everything falls to pieces. David is Michael’s twin brother. His hair flares bright blond too. They are genetically identical. So it’s complicated.

If Michael walks in, I know it’s him. He smiles at me, always. And I can look at him, at the way he dresses—black leather jacket, black jeans, shiny and apparently original McMarten’s boots—and the way he stands and talks and I’ve got everything straight. If David walks in alone, immediately, everything is just as clear—black leather, jeans and McMartens, same spiky, bleach-blond hair—even though they look and dress virtually identically, the differences that bounce from the front of my brain and back to the memory somewhere, are where they should be, all lined up, nice like. Differences make them who they are regardless of the chemicals that make them up. An average life on dying planet Earth does that to people.

The twins move around the pub, dipping in and out of view. I try to follow them like in that game where there are three cups and a pea. But inevitably, I get distracted. I glance at my beer, counting the bubbles and the froth, surface topologies and tension, and a hand alights gently on my shoulder.

“Hey, man, how are you doing?”

I look up and wrestle my face into a half-convincing smile. He’s striking like they always are, both of them. Square jawed with blond hair and green eyes and gel holding everything up nice and sharp. Words come.

“Yea, I’m great man, great and yourself. I-”

I am about to commit to some specifics, to some direct address that pins it down. How was your last gig? Did you check out that party? What about that girl? And then I realise that I’m not going to get out of it alive. Because my brain has betrayed me again.

I don’t know which one I am talking to.

Both twins in the same room messes up my brain somehow and confuses those pathways through that wet, grey muck and suddenly the little world-made-differences running around in the right order, as they should, smash into each other like a head-on collision in a fucked up railway network.

“I-err-I...”

Somewhere out in the gel of the Bio’scrapers, an exasperated logic gate has finally had enough of this shit and commits. XOR.

The twin’s smile begins to collapse. Offended.

“I’m David. He is Michael.”

He turns away as faint apologies seep out from the sides of my mouth. At least I mean it, and at the right time too. I’ll take it as a partial win, even though I feel like shit.

There is a slap on my back.

“Hi, I’m Michael!”

Michael grins and ruffles my hair, trying to distract me from the awkwardness of the situation that has already happened around fifty times before. I try to grin back, but nothing happens. I only have so much bandwidth, even on social night.

#

I count letters. My twin brother who is not genetically identical, does not. No, really. Two sets of twins. Just bear with me.

Brother Bill is a successful marketing executive. Well, that’s what they used to call them in the Nineties. We both know the reality. He doesn’t count letters because he pays an AI to do it for him. The AI counts up the letters, makes comparisons to sales volumes, shuffles them around and then tries again. Letter combinations, sometimes words and on the rare occasions, even sentences that lead to an upward trend on sales get to stick around a while before they are culled. Very few people even know what paragraphs are these days.

I don’t count many different letters myself, but they are important. A, C, G and T. Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G) and Thymine (T). Different combinations of these letters and their corresponding chemical properties lead to an astonishing variety of outcomes. They make the whole of life possible, from the smallest microbe to the smartest human and even to the super-smart bioprocessors as big as ‘scrapers that run things these days. A bewildering array of informational pathways that make up this most astonishing of dying planets.

Although my job is a little more limited than the tempest of possibilities those four letters can achieve. My job is to count the letters and test them against base-pair combinations on a simulator as part of an effort to extend life for the very few, the maybe less than a hundred who these days seem to own the world. For their power is such that they weave that world to their bidding and their bidding is to live forever.

I don’t judge. Perhaps, finally, my brother and I are doing essentially the same job. We are just at different places in the chain. Like different base-pairs in a long chain of DNA. It’s just a shame we have difficulty getting on. Or so he tells me.

#

A week later, it’s social evening again and I’m scheduled to meet Bill again. My brother. I grit my teeth and, seeing him from the corner of my eye, move my feet away from my usual barstool to the alcove seating where he is already scowling at me, eyes glowing blue.

I sit down and wait for his attention to shift from the letter combinations he is shuffling and rejecting. He never seems to stop working. I pray he does not notice me, but too late. The faint blue light behind his eyes fades and he smiles broadly in that way that advertising executives always seem to in old television serials.

“Hi Leo, what’s cookin’?!”

He always says the same thing. The sides of my mouth twitch upward and he seems happy enough with the response.

We are silent for a few minutes.

“Sooo... what news, man? Enjoying monsoon season?”

I look down at my feet. My shoes are wet and inside my shoes, my feet are damp, even though it stopped raining hours ago. It is monsoon season in Manchester. Manchester in monsoon season means your shoes never dry out. It has always been like this in Manchester.

I look up from my shoes and twitch. He tries again.

“I went to see Mum last week. You know, she’s looking a bit tired. That flat is a mess and it’s difficult to prise her away from her Lenses. Nostalgia channels again. I’m guessing she micro-spends every cent of her pension on those damn things...”

I’m watching the rain pouring down the window. The yellow street lights bounce around inside each drop, searching for a way out. A billion little prisons of quanta. Angles and interfaces. Bubbles in beer.

“If she spends so much, maybe you should reduce the effectiveness of your marketing streams. Then she might have a chance.”

Bill jolts back as though stung. I wonder if he has had a heart attack. Or cramp.

“Shit! What’s that got to do with anything?!”

“Well, you take the tracking data you have about trends and people and create a positive feedback loop that creates a spiral of increased consumption...”

He is gripping the edge of the seat fiercely. The music and lights bounce along. Angles and interfaces. Unsurprisingly the rest of the evening does not go so great.

#

Albion is gripped with the drama of it. I peer at the surprisingly grainy video feed playing pale blue over the inside of my lenses. There are two little boys walking through the New Arndale Living Emporium, weaving in and out of the few isolated TactoShoppers. They are clearly twins. There are cameras everywhere and the feed shows them from every angle. The scene is repeated again and again, on the hour, every hour, journalist interviewing journalist. The two boys turn the corner into an aisle and the feed flickers and cuts out. Then at the moment they should be picked up on the other camera in the aisle, nothing. As though they ceased to exist. The TactoMalls always have every angle covered except for some reason this time they don’t. I wonder for a while until I am distracted by the letters. Marketing or genetics, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.

A week later and it happens again. This time the streams are hysterical. A set of twin girls are walking down the fresh produce aisle of a McTesco. They don’t touch obviously. That is the job of the machines, but looking is allowed. Obviously if you touch it you own it. The avocados look immaculate but their state of ripeness remains a mystery.

The girls meander along, past fluorescent tomatoes and polished butternut-squash, and then there is a flicker, a graininess like something from the age of videotape and they are gone. A journalist talking to a journalist suggests a particularly fiendish hacker. I zoom in on the faces of the twin girls. They dress the same, just like Michael and David, but look like something from a scary movie. They even have a slight look of surprise on their faces at the moment the feed flickers and they are replaced by a professionally concerned journalist. An ad appears for a new pair of eco-jeans, a reflective sun-helmet and a hand-crafted, vego-leather vaccination shot holster. One of the twins appears to have a runny nose. I blink buy on the holster. Just in case.

#

The ImpulseIsLife holster purchase comes next day and I chuck it, unopened, into the corner with a small pile of other One-Blink-Buy LifeItems. I’ve been feeling a little anxious and when you’re anxious the Blink-Streams are as toxic as crack-cocaine used to be in the eighties. Later, I sort out the pile, laying them out as though everything is there by design. I’m not stupid, but it makes me feel better.

Over the next week there are a rash of twin-disappearances, spreading further and further from Manchester, like a viral epidemic. And then the first bodies are discovered. No one is sure at first if they had been missing or not because they were in their eighties and kept themselves to themselves. The two sisters are found together, lying by the lake near the statue of Peter Pan in Hyde Park. They took pills and there is an empty bottle of whisky. They are found, neat and proper, feet pointing towards the lake. They are still holding hands. Their lenses are cold and white, all data corrupted. They were last detected in their front lounge in a sheltered flat in Walthamstow after returning from a trip “Up North”. It is a mystery how they got to Hyde Park unseen. The tree branches wave semaphore over their bodies but are saying nothing that makes sense. I have to swipe away. The leaves are making me nauseous.

#

I can’t escape it. Social evening. Again. With my brother. He is trying to convince me to do the right thing.

We are sat at the bar and he is talking. The Bar-Blond looks over sympathetically, although I’m not sure where their sympathy lies exactly.

“You need to go and see her. It’s been weeks.”

“Months actually. Three months to be exact.”

“Well, precisely! I was trying to be diplomatic. She’s our mother. I go every couple of weeks and you need to go too.”

“I’m not sure she likes me. She never says anything. In fact I’m not sure she even knows who I am.”

Bill gazes into his pint. He sighs. Blue flickers for a moment. He’s good like that, able to flick in and out of his Stream, monitoring what is going on, inside and outside. I think it’s a marketing professional thing and he’s a solid gold trooper on that front.

I find myself looking at the door. I like things to be regular, predictable, even the things that I don’t enjoy too much, like these evenings listening to my brother complain or worrying if I’m talking to the right blond twin. I continue to sit there waiting, but the door always opens to someone I’m absolutely sure I don’t know.

#

We beep the door but nothing happens. Bill knows the code, so he just opens the door anyway. The place is a mess, strewn with unwashed plates, the remains of recyclable delivery trays, plastic forks, and items of laundry needing to be rewashed because they were not removed from the washer in time.

An old, unwatched flatscreen still dominates the lounge. It crackles demandingly, sullen and annoyed. My mother sits there in her dressing gown, her eyes pointing uselessly towards the screen, while the blue glow of her Lenses blinds her to the re-run playing on it. The image is so old, crackling with pre-digital noise that I can barely understand what I am looking at. Small grey mice-like creatures wearing silver costumes waddle around a pock-marked asteroid. They communicate to each other by hooting and whistling. They discover a machine that continually manufactures LifeItems, spewing them out in a multi-coloured tidal wave that threatens to drown the hapless creatures in plastic.

“Mum, mum! Are you in?”

Bill tries his best. Mum’s lenses fade and she stares at us, half stunned at her genetically un-twinned sons looking down at her as though she has just been disturbed by burglars. I have to confess, the retro moon-mice are a struggle to look away from.

“Yes?”

She seems unsure. The elder generations always seem unsure. The whole lensing/unlensing thing seems a big deal with them. They either reject the whole business entirely, in which case they basically cut themselves off from the world, or they deep dive and can’t find their way out. Mum is more the latter.

“We’re here to see you mum. It’s me, Bill. And Leonard.” I hear the afterthought, which I also count as a win. Social evenings are family evenings.

“Yes! My boys!” Her eyes glisten and she gestures to us to help her up. She looks around the mess of the apartment as though it is all a bit of a surprise, the aftermath of a terrorist attack by some advanced neutron bomb. Smashes property and leaves people standing.

“Oh. Well, would you like a cup of tea?” She looks hopefully towards the corner kitchen, half expecting the cups to leap up, wash, make and milk themselves like in Mary Poppins.

“I don’t drink tea mum, remember?” Bill is beginning to sound a little exasperated. “Don’t worry, I’ll do it. Do you have any milk? Why don’t you talk to Leo?”

I worry about the state of the apartment, the filth and the dust. I need things to be clean and ordered and simple. Then they just work. Anything else only leads to nervous exhaustion. I smile at my mother and she smiles back sheepishly. We don’t seem to find the words. I think about my own experience with the blond twins. There’s something in my brain that short circuits things and I get confused. Mum appears to be the same. The gradual mayhem being unleashed upon her by the digital-dementia is leaving her confused about her own un-twins. I don’t do a great deal of empathy, but at that moment I know exactly how she feels.

#

Albions are always rioting. Regular as clockwork. Over skin colour. Money distribution. Proto-noun choice. Cooling rations. Bedsit allocations. Food additive shortages. You name it. Then one day, down near the old Royal Exchange PornAxle Theatre, there’s a violent riot that just happens for no reason at all. A kind of violence that dare not speak its name. Whatever its cause, a pizza delivery kiosk gets torched, which to some is roughly the equivalent of burning down a cathedral. There is shock and blood and fists and batons and the parting of seared flesh. Hundreds running around, screaming in tongues and law enforcement laughing with the joy of it. Community policing in action.

#

I grit my teeth and finally decide to visit mum alone without my brother. I don’t know why as usually I like to keep things regular and simple, but the ads say spontaneous buy-in is life. Like a lone base-pair that just decides to react for no reason, triggering off a reaction further down the chain. It might be a trigger for some higher level inspiration or just cancer. Shame you never know which beforehand.

My brother seems uncharacteristically enthusiastic about my plan. He adopts a diplomatic tone. As if he were defusing an improvised terrorist bomb with a pair of pliers and a torch held between his teeth, desperately unsure which wire to cut. He nods a lot, puts another beer in my hand and bolts for the door before I’ve even finished sipping the head off it.

#

I tap in the code to Mum’s apartment bearing a bag of shopping like an offering. In the living room, it is obvious that something is off. She is not in her chair and I find her crashing around the kitchen, looking up and down and in and out of every nook and cranny.

“Hello Mum,” I say, trying to keep to the same tone as my brother. We are kind of twins after all.

I stand there with the shopping in my hand waiting in vain for her to take over like she used to. There is another episode of the space moon mice on the TV. They are chasing an astronaut covered in soup. He runs too fast and flies into orbit. I imagine it all made sense way back when.

“Mum! Hello!”

My voice sounds louder than it should be.

“Oh! Leo! Yes! How are you? Can you you help me? I can’t find Jean-Claude.”

I find myself looking ahead of her gaze, wondering if Jean-Claude is an errant cat or pet rat or even an AutoGigolo I hadn’t been kept up to speed about. Then, like the parting of morning mists, all becomes clear.

“Mum, you don’t have to move around in real space, remember. You just have to move your eyes and focus.”

As a “Pre-Lenser” she struggles to search the Grid, like many from the Old Century, finding themselves searching RealSpace instead of WorldSpace, stumbling around blindly before being brought to a painful halt by the sharp edge of a piece of furniture.

I lead her towards her chair, but she turns back towards me, the blue of her lenses flickering as tries to turn them down.

“Would you like some tea?”

“No, Mum, it’s fine. Who’s Jean-Claude anyway? An old rock star? From the Eighties?”

She giggles, slapping her thighs loudly.

“No, silly! He’s the actor! Jean-Claude Van Damm... JCVD!”

She punches the air like the pistons of an ancient steam engine stuck in a station and tries a marshal arts kick, nearly falling over into the old flatscreen where the space mice are cleaning the last of soup from the silver spacesuit of the rescued astronaut. Interplanetary peace at last.

“He kicked arse back in the Eighties. Kick Boxer, the incredible Time Cop and, and... Yes! Double Impact! That was what I was looking for! Can you find it for me? It’s such a favourite! Your father took me to see it on one of our very first dates, way back before they outlawed irony. ‘One packs a punch, one packs a piece!’ ‘Double the Van Damm-age!’ Those were the days!”

I roll my eyes and flash blue, diving deep into the Bibliotek for the title. Down in the dark blue, the Index blinks for a few seconds, taking longer than usual. I find my attention wandering. One packs a piece? You’re kidding, right?

The Index, which usually finds what it is looking for and then disappears, is still there, blinking inexplicably. Can a search bot feel embarrassment? I give up and surface.

“Sorry, Mum. Looks like the Index can’t find it. Are you sure about the name?”

She explains. JCVD. Twin brothers separated as babies. One is a marshal arts specialist. The other likes guns. Hence the tag line. They are reunited in the quest to reconcile their differences and avenge the murder of their parents. And in a triumph of early Nineties split-screen, JCVD plays both brothers. I have to stop myself from being ironic. OffensiveThink can get you in trouble. No offence.

I give up on the shopping, putting it away, and order some Kwikfood, finding her a substitute film from way back whenever. Perfect: “Twins” starring Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“There you go Mum. Twins, a big twin and a small twin team up to... kick arse. Usual. Got to be as wild as CJDV.”

“JCVD!”

“Sorry.”

I do wonder later, between spongy mouthfuls of insta-regret nutrition, about the Index blinking guiltily. Normally the Index can find anything, even from the Dark Ages before Windows 98. The OffensiveThink Chip in my Lenses prods me with a short electrical discharge. Irony again. Bad habit.

I ignore Twins the Movie, which is hitting a little too close to home, but sneak an occasional sideways peak at the rapt face of my mother. I think the fact is that Mum was always a bit strange. Maybe it accounts for why I am the way I am, except while I find people a problem, she was always the opposite. Loud and smiling and rosie-cheeked, black hair wild and curling as though she was tuning into some alien frequency beyond detectable range.

After a time, I grew up but also somehow didn’t. My body expanded, mainly upward, but somehow I stayed small, hiding somewhere around about the level of my navel, peeking out at the world and squinting, startled at its volume and terrifying, sharp-edged complexity. There was a way through it though, through the winding umbilicus of scientific study, reaching out just far enough that the terminology of electronic, technological connection found me, like a rescuer discovering a trapped caver. The world of the Grid, open and welcoming to the neurodivergent, gave me place and belonging and ultimately a job, counting and collating the base pairs of the hyper-rich on their quest for eternity.

Mum had evidently never been impressed by the electronic modernity foisted upon her by the Wave. She claimed the wires were reaching into her skin, making her sick, and for a time the doctors agreed. They put her in a care centre until the day came that she was fully reintegrated. My dad eventually left us too, having a horror of a different kind of connection. I saw him infrequently until the last time. To this day, I don’t really know what I felt.

#

“It’s happened again!”

I’m actually pretty surprised to see her face flash up on the Lens and answer the call almost without thinking instead of ignoring it, which would be the social norm. I get a minor prod from the SocialModia chip. What can I say? She is my mother.

“Darling, thanks for answering, I know you are busy. Optimize4Economy, right! But, I just need your help again. It’s ‘Dead Ringers’, you know the vintage one, with Jeremy Irons, the twin gynaecologist one. The Index can’t find this one either.”

Now this time my ears do prick up. I remember watching it years ago with my brother during a retro horror-film phase. The aftermath was equally horrific. Nightmares of the infamous gynaecological instruments for operating on mutant women infected my night-sleep, their metallic yet organic articulations squirming through soft and bloodied female flesh. I stuck to collating my base pairs after that.

A quick check of the Index confirms my mother is not having delusions. The Index just sits there, flashing and waiting for me to get bored and fuck off.

I ask for a list of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, flicking through them with my eyelids:

1983 : Videodrome – freaky
1983 (again) : The Dead Zone – don’t remember, a big blank
1986 : The Fly – the nail-pulling was a bit much
1991 : Naked Lunch – humping rubbery creatures and effing cockroaches
1993 : M. Butterfly – I never really got on with opera
1996 : Crash – Really the best. Not a single straight sex scene in the whole film. I still walked out though. Too many scars from mutant memories.

I look again, up and down several times. The 70s, 80s... right up to the 2030’s and Cronenberg’s upload and virtualisation. No Dead Ringers. Are the memories of those awful instruments somehow false? I wonder about calling up Crononberg himself. I never spun up a transitioned person before, but apparently all you need to do is pay their Union Rate... And remember to use the right proto-noun of course. Post Crononberg. I giggle to myself. “Excuse me Post Crononberg, I wonder if I might ask you a quick question about an early work?” The Electronic SocialPersonality Prod nearly makes me jump out of my skin with the shock.

#

There’s only one person I can talk to and it’s my definitively non-identical twin brother. Over a non-scheduled beer that impresses both Bill and the Bar-Blond, I grit my teeth and lay it all out. A new twins-paradox is being writ large in digital space: Any film where twins are represented by a single actor has been utterly erased from existence outside of our collective memories. And how long might those fragile memories last outside of GridSpace? It has to be a conspiracy!

He listens with that sceptical look that he can’t hide from me even with that clean, even-toothed marketing smile. I convince him to search himself. Legend with Tom Hardy, The Man in the Iron Mask with DiCaprio, Leaves of Grass with Edward Norton, Last Days of Neo Nero with Cassandra Trump... Luckily I’m good with lists and remember every one, because now they don’t exist, well, who is to say they ever existed?

We sit in the booth nursing our beers and he looks at me and for the first time, perhaps ever, I feel as though he is reaching in through my umbilicus and pulling me towards him.

“We’re not insane, are we? We really did once see those films?”

I nod emphatically. The fact that I can nod is actually a real breakthrough. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be close to someone, to have a brother. My mind begins to wander and then I look up at the door as someone comes in. I don’t recognise them. I haven’t seen Michael or David, the blond twins for ages. I get zapped by ads on my feed and struggle to decide which hair gel I’m supposed to buy. Really, the best of times.

#

I’m at my work station and data is up on my secondary screen. I look once and look twice. 1983, 1983 (again), 1986, 1991. 1991? I wipe my eyes. What happened to 1988? The base-pairs stare back and I check the reference numbers. No ‘88. No Dead Ringers. They were there when I logged them in. And now, instead of an identical pair of genomes there is nothing but noise. A, C, G & Ts but all in the wrong order. An order that is totally random, signifying nothing. Letters out of order might as well be zeros. The oeuvre of humanity is short. I feel a certain frustration, a disruption in the orderliness of my files but also... some excitement, like I am a secret agent, privy to some diabolical plan.

Of course, I know why I do it. But I don’t want to articulate it, even to myself. That look in my brother’s eyes. That we were touching mental fingertips. Reason enough.

My supervisor has her suspicious back to me as she chats to one of the technicians she has the hots for. The sun is behind me blinding the camera. I move my phone towards the data transfer port. I press an icon. I’m shaking. My supervisor wanders past and I smile. She looks down on me in disgust. The things we do to impress others in the heat of opportunity.

#

My brother looks at the data and frowns. I explain to him how twins are used in anti-aging drug trials to account for out environmental factors. I just have a way for spotting odd combinations. And these combinations of A, C, G & T in this data just don’t add up. Random combinations that do not code for proteins in the real world means whole genomes are missing. And two twins for every genome.

“That was stupid. You could get in trouble for this. Isn’t this GenoTeque data?”

I look down, trying to hide. Reproach is not what I was looking for. We are holed up in Mum’s apartment. For the first time in I don’t know how long, she is paying attention to what we are saying. Even her Lenses are dimmed to red.

Later we sit around the old flatscreen and eat from reheated McApple platters. Outside there are more and more people shouting in the streets and from time to time a scream resonates through the canyons of the old converted nineteenth century warehouses and newer glass towers, their watchmen. Manchester used to be a mill town, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Did that prior revolution provoke more screams than the current one? If so, I wonder how many.

“You still have access to the databases, right?”

I nod.

“Could you pull up, let’s say, one hundred twin profiles?” I nod again. “That way we can watch what happens.”

There is another scream and the mills churn and turn and pistons pump and weft and yearn are thrown about and there it is, the weave of the fabric of change and payment. A new world.

“I’m not sure you boys should be getting involved with this. Maybe you should just call the police. It’s their job after all.”

Bill puts his spoon down onto his plate, but gently like his bomb disposal expert persona, taking a brief pause with his wire cutters.

“You forget Mum. This is my business.”

I can’t help feeling a sense of pride in Brother Bill. Of course we spent the first nine months of our existence being incomprehensibly intimate, but that was no guarantee the sequel would even break even. So it feels like the team is back together again, cruising to an appropriately spectacular denouement.

#

Piccadilly Gardens goes up in flames. And no, I’m not talking about an average Saturday night in the early Nineties. I still see the smoke drifting above the red brick office block a couple of days later. The first shortages hit. Gangs roam the streets through Hulme and the students are holed up in the towering Oxford Road Halls of Recuperation, nursing their cans of cheap, vegan beer and McApple’s Kwik-bytes. Riot squads prowl the streets and searchlights swipe their beauty from one side of the sky to the other. One person’s riot sure looks like another’s ecstasy-fuelled fiesta.

And what’s more, I could swear I’m being followed. Everywhere I go. Which is odd when the era of privacy feels as remote as the stone age. I pull my lapels up against the rain, swiping away the umbrella and waterproofing ads with irritation. My music mix is playing soundtracks from the future. Must be that keeping me on edge. Several more shops are burnt out. I turn, looking behind me. Footsteps. I shiver. Nothing. Blade runner. Instruments for operating on mutant memory. Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?

#

With the increasing chaos on the streets, my brother and I are spending more and more time holed up in Mum’s apartment. One evening, a couple of weeks after the Piccadilly Inferno, my brother bowls in through the door in a state of high excitement. Closely packed figures and annotated notes scroll up and down. His lenses are completely dark and for the first time in a long time I suspect his eyes may harbour souls.

“You are not going to believe this! I set up a targeted test campaign using the gene profiles of the twins you sent me and the results are incredible!”

“What do you mean?” My mother, unusually also lens-dark, rests her weight on one hip, arms crossed, as though awaiting some childhood confession.

“Well, according to Leo’s data, sixty-seven percent of the twins from his initial list have disappeared over the last couple of weeks. And this is reflected out on the Grid. We can see it because when we do a targeted campaign, we collate genetic profiles and track shopping habits through mathematical clustering techniques.”

“Tracking people! Who’s tracking people. That sounds illegal!”, exclaims my mother, somewhat lost.

“No, not at all Mum. Tracking guarantees freedom to consume. Volume seven of the Albion Citizenship T&Cs.” Mum’s eyes glaze over and she shrugs, looking towards her vacated spot on the sofa with longing. Bill takes that as his cue to plough on.

“Anyway, check out this customer journey map.”

He flicks his forefinger upward and on the TV screen, a myriad rainbow of lines like tangled spaghetti burst upward, leaping from one brand locus to the next. Different colours signal consumption types and correlations. Some even indicate RealWorld locations. It would be a beautiful sight even in a world that did not measure values in key performance indicators and user engagement.

“I take it you get the picture—” My brother does not bother to imagine we might find the tangled data lines tricky to digest. Mum sniggers. “—If we feed in filter based on Leo’s data, we get this:”

The spaghetti suddenly gets slurped off the screen as if by a thousand delighted KidSumers and just a few strands remain. Each journey branch ends with an abrupt interruption. A gardener trimming a branch in some bio-garden could not be more definitive. Deletion and… What?

“Are they dead?” I ask. I sound guilty, although I know I should not. “Correlated?”

My brother points his finger at me with the affirmation of a school teacher receiving the correct answer to a difficult question from his class. HyperZoom.

“Indeed! Look.”

“What’s that?”

Mum has suddenly piped up, almost sounding relieved. “Ohhh, I know this! It used to be the old Afflecks Palace, the alternative-shopping centre. But it’s been closed for years, since the last pandemic but one, I think...”

“And what is the correlation?” The lines weave their way through and beyond the brand loci and annoyingly, I’m not sure I see the significance.

“At some point, the customer journey of at least one of the twins passes near this location. Sometimes its both, but in any case, around forty-eight hours after... pfff.” Bill makes like a puff of smoke disappearing with his fingers.

“Could it be a coincidence?”, wonders Mum.

Bill shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t see it to be honest.”

“Maybe we should call the police?”, I venture.

“And then how do we explain how we got the customer journey data?”, Bill chides. “No, unfortunately, we need to keep this to ourselves.”

“Well, that’s no reason we can’t do a little sleuthing!” My mother now has both hands on her hips and her unkempt grey hair is looking wilder and more determined than any time I can remember.

“I don’t trust those fasho-techo bastards as far as I can throw them anyway!” I swear the ancient and faded faux-Celtic tattoos on her forearms almost burst into flame. Like a punk phoenix bursting back into life, I worry she means business. Bill glances over to me nervously, pleading for an escape route, but after a diet of too many Lens Procedurals, this mum, digital-dementia or not, is clearly packing a punch.

She grabs her coat. “Come on, it’s ten minutes from here. Let’s go and explore. We might find some clues!”

#

It’s raining of course and I shiver from the water seeping in through my jacket. The faded sign just about remains visible above the doorway to the once infamous worn jean, tie-dye, cheap silver jewellery, tuna-mayo sandwich mecca. There are boards nailed over the remains of the door, but a few have come loose enabling us to creep inside. Ants swarm over my skin.

My brother turns on his phone light. “Hello? Hellooo? Is there anybody there?” Mother’s voice echoes around the disused and suspiciously malodorous interior. The ground floor is empty, just the shop unit dividers left, ancient matt-black paper pealing from the walls. Incomprehensible spray graffiti and the odd discarded piece of merchandise rots in the midst of the decay. Water runs down the walls, forming puddles within which our faces are reflected, curious ghosts peering in from the previous millennium. We take the stairs to the first and second floors and it’s the same story. Finally my feet refuse to move any further. All of my self-imposed limitations are brought to bear. Too many unknowns and too much contamination. I grit my teeth and pray for a way out. I’m convinced Roy Batty is stalking us.

“Memories, memories...” Mum is waving her arms from side to side from the shoulders in a ghostly echo of dances long dead. The faint red of her lenses glisten, wet. I suspect her digi-drawal may be rallying.

I manage to open my mouth and words come out. My brother jumps.

“I don’t like it here. Can we go back? Maybe there are ghosts...”

From out of nowhere, Mum’s arm slips around my shoulders. My Lenses flare blue for a moment. Dad makes an unexpected appearance with that look. Disappointment. A lonely kid abandoned to balance a seesaw on his own. Affleck’s Paradox. A palace of meaning for mum, a dripping, derelict shell for us.

“I think I told you once I met your father here. Do you remember?”

“Really?” Bill has obviously forgotten, but I remember the story. They met over a used clothing rack and both took a shine to the same Grateful Dead T-shirt. Whales and dolphins and skulls. Deadheads to the core, there was only one thing for it. Negotiation. Marriage, kids and alternating T-shirt weekends. Disaster foretold.

“This place really is giving me a headache. Can we go?” I feel it behind my eyes. A thousand angry voices shouting needles straight into my spinal column. Police sirens start blaring outside and then fade just as quick. A sudden rush of BlinkBuySpecials pepper my Lenses. Funny how I don’t remember my father’s voice.

Nausea rising, I stumble towards the stairwell leading down to the ground floor. There is a pool of water we navigated past on our way up and just for a moment I see them reflected. A pair of eyes glowing in the reflection from the doorway. And a set of bare, wet footprints that disappear into vapour. Are the ghosts of alternative shopping lifestyles rising? I glance towards the doorway on this side of the reflection but there is nothing. I run, wailing asphyxiation scrabbling past the narrow folds of my tightening umbilicus. Outside, I puke into the gutter. I feel my brother’s hand patting my back, gently.

#

“I got the sack.”

I can barely get the words out. I am shaking and sitting on the other side of my mother’s sofa, the side that does not have the great big dent in from her arse. I cogitate on the limits of disciplined upholstery hygiene.

Bill is sat the wrong way around on a dinner table chair, his arms draped across the back. “Did you keep a copy of the twins’ data?”

First I shake my head, not seeing the relevance and then I nod.

“Did they say why?”

“They said they didn’t need to give a reason. It came down from above. I got called into my supervisor’s office. There was a guard with a box of my things. They didn’t even let me say goodbye.”

My shoulders begin to heave, my lungs spasming hard sobs. Bill places his hand on my shoulder and presses down as though he is trying to dampen the vibrations from a badly regulated car engine. My mother stands there, her weight oscillating from one foot to another, making more engine noises. I always did make her nervous.

“I don’t know about you, but that seems more than a little suspicious. You’ve always been, well, nothing less than diligent. Do they know you ‘borrowed’ the data?”

“I don’t see how they would know. We move stuff around constantly. It’s easy to...erm, borrow stuff.”

Shaking, I check the files on my phone and nod. They are still there. I mull over the definition of the word ‘borrow’.

“Whoever it is, they are going to a lot of trouble to kidnap these twins and keep it hidden.”

“Kidnap!?” cries Mum.

“Well, what else?! And what’s worse, there are more turning up dead afterwards.”

“Really? More suicides?”

“A range of causes, usually suicide but rarely natural causes. Sometimes it’s really violent, like they’ve been attacked—I have a friend in End Of Life marketing. Nothing escapes him alive…

“Oh, and check this out: I happened to mentioned to a colleague over lunch that I had a twin brother and right then and there over his soya cannelloni he said that it was impossible. Twins were just a myth, a conspiracy theory put about by the EliteCent. Twins could not exist because everyone was an individual and that it was impossible for two people to have identical genetic structures. He flat out denied it was possible. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use us as an example of how he was wrong, obviously!”

“Insane!”

I’m barely listening. What am I going to do without my job? My job makes everything work. It links everything together. It is why I get up in the morning. It is why I get out of the house.

I run my fingers through my hair and then rub my hands together, the anxiety rising and then subsiding in waves. Even the dim lights of Mum’s apartment are too much and the slightest noise feels like the screaming of a thousand suckle-starved babies.

“Don’t worry Leo. Why don’t you have a cuddle with Mum. We’ll talk again later.”

I look up at my brother and he is smiling. It’s like being back in our Cronenberg Period. Mum plants her arse onto the dip in the sofa cushion and I lean in to her shoulder and stop thinking as she strokes my hair.

#

Someone is washing some cups in the kitchen when I wake up. They place them very carefully on the drainer so as to not make too much noise. My head is drooping into the dip in the sofa cushion. I lift my head and then I have a flashback to the guard leading me out to the foyer of GenoTeque, everyone watching. With a shiver, I reach for my phone and flick the gene data up onto the flatscreen and begin flipping through the bases. TAGCAAAACC CCCAGTACAG CCTCCAGAGA GCCCGTTCTT TGACCCACAG AATAGGTCTT…

My mind begins to settle. First there are the letters, the nomenclature, but underneath I see the chemicals and their encoding sequences and beneath that I see the conjunctions between proteins and tissue and biochemical processes. And finally there you are. You, I mean. The colour of your eyes, the shape of your nose, the curve of your mouth and the particular sweep of your limbs. Your mouth opens and your words come forth. A and C and G and T. The vocabulary of who you are. The irony is not lost on me, that I know so much about you. I who find encounters outside of that alphabet of four such a challenge.

“Good Lord, what are you looking at?”

I turn to my mother and then it happens. I smile.

#

“You remember that you said they use everyone’s genome to help create a unique identifier to track everyone’s consumer path, right?” My voice wobbles up and down like a pubescent teenager.

Bill nods. “Yes, that right. Available consumer choices are based on it. Not freewill, that’s for sure!” He laughs raucously. Who says marketeers are devoid of humour.

Mum huffs contemptuously, her tattoos flexing.

Bill turns to her, annoyed. “Go on” he says to me, patiently.

“Well, GenoTeque is one of the main resale clearing houses for customer journey identifiers...”

“Go on...”

“I think I know what is happening. And GenoTeque is the centre of it. I think we can prove it too, with an experiment. We are twins but actually we are non-identical, our genomes are different. But our customer journey origin points are identical—same birthday, mother, father... It happens I have a spare set of login credentials for HotBeach working that I never used. I don’t like being naked with other people, you see. So do you want to be me or shall I be you...?”

It takes them a while but finally they get it.

#

I reach out and gently stroke the back of Mum’s hair. Her lenses are glowing blue and the television is once more playing in the background. A tear of pale sky rolls slowly down her cheek. There is a plastic puppet of a serious looking man dressed in a scarlet uniform whom fate has made indestructible. I cannot help but look up at the ceiling. No strings, no ghosts with glowing eyes.

“Are you sure she will be safe?”

Bill looks at me and says nothing. It feels like a goodbye from a WeepyShow. She accepts she cannot go where we are going and watching would simply be too much. We might become her victims.

We head back to Afflecks Palace. Several new buildings have been burnt out. Graffiti is everywhere. We are free, we are not numbers. No to ACGT, yes to freedom.

Clambering through the broken door, we climb to the very top floor, the one we missed because of my migraine. I feel dreadful again, as though the walls are a lot closer than they really are.

Bill nods to me. I gulp and click return on the GeneTerminal programme.

“How long?”, he asks.

“No idea, a couple of minutes. It has to propagate through the system though. Then you get to be me.” I laugh, he does not.

Nothing happens. It’s been twenty minutes and the noise of the rioters is getting nearer. Our lenses are on red.

“Wait, I have an idea. Maybe we should flip our lenses out?”

Of course. Muted Lenses are still always on. But without sterile bathroom wipes? In a state of excruciating anxiety and with some painful prodding, eventually they pop out.

At first, I feel like I am having a crisis. Blurred vision. And then everything becomes sharper and more defined under the blinding white of Bill’s phone. The walls of Affleck’s are dripping and scarred with graffiti just like the first time. But now the walls begin to move and splinter and step before me, graffiti legs and arms and heads and letters waving like the trees above Peter Pan. One of the figures steps forward, his spiky blond hair like a beacon. Shadows form behind and then another, a twin of the first steps forward, head ablaze.

“Leonard? Is it you? Can you see us?”

#

Three months later and we are still offline, living one day at a time, crammed into the top floor of the Palace. We spend our days scavenging for resources and food. Our clothes are tattered, and we no doubt stink. Thankfully, this being Manchester, there is no lack of rainwater for drinking. The Palace is the one place we are safe from FlashMobs. When we go out, in twos and fours, we have a short window of opportunity before the next RageWave hits. About two dozen of us are holed up in the old retail units. Our de facto village of the neo-damned is certainly disconcerting to the eye, with each pair of twins a call out to that time when mirrors truly did reflect the fashion of the Affecks Palace retro-present.

I remain wary of the looks people give me. I suspected this might happen, but I say nothing. Best to wait and see. As the weeks pass, we carve out our parallel, survivalist world and although I keep my council, it is the first time for a long time that I do not feel alone.

#

I recall that first evening after we unplugged. We are sitting together huddled over a battered old local air purifier in an abandoned grass café on the top floor. Faded posters advertising a range of herbal quiches and silage stews weave their marketing magic. Bill has his arm resting lightly across my shoulders and I am finally beginning to calm down.

Michael is talking, with David sitting quietly by his side, nodding occasionally as his brother relates what little is certain. I try not to catch their eye. It is easier to let my ears decide which twin is which.

“All we know is there are thousands of us around Manchester and more beyond. We are totally locked out. We steal and scavenge what we can. If we try to interact with Non-T Lensers, a violent FlashMob jumps us in seconds. And the chaos in the city just keeps on increasing, like a chain reaction. We’re only truly safe in Afflecks Palace. It’s like being at the eye of a networked hurricane, literally. You two are the only Non-Ts we’ve spoken to since this began!”

I inadvertently look up, catching Michael’s eye. And there he is.

Every angle of his face, every pore in his skin, every faint marker of difference. I glance over at David, and there he is too. How odd. Similar, yes. Maybe even identical at the level of the base-pairs, a measure I guess I’m uniquely qualified to appreciate. But two utterly independent people. That’s when I see it. It never was my fault. Electronic scales have quite literally been torn from my eyes. Michael is Michael and David is finally David.

“So how come you can see us? You are not identical! What did you do?” David, the quiet twin, is clearly intrigued.

Bill turns towards me and smiles. “We have this genius to thank. Leo worked out that someone is gaming the Grid, rewriting the customer journey tags to create a conflict in the Lensing World Passthrough. Genetic twins are being excommunicated from the Grid. From the world. Even from cultural history. The only thing is, we don’t know who or why.”

I gaze deep into the whirling filters of the purifier with their flickering orange lights simulating ancient campfires around which tales once were told. Beyond the immediate pool of synth-peach scented air, I see blinking eyes reflecting back, wondering, dreaming, fearing the forests and praying for the future. My lips move.

“There are no conspirators.”

Bill turns towards me, puzzled. Twins’ eyes focus on me.

“There never were any. A feedback loop. Kings and queens. Isolated, studied, collated. A resultant interference pattern. Similarity as a rule threatens instability. Promotes the possibility of commonality. Of sharing. But a sharing exterior to the customer journey. So no conspiracy. Just a machine driven marketing war keeping individuals separate, isolated. Twins not allowed. An XOR bug in a code virus that got out of control...”

I find it difficult, my throat seizing up, but regardless, the penny seems to have dropped.

“My God, I think I see it! So you are saying this is nothing but a system crash. But can you prove this? And is there anything we can do?” Michael’s hope springs desperately.

For just a second, I feel like I should say more, but some instinct of self-preservation kicks in and I shake my head instead. Many twin eyes are watching. I pray they don’t make the connection.

#

A virus, spread through the Grid Waves via, as we later discover, a faulty antenna on the roof of Afflecks. But that is the how, not the why. I keep my suspicions about the why to myself.

High up in the bioprocessor ‘scrapers is where it must have begun. Perhaps the bug in the code has always been there, itself like a dormant virus, waiting. Then some steaming evening in February, a very specific kind of consumer has a meltdown. A problem with twins. That social night in the Salisbury before meeting my brother. Paradox: a single pattern cannot be in two places at once.

Clean, delete and reboot. Turn it off and turn it on again. Problem solved.

A buggy deletion subroutine of limited intelligence is sent out to do some clean up. It discovers two genomes that are the same and inadvertently deletes both. But now there is nothing to reboot. And so it keeps on searching. And when it finds another twin pair it deletes them too. And on it goes. Genomes, movies, books and finally even ideas. Clean, delete and reboot.

Confusion propagates. Antibodies flood the system. Infection, inflammation, foreign threats dealt with mercilessly. Chaos pouring onto the streets. Even I am recognised as a threat when I spot what is happening. Fired by subroutine. Probably not the first. But then why did it not delete me too? A curious, almost alien voice in my head just says: relax and breathe deep. It’ll be fine.

#

Six months after and I find flowers outside the entrance to my alcove for the first time. At first I think someone has dropped them, but next day there are more, stolen from a flowerbed in Piccadilly Gardens. Someone leaves half a pack of NeoPrawn cocktail sandwiches recovered from a jammed recycling bin. A veritable fortune.

Then people start seeking advice. I say a few words, saying that it will be all right. That we will get through it. They smile, rapt and then return to their scavenging. Eventually, after some prodding by Bill, I accept an invitation to speak to a newly established holistic therapy group. I talk of genetics and information coding as I don’t feel I am qualified to speak of anything else. Astonishingly, the enthralled listeners clap enthusiastically and some of the youngest on the front row clap the loudest of all.

After a few more weeks, a delegation of the most attractive come to me and insist that I move in with them in the old Tuna Sandwich Café, to keep me safe, they say. They place me on a small dais made of mattresses and smashed up vegan dining tables. They dress me in brightly coloured tie-dye castoffs and faded Grateful Dead tee shirts. Oversized, they look like ceremonial religious robes. In the evenings, they bring offerings of nourishment and by night they caress my body in the dark. The very best of times.

#

We free Mum. It is like a guerrilla operation. By the time we smash through the door to her apartment, Non-Ts are crawling over the building like zombies. The space mice scurry across the surface of their asteroid and make their escape in a life-boat powered by music. Their hoots fade as the television screen transforms into the inky black of deep space. I’m glad they got away. I often think about them singing their way from star to star.

#

I first spot it late one evening, after some recreational archaeology of the infamous base-pair code database on my now defunct phone: remnant Lens code injections at the instant each set of twins is cut off from the Grid. Not only ejection then, but infection. Or rather, inoculation.

The virus, the worm, is no longer mere biological metaphor. I suspect the very origin of the subroutine’s original purpose is still buried deep within the infectious code. Unconditional love. For me, and for my unique role within it. Its raison d’être, I am the ultimate consumer as king. So having been ejected from the tyranny of the Grid, each twin has been initiated into a new kingdom of idolatry. Or rather, of an idol. I pledge myself to my people, but wonder at the virulence of that virus. Am I immune or not?... I say nothing, even to Bill.

As time passes, the Non-T population is descending into utter chaos, swarming from one empty retail outlet to the next, their phones held up like talismans to their rapidly diminishing credit lines. Refusing to labour and hooked on the dopamine the Lens Virus feeds them, with the collapsing economy, supplies are finally running out. So they turn on each other. Never in his wildest imaginings did Post George A. Romero have such source material to plunder. Truly the greatest of times.

My lieutenant brother sits to my right, sensitive to the people’s needs and loyal to mine. My rejuvenated high-priestess mother sits to my left. Freed from the scourge of the Lenses, her mind is gradually recovering and her tattoos blaze with faith and fury. Armed with my vego-leather vaccination shot holster like a bandoliered Mexican robber baron, I gaze with beneficence across our rapt tribe. Digitally inseminated with the viral base pairs extracted from my own, they are brothers and sisters, all. The family I always wanted, and more. For as the increasingly swollen bellies of certain females attest, a new human species is rising upon the pillars of ACGT. The Day of Homo Geminos Mancunicus is dawning.

The End

Copyright © 2023 Peter J Jones All rights reserved.