Rikki Times Two

The low hum of the lab—usually a steady, tectonic drone that Tim had long since learned to tune out as part of the house’s ambient noise—was gone. In its place was an eerie silence, broken only by the wet sizzle of something shorting out and the frantic ticking of the old kitchen clock.

Tim stood in the doorway, his coffee cup cold against his palm. He had come looking for his father, hoping to find Walter lost in a tangle of copper wire and schematics, as usual. But when he looked at Rikki standing beside him—her vibrant energy suddenly coiled tight, her eyes wide with a quiet, terrifying dread—he knew something was terribly wrong.

Rikki squeezed his hand, her fingers digging into his skin. "Tim," she whispered, her voice trembling just enough to make the sound feel fragile. "I think he's hurt himself."

Before Tim could answer, the heavy steel door of the lab groaned and slid open. A wave of ozone and scorched metal hit them, followed by a puff of gray smoke that clung to the floorboards like fog.

Through the haze, a figure stepped out.

Tim blinked, expecting to see his father's familiar, hunched shoulders—Walter was never upright—and his ink-stained fingers, or perhaps the pale, perpetually sunburned skin that always seemed one bad day away from peeling off. Instead, Tim felt a jolt of pure, unadulterated confusion.

The figure was Rikki.

Not her face exactly—it wasn't just a face swap—but every curve, every line, down to the way a single drop of condensation clung to a collarbone. It was Rikki's body, naked and glistening under the harsh lab lights, unashamedly so. Tim felt his stomach turn over in a sickening lurch; the visual dissonance made his head spin. He wanted to look away out of sheer filial embarrassment, but he couldn't take his eyes off it. The sensory impact was overwhelming—a ghost wearing Rikki's skin.

But then the figure moved.

It scratched at its side with a smudged, soot-blackened finger, leaving a streak of dirt on pristine skin, and tilted its head—Rikki's head turning on Walter's neck—with a sickening crack of cartilage.

"Fascinating," the clone murmured. But it wasn't Rikki's voice; it was Walter's gravelly baritone, distorted and echoing as if coming from inside a tin can. "The transference protocol held. The biomass recalibration is... complete."

Tim stood frozen on the threshold, his coffee cup forgotten in his grip. He felt like an outsider in his own life, watching reality fracture under the weight of his dad's genius. Walter was brilliant in spades, but Tim had never seen him do anything that didn't involve a calculator or a half-eaten sandwich. The sheer absurdity of it left him tongue-tied, rooted to the spot by the cognitive dissonance of seeing Rikki standing there—naked and talking about biomass—with his father's eyes.

Rikki let out a sharp inhale and took a step back, her heel catching on the edge of the rug. Her face was flushed crimson as she stared at the naked thing wearing her face, her panic rapidly curdling into horror. "Tim," she breathed out, grabbing his arm with a grip that was both **** and grounding. "Your dad... ."

The clone turned its head again, this time looking directly at Tim. A slow, unnerving smile spread across Rikki's face in a way that felt entirely wrong—like seeing a puppet being manipulated by invisible strings. The expression didn't match the eyes staring out from behind it; those eyes were Walter's: sharp, calculating, and utterly devoid of shame or self-awareness.

"I assure you," the clone said, raising Rikki's hand to inspect its own palm as if it belonged to a stranger, "this is for science."