When Julian took me to Sofia for examinations or meetings, strangers sometimes stopped me on the street.
“My God…” a woman with white hair and a refined scarf whispered once. Her eyes filled with tears. “That can’t be…”
“I’m sorry, do we know each other?” I asked.
“No… sorry…” he turned and almost ran away.
Such moments were becoming more and more. Strange glances, trembling lips, smiles that stop in the middle.
They looked at me like they were seeing a ghost.
Who’s Catherine?
One night, while I was fixing the library in his office, I dropped a book. It fell, the pages flew over the floor, and a photo burst from the inside.
On it – a woman around the forties, with her hair up, in a white laboratory apron. He holds a test tube in his hand, smiles slightly. Beautiful, intelligent face.
On the back – inscription: “Katerina. 1999.”
My stomach curled up like a fist.
I recognized the smile.
Because I saw her in the mirror every morning.
The same slightly raised corner of the lips. The same tiny wrinkle on the left when the smile is semi-ironic.
I’d seen her on the portraits on the walls, but I always thought I was suggesting.
That night, when at nine I took the pill before I “disappeared,” a word appeared in my head that was not mine:
“Bridge.”
Just one word. But heavy as concrete.
The plan
The next day, when Julian left “on business” in the city, I started looking.
I may have been naive sometime, but I wasn’t stupid. I graduated in biology, worked for a year in a laboratory, I knew how documents are arranged, how they hide clues, what no one can completely erase.
In the suede headboard of the bed there was a slight, almost invisible slit. I put a small voice recorder there – a gift from a journalist friend who had been forgotten in the drawer until now. I set it to turn on in a sound.
I took the pill again tonight.
I disappeared again.
In the morning, when Julian went out for a meeting with his lawyers, I waited for the car to move away and pulled out the voice recorder. My hands were shaking so hard that I could barely press “play.”
I expected… I don’t know what. Heavy breathing, whispering, maybe something much uglier.
I heard… crying.
A male, choked, raw cry like I’ve never heard of him.
“Night one hundred and twenty-second…” his voice hoarsely whispered. “The synaptic transfer is sixty percent.” Her brain takes the data better than any simulation. Its neural networks are… fertile ground.
My heart is frozen.
“That night he smiled in a dream,” he continued. “He smiled just like Catherine as the lilacs bloomed in the western garden.” For a moment I forgot that I was looking at a stranger.
