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04:34 pm - Replacements

When I came downstairs this morning, there was an intruder in my dining room. He had already made coffee and was drinking the first cup worth.



"Who the hell are you?" I asked, reflexively taking a defensive stance.



He barely gave me more than a glance, entirely unconcerned. "Oh. Good morning." He took a sip of the coffee. "I'm you now. Your doppelganger replacement. You've been replaced."



This took a few seconds for my un-coffee'd brain to process. "My what?"



"Why don't you have the other half of the pot?" he suggested. I had to admit, that was a good idea. "Might as well sit down, too," he added, but I wasn't getting within arm's reach of him. I stood in the kitchen, flexing my weight slightly back and forth on the balls of my feet in case it turned into a fight.



Finally, once the first sips of brown benediction began to do their thing, I tried again: "You're my doppelganger replacement?"



"Yeah," he said, still casual, checking email on his phone. No, wait: on *my* phone!



"That's my phone!" I exclaimed, and reached for it. He snatched it away.



"No," he said, "it's my phone now. You're replaced. Or at least, you will be once the waveform collapses."



"Waveform?"



"Yeah," he said. "Right now we're in a state of superposition. Like the cat, right? We're both you, or neither of us are you. In an unobserved eigenstate. Soon, only one of us will be you again. Which will be me."



"You can't be me," I growled. "You're, what, six inches shorter than me, but probably fifty or sixty pounds heavier as well!"



He shrugged. "Details. You're not important enough to line up a really identical replacement."



I tried not to be offended. The guy was clearly crazy. "Get out!" I told him. He looked at me for several seconds, clearly considering a range of responses, before finally setting down my coffee mug and getting up to head to the door.



"Doesn't matter," he said. "I'll leave right now, but you've been replaced. The sooner you can accept that, the sooner your life can move on."



"Move on…?!" I practically shouted. "Move on without me, you mean!"



He nodded. "Now you're getting it. Your life will move on, only with me-you, not you-you." Then he was out the door.



After locking the door, I showered and got dressed and tried not to think about the weirdo anymore. But when I went out to my car, he was already sitting in the driver's seat.



"What are you doing here?!" I shouted.



"I waited for you," he said. "Your life can't move forward while we're both activated, so we need to stick together until you accept your fate."



"Get out of my car!"



"Make me," he said, simply, without hostility or aggression or anything. Just a challenge stated like a fact.



I couldn't. He was just too big and too firmly planted there.



"If it'll make you feel better," he said, "you can drive." He pushed over to the passenger seat.



I stood there a long time trying to think of something else to try, but ultimately I couldn't come up with anything. So I got into the driver seat and off we went.



At the office, we both piled out and headed through the front doors… then I went straight up to a security guard. "I'm being stalked by this guy," I told him. "We need to do something about him."



The guard gave no sign of having heard or seen me. My new "friend" strolled up alongside. "Nobody's going to notice us," he said, "until we collapse the waveform."



I poked the guard a couple of times, with no response. Seriously?



At the door into our wing, I tried to badge open the lock and squeeze through without letting him tailgate, but he wedged his bulk in before I could get the door closed, and slipped in along with me. Same thing at my office door. He was simply impossible to shake.



The whole time, nobody seemed to notice us at all. No response to being addressed, nothing.



I had two chairs in my office. We each sat down and looked at the keyboard of my admin machine. He woke the machine up, signed in with my password, and fired up my email. "I know all your passwords," he said. "Didn't have to be told or anything. Just knew them. Comes with the job."



The whole world was reeling. I felt like I was going to vomit; I put my head between my knees and tried to breathe deeply, calmly until blackout passed. When it was finally under control again, I sat back up. My replacement was sitting there looking at me. "I think we're there," he said. "You know what to do."



Weirdly enough, I did. I got up, went to the door. "Good luck with my life," I said, handing him my badge.



I went downstairs and out of the building, feeling tugged by a strange sense of sudden direction. Out to the sidewalk, walk, walk, walk a ways until suddenly I found myself at a house in a nearby neighborhood.



There was a pretty nice car parked in the driveway. I had no problem opening it up, getting in. I sat in the passenger's seat until a fellow came out, easily twenty years older than me. He leapt back, startled, when he saw me in the car.



"Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in my car?"



"Actually," I told him simply, calmly, "it's my car. I'm your doppelganger. You've been replaced. Why don't you get in and drive while I explain to you how this works…"



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For consideration: think of me as the compact fluorescent to your incandescence