Anna Lisa 0.1

by Misha Firer

When Sotto asked around to help him find a perfect persona for our cloning enterprise, he got inundated with candidatures one better than the other. I, being Sotto's closest friend and successful business collaborator, had an upper hand in decision-making. Thus when a brilliant idea entered my viscera, tingling my spine and setting my eyes aglow, I immediately dialed Sotto's cell number and requested that he bring his genius ass down to my place.

Sotto, looking tired from sleepless nights spent in his lab, eased his fat behind into my armchair that altered its molecular structure to accommodate the obese shape of his body. I said without preliminaries, "Clone my girlfriend, dude."

"Mike, what's so freaking special about your girlfriend?" Sotto asked grumpily.

"Absolutely nothing."

"Nothing? Are you sure?" Sotto looked at me with the true skepticism of a scientist.

I couldn't hide my excitement and blabbered on. "My girlfriend is into stability. Go check her out on her manager job: sterile, efficient. Doesn't do drugs, doesn't drink, doesn't think, average intellect, wakes up at seventy-thirty every morning, spends weekends watching TV. Got all the crap virtues: diligent, modest, polite, incapable of extremes. Sometimes I'm not even all that sure she is alive. I'm telling you, she's absolutely perfect for our project."

"All right, all right. But what about her looks?"

"Bland. You know I'm an imaginative type, but I'm lost for words to describe her. A girl-next-door, perhaps? Only clichés come to my mind."

.

Sotto cloned my girlfriend, using one single cell from her left earlobe that contained all the DNA data about her. We called the product "Anna Lisa 0.1".

In recent years the market had been overwhelmed with similar merchandise. Sotto and I wanted to go into the sex industry, but Playboy Corporation had monopolized the cloning of supermodels and playmates. Besides, it cost a lot to buy the original persona— all the good-looking girls seemed to be booked with upscale agencies. So instead we decided to clone someone ordinary, in a deliberate imitation of reality shows' participants, aiming for the masses.

I invested ten grand into putting spam ads on the Internet and producing five-second Flash ads on cable TV, featuring my girlfriend sitting in her impeccably clean and ordered office typing eighty words per second sporting an uber-polite smile for all the viewers to admire. My goal was to sell her as a secretary, or an employee decoy for the smaller companies that seek to cut their taxes.

In my office five clones of my girlfriend Anna Lisa were answering 1-800 phone calls, reading from a paper the standard promotional line, which I was taught in business school. They were selling themselves to potential customers for one grand apiece.

Business was slow at the beginning. In two weeks I managed to sell only seven clones. But then things picked up a bit and by the end of the month I had shipped, with UPS Special Faux-Human Delivery, twenty-nine units.

A few more days later, something strange happened: I received seven-thousand-three-hundred-twenty-nine orders for Anna Lisa clones. It must have been word-of-mouth that turned the trick, for I had curtailed the ad output due to shortages in cash flow.

I rented a bigger warehouse in Huihu, China to accommodate the burgeoning production.

.

Always reserved, Sotto's voice was shaking with excitement. "You were right, Mike, your girlfriend's perfect!"

Flabbergasted, I found nothing to say in response. I just squeezed my cell phone tighter. Sotto continued his soliloquy, saying what I had already known so well.

"Men line up in droves to marry her clone. 'Faithful, monogamous, kind, loving.' And I thought my girlfriend was cool. Mike, I envy you."

I blabbered, "I thought she was totally dull—"

"Shame on you, Mike. You don't appreciate your luck," Sotto chastened me. "Where's she now? Can I speak with her? It's kind of weird, I've talked to dozens of her clones, but I've never met the original."

"I don't know, Sotto. She ... left me."

"That's all right." Sotto's excitement didn't flag a bit. He said with a snicker, "You got a dozen of her in your office, don't you?"

"Yes," I said and swallowed. In fact there were seventy-five Anna Lisa's in my new office, which was three times bigger than my old one.

"Listen, a friend of mine gave me a great idea. It's quite radical. Sit down if you're standing."

I was sitting on the swivel chair gazing at the street two floors below that teemed with the clones of my girlfriend, some dressed in secretary's garb, but the majority wearing designer clothes, hurrying to their boyfriends or husbands.

"Let's clone you," Sotto said.

"What?"

Sotto spoke with the enthusiasm befitting a businessman rather than a scientist. "After all, original Anna Lisa was in love with you first before all other men came into the picture. Therefore there must be something very special about you. I already can read the promotion logo: 'That perfect male who has conquered Anna Lisa's heart.'"

Indeed the streets swarmed with Anna Lisa's. It seemed like most of the city's female denizens had had plastic surgery to become the look-alikes of my ineffable ex-girlfriend. Some of them greeted me sporting a dull, polite smile—others just rushed by. I went around the corner of the block where I'd parked my new car (a yellow Ferrari), when I ran into someone who was, well, my look-alike.

"Hey Mike 0.1," my look-alike said, grinning, bobbing his head up and down like he had just met a long-lost friend.

"H-hi."

He said, squinting his left eye in an ominously familiar way, "I've talked to many Mike 0.1's today and they, we, all agree that Mike is a damn boring person. I mean, totally banal and dull. So I have this question nagging my mind: what on Earth could Anna Lisa, that perfect girl, find in him?"

Copyright © Misha Firer 2005