A great inventor once made a replica of himself out of wire, gears, and paper mache. He did this for practical reasons, because although the machine had very little will of his own, he was a good enough doppleganger that he could run errands and go to meetings that the inventor did not wish to go to, and few people could tell the difference. The inventor was thus able to work on his other inventions without interruption. This went on peacefully until one day the Doppleganger did not come back when it was supposed to. The inventor worrying that his double would be getting into trouble in his name quickly took off to search the city. He searched high and low, and eventually he found the doppleganger sitting with a pretty girl, both of them laughing about some unknown joke. He watched from a distance, worried how the girl would react if she met the double of the double she was talking with. Worried that she might expose his anti-social behavior to the world. As soon as they separated though he rounded up the robot, and took him back to the lab. There he questioned him on all the aspects of the relationship he had started, he got very few answers, the automaton discussed the smell of her perfume and the timbre of her vocie. As far as he coudl tell they talked only about what they could see, squirells, birds, trees, shadows, sun, people, they occasionally talked about what they though, but they never talked about themselves, and their thoughts never revealed anythong about themselves other than things that anyone could be thinking, perceptions of the outside world and how it fit together. The inventor was curious about this, so he set up some recording equipment and recorded the next few meetings. He studied the recordings till one day he felt he could switch with his doppleganger. He copied all the persoalities of the doppleganger, which were visual mimics of his own personality. He went out many times with the girl, always keeping the personality of the doppleganger, in fact a non-personality. He wanted to get to know the girl, find out the reason for the affection she held for the doppleganger, but he never discovered anything about her, he just slowly fell in love with her, as both of them reflected everything they saw.
As delving into the non-personalities of both her and the Doppleganger he slowly forgot that he was a thing with personal feelings and anxieties. If asked about himself he would only talk about her smell, the feeling of her skin, her lips on his, his ability to move his hands, animals that he saw on winter days, men walking down the street, the shadow that followed him.
L... you,
Brad
Comments