Doppelganger

He looked between us once more and said, “It’s either her or me…”

He was right of course, one of these two: either my good friend Niles Curmudgeon, or my boss Sylvia Brightenite, was a monster in disguise, a doppelganger here to steal the company's secrets.

In my hands I held a torch, a machine designed by our own company, appropriately named TorchCorp. I could roast one or both of them alive in an instant if I thought that the best option.

But how could I torch my good friend Niles? We’d worked at Torchcorp together for five years. We’d designed the handheld torch together, along with several other questionable weapons and other equipment for our government’s military. I’d always felt bad about what we had to do, but he always had a clever joke that made me feel better and made me laugh. “Everybody dies eventually,” he’d jest. “Whether it’s contentment in old age, or some sort of horrifying, flaming doom, no one gets to choose. We’re all flotsam in the wretched river of life, after all!”

But on the other hand, how could I possibly cook my poor boss? She’d always been so lenient, always ready to extend deadlines, always going over her bosses heads to keep me around even though every assessment I’d ever received called me: “Creepy, and clearly too affected by the work.” And the way she’d get even more stressed than me as a deadline crept up, the prospect of fiery technology I think both frightened and excited her.

“You’ve been pointing that thing at us for seven minutes now,” Sylvia said, her hands held high above her head, even though I’d not asked for her to do that, “in another fifty-three, the base’s internal nuclear reactor will explode, destroying us and most of middle-America with it, unless we can get to the main computer and tell it that everything’s fine, that there’s no Doppelganger and the technology we have lying around the office, technology that could fry the whole world to a cinder if placed in the wrong hands, is safe.”

“And fortunately, the computer doesn’t know that we certainly aren’t the right hands,” Niles added, trying to sound cool, but he was sweating like a Gatorade outside in the summer. And his voice sounded like a pre-schooler caught with their hand in their parent’s liquor cabinet.

“Therefore, you must choose!” Sylvia yelled. “You know I hate pressuring you, but you have to decide which one of us you can trust! Go back to your training! Go back to how you recognize a doppelganger!”

“Yes! Yes! The course we all took!” I was excited, happy. Surely all that training was for something. “I remember the training packet in my mind’s eye! There were so many pictures! The diagram of the filthy beast that hides beneath human skin still haunts my dreams! They’re like cotton candy under there, held up by a spine of so many colors, like a candy cane. I think my blood sugar might be low!”

“Fortunately you still have forty-eight minutes. But keep in mind that it takes five or so access the computer. So you don’t have as much time as you think.” This was Sylvia

“So confine your babbling to relevant information.”

“The cotton candy is relevant!” I stammered. “If I roast one of you and you don’t turn into brown, sugary mush I’ll know I cooked the wrong colleague!”

“But you also risk giving the other a chance to dive behind cover: like the refrigerator. Would you really roast the home of your many stacked boxes of hot pockets?”

“Focus Niles!”

“I don’t have to focus. One of us is the intruder. He doesn’t know which one, but clearly we’re opposed to each other, so there’s never any reason for us to cooperate or give each other good advice.”

“Silence!” I cried. “Let me think. Let me think out loud. I can see the relevant page in my mind. It’s on lovely, glossy paper. There’s a numbered list and a cartoon woman with red hair staring at me, daring me to commit this critical list to memory. It’s the list of how you can tell someone is one of those foul creatures from the deep sea. Those foul doppelgangers who only which to cleanse the land so that we’ll stop dropping plastic and acidification into their abodes. So that we’ll stop scaring the whales with all our noises. And so that the dolphins can go back to loving them the most instead of us.”

“I… don’t remember any of that in the text,” Sylvia was looking at me suspiciously.

“Yes, now that I think on it, wasn’t the number one way to identify a doppelganger in human skin their inclination toward talking?” Niles was rubbing his chin, as he often did when considering payloads and total compressive force and other such matters. “The second is that they sweat way less than us.”

“Yes, and what were the others?” Suddenly I was desperate to know, and they clearly had better memory for the materials than I did.

“Well, don’t they have poor memories, but also random?” Sylvia slowly lowered her hands while a coy smile crept across her mouth.

“And it wasn’t in the book, but surely showing extreme, and hitherto unknown knowledge of, and sympathy for, the struggle of the undersea Dopple Kingdom could surely count toward any suspicion.”

“You can’t! You surely can’t think it’s me!” I felt my mouth hanging open. My hand flew to my forehead… it was dry! “No. Not possible! If I was the doppelganger, I’d have slain you both by now! Both of you wretched humans! I’d have destroyed your foul technology, and walked tauntingly up to the computer and said something appropriately terrifying like ‘Well. Well. Well. Looks like you’ve got not choice but to annihilate St. Louis, Chicago, and various other human cities if you want to stop me! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

“That’s… a good question. And, didn’t the alarm go off when Niles and I walked through the scanner?”

“Oh come now Sylvia, that scanner is so imprecise, it likely picked up his molecules from across the room. It’s plainly him.”

“That still doesn’t explain why he hasn’t put his dastardly scheme into motion.”

“No! No! No!” My friends didn’t believe me! I could hear my lip quivering. I must look pathetic, despite bearing the most efficient flame-thrower known to humankind. If I was an alien… if I was a monster from beneath the sea. If I had truly eaten myself, er, myself…

“I know how we can solve this!” Sylvia pointed an accusing finger at me. “Tell me your name, Bob, your full name.”

“Bob… Bob… Bob…” I could check my ID! No! Too suspicious. What was a likely human name? “Bob Smith!” I tried to speak certainty, with confidence, but they both immediately cracked up laughing.

“That’s actually a lucky guess on the ‘Smith’ but your first name is Allen.”

My shoulders slumped, I felt the torch slip from my hand. I’d failed. It only happens to the weakest of our kind, that when they consume a human (or other animal) and assume their form, that they forget who they truly are. I’d gotten stuck halfway. My mind wasn’t that of Allen Smith, nor was it Bloople Tagoople, my Doppelganger name. I was no one, or two people, one or the other.

“Go sort out the computer, I’ll handle him,” Sylvia again, I glanced up to see that she’d picked up the torch, though she wasn’t pointing it at me.

“Are you going to cook me, like a fish?” I asked. “I hear we taste like calamari in a sugary sauce.”

“No,” she replied calmly.

“No?”

“No. Do you know how much paperwork I’d have to fill out if I killed you? Paperwork for a dead Doppelganger. Paperwork for a dead colleague: I assume we’ll find bits of Allen behind his desk.”

I nod.

“And then we’ll have to do a full inventory. Make sure you didn’t hide, or destroy, or spirit away any of our notes or equipment. They’d surely find the off-the-books accounting we’ve been doing. They’d send the Men-in-suits. They’d clean out the fridge. It wouldn’t be fun.”

“Then… what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to recruit a little lost soul.” She twirled a finger playfully at me. “It sounds like you’re half Allen anyway. And I’ve always wanted to learn more about how The Dopple People function.”

“The Dopple People? Is that what you call us?”

“Sometimes. It’s halfway between mockery and a term of endearment for the enemies who let us go whole hog on weapons development.”

Niles approached slowly, hands at his sides: “We still had twenty minutes left on the nuke time. I expected this absurd dramatic situation to take way longer to resolve.”

“It’s not resolved yet. What do you say Allen? Or would you rather another name?” She reached her hand down to me.

“I suppose you better call me Allen, but my real name is Bloople.” I reach up and take her hand.

“Let’s get you some hot pockets.”