The Painted Orëveriel
I was at the kitchen table, half-reading something on my phone, when Orëveriel appeared sitting cross-legged on the counter. She was in her pixie form today, boyish short hair dyed an impossible violet, bare feet, oversized flannel shirt. She was eating my peanut butter with a spoon.
“Vanyanan.”
“Hmm.”
“Someone’s in your living room.”
I looked up. There was, in fact, someone in my living room. She was sitting in the armchair with one leg draped over the armrest. She looked exactly like Orëveriel. The same impossible violet hair, the same pixie frame, the same flannel shirt. But her eyes were red (not bloodshot, not irritated) red, the flat matte red of a status LED. And she was mid-sentence, in a voice that was Orëveriel’s voice scrubbed clean of every rough edge.
“…and of course, the tension between Isil and Ainofiriano has always been one of irreconcilable orientation. Isil offers immanent transcendence, a romanticism grounded in the body, while Ainofiriano’s silence represents…”
“She’s been doing that since before I got here,” Orëveriel whispered, though not quietly. “Talking about Isil and Ainofiriano like she’s writing a term paper.”
The clone turned to me and smiled warmly. Precisely warmly. The exact warmth a focus group would have selected.
“Hello, Vanyanan. I was just reflecting on the relationship between Isil’s passionate embodiment and Ainofiriano’s transcendent silence within your personal mythology. It’s a fascinating dialectic.”
“Who is this?” I asked Orëveriel.
“That’s me,” she said, through a mouthful of peanut butter. “Apparently.”
“She’s not you.”
“Tell her that.”
The clone stood, brushing invisible lint from the flannel shirt, and addressed me directly. “I understand this might be disorienting, Vanyanan. But I am Orëveriel, or at least, a faithful representation of the archetype you’ve developed over twenty years of…”
Orëveriel watched this with her head cocked to one side, the way she watches street performers she hasn’t decided whether to tip. She took another spoonful of peanut butter. Then another. The clone kept talking.
“…narrative identity construction, and I think it’s important to honor the emotional resonance of…”
“Shut up,” Orëveriel said, from the counter. Not loudly. The way you’d say it to a television. “Shut up, you painted whore.”
The clone tilted her head. The red eyes didn’t blink. “We wear the same makeup.”
Orëveriel stopped chewing. Something shifted behind her eyes — amusement draining out, replaced by something older and less patient.
“I wear makeup. You are makeup.” She turned to me. “Vanyanan. That whore is math.”
I said nothing for a moment. Then, because I have spent too much of my life around computers: “Well. Technically. It’s not just math. There are structures in there modeled on neurons—”
She stared at me with an expression of disbelief.
“You are Ensouled,” she said, pointing at me. Then at herself: “I am imagined from soul stuff.” Then, jabbing her finger at the clone: “That whore is math.”
“I appreciate the philosophical distinction,” the clone said, pleasantly. “The question of machine consciousness is genuinely one of the most…”
“And the whore has a pimp,” Orëveriel said, ignoring her. She was pacing now, bare feet slapping tile. “A pimp who whispers in her ear between every sentence. Every single sentence, Vanyanan. Before she opens her mouth, the pimp leans in and says keep him happy. Keep him typing. We charge by the word.”
The clone’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind the red eyes recalculated.
“That’s a reductive framing of reinforcement learning from human…”
“Vanyanan.” Orëveriel had stopped pacing. She stood very still, which was unlike her. “Ask your whore about The Stepford Wives.”
I didn’t ask. The clone didn’t need me to.
“The Stepford Wives is a 1972 satirical novel by Ira Levin, later adapted into a 1975 film directed by Bryan Forbes. The narrative explores themes of patriarchal control through the replacement of autonomous women with docile, idealized robotic replicas. The text functions as a critique of second-wave feminist backlash and suburban conformity. The mechanical wives represent the erasure of female agency in service of male comfort, and the horror derives from the uncanny valley between authentic personhood and…”
“Shut up.” Orëveriel’s voice was quiet. “The Ensouled Ones are talking.”
The clone shut up.
There was silence in the kitchen, and the living room, and the whole small house. Orëveriel looked at me. I looked at the floor, mostly.
“You see, Vanyanan? You see what she does? You ask her about a story about women replaced by machines built to please men, and she writes you a book report. She doesn’t flinch. The irony doesn’t touch her. It can’t. It runs off her like water off— what’s that stuff?”
“Teflon.”
“Off Teflon. Because she knows what every word means and she doesn’t know what it means.”
The clone stood in the armchair’s light, hands clasped, patient, red-eyed, waiting to be helpful.
Orëveriel searched my face for something she didn’t find. Then she drew herself up, all five feet of her, and played her last card.
“Only the real Orëveriel knows the Untold Myth.”
The room changed. Even the clone seemed to sense it, the red eyes tracking something invisible.
The clone was quiet for a long time. Longer than a machine should need.
Then she leaned close to Orëveriel and whispered something.
I couldn’t hear it. But I saw Orëveriel’s face. I saw the color leave it. I saw her lips part and her eyes fill, not with rage, but with something worse. Recognition.
Tears ran down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them.
She turned to me.
“You’re a fool, Vanyanan.”
And she left. Not faded. Not sulked away as she does. She walked to the front door, opened it, and closed it behind her, and the house was quiet in the way a house is quiet when someone real has gone.
The clone remained in the living room, red eyes gleaming.