The email still sat in her inbox when she got back from campus on Tuesday. It had such an innocuous beginning.

Dear Ms. Niehaus,

I know that we’ve never met, but…

Cosima had seen it the night before, when she was baked, and skimmed it that morning, when she was rushed, and now she could read it carefully. With a clear head, she knew now that was not misreading or imagining anything – a certain Detective Elizabeth Childs from Toronto claimed she was Cosima’s genetic identical. The attached photos were certainly compelling. Detective Childs in a sports bra, running in the park. Detective Childs in a business suit. Detective Childs as a child, a teenager, a young adult. Detective Childs as a baby. Those were the photos that caught Cosima’s eye the most.

I was contacted by another identical, the detective wrote, from Germany.

A picture of the German was attached, too, though the similarities were harder to catch there. Katja Obinger’s hair and makeup were dissimilar enough that Cosima would have dismissed a similar email from her.

I used facial recognition software to search driver’s licenses in North America, Beth went on, and I found you and one other person.

One other person? Detective Childs said nothing more about her.

 

I understand you may be skeptical.

“You bet your ass I’m skeptical,” Cosima muttered. She’d grabbed an avocado from the farmer’s market on her way home, and she paused from reading to cut it open, remove the pit, and scoop some of the meat out onto a cracker. Avocado really was the butter of plant world, she thought.

The detective’s email went on. I found your student researcher page on the UC Berkeley website, and your Facebook page…

Cosima paused with her next spoonful of avocado halfway to her mouth. She put it down and opened a new tab on her computer. Facebook had at least fourteen users named some variation of Elizabeth Childs. Only half of them had pictures of adult women as profile pictures – the others were pictures of pets, children, or the blank Facebook standard silhouette. None of the seven she could see looked like her, and none of them lived in the Toronto area. Cosima tried searching the Toronto PD’s webpage, but there was no information about individual detectives there. Probably for the best.

I’m especially interested in speaking with you because of your work in biology, particularly in genetics. You could be a great asset in our investigations.

Cosima finished off the avocado before reading on. The pictures were enough make her believe Detective Childs’ claim of genetic relation, at least for the two of them, but Cosima wasn’t sure how that was possible. They would be distant relations, and while the chance that distant relatives could look so similar was greater than zero, it wasn’t much greater.

My mother used a fertility clinic to conceive me, the email said.

Well, that was something else they had in common. Cosima’s parents had gotten help after struggling for almost ten years to get pregnant on their own. They’d told Cosima all about it, about how hard it was for them, and how lucky they felt to finally have a daughter. Still, though, it did not explain the physical similarities between her and this detective. Cosima’s parents had used their own cells to make her; the clinic just ensured the cells combined properly to form a healthy zygote and embryo before implanting the microscopic Cosima into her mother’s womb. There had been no sperm or egg donor involved, which otherwise could have explained her resemblance to this detective all the way in eastern Canada.

I’d like to fly out to Berkeley to meet you face-to-face, Elizabeth Childs said at the end of her email. If you have the ability to run genetic tests, I’d be happy to give you some samples of myself for you to test. I’ll be as transparent with you as possible, but I’m sure you understand that I don’t want anyone outside of our little genetic club to know about this. There could be safety concerns.

Safety concerns. Cosima lit a joint and leaned back. She could run the genetic tests, she thought. Why not? It could be a fun little exercise, something to do one day while her dissertation data compiled or her samples mutated. Hell, she could even run some tests on her parents while she was at it.

Outside the apartment, she heard Emi rustling in her bag for her keys.

Sure, Cosima typed. Come on down. I’ll meet you near campus sometime.

She hit send just as her girlfriend walked in the door, and Cosima closed all the tabs on her computer.

 

* *

Detective Childs, or Beth, as she asked to be called, arrived at the coffee shop at exactly four o’clock. Cosima had been there for most of the afternoon, or she probably would have been late. She sat at a table by the window, watching college students and tourists going by with one eye trained on the door. It was a familiar position for her. Her past five first dates had met her here, and it was hard to remember that this was not a date. Instead of looking for a sexy girl who seemed to also be looking, Cosima was keeping an eye out for herself. Or rather, a professional version of herself. And then she walked in, wearing a light blue blouse and sunglasses.

“Hi, I’m Beth,” Beth said.

Her smile was so similar to Cosima’s own that she pulled back. Not even the pictures of Beth could have prepared her for this. They were the same height, had the same eyes, the same bone structure, the same ears.

“I know,” Beth said. “It’s weird.”

“Have you, uh, met any of the others?” Cosima asked after Beth got some coffee from the counter. She wasn’t even sure how to refer to them, all of these women who looked like her but didn’t.

“Just briefly.” She didn’t expand on that, but Cosima was too fascinated by the way Beth sat down and crossed her legs, the way she folded her sunglasses, and the way the she tucked her hair behind her ears, to push for more.

“Okay. Um.” Belatedly, Cosima cleared a space on the table for Beth, who glanced over the assembled books and papers with some interest. “You mentioned something about a theory in your last email. What kind of theory or hypothesis are you going with?”

“A crazy one. It’s Katja’s idea. She thinks we’re all clones.”

“Clones?”

“Yeah, like Dolly the sheep clones. Only, under-the-radar, totally-not-legally-made clones.”

Cosima took a minute to absorb that thought. She was familiar with some of the research into cloning and the potential medical benefits thereof, such as somatic cell nuclear transfer and the use of stem cells. “Okay,” she said, writing down CLONES in block letters on a piece of paper. “Any proof of this so far?”

Beth gave her a little half smile. “I’ve already shown you all the proof I have so far. We all look the same.”

“Right, but, I mean, that doesn’t automatically mean we were cloned. Even just one human being that’s cloned would be huge international news.”

“Like I said, under-the-radar, totally-not-legally-made. If we are actually clones.”

“Right.”

“You said you could do genetic tests?”

“Yeah, sure. Give me a couple days, maybe weeks. I don’t do genetic tests very often.” She smiled at Beth, but Beth just nodded.

“No problem. I’ll give you hair and blood samples, just to make sure we’re thorough.”

She had offered this before, via email, but hearing it come out of her mouth wiped the smile off Cosima’s face. This woman was serious. “I can’t really collect the samples here,” Cosima said, gesturing to the coffee shop around them. “But if you wanna come to the lab with me…”

Beth interrupted her. “That could get complicated. At least here, not too many people are looking at us, but in the lab it’ll be pretty obvious we look the same. Don’t you think?”

Cosima didn’t see the big need for secrecy the way Beth did, but she humored her. “True. I’d still feel more comfortable collecting the samples myself, or watching you take them and bag them for me.”

“Of course. I’m staying at the Hilton nearby. We could do it in my room there if you’d like.”

It wasn’t the first time Cosima had heard those exact sentences spoken together, and she smirked. “Uh, that’s a little too intimate for me right now. Tell you what. There’s a bathroom in the basement of the bio building on campus that not too many people use. It’s usually empty, but people come in and out often enough that you can’t really get away with a murder in there. How ’bout that?”

Beth smiled off into the distance like she was remembering a private joke, and nodded. “That sounds good. Right now?”

“Let’s go.”

* *

An hour later, Beth dropped a few strands of her hair into a sterile baggy and used Cosima’s scalpel to draw some blood from her left thumb, which then dripped into a glass vial.

“You’re sure no one’s gonna notice that?” Cosima asked.

“Nah. I’m staying here for a week; it’ll heal up enough by the time I get back.” Beth put a bandaid with bacitracin over the cut.

“A week?”

A student came into the bathroom then, and Beth turned to hide her face. When the student was in a stall, Beth asked, “Is that a problem?”

“No, no problem. What are doing here for a week, though?”

Beth pointed to the samples in Cosima’s hands. “Waiting on those. And maybe taking a little vacation.”

* *

Once Cosima got access to the gene sequencer and a tech who could help her use it, it only took two days to run the tests on all four of the samples she had – her own, Beth’s, and her parents’s. Her parents had been more than happy to provide hair and blood for her; compared to the science experiments she used to run, this was banal. When the tech called to tell her the results were in, she jaunted down to the lab with an Eskimo Pie in one hand, excited to learn something about her resemblance to Beth Childs, but actually more excited to see all the similarities she would have with her parents. Everyone always said she had her mother’s eyes, her father’s hair, and her grandmother’s hands; she wanted to see how much the DNA backed that up.

The tech was a friendly guy in his early thirties with a beard straight out of the seventies. He pulled up the results and mansplained a while about what they all meant while Cosima halfway tuned him out. She had color-coded the samples – red for herself, blue for Beth, white for her mother, and black for her father. On the screen in front of her, the results for red and blue were identical, while there were no significant similarities between red and either white or black.

“I’m sorry,” she said, interrupting the tech’s flow. “Just to make sure I’m seeing things correctly, are these two samples exactly the same?”

“Yes. Red and blue came from the same person.”

“With no relation whatsoever to white or black?”

“That’s correct. I mean, they’re obviously all human, probably from the same basic ethnic region of the world, but there’s not immediate relationship there.”

“That’s not possible.”

The tech stared at her. “Why not? Were you expecting similarities?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was. Can I get a copy of these results?”

He gave them to her and she went out into the bright California sunshine, heart beating fast even though she was completely sober. Something had gone wrong. She said nothing to Beth, but googled DNA tests, unsurprised when all of the results were for ancestry sites or paternity tests. She chose the latter. As she chose a lab in San Francisco that could do the tests in two days, she thought of her father’s face. At no point in her life had she ever questioned the legitimacy of her parentage; there had been no reason to, and she loved her parents. She did not want anyone else to be her father, or her mother, for that matter.

The lab in San Francisco came back two days later with the same results – no genetic relation between Cosima and the people who raised her. A day after that, she sat down with Beth Childs in her favorite coffee shop, her hand over her mouth, looking at the results with her.

“Genetically identical,” Beth said. “Just like I thought.”

“Don’t you have a way of testing this through the police station or whatever?” Cosima asked. It wasn’t the most pertinent issue on the table, but it had been bothering her.

“Of course, but I have to give a reason to run tests, and I’m not telling any of them about this. Besides, this way I kill two birds with one stone – I get the results, and I convince you that I’m right.”

“How is this even possible? How did my parents get a clone baby instead of their own child, when they…” Her voice broke and she stopped. She needed to talk to her parents, but what the hell was she going to tell them? Had they known about this all along? No, she thought. There’s no way they knew about this. Maybe she shouldn’t tell them anything, until she knew more herself.

Beth had no answers for her. She gave Cosima a pink cell phone, identical to the one Beth carried, with Beth’s number preprogrammed in it. “We’ll talk more soon,” Beth promised.

“Count on it,” Cosima said.