Anaphase (2021) is an experimental A/V project exploring identity and duality, conceptualized and written by LeeAnn Perry, and produced in collaboration with Not An Exit.

I’d been researching it a long time, first idly, then obsessively. I had my degrees, a perfect credit score, the correct ratio of stocks to bonds. I’d worked hard, invested in my life quantitatively, if not qualitatively. Giving it all up was not an option, though, like suicide, the thought of it was a comfort in dark times. Gradually, it occurred to me that I might be able to leave my life without leaving my self.

I was bored of my all-forgiving husband and my kind, clever friends, of the detritus of a long-desired affair that had failed to make me feel alive. Bored of being surrounded by love, by love’s strangling ties, its demands, its penumbra of guilt. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Or rather, I didn’t want anyone to know I’d hurt them on purpose. When the police receive a missing person report, after the data catches up with you, they must call the person who filed it, explain that their loved one is still alive but desires never to be contacted again.

The procedure was simple enough. Two physical copies are made, lab-grown with the endless potential of unpruned neuronal connections. The original brain is partitioned and scanned. They say there is immense suffering, feelings of pain and terror as the construction of will and consciousness comes undone, as memory and thought and self slip away. These memories die with the host body.

At first, we did not need to speak to each other. After we signed the forms, we wordlessly agreed to simply flip a coin from our mother-self’s purse. I knew the odds, but somehow I still believed it would be me.

With our futures revealed, our twinned mental processes began to diverge. We decided that I would go home first, say good night so that the patient, wonderful man I would never escape would not worry, so that there would be no break in continuity. Numbness dulled panic as I finished packing and set the suitcases outside the front door, ID and boarding passes on top.

When I saw the face outside the window, saw from outside for the first time the fear wrapped in tightness, the body wired to flinch from touch, the darting eyes already looking for something more, something different, it became obvious that we would never be free of myself, would never be free of our inability to love anything back, of our ache for detachment. From the last filaments of our connection I knew the being outside did not know this, may, cursed with freedom, pursue this forever and never know it.

And when she turned to look back, before dissolving into darkness, I didn’t know what she was thinking at all.