Preface: a note on rules.
In hindsight, we convince ourselves that we should have known from the first shred of dissonance, but humanity is ever capable of holding onto perceptions as reality. We find meaning, see supporting evidence, and take those ideas which we fail to disprove as the indomitable truth. Hypotheses are made to be disproven. We create ideas and then endeavor to destroy them. To prove is unreachable, but to disprove is the lifeblood understanding. So please, believe me when I tell you, I’ve failed to disprove this idea in many bloody and tortuous ways. We’ve sacrificed life, limb, sanity, and hope, and still, the theory holds water. Morosity is not my intention; it is the inevitable conclusion from our trials. This is the theory of how we end.
Truths we (think we) know (now):
A disclaimer - this is not a guide in the traditional sense. This is what’s left of my sanity bundled in sentences and organized into some semblance of logic and order - control falsified by text. I’ve long since abandoned my attempt to impose gridlines onto the chaos that reigns outside. Please, take these words, as all things, with a grain of salt and impose upon them your own evidence.
I’m not sure what the first clue was. I remember the early days before the illusion shattered, when the sense of wrongness was a constant, unnoticed hum in the background. It may have been the eye contact, or the number of times they say your name. The threads of our reality frayed and we saw the hasty repairs done with fibers not quite matching our own. But, uncomfortable, we looked away, determined to see only those details matching our memory of the tapestry. I don’t know when the unwinding became impossible to glance over, but I do know when I began to perceive it.
She came back with scissors. It was the end of summer and it was dusk. We’d been waiting, indolent and unbothered, for the air to cool from the day and had set up the camping chairs so we could sit any place other than the ground, still damp from the evening’s storm. Two of us were still working on our grad degrees, so we’d invited Murphy and Sam and Rayna to the park to drink and eat burned meat from the park grills by campus. Others wandered the lakefront nearby. Ava had gone with Mark to grab more beer and some plates because we always forget them from the corner store on Main, just a few blocks from the park. She came back alone.
Sam had been saying something depressing - probably about toxic academics in ivory towers or something we all nodded along to - and Ava had come strolling back to the circle. I’d asked her where Mark was, and she’d looked at me in the eyes and said ‘he’ll be back soon, Alexis’ and I’d started laughing because she called me Alexis and I haven’t been called Alexis since my mom saw me last winter. She’d just smiled, still holding eye contact. Back in those days, they were fresher, less assimilated. Now the eye contact is less common and less of an immediate giveaway. I’d felt that first hit of disillusion, like reality clicked ever so slightly out of place, and I saw her holding the scissors casually in her fisted hand. I’d wonder later if they already had a smear of red, but memory is fallible. I can never be sure. She was still smiling and staring at me, unblinking, and Murphy had looked at her laughing at some shit Sam had said when she raised her hand and brought it down, scissors held firm, on Murphy’s head.
Reality shattered and chaos slipped into its place.
It took a few seconds to process. Sam and Rayna didn’t react at first; they hadn’t been looking. Sam looked when Murphy started slumping, with Ava still holding the scissors angled down in his temple. He hadn’t said anything - I always thought you’d have a second if something happened, but I don’t even know if he had enough time to feel the blow. The scissors slipped a bit out. I thought it was a joke for a moment. There was blood now, rolling down his cheek. Ava was still looking at me smiling with her teeth and dimples. Sam faltered, her fading laughter turning to confusion and alarm as Murphy slipped over his seat further, until finally the scissors slid all the way out, still in Ava’s grasp. That was when the yelling started. I hear later that Rayna was the one shouting. Sam didn’t scream, just stood up and stumbled backwards away from Murphy as he fell towards her shoes. I remember Ava holding the scissors, coated in blood now, smiling as she took a gentle step over Murphy’s sneakers and towards me. I ran. I still run sometimes when shit gets critical, but I don’t think I’ve ever run as fast as I did then.
It was a case that closed before it opened. Multiple witnesses and all. Ava left after she stabbed Murphy. She went back to the corner of Main and Forest Ave and disappeared into the corner store bathroom. They found her there later, scissors in her throat, bled out on the floor. I was surprised later that the case was open and shut so quickly, but I guess their time of death calculation isn’t that precise. After all, what would they have thought when it came out that she’d died before Murphy?
The news was lightning on a clear day. A perfectly normal and unremarkable, at least criminally, woman in her mid twenties brutally murders a friend on a balmy August evening during a perfectly normal and unremarkable cook-out. The story ran, both in headlines and in rumor circles, some whispered as judgements, others discussed in somber tones as the result of some psychotic break. Bring in more mental healthcare. Make sure our students are getting treatment if they need it. Anxiety and depression in higher education is A Problem, etc. Nothing really changed fundamentally, per usual. The thing about lightning is thunder always follows, and it did. Two weeks later, a multiple homicide a couple towns over. No survivors, family annihilator-style, only without the trademark escape. He must have been under immense pressure. No one saw it coming. The poor wife. The poor children. What must he have been thinking? His body was found by the door to the master bathroom, with his wife feet away in bed. Some people wondered how he managed to kill himself with a mallet. Others thought that he must have felt shame at his crimes and been unable to bear it. He’d punished himself. How does one punish oneself to death with a mallet? Especially from that angle, but it’d been irrefutable. The video feed from the nursery showed him killing at least the youngest. He must have killed his wife, then the kids, then himself. Again, open and closed. A handful of days later, stockroom employee kills coworkers with a forklift (all caught on video) and is found dead, later, from a crush injury in a back corner. A line cook skewers 3 customers with a paring knife through the eyes then disappears into a bathroom. Someone comes out 30 seconds later, screaming that some guy just gutted himself in the stall next to theirs.
You’re beginning to see a pattern here I hope. If not, it’s probably already too late for you. Your brain is pattern seeking - use that here and now, or you’ll never make it. Then again, maybe that’s for the best considering I doubt any of us will.
The pattern:
(i) Normal and unremarkable person A inflicts horrifying and lethal damage on person(s) B - ??
(ii) Normal and unremarkable person turns on themselves and is found dead
(iii) Some irrefutable, usually visual, evidence of their crime is found and they’re posthumously convicted by the jury of public opinion (and the cops) of being guilty of the heinous crime
(iv) (This is key) their death is not caught on camera
I’m willing to bet you either believe me, or someone has run the most effective misinformation campaign of all time. If the latter has happened, I’d pay careful attention to your figures of authority. How much eye contact do they make? Do you ever feel like a mouse in a laboratory cage? Do you ever wonder what bits of your body will end up on slides? To be fair, this analogy runs a bit thin - I’m not sure if they’re studying us or just killing, but hey, I’m a scientist at heart, and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.
On to the lessons.
If you’re like me, dear reader, then you’ve likely relied on visual evidence. The meat is cooked because it’s no longer pink. Spring is here because the trees are growing leaves. The plane is in the air because you see clouds all around you. You see, you notice, and you believe. Unfortunately, we now know visual evidence, however direct and convincing, is refutable. For example, I see my uncle strangle my cousin using laundry cord. In the before times, I’d think ‘well, uncle Brett always was kind of an asshole, so this, though shocking and traumatizing, will later be re-written as something we should have seen coming.’ If I saw it today, I’d know (1) that’s not uncle Brett, and (2) if we’re lucky, uncle Brett is somewhere nearby, still breathing and not about to stop in the immediate future. The eyes fool - Uncle Brett 2.0 is illusory, but unfortunately tangible and visually convincing.
I’m still not sure what the illusion is. I thought at first it was a projection, some kind of glamour or some such mythical nonsense. Evidence against this: you can touch them, hurt them, disfigure them, and damage them. You can kill them. They’re solid enough, which, depressingly, is a tally in the positives category. I now think, after some refinement, that they can shift or wear disguises, but that the costumes are flesh and blood. They become perfect likenesses, right down the bones that will break if enough force is exerted. To be direct, the closest word I can use is doppelganger, though even that descriptor is not perfect.
Traditional doppels, in the mythical sense, do act similarly. They do seek out the original and attempt to kill them to replace them more easily. They attempt to imitate the original, though most of them just imitate what they think the average person would do. You’ll notice, rarely will they say much of anything. Would you, in their shoes? They enter the image, the copy, and they infiltrate, but they’re not perfect copies in any ways other than visually. They have the mole on your ass, but not your childhood trauma.
Next lesson.
Like I said before, the doppels (yes I’m calling them doppels, if you have a better idea, I do not care. Bigger fish.) have either no knowledge, or severely limited knowledge of their originals. They might know they have a family based on framed photos, or they might know their dog’s name from their collar tag, but they won’t know that the Klines are coming over for dinner on Tuesday so they need to pick up wine that afternoon. To be fair, most of their goals tend to be immediate and violent, so it usually doesn’t matter, but it does present an opportunity. Passwords protect.
One of the first lessons they learned was that waiting to act can lead to better return on their investment. If they hang around a while, they can access more information and more people, all the better to kill them and infiltrate to kill others more easily. To find them out, every single person in your group will need a password. Unfortunately, a single password or a simple system is easy to crack. Though they don’t generally speak much, they can and are able to say passwords among other things if they happen to overhear them. Use a password. Another useful system is redundancy: implement multiple layers of checks. (1) a verbal password, (2) a password rule, and (3) a visual cue. Most infiltration attempts have been caught by the three layers. We’ve tried to add a fourth layer in the past, but there’s always one or two people who can’t track all four consistently enough for it to be useful and reliable. Someone forgets one layer or gets it wrong and we accidentally almost kill an original.
To be more specific, each person in a group (more on group size later) should have an identifier word or phrase. You can make your own as long as it’s memorable. The group should have some non-obvious rule, like the third word must always contain the letter p or some reference to a Beatles song. Lastly, each person should have some subtle physical talisman, not for mystical purposes, but for identification. The doppels are excellent at recreating the physical details of the body, but they usually miss subtle details like jewelry or personal belongings. If you dress in a red sweater and jeans and carry a flat stone in your right pocket, they’ll dress in a red sweater and jeans, but the stone will be missing. Important to this rule: the talisman cannot be obvious. Obvious talismans defeat the purpose, but hey, have fun with it. I knew a guy who had a tamagotchi that was his verbal password and talisman - always wondered if the doppels would know how to take care of a tamagotchi or understand that the point of it in the first place.
Finally, the finishing touch:
Sure it’s higher stakes than going to the bathroom, but the buddy system nevertheless maintains its utility. To be fair, this is the most obvious strategy, and it’s one the doppels have begun to routinely anticipate, but having a buddy at least means there’s a higher chance of (i) both of you surviving, (ii) one of you surviving and warning the others, or (iii) if neither of you lives, chances are one of the doppels will fuck up and give themselves away faster when there are two of them than one of them. It’s also just more difficult for them to get the drop on someone of they’ve got a buddy watching their back. Granted, if you can travel in larger groups, it’s good to take more people. Doppels generally aren’t traveling in packs as far as I can tell, so there is a physical limit to the number of people they can replace. I’ve seen groups as large as 4 be entirely taken out and replaced, but it’s rare. It’s almost always one or two replacements, and most often just one.
Lastly, group size protection has its limits. Because we are potentially (really likely) living through an apocalypse of sorts, knowing the person who has your back is imperative. You can trust a stranger in emergencies, but keeping your group sizes to a manageable level is important. For one, having too many people means you don’t notice a strange face, and then you’re wrestling a doppler when you turn a corner trying not to get replaced. You also need to be able to remember everyone’s identifiers. I’ve never seen it personally, but I’ve heard stories of actual people being killed because everyone was convinced something was off. People can be stupid in desperation, but it doesn’t help the person who was killed for acting slightly differently than expected. Again, way way more common in groups that don’t use redundancy, but you can’t help everyone.
As it stands, we have our group, we have our system, and we have at least a semblance of normalcy, though that too is fast fading. We know that the doppels are gaining ground - news reports have dwindled, even though word of mouth says the killings are continuing. We also know that at least a few doppels are in positions of power, but it’s unclear why. The higher up doppels don’t follow the same rules. Unless they’ve already replaced all of those in power, they don’t seem to be taking the same unmeasured violence approach they had in the early days. That means they’re strategizing, which, as you may have surmised, is concerning. If we can figure out why, maybe we can turn the tide and gain back something resembling an upper hand, but at this point I’m betting on impending demise. Bottoms up, friends, as long as you have a lockable room and a camera recording every corner.