At the wrap party for Stinger, her first leading role, Julie asked her co-star, Hannah Price, if she would rather be rich or famous. At that point, Hannah was both richer and more famous than Julie, so she was surprised when Hannah didn’t hesitate.

“Famous.” Hannah plucked a mini spring roll off a platter of hors d’oeuvres and placed it in a napkin. “Ask me why.”

“Why?”

“Because no amount of money can buy the look on people’s faces when you walk into a room.” Hannah smiled and lifted the glass of champagne in her other hand. “Cheers,” she said, biting into her spring roll.

Julie never particularly liked Hannah Price, but she thought about that exchange every time she ran into someone like the clerk at AM/PM Convenience in Sagebrush, Nevada. Fat gauges jutted from the tall clerk’s ears, and her expression in the half-second before she registered who walked in reflected abject boredom. “How can I help—?”

Julie smiled and glanced down at the clerk’s name tag. “Hi, Valentina.” The clerk shivered in a Julie-Penrose-just-said-my-name kind of way. Julie picked a Diet Coke out of the cooler and a bag of Skittles from the rack on the counter. She had just taken the card out of her bag when she remembered something she should have said when she walked in. “No pictures, sorry.” She gestured at her messy blonde bun and lack of makeup, then paid and swept everything into her bag.

“Have a good day,” Julie said.

“You were great in Songs of Devotion,” Valentina blurted out as though she felt guilty for not saying anything before.

“Wonderful movie, isn’t it? I only managed to make it through that shoot by picturing myself roasting the director alive on a spit.” Julie realized, from Valentina’s horrified expression, that a convenience store clerk in the Nevada desert may not have known about the Molyneux debacle and attempted damage control with a slightly-too-loud laugh. “Only kidding! Only kidding. You take care, hon, okay?”

Julie walked out of the store and got into her car, relieved that she wouldn’t have to go out in public for a month.

********************

As she zipped through the Great Basin Desert in her Lexus, the midday sun making her squint even through her sunglasses, Julie thought about Songs of Devotion. She was proud of her work, of course, and the Oscar nomination had opened plenty of doors for her, but there was only so many times she could bear being thrown off a horse while an Einstein-haired Canadian called her a worthless cunt for not looking wretched enough, and Armand Molyneux well surpassed it. Sometime during the awards campaign, he called to “apologize,” saying he only meant to help get her into Rhoda’s mindset. Why he didn’t do the same for Tim Bryant when his character went through just as much shit as hers, he didn’t say.

Sobbing fits in her trailer couldn’t help her cope with him, and picking up smoking again didn’t help either. After a week and a half, the idea came to her: she would imagine herself turning a spit over an open fire, Molyneux’s phlegmy honk of a voice wailing in agony as the fat rendered from his pale, saggy carcass. The vision comforted her, and it was cathartic to make it a reality (metaphorically, at least) when she spoke out alongside some of his past collaborators/victims, which sent him packing back to Quebec.

Julie rolled down her window, pulled a cigarette from her bag, and lit it. The nicotine hit her like a breath of fresh air. She knew she wouldn’t have to imagine Peter Vos roasting on a spit. Vos made the kind of ambitious, conceptual movies that nobody made anymore, and they hardly ever got a big budget for mass appeal. When her agent sent her his latest script, she read it lying on her stomach in bed, kicking her legs like a giddy seventh-grader, occasionally bursting into laughter out of sheer excitement. The title was Tanya Zero: an existential sci-fi thriller about the tyrannical head of a scientific research facility and her vengeful clone, set entirely within the labyrinthine confines of the facility itself.

She knew she was a yes after five pages.

Julie flicked her cigarette out the open window as she pulled up to the gate of the Sagebrush Research Facility, where a dark-skinned, balding man who looked like her boss the summer she worked at Dunkin’ Donuts asked for her ID. She used to daydream about moments like this: she heaving a weary sigh, slightly lowering her sunglasses, and watching the gatekeeper stifle a gasp before he waved her along with an “All clear, Miss Penrose.” But she had received only a temporary ID for the shoot, so she dug it out of her bag and handed it over.

********************

Vos waited for her in a meeting room to the left of the reception desk, with sky-blue carpeting and a brown round table half-bathed in light from the window. They talked on Zoom for months during pre-production, but this was Julie’s first time meeting him in the flesh. He looked friendly enough in a baseball cap and a black t-shirt, and his round, dimpled face made him look even more Dutch than his heritage declared. Julie shook his hand; Vos grimaced in a way that indicated he knew his hands were sweaty, so she pretended not to notice.

“There won’t be many windows where we’re filming,” he said, “so enjoy the sunlight while you can.”

“I don’t mind. My mom was a chemist and she used to work someplace just like this. I went to daycare there.”

“Oh? What did she work on?”

His curiosity seemed genuine, which made Julie wish she had a more specific answer. “Either cereal additives or Agent Orange. She never really talked about work.” A white lie: she talked about her work with Dad, but their paranoia led them to learn Cornish so nobody could listen in. This turned out to be overkill since the only person present was a bored teenage girl with a C+ in chemistry.

“Speaking of scientists.” Vos gestured to a perky middle-aged woman with a black ponytail who was so tiny Julie quietly checked to see if she was sitting on a phone book. She sprung up to introduce herself.

“Hi there! Dr. Ellen Messerschmidt. I’m the head of biotech here and I’ll be consulting.” She spoke with the kind of cheerful raspy Brooklyn accent that gave the impression she was chewing gum. She shook Julie’s hand and kept talking. “I gotta say, I’m trying not to sound like a fangirl, but Land’s End? One of my all-time favorite movies. I know you played a geologist and not a biologist, but just…” She made a vague clutching gesture with her hands. “The way you embodied that sense of scientific curiosity under this outer shell of strict discipline? And seeing that shell just melt away as you get closer with Margaret. Terrific stuff.”

“Oh! Uh, thank you.” Julie tried not to sound too flustered. It was one thing to smile and nod along to Hollywood ass-kissing, but hearing sincere praise from someone grasping for the right words always caught her off-guard.

“Now, how much of the geology did you know about? Did you study or was it just reading lines?”

Julie glanced over at Vos and found him busy texting somebody. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, so Julie happily indulged Messerschmidt for a bit.

“Well, Libby Crockett directed Land’s End—one of my favorite people to work with, actually. You should watch the other movies I did with her. She’s always really insistent that her actors know exactly what they’re talking about, so she gives us homework. And I’m not the sort of actor who needs to do that, but she makes it fun.” Julie heard the door open, and from the corner of her eye she saw three Sagebrush employees walk in. She noticed one young woman’s glossy blonde hair before continuing. “So I did a lot of reading about nineteenth century geology and went out in the field a few times. By the time we started filming, I really knew my stuff, but Libby would always quiz me on the spot.” Her subconscious mind noticed something else about the woman who walked in, but it took a moment for it to register. “We’d stand on the shore talking about something and she’d point to the lighthouse rock and go, ‘Now, is that granite pluton or country rock?’ She wanted you to be quick about it, too.” Julie laughed; Vos looked up from his phone. “No, but it was a really enriching ex—”

Her throat froze up. Her lips closed. Her eyes went wide and glassy like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. For the first time in her life, she experienced being stunned into silence by the presence of Julie Penrose.

“You can call me J,” said Julie’s clone.

********************

Julie spent the next hour lobbing questions at Vos, Messerschmidt, and J through a woozy daze, like a tennis player powering through a fit of vertigo.

Why? “It was a long shot at first,” Vos said. “I heard that Sagebrush made big strides in the field of cloning while doing research for the script, and I reached out asking if I could get involved somehow. It was one of those crazy ideas you get early in the process, the kind never actually work out. I didn’t think I’d get an answer.”

How? “Listen, Julie,” Messerschmidt said, with a self-effacing grin, “if I got in the weeds to explain it, it’d take twelve hours.”

Is she really a clone? “That’s right!” J said. “Our DNA is completely identical.”

Does she have that birthmark right over her tailbone? “Sure do!” J turned around and lifted up the back of her shirt.

How come she sounds different, then? “She doesn’t smoke,” said Messerschmidt.

Won’t that be a problem in the movie? “I can modulate my voice like this,” said J, imitating Julie’s voice exactly.

Can she please not do that when we’re not filming? “No problem! Sorry about that.”

What happens to her when the film wraps? “She’ll stay with us at Sagebrush,” Messerschmidt said, clasping her hand onto J’s wrist like a proud mom. “We’ll monitor the way she ages and develops in comparison to you.”

That spawned a whole bunch of questions that continued until Julie’s curiosity and patience ran out, and the four of them made their way inside the facility proper. The reception area for Sagebrush looked more or less modern, but beyond that, concrete walls, chipped linoleum, and a cicada’s chorus of fluorescent lights ushered them through corridors that resembled a warren dug by a deeply paranoid rabbit.

After what seemed like an hour of echoing footsteps, they showed Julie to her dressing room, which also doubled as her room-room. It must have been a lab at some point—a faint chemical odor hung in the air, and some old splotches that appeared to date from the Nixon administration stained the walls—though no dangerous equipment remained. The room now sported a cot, a trunk, and a vanity for hair and makeup. Assistants would come down shortly with the rest of her luggage and make everything a bit more homey, but, on the whole, she preferred the Chateau Marmont. Still, she wasn’t too proud; at least there was Wi-Fi.

Halfway through entering the twenty-five-digit internet password taped on the vanity mirror, Julie heard a knock at her door. When she answered, she found J smiling and bearing a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies—Julie’s favorite snack when she was growing up. “These are the ones, right?”

The cookies helped assuage Julie’s uneasiness of opening the door to find her doppelganger. “They certainly are. Please, come in.” Then, suddenly suspicious: “How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Pete gave them to me so I could break the ice.” J pointed at the cot. “Can I sit there? Sorry they couldn’t put you up somewhere nicer.”

“I don’t mind. I did a movie called Heather a few years ago. Filmed in the Hebrides, got eaten alive by midges. This is like a Marriott next to that.” Julie paused, then tilted her head. “Wait, do you remember the…?”

“Nope. I don’t have your memories.”

“Ohhh, got it.” Another question bubbled to the surface. “Then how can you speak? My memories include the things I’ve learned, right? Why aren’t you talking like Jodie Foster in Nell?”

J knit her brow. “I don’t really know how to answer that.”

“Never mind. Yeah, you can sit down.” Julie joined her on the cot, which creaked beneath them. “So, I’m guessing you can act, right? Or they wouldn’t be doing this in the first place.” J opened the box of cookies and Julie popped one into her mouth.

“I mean…” J gave a demure, somewhat sheepish smile, the kind Julie rarely gave anymore. “I think I can? Part of why they’re doing this is the question of…what’s it called? Nature versus nurture.”

“So are you nature or nurture in this case?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how did you learn to act? Did you learn to act?” Julie gesticulated with a cookie before taking a bite. “Do they have a clone of Uta Hagen down there, too?”

J smiled, a little coy. “What if we did?”

Julie sat there for a minute, starting to wonder for what exactly she signed herself up. “Can you do a monologue?”

“Hm?”

“A monologue. So I can see what I’ll be up against.”

“Umm…” J gave a self-conscious laugh. “Sure. What should I do?”

“Whatever you’ve got. Shakespeare? Or you could do one from the script?”

J closed her eyes, took a breath. Julie noticed that her tongue flicked out across her lips for a brief moment, like a lizard’s, just like she always did before a monologue.

Then, she began.

It was from Persona—of course it would be. It was Alma’s monologue towards Elisabet, the one about the boy in the photograph, Elisabet’s son she came to resent. Despite being translated from Swedish into English, J delivered the lines as if speaking them for the first time. It felt odd and a little masturbatory to essentially marvel over her own acting prowess, but Julie sat rapt.

She watched as J made careful, finely-tuned adjustments in her tone and delivery, not mimicking Bibi Andersson but creating something of her own. When she said, “Tell me about it, Elisabet,” her voice soothed Julie like a warm cup of tea. J’s hand reached out to Julie’s, brushing her fingers over her knuckles. When she followed it with, “Then I will,” a single drop of strychnine tainted the tea, and as she traced the contours of Alma’s monologue, moving from bitter spite to cold judgment to quiet pity as she described Elisabet wishing for her baby to die, she didn’t blink once.

When J finished, she took a deep breath through her nose and smiled. “How was that?” She leaned in, brows raised, like an overachieving freshman taking notes.

Julie sat in stunned silence. Her expression presented a three-way tug-of-war between awe, anger, and fear. “Do you know where I can get a drink of water?” she finally asked.

********************

Except for Friday, the first week of filming went by without incident. Julie had been on sets that felt like frontier boomtowns, chaotic little cities swarming with grips and gaffers and extras that sprung up in a matter of days. Sometimes that chaos could be endearing in a Day for Night kind of way, but other times it made Julie want to grab the director by the shoulders and shake them. In any case, Tanya Zero was the neatest set she’d ever seen, moving with an unfussy, motorik efficiency she understood to be typical of a Vos production.

Each day, after a morning scrub in what she sincerely hoped wasn’t a former decontamination shower, Julie got a knock at her door. A stringy-haired PA in a gray hoodie would give her the breakfast sandwich and coffee he fetched from the nearest McDonald’s, which she scarfed down in double-time. Then came hair and makeup, wardrobe, and any other stations she needed to visit before arriving on set. At the day’s end, she went through the same process in reverse. Tuesday morning, she sat for a few hours so makeup could attach an acid-burn prosthetic to her face. Thursday evening, she recorded a video message for the cinematographer’s niece, speaking in-character as a cat with OCD she voiced in a Disney movie last year. Nonetheless, the broad, daily strokes remained the same.

The only part that really bothered her was J. She came in every single day, even when they weren’t shooting her scenes. She arrived before Julie and would only return to her room once the day wrapped. This alone wasn’t unusual—Julie tried to do the same thing—but usually being on set all the time meant chatting with the crew, consulting with the director, or mingling with the rest of the cast. J didn’t talk to anyone: didn’t chat with Julie, didn’t give notes to Vos, didn’t pick the prop master’s brain, didn’t joke around with the assistant director. She just sat in a folding chair off to the side, munching on peanuts from craft service and watching in patient silence.

It was difficult to stay in the mindset of a ruthless, relentlessly practical scientist with a walking existential crisis in her periphery. She wanted to ask J if she maybe wouldn’t mind fucking off back to her amniotic vat or wherever the fuck they kept her, please. But, Julie could think of no reason for being a diva half a mile underground, and it wasn’t like J was doing anything to her. Because of this, she put on a pair of metaphorical blinders and blocked her out, which worked for a while.

Because Julie didn’t want to walk half an hour to the facility’s exit every time she needed a cigarette, she took to using a nearby bathroom with a convenient ceiling vent. The decor somehow felt less inviting than the rest of the facility—it reminded Julie of those old Soviet apartment buildings, boxy and concrete—but nobody would catch her and the vent carried the smoke up.

Friday night, when she ducked into the bathroom for one last smoke before bed, Julie discovered that the vent also carried voices down.

“She’s learning quickly, isn’t she?” she heard Vos say, whose makeshift office was one floor up.

“Doesn’t surprise me. Julie’s pretty bright, so it only stands to reason.” That was Messerschmidt, although it took Julie a second to recognize her voice. She spoke softer in private and sounded exhausted.

Vos responded, but Julie only caught the last two words. “...second thoughts?”

A long pause. “I don’t know. It just seems like a real shame.” Julie froze at those words. Her ears perked and her cigarette rested forgotten between her fingers.

Messerschmidt must have been standing over the vent, because Vos’s voice barely came through. “Ellen, I completely understand. But…” He went inaudible again, and Julie gritted her teeth until another phrase drifted down. “...another million? Five?”

An even longer pause. “Ten.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

After a moment, Julie realized she dropped her cigarette. When she went to stomp it out, she missed her first try.

********************

Julie didn’t consider herself as an envious person—at least not anymore. She struggled with it back when she sat in crowded blonde waiting rooms reading and re-reading the script for stuff like Spill Your Guts VI: Truth or Die!, but now she had the luxury of being happy for other people’s success.

J tested that notion.

Most of the film focused on J: TM-06 was the one tricking, seducing, and killing her way out of her containment, and the script gave her a couple monologues Julie wished she could sink her teeth into. But, as the original Dr. Tanya Matheson—or Tanya Zero—Julie had the titular role, and the climactic unraveling of her cold, clinical persona offered plenty of room for play. Besides, if just a bit of upstaging sent her into a jealous spiral, she would have long ago killed Hannah Price with her bare hands.

It also bothered Julie how the crew reacted during J’s takes. Everyone acted as if in the presence of greatness. As TM-06 stalked down corridors or whispered in some poor scientist’s ear as she injected him with neurotoxin, Julie saw wonder on their faces. Restrained, professional awe flashed in the eyes of grips and boom operators as they captured lightning in a bottle. It happened after every take, no matter how trivial: J opening a door with a passcode garnered the same rapt attention as Mission Control watching the moon landing.

Despite this, J herself seemed oblivious to it all. When she wasn’t on camera, she stood or sat wherever she was supposed to stand or sit; when Vos came over to give her notes in between takes, she stared at him with pleasant cow eyes, punctuating his sentences with three quick nods.

“The thing about TM-06,” he might say, “is that no matter how violent she gets, she’s a chess player at heart.”

Nod-nod-nod.

Or he might say, “For this next take, think of a venomous spider. That’s what you’re trying to channel.”

Nod-nod-nod.

Then he’d step back, say “action,” and J would channel a venomous, chess-playing spider. The whole crew tried to stifle their amazement as Julie failed to stifle her rolling eyes.

One night near the end of filming, when Julie couldn’t sleep, she decided to take the elevator up to Vos’s office and knock on his door. Halfway through the elevator ride, she realized it was stupid to expect him awake at this hour, but it was too late to turn back. When the doors opened, she marched over to his office.

Before she knocked, she heard his voice burrow through the door. She stood outside the door and listened. “—shouldn’t be a problem at all. How about co-stars?”

“Co-stars?” came J’s voice, in her usual earnest schoolgirl mode. “I mean, I didn’t really think of that as I watched the homework you gave, but…”

“Hmm?”

“Well, I don’t know.” A shy little laugh. “Tim Bryant? Jason Schrader?”

“How about Sean Becker?”

“Ohhh, I loved him in the one with the bank robbery. That’d be an honor.”

Sean Becker. Disgraced asshole Sean Becker. Hit-his-girlfriend Sean Becker. Spat-on-Julie-after-their-argument-scene-in-Shipbuilding Sean Becker. Julie-spoke-out-and-ended-his-career-except-maybe-not Sean Becker. Julie balled her hand into a fist so hard it shook.

“Good taste,” Vos said.

********************

“It’ll be fun,” Vos said, “for you two to switch places, don’t you think?”

Julie sat in the makeup chair and stared at her reflection as the artists did her up like TM-06. Pale complexion, bags under the eyes, a scar on the left cheek acquired from the fight against Tanya Zero’s second-in-command. At this point in the shoot, they really only needed to add the scar.

“It’s just a treat for the last day of filming,” Vos added. “Just for kicks, really.”

J was on set by the time Julie arrived, of course, sitting in a folding chair with her hair pulled into a tight bun. Bandages covered her fingers from the scene where Tanya Zero accidentally rested her hand on a Bunsen burner to show the toll this clone business took on her. Vos gave J notes, his hand resting on her shoulder. She stared straight ahead, smiling like a dutiful concierge.

J nailed it, of course, just to show Julie that she could.

********************

Julie didn’t know if J would be awake at this hour, but she didn’t really care. She stalked down the hall at two in the morning after the last day of filming, her bare feet thwapping against the linoleum, her phone flashlight searching for the door with the slip of paper taped on it that read “J” in sans-serif font.

Julie swung the door open without knocking and flipped on the lights; J awoke, but didn’t seem particularly startled. Maybe she expected this, or maybe she hadn’t been taught to fear intruders.

“You know what really gets me about all this?” Julie asked.

“Mrrrm?”

“You’re getting the shit end of the stick.” Julie closed the door behind her, walking closer to J’s bed. “I don’t know what they’re telling you or what you’ll have to do out there, but if it’s my life you want, you’re not getting it.”

J squinted at her but said nothing, which Julie took as a cue to keep going.

“I love my job. I love my life. But that’s because I choose it. I shape it. I work with the directors whose movies I saw in lousy little arthouse theaters back in college. I take pay cuts for great scripts if a new talent needs to get their foot in the door. And I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I don’t have to work with assholes if I don’t want to. Do you know how good that feels after putting up with eighteen years of bullshit?”

Again, no response. Julie continued.

“You know where I’d be if I did everything some guy in an office told me to do? I’d be playing kissy-face in a rom-com with a chronic masturbator. I’d be in five different true crime miniseries no one watched. I’d be in the seventh year of a Marvel contract trying to work up chemistry with a fucking tennis ball. That’s what you’re in for, J. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll hate it so bad you’ll want to bash your brains in.” She inhaled, nostrils flaring. “And Sean Becker’s breath smells like a drunk onion, so have fun with that.”

J stared up at Julie with moon-placid eyes. “Julie, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I know it’s been a weird shoot, and maybe you’re getting cabin fever down here, but—”

“But what?” Julie realized she was looming over J’s bed at this point, but she wanted to loom. “What do you think is going to happen, huh? They made you in a vat and taught you to act god-knows-fucking-how, and that’s it? They just let you hang out in their basement taking a blood test once a month? How much do you think it cost to make you? Think about it!”

“That’s not—”

“Think about it! Wouldn’t it be cheaper to clone a fucking mailman or something? Eight billion, nine billion people on the planet they could’ve cloned, and they picked me? Why me?”

“Julie, listen—”

“Why me?”

********************

Later that day, at AM/PM Convenience, Julie bought two packs of Newports, thanked Valentina, and drove west.