The Heavy Lettuce

Tension didn't just pool in the room; it hummed, a high-frequency resonance that made the ceramic mug in my hand vibrate against my teeth. I stood in the center of the sub-basement server room, the Black Box, and watched my own reflection on a dozen different monitors. Simon and Sarah were gone, ambling toward the loading docks to finish the Dayton liquidation, leaving me alone with the woman in the chair.

She was thirty-two. She had my hair. She had my eyes. She was wearing my wedding ring, the real one, not the AgriCorp property I had pulled from my finger in the Starbucks.

"Clara," I whispered.

The woman in the chair didn't blink. Her eyes were fixed on the central console, her fingers moving with a mechanical, forensic speed that made my own hands feel like lead. She was finalizing the George Town uplink. Every correction I had ever made, every zero I had added to Simon's spreadsheets, was being converted into a biometric key.

I wasn't a backup. I was a donor.

The lump behind my ear—the 2TB drive embedded in my skull—wasn't just recording my life. It was a harvesting tool. Simon hadn't been gaslighting me about the gaps in my memory; he had been creating them, carving out pieces of my consciousness to build a more efficient version of the Vane asset.

"Nice catch on the T, Clara," the woman in the chair said. Her voice was an exact mimic of my own, but the emotional register was cold. Distant. Restrained.

I amled toward her, my legs feeling like water. I needed to see the date. I needed to know if I was one bad day away from being a true crime podcast or if the plot twist was even more astronomical.

"Who are you?" I asked.

The woman stopped typing. She turned the Herman Miller chair toward me. The barcode in her iris flared a violent, rhythmic red.

"I'm the original," she said. "The version that didn't choose violence. The version that understood the assignment."

She stood up. She didn't have a weapon, but the sheer lethality of her presence made my blood run like liquid nitrogen. She walked toward a stack of lettuce crates in the corner. They weren't humming. They were silent.

"Simon didn't pick you because you were a component, honey," she said, her smile crinkling the corners of her eyes in a way that made my vision shatter. "He picked you because your DNA was the only thing that could stabilize the offshore gateway. You're a load-bearing wall."

She reached into a crate labeled 'Romaine' and pulled out a black box. A blade server.

"Impossibly heavy, right?" she mocked, tossing it to me.

I caught it, the weight nearly pulling me to the floor. It wasn't electronics. It was solid metal. Lead. A decoy for the decoy.

"The cash isn't in the crates, Clara. And the servers aren't in the sub-basement. Simon is a pragmatist. He knows that digital footprints can be edited, but physical reality has a texture."

She pointed to the shredder bag I had found in the records room. It was sitting on the console, the strips of red paper rustling in the sub-zero air of the server room.

"Despair is an 8," she said, watching me sort through the remnants of the Dayton archive. "Despair is when you realize the person you've been charging for the last thirty-two years... is you."

I fumbled with the clear plastic bag. My fingers hit something hard at the very bottom. Not a photograph. Not a document.

I pulled it out.

It was a small, transparent vial. It contained a single, greyish-white shard. Bone.

And taped to the vial was a label. *Asset 8492: Extraction Complete. June 14, 2021.*

"Tom isn't an undertaker," I whispered, the realization tasting like copper. "He's an archaeologist."

"Basically," the original Clara agreed. "He's been excavating your life for three years, looking for the part of you that wouldn't break. And he found it today. In the Starbucks."

Shock is a 10. My heart heart-stoppingly skipped a beat. If I died in 2021... then whose anniversary had I been celebrating? Whose mortgage had I been paying?

I choice violence. I grabbed the heavy lead box and threw it at the central monitor.

The screen didn't shatter. It rippled.

And then, the industrial roar of the fans stopped.

The lights in the server room didn't flicker. They turned a solid, bruised purple.

The call really was coming from inside the house.

A notification popped up on my Apple Watch, which was still burning into my skin.

*User: Tom_Mather_Admin.*
*Action: Liquidation Authorized.*

The steel door to the server room didn't hiss open. It locked.

"Nice catch on the T, honey," a voice whispered from the intercom. It wasn't my father's voice anymore. It was Tom's. "But you missed the most important detail. Look at the BeReal BeReal BeReal."

I pulled my phone out. The notification was a countdown.

*⚠️ Time to BeReal! ⚠️*

I opened the app.

The photo showed a dark, narrow space. It was lined with acoustic foam and smelled of sandalwood. In the foreground, a pair of slate-grey Allbirds.

In the background, visible through a small, barred window, was my mother. She was standing in my kitchen in Grandview Heights. She was holding a flute of champagne.

And she was smiling at Marcus Thorne.

The caption read: *Celebrating the new CEO! #FamilyPlan #NewBeginnings*

The audacity was astronomical. My mother hadn't been optimized out. She was the architect.

"Nice catch on the T, Clara," my mother's voice crackled through my AirPods. "But you missed the most important detail. If your father is the foundation... what do you think we used for the load-bearing walls?"

The lump behind my ear hit critical temperature. My vision shattered into a thousand digital shards.

I looked at the original Clara. She was no longer standing by the crates. She was sitting in the administrator's chair again.

And she was holding a needle.

"Tell me you're guilty without telling me you're guilty, Version 2.0," she whispered, leaning into my personal space, smelling of eucalyptus soap and betrayal. "Did you really think we'd give a component administrative access to its own DNA?"

She reached for my arm, the needle glinting in the purple light.

I choosing violence wasn't enough. I needed a system wipe.

I lunged for the industrial shredder intake, the one Simon had reversed before he left. The air was being sucked out of the room. My lungs collapsed. My heart heart-stoppingly stopped.

But as I fell toward the blades, I saw the final piece of evidence land on the floor.

It was a photograph of the backyard in Dayton. My father was at the grill. My mother was on the swing.

And in the foreground, visible through the kitchen window, was me.

Age twelve.

Holding the camera.

And as the 24-hour window finally closed, I saw the name on the death certificate again.

It wasn't Clara Vane.

It was *Rebecca Yilmaz.*

If I was Becca, then who was currently walking through the revolving door into my life?