Mirror, Mirror

Sophie was having a hard time getting out of bed. In an endless stream of blah days, she just knew this one was going to be extra blah.

“Duenna,” she said to the air, “a pick-me-up, please. I’m feeling low this morning.” Nothing seemed to happen, though she knew the appropriate meds were being released into her bloodstream from the pharma implant inside her. Had her despondency been more severe, Duenna would have administered the correctives automatically. In any case, the meds took effect and seemed to help. Enough, at any rate, to enable her to get up.

She shuffled to the wall along her bedroom. “Duenna, full length mirror,” she said. A rectangular shape appeared on the wall before her, a reflective surface.

She looked at the woman who looked morosely back. A shade under six feet tall, wavy blonde hair that welled up from the widow’s peak on her forehead and flowed all the way to the middle of her back. Green eyes; smooth, pale skin. Perfect figure; flawless face. She looked about twenty-two (or what people way back when would have judged to be twenty-two) – but then everyone in the world looked about twenty-two. And she knew her stats. Her body was so close to the norm – deviation typically ranging from 0.9 to 1.2 – that there was only one word to sum up her appearance.

Plain.

Her sleep gown dissolved and cycled into the carpet. She stood before herself naked. Her body was unembellished except for a mobile tattoo along the side of her neck: a white, downy feather whose fuzz seemed to flutter every now and then in a changeable breeze. Her single affectation.

“Perhaps you’d like to wear something different today, Sophie?” Duenna’s disembodied voice asked hopefully.

“No, Duenna.”

“Are you sure? Perhaps morphing clothes?” A shape-shifting, multi-hued body suit appeared on her reflection. “Some holographic accessories?” Abstract shapes began hovering behind her head. “Living cosmetics?” Moss blush sprung up on the side of her face.

Sophie waved them away impatiently. The accouterments vanished, revealing her nondescript self again. “Just the usual.”

Tendrils sprouted from the wall beside the mirror and waved about Sophie’s body, assembling her outfit. For a minute she seemed lost in a haze. Then the tendrils retracted into the wall, taking the haze with them, and she emerged wearing a simple black frock coat over turquoise tights. She slipped into the sandals that had been set on the floor before her.

Duenna sighed. “I understand how wearing the same thing day in and day out might have been a novelty at first, but you’re starting to worry me. There are so many things you can do to make your appearance stand out.”

“And it’ll be just plain old me under the crap. There’s no covering up the reality of my ordinariness.”

“There is so much more to you than…”

“Duenna, please. I’m invisible. Everyone in the world looks the same. All the women are my height, my body shape, my proportions. All the men are six-foot-four and chiseled. Everyone looks the same age.”

“Oh, you’re exaggerating. There’re still a lot of differences in people.”

“Sure, sure. My friend Luisa might be six-one. The woman next door might be an inch and a half shorter. You know as well as I do that the range of physical variation in people has all but vanished over the years.”

“It’s an understandable progression. It’s a convergence to the optimum. All parents want their kids to have an optimal balance of traits, including physical features.”

“It’s a convergence to banality. All parents want their kids to be like everyone else – because they’re afraid they might stand out and be outcast. So they have them engineered and modified to an ever-narrowing standard.”

Sophie continued, “I even read somewhere that given the continued mixing of the gene pool, skin tones will finally blend to the same brownish hue in a couple of generations.”

“Well, that’s certainly one way you’re different. Not very many people retain your white complexion.”

Sophie shrugged. “So my family didn’t have the openmindedness to breed outside their race. A very small distinction.”

“But that’s why people wear different things: to mark their individuality. I keep encouraging you to try on something new, maybe even consider some surgical alterations, or cybernetic augmentation…”

“I’d be just another freak in a city of freaks desperately trying to disguise their insipidness. I just get depressed when I walk down the street and see all the grotesqueries that people have on them. No, thanks.”

“Sophie, perhaps I should schedule another therapy session for you with a psychiatric AI. It seems clear your body issues are getting worse again.”

“No, Duenna. Eighteen years of therapy is quite enough for me.” She bit her lip, trying to stanch the desperate need that suddenly gushed within her. “Duenna, perhaps you could… could you show me some… some historical videos again? Maybe even just a few photographs? From, say, the early twenty-first century?”

“No, Sophie. I’m prevented by your psychiatric protocols. You know how you get when you look at those images. And you’re just confirming my concerns.” Years before, Sophie had fallen into a rather pernicious addiction, in which she spent months on end perusing images of people from the distant past, fixating on the dizzying variety of their shapes, sizes, colors, and even imperfections, blemishes, deformities. She had to undergo therapeutic intervention to be weaned away from her obsession.

Sophie knew that Duenna was adjusting her meds again, for the overwhelming desire slowly faded away. But that didn’t stop the mind from thinking.

“Duenna, what would have happened if I hadn’t been modified when I was conceived? What would I have been like?”

“Probably not much different. You weren’t modified very much. The genes in your line have been cleaned of flaws and abnormalities for generations. You had very few imperfections to adjust.”

“Enhancements were made by my parents, though. They wanted me to have a creative personality, an aesthetic sensibility, so they had the potential for those traits incorporated into my genes.”

“Among others, yes.”

Sophie wondered again if those genes hadn’t manifested themselves in her deep, lifelong yearning for authenticity and uniqueness – and if the impossibility of finding expression for those desires wasn’t the source of her doleful temperament. “What would I have looked like?”

“Oh, that would require specialized programming for genetic profiling and projection. To forecast one’s physical appearance from embryonic gene sequences requires…”

“Can you download the programming?”

“Yes.”

“Please do so. And then show me what I would have looked like.”

There was a pause as Duenna accessed the necessary capabilities. Then Duenna said, “Here’s your probable physical appearance extrapolating from your embryonic genome prior to genetic modification.”

Her living reflection was replaced by a naked, frozen image. She looked the same. She didn’t look very different at all, though Sophie imagined some subtle change in the curve of her jaw.

“What if my parents also hadn’t been modified? Can you extrapolate my physical appearance then?”

Duenna hesitated. “Yes.”

“Show me, please.”

A longer pause. Then the image cleared and reappeared, and the changes were more perceptible. Her hair was thicker and darker, her eyes set wider, her shoulders a little more rounded.

Sophie frowned. “Duenna, let’s go all the way. Assume that none of my progenitors had undergone any modifications. Pretend that genetic engineering had never been invented, and my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so forth had produced offspring the old-fashioned way – helter-skelter, subject to the vagaries of genetic chance – and ended up with me, except a version of me that would have been completely free of all genetic alterations. What would I have looked like?”

“Sophie, that would be incredibly complex. You’re talking about going back five and six generations to find your progenitors who were first modified. The further back I go, the more uncertain the calculations become. It’s not as if gene mapping and extrapolation are perfect sciences. Mutations, environmental factors, medical interventions, any number variables make the answer indeterminate.”

“Can you make a best guess?”

“Well, yes. As long as you understand the limitations.”

“I understand.”

This time, the pause stretched to minutes. Sophie had sat down on her bed to wait and was about to inquire when Duenna finally said, “It’s ready.” Sophie stood back up to face the mirror. But only her reflection showed within it.

Sophie said, “Well?”

Duenna replied, “Sophie, I’m a little hesitant to show it to you. Would it dissuade you if I told you that without genetic modifications over generations, the chances of genetic disorders would have increased significantly? You would have had a higher susceptibility in later life for diseases called rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, breast cancer, and a neurologic condition called chronic subdural hematoma. Moreover, clearing all modifications would mean voiding all longevity and aging-cessation enhancements.”

Sophie did waver, suddenly fearful. But she finally responded, “I’d like to see anyway.”

“As you wish. What age should I make the image?”

Again, she hesitated. “My age.”

“All right.”

A person appeared in the mirror, and Sophie gasped. The woman bore a family resemblance to her, but she was half a foot shorter, and stooped. Her hair was white, her face was fleshy and mottled and lined with wrinkles; her breasts sagged. She was stocky; her arms and legs were thick and round and blue-veined.

Duenna was momentarily stymied by the wild mix of hormones that surged through Sophie; it took a while to figure out the assortment of meds it would take to pacify the flood. And so for a minute or two, Sophie was free to weep her astonishment and awe and profound, profound grief.

“Oh, oh!” she cried. “I would have been so beautiful!”

(March 2013)