Leonora McLeod arrived home on Sunday evening, shortly before dinner time, eager to be reunited with her children. She was a petite woman in her early fifties with a pointy freckled face and the sort of mouth that appeared very small when closed and then revealed itself in full blinding rays of glory when she opened it to share an anecdote, real or fabricated, from life on the road.

She was pleased to see that the lights were on and someone had salted the front steps so she wouldn’t slip. She let herself in, balancing a couple of pie tins in one hand, pulling her suitcase behind her, two saxophones slung across her back.

She hadn’t seen her brood in several months; a long run of shows had transitioned seamlessly into a cross-country tour, and though she knew not to worry, because Jaymie and Aaron were responsible adults and Rex was very mature for their age, she did miss them terribly.

“Hello, anyone home?” she called. And they were.

She was careful to hug Rex first and longest, knowing that they were going through a sensitive phase and could read anything as a rejection. She supposed she couldn’t blame them, since she’d been away so long—it was funny, when she was a teenager all she’d wanted was to escape the watchful eyes of her parents for long enough to play her instrument without someone breathing down her neck and asking if she was done her homework. Then she remembered that Rex was already seventeen, and she recalculated. Leonora had run away by seventeen.

She experienced a small jolt of alarm when she greeted her sons—had they grown even more alike? She looked hastily back and forth between them, hoping they wouldn’t notice, wishing they’d just move the hair out of their faces so she could see…

Jaymie grinned brilliantly and cried “You’re my mom!” and Aaron gave him a look of intense perturbance, and she immediately knew who was who. She embraced them both, saying their names so they’d know that she knew, and kissing their cheeks, making a mental note that it was Jaymie who had grown his hair out, in case they switched positions. Still, it puzzled her, since she rarely had trouble identifying them when they were together.

There was no time to dwell on it because her sister and sister-in-law had just pulled up outside, with her niece and a tall punk musician who she could already tell was going to be a lot of fun.

***

Aaron woke to the thick, mousy light of day. The solid black of his window had been replaced by an equally solid grey, as though someone had decided sunshine was entirely inappropriate, considering the current social and political and literal climate, and blushingly thrown a sheet over the whole mess.

He was alone; Cassie 2.3 had undoubtedly grown bored watching him sleep and resumed her card game with Derek at some point in the night. He was tempted to lie in bed and avoid his problems, but he knew he’d start thinking too much and work himself into an anxious funk again, and his cognitive behavioural therapist had encouraged him to focus on active solutions rather than imagined disasters.

He was glad to find that a fresh set of clothes had been provided for him, since his own had been thoroughly sweat-drenched during Friday’s chase. He dressed in them, except for the shapeless pants. He retrieved his jeans from the heap Cassie 2.3 had made beside the bed and pulled them on, not wanting to feel too much like a hospital patient. Then he picked up his new therapist—whose only input so far had been to systematically prod his half full/half empty water glass off the nightstand while he’d slept, as a metaphor for the precariousness of subjective reality—and went to join the other clones in the common area.

Cassie 2.3 was back in her tidy suit with her braids gathered in a smooth knot at the base of her neck. She greeted him in a warm but platonic manner and informed him it was already late in the afternoon.

“You weren’t kidding about liking to sleep!” she said, and gave a soft crinkle of her eyes. “You must have been tired.” Aaron thought of all the events of the past weekend and agreed that yes, he had been.

She sat with her legs folded under her on the corner of the lawn with Derek and Five-O, who were intensely absorbed by something that sat on the fake grass in front of Derek. Aaron looked around for the new arrivals Cassie 2.3 had mentioned, and estimated that the number of clones lounging in the alcove across the room might have increased. He hadn’t bothered introducing himself to that group, not having need of more friends, and none had approached him, so he assumed the feeling was mutual.

Actually, several of the clones in the alcove were in a more palliative phase, having been made in less effective ways than Aaron’s new friends had been; they were nearer to their time of expiration and were winding down. It’s fortunate he never went to investigate or he might have been severely creeped out.

50117 looked up at him. “He’s almost got it!” he fervently announced. Derek immediately hissed at him to quiet down, peering about suspiciously. Two figures had overheard, detached themselves from the alcove group, and begun an unhurried walk toward them across the lawn.

***

For once, Sasha’s entrance had not gone unnoticed. She was certain that Michaud’s appearance alone was enough to raise alarm bells in the hearts of her older family members. Even her normally supportive mothers had their misgivings about his character—and rightly so!

She and Michaud had made a seafoam salad with marshmallows instead of cream cheese, which was the most ridiculous item she could think to bring—her only instruction had been to “prepare a side”. She was delighted to discover that her cousins had also contributed a seafoam salad. They couldn’t have botched it better if they’d planned it.

Every time she’d seen her grandparents in the past few years, she’d gotten the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head for her normalcy, and then they’d moved on to direct toward her mothers the type of suspiciously polite comments that betrayed great judgement.

It wasn’t that Sasha wanted to stir up drama—she was approaching thirty, and she’d never been one to act out immaturely. She simply felt that if her grandma was going to spend the evening doling out admonishments over trivial things, she wanted in on the family bonding experience. Her mother and Auntie Leonora had always managed to do something disappointing in the interim between gatherings, and the Brzezinskis somehow failed at being model grandchildren by their mere existence.

Speaking of the Brzezinskis, there was definitely some shady business going on. Jaymie had texted her that Aaron had been located, and everyone would be present at dinner, which was a relief. Not that she’d had much time to get worried; a Brzezinski disappearing for a day wasn’t that unusual.

But as she sat across the table from them, she had the distinct impression that something was off. For one thing, one of them had grown his hair out in the weeks since she’d last hung out with them, which was unheard of when the other one hadn’t as well.

“Where did you disappear to on Friday, Aar?” she asked. “I thought I’d see you at the show.”

Neither responded. Sasha tugged the reusable wrapping off her salad bowl and narrowed her eyes. Leonora could be heard exchanging joyous greetings with Sasha’s mothers in the front hall.

“Oh! Me. Um, I ran into Daffodile… We had a nice chat,” said Aaron.

Sasha raised her eyebrows in skepticism. “You talked to Daffodile? And then you just went home to…?”

“Went home to drink with the cats, yeah.” He placed the siblings’ own seafoam salad at the other end of the table.

“But then yesterday you were gone…?”

“Left early for groceries and my phone died. They thought I’d never made it home.”

He nodded sympathetically toward Rex, who glared silently at both brothers. Sasha knew this wasn’t the way Rex usually acted, but you could never tell what kind of mood Rex was going to be in these days.

“Two identical salads!” laughed Leonora, joining them at the table. “We’ll have a whole dinner of mini marshmallows! This reminds me of the time our tour bus broke down in a field in Indiana and all we had to eat were smores ingredients for a day and a half. You might be wondering why we had only smore ingredients, and it’s a good question—see, our driver, Brian, loves camping, and sometimes once everybody else is checked in at the hotel, we go out—”

“Mom, Grandma and Grandpa are here,” Rex interrupted, looking out the window.

“Oh. Fabulous.”

“Sarcasm?” asked Rex in the monotone that Sasha was starting to recognize as Rex’s tired and/or nervous and/or angry voice.

“Would I be sarcastic about—what I meant was: How wonderful! …But should we hide one of the salads?”

***

The two new clones turned out to also be 50117.

“It’s you, you monster!” said one.

“I’ll kill him!” cried the other. They’d approached Aaron’s friend group for a meet and greet, seeking potential networking opportunities. Neither was thrilled by the sight of their look-alike.

“Kill me? I’ll kill you! Just like I killed my—our—Original!” shouted Five-O, not about to take abuse from these ignorant newcomers.

One of the two was identical to Five-O, down to his bright black eyes and neat silver beard. The other appeared to be in his mid teens, and could have been mistaken for a son who’d fallen very close to the tree. He was dressed in expensive jeans and a skater-brand shirt and had a face that looked on the verge of sprouting its own neat silver beard.

“Our Original? It’s not you, then?” asked the elder clone suspiciously.

“Did you make me? Tell me the truth!” cried the boy, clearly about to unleash the level of drama appropriate to a young jedi learning that his least favourite jedi was, in fact, his dad.

“You’re too old. Must be one of our Original’s later projects,” Five-O told him offhandedly. “I only started growing clones two years ago. I made those ones.” He pointed to the children’s area, where the two pudgy toddlers were wrestling in a pile of plushies and chuckling to themselves, on a single-minded venture to entice someone to pull out a phone camera and win them the Pinterest award for Cutest Babies 2019.

The teenager squinted with mistrust, but was appeased enough not to take up arms.

“Hmm, lucky,” said the other. “I didn’t get a chance to make any of my own.”

“How do you think I feel?” whined the teen. “I never even had a chance to take Jessica out in my convertible—” Everyone stopped listening to him. Five-O and the other clone—50119—were already bonding over their opinions on the best cloning techniques and the benefits of growing them from fetuses, for fresh young organs, rather than just using a 3D-copying method like these other three idiots had obviously done.

The three idiot-copies in question, huddled around Derek’s project, had no time to waste participating in this family gathering. They knew the arrival of the newcomers signalled the imminent departure of two of their company.

“Any luck?” asked Cassie 2.3. “The collectors will be in soon for the evening shift…” she glanced around nervously.

“I can’t believe two of us are going to get dismembered so there can be more of him,” Aaron muttered. He dragged his loaner-cat away from Derek’s contraption for the fifth or sixth time; she was attempting to rub her facial glands on it to remind him of the value of therapeutic physical contact.

“Dismantled,” said Derek.

“Go commiserate with that kid,” said Cassie 2.3, with her gentle smirk. “Perhaps you can both take your complaints to the government.” She ruffled the back of his hair, and he felt a strange mix of feelings that were mostly—but not entirely—anxiety-based.

He ruminated to himself, concluding that he was probably an anxiety hipster by now; he could identify its genres and subgenres and which anxious moments were new and inspired and which ones were just cleverly referencing experiences long past. He could parse the bad anxieties from the happy anxieties, and maybe one day he’d even be able to hold them to the light and turn them to determine which ones were a passing trend in his brain and which were signalling a legitimate threat to his life. And wasn’t that the ultimate goal laid out for him by his CBT? Maybe he was making progress after all.

***

Jymmy had been looking forward to experiencing his first family dinner, and telling everybody about his life and Big Niki, whom he considered to be the closest thing to family that he had. Instead he found himself fascinated by the people and activities around him and was content, for the time being, in the role of a passive observer.

For instance, Grandma McLeod was greeting Jymmy’s fake-cousin’s boyfriend and making one of those nice comments which he understood to secretly be a not-nice comment, about how many tattoos he had. Sasha and Michaud either missed or ignored the not-nice element, but then smiled secretly to each other for some reason, and Sasha said, “I like how permanent tattoos are—I’m very into long-term things right now,” and then she looked at Michaud with the sort of admiration that Jymmy had only seen in partners of his who hadn’t understood his independent lifestyle and turned out to be very hard to shake off.

“That’s so fucking romantic,” said Michaud, and then apologized to Grandma for the swear, but didn’t look sorry at all, and Sasha whispered “Tu es magnifique,” with terrible pronunciation, but Jymmy didn’t realize that last part.

Besides these intrigues, there was the fact that Farida, one of Sasha’s moms, used to be Sasha’s dad, but apparently this was old news, unfortunately for Jymmy, who would have loved to bring it up and find out how that all worked.

Dorothea—Dory—Sasha’s other mom and Leonora’s younger sister, was trying to talk about some musical accomplishment of Sasha’s and was promptly shut down by Grandma McLeod asking how Sasha’s boring contract job was going, and if there was a permanent position in sight for her, since she was so into long-term things now.

Jaymie had warned Jymmy that no one must find out what he was, at least until Aaron was home safe. (Rex had sarcastically commented that their poor grandma had already been forced to repress both her ingrained, unintentional racism and transphobia for the sake of the family, and adding a clone to the mix might give her a heart attack.) Jymmy was instructed to be quiet and not draw attention to himself, but Jaymie needn’t have worried; there was far too much going on for anyone to be concerned by his delighted little comments or the fact that his hair was longer than his fake-twin’s.

His brain struggled to properly balance Grandma McLeod’s complaints; for instance, it seemed to be a big deal that Leonora had only managed to visit her kids three times in the past year, which was less than most years—yet it was an equally big deal that there were two salads made out of marshmallows? It was no problem to him.

***

Cassie 2.3 watched Derek struggle with his invention until something clicked and beeped to life. The three friends sat huddled around a small, silver box with a miniature screen, which was attached to an ancient-looking telephone receiver.

“I’ve done it!” he quietly announced, looking like he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

“Excellent work,” said Cassie 2.3, who had no idea what he’d done but had been captive far too long not to be enthralled by any change in routine.

“Cool. What is it?” asked Jaymie 2.0, scrunching his adorable anxious freckly face and drumming on his knees. Cassie 2.3 didn’t think he’d stopped drumming on things the entire time she’d known him. She wondered if his friends found it maddening. Still, she could confirm that he kept steady time, if you caught her drift.

“It’s a temporary telephone!” whispered Derek. “I thought, if Eric could invent me—a human being—out of rubber and dye and a handful of chemical elements, I could make a basic signal transmitter out of odds and ends!”

“Brilliant!” said Cassie 2.3. She’d never had opportunity to use a phone, though she knew from her robust reserve of memories that she loved phones very much. “…Who should we call?”

Derek was already entering a number using an agonizingly slow selection system on the miniature screen. The three companions leaned in silently as a voice identical to Derek’s, but tinny and faint, chirped out a response from the receiver.

“Hey, you’ve reached Eric and Erica. Leave your name and we’ll get back atcha!”