"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"I said, this ...." she replied, and paused, apparently searching for the word.

"... flower," I supplied.

"...right, flower. It is ... It makes me feel ... something." She sighed. "I don't know the words yet."

"That's OK. Don't rush yourself. You've come pretty far already." This was true, considering that she had started with a blank mind. She could already walk and talk, even if she did have peculiar gaps in her vocabulary.

"You seem ..." she trailed off again.

"Distracted?"

"Yes. Distracted. Are you alright?"

Good question. "My sister is arriving later. I haven't seen her in some time. It makes me feel ... " I smiled, as I realized what I should say. "Something. I miss her."

She smiled in return, possibly trying it out to see how it felt. "You said the same thing."

"Yes. This is humor. A joke."

She considered this. "I like it. May I keep it?"

I laughed, which caused her to frown.

"I may not?"

"You hardly need to ask my permission, Caitlin. Humor is something that marks us as human, and so it belongs to you as much as to me. You couldn't have known that, but almost anyone else would. Thus, I find it amusing that you would ask. More humor. It is as if you were intentionally making another joke."

"Because you forget that I couldn't have known?"

"Yes. I made a mistake by forgetting, and I apologize for that."

She nodded. "May I?" she asked, reaching for a pencil.

I was curious as to what she wanted with the pencil, so I nodded.

She also took a sheet of paper and began to apply the one to the other. "I feel ... things that I don't have the words for ... when I see the flower, the ... clouds ... the ant ... the bird ... you ... the sky. Everything. I don't know the words."

"You want to express your feelings."

She considered this, blinked, and looked up. "Yes. Is that good?"

"Sounds pretty normal to me. Most people have feelings they can't express." I frowned at my train of thought. "They may have the words, but they lack the courage, or the opportunity ... or the feelings they have would cause people to hate them. Everybody has this problem." Even me.

"Even you?"

Startled, I looked up to find her staring into my eyes. I was caught, and couldn't look away. I have always found myself all but unable to tear myself away from looking into a girl's eyes in this sort of situation. Thankfully, it doesn't happen that often. It was familiar, and intimate. It was simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable. I felt like everything that I was had been laid before her, to be judged worthy or unworthy. I wanted to run away screaming, but I also wanted to surrender myself and dissolve into those eyes. I could feel myself trying to figure out what was going on behind them, but it was out of reach, at least for me. I could also feel my barriers going up, trying to re-establish separation.

She blinked, and I was released for an instant, long enough to break free.

"Sorry. Yes, even me."

"Your face changed. It became ... empty? I felt something at that, but I don't know what to call it."

I nodded. She didn't know how to say that my face had lost all trace of emotion. She also didn't know how to say that it creeped her out.

She bent back to her paper, and I was left alone with my thoughts. Two months. The person before me had been alive for only two months, for all that she looked to be my age. I remembered watching her body float in the fluid-filled clone tank in Doc's lab, growing rapidly over the course of a few weeks. I had certainly gained a lot of data for the Female Investigation Project from those observations! And now she was sitting here across from me on her parents' back porch, a living breathing girl. All because of me. She'd be nothing more than a memory right now if it weren't for me. A ghost haunting her parents for the rest of their lives. Another "justified" murder for Tyler Elliot to put on his kill tally. Damn him.

"Done." she said as she held up the paper. She had drawn a quick sketch of the flowers. It was very good; much better than I would have expected. Better than I would have been able to accomplish.

"Very good. I like it. But I forgot that you were an artist, before..." Too late, I remembered not to bring this subject up.

"Does this mean I am remembering?" Poor girl, she sounded so hopeful.

"Ah... well, I wouldn't get my hopes up."

"Oh." She sounded as if she were trying to fight off a wave of depression.

I hated to crush her dream, but it was better to head this off. "Why is it so important that you remember?"

"You don't know what it is like ... these things I feel ... they are constantly struggling to get out, but I don't have the words to say them. These faint glimpses of memory. The images I see at night ... dreams. I feel ... like half a person. Incomplete. I don't want to be."

"I told you ... everybody has that. Maybe not in the same ways, but it is there, somewhere."

Conversation paused while we both considered. I broke the brief silence. "You say you feel incomplete; everybody feels that. You say you can't express your feelings; everybody has that. It means you are a normal teenaged girl. You don't have to fight to get your memories back. They will come back or they will not, and struggling won't speed the process at all. And..."

"Yes?"

"...what happens if you get your memories back ... and they aren't what you had hoped for?"

"What do you mean?"

I had to be careful with this, lest she discover that I know about her past all too well. "Well, you know that you disappeared mysteriously for several weeks. And you were found like this, without any memory of your past, barely able to talk."

"Yes."

"Well, something obviously had to happen to you for you to get that way. Probably not good things. Not good at all. Maybe you were hurt more than just by taking away your memories. Maybe the fact that your memories are missing is a good thing. Maybe once you get them back, you find out that you don't WANT them back, but by then it'll be too late."

"Hmm."

"My point is this: as people grow and learn, they become limited by their experiences at least as much as they gain by them. For example, if you are horribly frightened by a cat, then you will try to avoid cats in the future. While that means that you are less likely to be hurt by a cat, you will also never be able to understand why people have cats as pets and love them.

Right now, you have the opportunity to be anything you want, to like anything you want, to learn anything you want. If you find and reawaken the old Caitlin, you will probably limit yourself to what she was. You will like the things she liked and hate the things she hated. In fact, *you* will probably die, and she will be the only Caitlin that exists.

We already know that you have many of the things she had ... such as her artistic talent, her parents, her appearance, and so forth. Is there really any need to destroy yourself to become her? Everything that is missing ... words to better express your feelings, memories to help you understand ... all of this can be regained without her. She learned it, I learned it ... and so can you."

She looked thoughtful.

"Look, all I'm saying is that you probably haven't even considered whether trying to get your old memories back is even a good thing. You don't need them, as this picture demonstrates. You can get your own. It is something you should consider."

"I see. You are right, I had assumed that it was something that I wanted. I will, at least, think about it."

"That's all I ask." I glanced at my watch. "Uh-oh. I've got to go."

"Your sister?"

"Yes."

"Will you come again tomorrow?"

"I don't know. Probably not, school is starting, and I'll be busy moving in and showing Tenna around. In fact, once classes start, I won't have as much free time as I have had recently."

"Oh." She sounded disappointed.

"What about Saturday?" I asked.

"Saturday I am supposed to go to New York with my parents. It will be dark before we get back."

"Oh."

"Although..."

"Yes?"

"Darkness comforts me. You only come during the day. Show me night things."

"Well, I don't know. You know how protective your parents have been since you've been back..." I indicated the window where her mother was pretending to clean the kitchen and ignore us.

"Please?"

"Alright. Make sure it is OK with your parents, and I'll come back Saturday night."

"I will do that."

"See you then."

"OK, goodbye."

---------

Caitlin watched Kerry depart, then sighed when he was out of sight. She leaned back in the lawn chair and looked at the clouds. Whatever images she saw there were not revealed by the reflections in her dark eyes. She sat up and turned to stare at the small decorative fish pond in the back yard. The water ... something about the water. The water rippled slightly as Caitlin sat down next to it and lightly moved it aside with her hand. It refused to give up its secrets so easily, however, and she frowned, lost in thought.

[10 weeks before...]

Kerry jotted down another note and reset the stopwatch to remind him to take the next reading once another 15 minutes was up. It was late, and he was getting tired. As so often happened when he was briefly alone in the lab, his eyes drifted to the clone tank itself, source of his readings. He let his eyes travel up and down the frame of the girl within. Soon the clone would be complete, and she would be released, and Kerry wouldn't have any more chances to "study" her. He got up and walked to the glass tube. In his mind's eye, this wasn't Caitlin Mark II, this was his sister, Tenna.

She looked so peaceful, floating there in the fluid-filled tank. Relaxed. Asleep. Again his eyes wandered down, and his finger traced her outline on the glass. Lithe. Healthy. Curvy. Breasts. Hips. Very female. Thighs and calves well formed. Back up to her chest. Collar bones well defined. Delicate features on her face. Deep, dark eyes that seemed to go forever. Hair wafting gently in the currents ...

Kerry nearly fainted as his eyes snapped back to hers. They were open. She was looking at him. Staring into his soul. Tenna was looking at him, judging him. Would she hate him? Love him?

Kerry's stopwatch went off, causing him to blink and glance at it. When he looked again, the clone was exactly as she should have been ... eyes closed, apparently asleep. Confused, Kerry rubbed his eyes. No change. He checked the various readouts that Doc had explained. All was as it should have been. The machines had recorded no anomalies. He must have imagined it. Yes, it was late, and he had been dozing. He had seen what he wanted to see.

He shrugged, and took his last reading. He glanced at the clone thoughtfully, then put down his clipboard and departed.