The night of the following Wednesday, in his loft, Uri settled in the same chair in which Juzo had made him sit to tell him about the project.

He set aside some envelopes with beads and pamphlets on the table as he had done with those classified files and photos, now lost, took his cell phone and searched again for news about deserters and stolen files on secret projects related to Markabia or the Edda Peninsula.

Nothing. Of course. What had made him think this time he would be lucky if he’d no longer had it the previous times he had tried?

He took one of those envelopes, crumpled it up, and tossed it on the floor. It was the receipt of the cremation services that took care of Juzo’s body.

“What are you gonna do with his ashes?” Sarah had asked him the day before.

Taciturn as ever, Uri had taken the small urn with his twin’s remains. “I’ll take care of him,” he’d said.

Now, the urn rested on a shelf that hung on the wall of the living room, near the photograph of him on the rocks by the sea.

He put on some music, went to the kitchen, got a beer from the fridge, sat down on the living room couch in front of a large window, and with his eyes on the city, he sipped it.

Until it was time to go pick up his date.

He had arranged to go to dinner with one of the pretty nurses he met at the hospital.

When he got into the car—which he had taken back from the Proxima Traffic Department, after having paid a fine to the hateful traffic robot for having abandoned it on the avenue—he felt a strange sense of unease; as if he feared the situation experienced that Friday night would repeat itself. He avoided all the streets he had taken that time with Juzo and crossed as far as he could from Liberty Park.

He went for the nurse at her place, went to dinner at a fancy restaurant, and chatted while they waited for the main dish. The conversation revolved around how she lived with three cats in a studio apartment, without the janitor noticing. He nodded now and then as if he were listening to the most interesting thing in the world, although the memories of Juzo wounded in the park, the old photographs that illustrated the horrors of the project, and the fear he’d felt when the Cyclops android stood in front of him, just before from blacking out, kept playing over and over in his head like a song on loop mode.

So, he excused himself and went to the restroom.

While peeing, the first encounter with Juzo at the B-Crush nightclub came to mind, and again, the chills.

He washed his hands, and when he looked in the mirror, frowned. First, he thought that his imagination was playing tricks on him, and careful not to get his pants wet with the water around the sink, he got close to the mirror to look better. He rubbed his chin, and it felt rough: the shadow that covered his face was not an illusion but a real stubble.

He tried to remember when was the last time he had shaved, and weirdly enough, he realized there was no such record in his memory. How was it possible not to have seen that hair repopulation before?

He washed his face as if that would make them disappear and stared at his own reflection for a while. He panicked. Then, he realized that something was wrong above his head as well. His hairstyle was undone, and his brown hair somewhat darker. It didn’t look bad on him, but he looked different; it wasn’t him.

He, Uri O22, had become Juzo Romita.

He sulked and went back to the table. The girl was waiting for him, but he had lost not only his appetite but also the desire to continue with the date. Now he just wanted to go back to his loft, shave, and maybe make an appointment with a shrink.

Striving not to be rude and ruin the evening, he waited to finish the dessert and pay the bill and offered the girl to take her place and leave having a drink in the privacy of his own place for another time. He didn’t care what her wishes were; he wanted to go back to his apartment and try to understand how he’d gained that most uncomfortable similarity with Juzo.

An hour later, he did.

That night the caretaker on duty was a boring guy Uri never spoke to. Luckily, the old Ruben N43 wasn’t there; he didn’t feel like talking or listening to silly jokes.

He opened the door to his loft, turned on the light, and a spark burned the lamps. Stress overload, he told himself; it was not the first time that happened.

Thanks to the glare of the street coming through the windows, he guided himself into the dark and went to the kitchen to switch on another light. He took a deep breath before pressing the button, waiting for his static energy to subside, but it happened again. Cursed. Went to the living-room lamp, and this time he not only blew the bulb, but he also received a shock that glowed in the dark.

“Shit!” he yelled and shook his hand until the nasty tingling was gone.

Staying away from any electrical outlet, he took off his shoes to touch the floor with his bare feet; one of his lady friends had told him that way you got rid of excess static energy. He felt a tingling on the soles of his feet as if they were numb, and after a few steps, the discomfort worsened so much he had the sensation of walking on needles.

“And now what?!”

Stitches went through his joints. He staggered, and before he could topple, he released some discharges that soared like vipers of white light, blazing in the gloom, looking for invisible preys. The energy flowing from him made him taste a sparkling poison, strangling his heart.

And suddenly, it occurred to him how to stop that scourge. If it had worked for Juzo, even if they were different things, maybe if he…

He stretched out his arm and contracted his fingers, imitating the gesture his brother had made. The discharges stopped dancing around him and accumulated in his hand, taking the shape of a ball of fire, of white fire. And the suffering ceased.

Frightened—and very, very astonished—he discovered he had created a Fotia.

No, it was not a Fotia like Juzo’s; this wasn’t just a bunch of electric shocks but a real ball of fire, a strange white fire that sizzled in his hand, but didn’t burn his skin.

Once again, imitating what Juzo had done that time, he contracted his fingers twice and made the fireball disintegrate.

Uri’s hand tingled, a tingle he didn’t know if it was from the shock of the moment or from carrying a mass of fire. He waited for the feeling to fade and repeated the show. Although this time, to make it disappear, he didn’t contract his fingers, only thought about it. The fireball disappeared.

“Right, right…” he whispered, gasping and excited. “You don’t have implants in your wrists, Uri… But then, how—?”

The mind.

Yes, the mind. He controlled it with his mind.

Looking to repeat the fireball a third time, now with the other hand, he reached out, took a deep breath, thought about doing it, and ZAP! Electricity reawakened in the form of white flames. But suddenly, it shot itself like lightning at the ceiling.

Uri screamed, and with his arms, shielded himself from the pieces of ceiling that fell on top of him. Covered with bits of debris and paint chips, he spat the dust out of his mouth, rubbed his eyes, and looked at the hole he had made above his head. He gritted in fear.

“Though late,” he heard his own voice say to him; “the project has finally concluded.”

It wasn’t the voice of his thoughts; this new voice had come from his lips. At that moment, Uri realized there was someone else nesting inside him; another person next to his spirit, hidden under the big noses of his conscience.

Plunged into the gloom, he looked at himself in the living room mirror; perhaps to make sure he was alone and that the voice he was hearing was indeed coming from him. In the shadows, he found his reflection and looked at it as if he were watching someone else.

His mouth was the one moving, but it was Juzo who spoke through it.

“Now you and I are one entity,” Juzo told him.

“What do you mean by that?” Uri asked, and when he saw himself speaking to his own reflection, he felt stupid. No, more than stupid; he felt crazy.

Electric flames erupted between his fingers again as if it were spontaneous combustion.

He tried to make them disappear with a thought, but this time they were so out of control they seemed to ignore his orders. So, he sought to put them out by shaking his arms; and while those mysterious Fotias were harmless to him, brushing them against his legs caused the sparks to set his pants on fire. He screamed, and responding to his despair, the ball of energy disappeared. He took off his jean as fast as he could, threw them on the floor, and stepped on them until the small fire was out.

On his thigh, where the fire had kissed him, there was a red stain. He touched it, and it burned.

He went to get the burn cream in the bathroom and stopped feeling the contact with the floor; he looked down and found himself walking in the air, five feet above the ground. Down there was the parquet floor.

And with the grace of a free-falling lead bag, Uri returned to the floor, hooked his foot on one of the dining room chairs, and tipped it over. Sore and nauseous, he stood up and ran to the bathroom to return dinner. He stumbled on the way, though he managed to get to the toilet in time.

He used his hand to wipe his mouth and flopped back against the shower wall—his eyes puffy from gagging.

Uri had just learned he had ceased to be yet another cast member of a macabre sci-fi play to take on the starring role.