STORY: Deep Cover
A science fiction/horror story about a man who believes he is a perfect copy.
When I was thirty I became obsessed with the idea that I was an alien shapeshifter.
It started out as a thought experiment, almost a game. Almost enjoyable. It belonged to cult SF films, of course, but I wasn't very interested in the genre before then. Bryn was the one who watched that sort of thing, she's a bit of a film geek. It was also the year when people started disappearing. Perhaps it wasn't that many, but it piled up in your memory when you read about it. A man in Paraguay is forcibly committed to hospital to stop infection spreading. There were never any articles following up what had happened to him. A woman in Finland leaves her man and kids, wanders out of town and is found dead from exposure in a field. There were inexplicable disappearances, and inexplicable attacks by people who had never committed violent acts before. I guess they could all have belonged to different patterns of mental disorders, or drugs, or even some other unexplained phenomenon. That's exactly it, I don't know.
There was a scene in one of those films that Bryn would watch and laugh when they freaked me out. It was called Satan Sends a Woman. The scene was set in a laboratory that the replicants had infiltrated. The main character had realised that his friend was one of them, and shot him. It took a long time. I expected the other guy to melt back to his real form as he died, but he remained human till the end. At first I thought it was weirdly anticlimactic that we didn't get a conclusive answer, but when I talked to Bryn about it later I realised how strong it was. If it was an alien, it would of course retain its human body while it was dying, in case he would change his mind and save it. It couldn't blow its cover as long as it still had something to lose.
My brain took that as a starting-point. I started considering that I might have been replaced by an alien that had copied every part of me, even the little folds of my cortex and all the neural connections that my memories had built. It would have the memories of the guys who bullied me in primary school and the time I read the Ramayana in uni, just as it would have my useless twisted little toes and the scar on my chin that I got falling off the shed roof. The pale little scar on my hand that I can't even remember how I got. It would have copied my mind so perfectly that I wouldn't notice.
That must have been when it took root. I knew it had started to hurt me when I could sit for minutes trying to spin all my senses into the labyrinth of my brain to see if I could find something wrong. For a while I lost interest in sleeping with Bryn since I didn't know if this was my body. I don't know if she noticed and thought I'd stopped being attracted to her. She never said anything.
Even while it went on I thought it might be delusions. I guess it would be paranoid schizophrenia, that seems to be the one that makes you see things that don't exist.
I went to a therapist a couple of times, but she seemed to think that I'd already decided that it was a hallucination and just needed to get a grip. Yes, I realise most people don't believe in aliens and the supernatural, but it was clarity I needed, not people telling me that I was delusional without even testing me first.
I could have looked for someone else, someone more professional, but I wasn't scared enough to want to weigh the possibility of years or decades in a psychiatric ward. If it wasn't true they would lock me up, and if it was they would do the same. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I hadn't hurt anyone, or caused any danger. The saner, sunnier side of me thought that meant it couldn't be true. I guess it was a possibility.
I never talked to Bryn about it, but I could almost hear what she would say, in her sensible voice: “Does it matter, if it's a perfect copy?” And when I broke down: “If you have all your memories and feelings, that means you're you. I wouldn't love you any less.”
It was the fact that I didn't know. Sometimes it felt like it would almost be better to find out that it was true.
*
I had all the energy of obsession, so I planned a great many ways to test it. I didn't notice any difference in my perceptions when I ate something I enjoyed or read a book I'd liked when I was a teen. I didn't focus so much on my feelings for Bryn or my family, because that was the first thing a Replacement would reproduce. All it would need was the equivalent of a soundtrack with strings on the inside of my auditory nerves.
Dreams were more important. If there was something in my mind, some kind of foreign body, it would show itself when my conscious mind wasn't in control. For a while I thought that was the key, so I wrote down my dreams every morning. It didn't calm me down. Sometimes I found things in my notes that might have been shards of forgotten memories, shadowed rooms where the creatures forced me to do things. It might have been real, or it might have been the obsession leaving marks on my dreams. For that matter, it might not even mean anything. If I were a perfect copy of the old Robert, my brain would still have the same memories to work with. It wouldn't be able to do anything different with the same constituent parts.
Placing myself in danger seemed to be the only way to get clarity.
It's hard to say this, but I was weak. I tried cutting myself, but it didn't make a difference: the blood that came out looked the same as other people's. Perhaps if I'd done something that hurt worse, like burning myself with cigarettes... I couldn't do it. Just pain probably wouldn't have been enough; I needed to put myself in danger of death.
I got vague ideas: taking up rock-climbing, or perhaps some kind of extreme diving or mountain biking, so I could take risks with my health without trying to commit suicide. I was afraid, and I didn't have enough money. Climbing was the only thing I could do at all, in the hills where we lived.
One day I went up to the reservoir where Chel and I used to play when we were kids. It was January and grey, with a cold damp wind rippling the surface of the reservoir like that of a lake. A tarmac road ran along the dam, with the water on the right and a steep grassy slope on the left. It was good for climactic battles straight out of the James Bond films we would watch: the high point was always when one of us got shot and fell dramatically from the wall and down the slope, or threw himself down voluntarily as a final gesture of defiance. I looked down at how steep and high it was. We ought to have died several times over - got concussions, at the very least. Children are so much more vulnerable than adults, it's weird that they're braver.
I leant my hands on the stone wall. I could throw myself down the slope, but the grass was tall. Even if I fell badly, I couldn't imagine I would come away with anything worse than a sprained wrist or ankle.
What did I expect would happen? Perhaps I would only need to be injured enough, put out of commission, so that I'd have to bounce back to my true form to be able to move. Maybe not. I didn't know what a Replacement needed to live.
I turned to the reservoir. The water didn't go all the way to the wall, there was a narrow strip of gravel right below me. I didn't know how deep it was. There'd been a metal sign at the other end of the dam that warned against swimming. It was still up, but I couldn't read it from here. The cold would be enough.
I swung myself onto the wall and looked around in case there was anyone in the vicinity. There was a moment when I looked down at the waves and realised that this was real. I let the wind do the rest.
I've forgotten the pain. Nerves don't remember. I remember the white and grey water spraying up in front of my face, and how I struggled.
My body didn't obey me. The water wasn't deep near the edge, I would have had my head clear of the surface if I'd been able to stand, but I couldn't move my arms from my sides or press my fingers together. I'd prefer not to think about the time when I thought I was going to die.
The powerlessness could have been something natural, shock, but I imagine that's how it would feel when this body took over.
It moved. It crawled up the gravel slope until it hit the raw air, and I lay looking down at my hands. They were still me. I went home, trembling and bloody, and lied to Bryn about slipping and falling in the canal, and she was nice to me.
*
Kev worked in the same office as I. I knew him a bit outside work. I wouldn't say we were close friends, but he was a good guy. I wish it didn't have to end like this.
I started noticing changes in his behaviour. They were small, perhaps too small to matter, but I watched him all the time and waited to see the whole pattern. He sat at the desk opposite me, so it was easy to look up and see that he'd started wiping his glasses on his sleeve instead of the hem of his shirt. He stopped talking about his newborn son, and he'd done that every day.
One day I waited in the office when he went to his lunch-break. I said I'd be along later. When I was alone I had a look at his desk, just the things on top. His notes were in a new handwriting. The letters were so disordered they barely looked like writing.
I could have waited and investigated more, but I didn't know how much time I had. I think that was why, but I can't remember everything.
When Bryn had gone to a conference I asked if he wanted to come over for a beer. I put a flick-knife in my pocket and waited for him to get drunk enough. There came a moment when I realised that what I was going to hurt wasn't Kev any more.
I went around his back, as if I was going to get something from the worktop, and got the knife out. I don't want to talk about the rest. It took a long time. He injured me. He never changed shape, but like I said, a Replacement wouldn't have.
And now it's done. I don't think a Replacement would be able to reproduce guilt. I want to believe that it's a sentimental genuine part of the human spirit.
But if there are no Replacements, then I didn't need to kill him.
THE END
When I was thirty I became obsessed with the idea that I was an alien shapeshifter.
It started out as a thought experiment, almost a game. Almost enjoyable. It belonged to cult SF films, of course, but I wasn't very interested in the genre before then. Bryn was the one who watched that sort of thing, she's a bit of a film geek. It was also the year when people started disappearing. Perhaps it wasn't that many, but it piled up in your memory when you read about it. A man in Paraguay is forcibly committed to hospital to stop infection spreading. There were never any articles following up what had happened to him. A woman in Finland leaves her man and kids, wanders out of town and is found dead from exposure in a field. There were inexplicable disappearances, and inexplicable attacks by people who had never committed violent acts before. I guess they could all have belonged to different patterns of mental disorders, or drugs, or even some other unexplained phenomenon. That's exactly it, I don't know.
There was a scene in one of those films that Bryn would watch and laugh when they freaked me out. It was called Satan Sends a Woman. The scene was set in a laboratory that the replicants had infiltrated. The main character had realised that his friend was one of them, and shot him. It took a long time. I expected the other guy to melt back to his real form as he died, but he remained human till the end. At first I thought it was weirdly anticlimactic that we didn't get a conclusive answer, but when I talked to Bryn about it later I realised how strong it was. If it was an alien, it would of course retain its human body while it was dying, in case he would change his mind and save it. It couldn't blow its cover as long as it still had something to lose.
My brain took that as a starting-point. I started considering that I might have been replaced by an alien that had copied every part of me, even the little folds of my cortex and all the neural connections that my memories had built. It would have the memories of the guys who bullied me in primary school and the time I read the Ramayana in uni, just as it would have my useless twisted little toes and the scar on my chin that I got falling off the shed roof. The pale little scar on my hand that I can't even remember how I got. It would have copied my mind so perfectly that I wouldn't notice.
That must have been when it took root. I knew it had started to hurt me when I could sit for minutes trying to spin all my senses into the labyrinth of my brain to see if I could find something wrong. For a while I lost interest in sleeping with Bryn since I didn't know if this was my body. I don't know if she noticed and thought I'd stopped being attracted to her. She never said anything.
Even while it went on I thought it might be delusions. I guess it would be paranoid schizophrenia, that seems to be the one that makes you see things that don't exist.
I went to a therapist a couple of times, but she seemed to think that I'd already decided that it was a hallucination and just needed to get a grip. Yes, I realise most people don't believe in aliens and the supernatural, but it was clarity I needed, not people telling me that I was delusional without even testing me first.
I could have looked for someone else, someone more professional, but I wasn't scared enough to want to weigh the possibility of years or decades in a psychiatric ward. If it wasn't true they would lock me up, and if it was they would do the same. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I hadn't hurt anyone, or caused any danger. The saner, sunnier side of me thought that meant it couldn't be true. I guess it was a possibility.
I never talked to Bryn about it, but I could almost hear what she would say, in her sensible voice: “Does it matter, if it's a perfect copy?” And when I broke down: “If you have all your memories and feelings, that means you're you. I wouldn't love you any less.”
It was the fact that I didn't know. Sometimes it felt like it would almost be better to find out that it was true.
*
I had all the energy of obsession, so I planned a great many ways to test it. I didn't notice any difference in my perceptions when I ate something I enjoyed or read a book I'd liked when I was a teen. I didn't focus so much on my feelings for Bryn or my family, because that was the first thing a Replacement would reproduce. All it would need was the equivalent of a soundtrack with strings on the inside of my auditory nerves.
Dreams were more important. If there was something in my mind, some kind of foreign body, it would show itself when my conscious mind wasn't in control. For a while I thought that was the key, so I wrote down my dreams every morning. It didn't calm me down. Sometimes I found things in my notes that might have been shards of forgotten memories, shadowed rooms where the creatures forced me to do things. It might have been real, or it might have been the obsession leaving marks on my dreams. For that matter, it might not even mean anything. If I were a perfect copy of the old Robert, my brain would still have the same memories to work with. It wouldn't be able to do anything different with the same constituent parts.
Placing myself in danger seemed to be the only way to get clarity.
It's hard to say this, but I was weak. I tried cutting myself, but it didn't make a difference: the blood that came out looked the same as other people's. Perhaps if I'd done something that hurt worse, like burning myself with cigarettes... I couldn't do it. Just pain probably wouldn't have been enough; I needed to put myself in danger of death.
I got vague ideas: taking up rock-climbing, or perhaps some kind of extreme diving or mountain biking, so I could take risks with my health without trying to commit suicide. I was afraid, and I didn't have enough money. Climbing was the only thing I could do at all, in the hills where we lived.
One day I went up to the reservoir where Chel and I used to play when we were kids. It was January and grey, with a cold damp wind rippling the surface of the reservoir like that of a lake. A tarmac road ran along the dam, with the water on the right and a steep grassy slope on the left. It was good for climactic battles straight out of the James Bond films we would watch: the high point was always when one of us got shot and fell dramatically from the wall and down the slope, or threw himself down voluntarily as a final gesture of defiance. I looked down at how steep and high it was. We ought to have died several times over - got concussions, at the very least. Children are so much more vulnerable than adults, it's weird that they're braver.
I leant my hands on the stone wall. I could throw myself down the slope, but the grass was tall. Even if I fell badly, I couldn't imagine I would come away with anything worse than a sprained wrist or ankle.
What did I expect would happen? Perhaps I would only need to be injured enough, put out of commission, so that I'd have to bounce back to my true form to be able to move. Maybe not. I didn't know what a Replacement needed to live.
I turned to the reservoir. The water didn't go all the way to the wall, there was a narrow strip of gravel right below me. I didn't know how deep it was. There'd been a metal sign at the other end of the dam that warned against swimming. It was still up, but I couldn't read it from here. The cold would be enough.
I swung myself onto the wall and looked around in case there was anyone in the vicinity. There was a moment when I looked down at the waves and realised that this was real. I let the wind do the rest.
I've forgotten the pain. Nerves don't remember. I remember the white and grey water spraying up in front of my face, and how I struggled.
My body didn't obey me. The water wasn't deep near the edge, I would have had my head clear of the surface if I'd been able to stand, but I couldn't move my arms from my sides or press my fingers together. I'd prefer not to think about the time when I thought I was going to die.
The powerlessness could have been something natural, shock, but I imagine that's how it would feel when this body took over.
It moved. It crawled up the gravel slope until it hit the raw air, and I lay looking down at my hands. They were still me. I went home, trembling and bloody, and lied to Bryn about slipping and falling in the canal, and she was nice to me.
*
Kev worked in the same office as I. I knew him a bit outside work. I wouldn't say we were close friends, but he was a good guy. I wish it didn't have to end like this.
I started noticing changes in his behaviour. They were small, perhaps too small to matter, but I watched him all the time and waited to see the whole pattern. He sat at the desk opposite me, so it was easy to look up and see that he'd started wiping his glasses on his sleeve instead of the hem of his shirt. He stopped talking about his newborn son, and he'd done that every day.
One day I waited in the office when he went to his lunch-break. I said I'd be along later. When I was alone I had a look at his desk, just the things on top. His notes were in a new handwriting. The letters were so disordered they barely looked like writing.
I could have waited and investigated more, but I didn't know how much time I had. I think that was why, but I can't remember everything.
When Bryn had gone to a conference I asked if he wanted to come over for a beer. I put a flick-knife in my pocket and waited for him to get drunk enough. There came a moment when I realised that what I was going to hurt wasn't Kev any more.
I went around his back, as if I was going to get something from the worktop, and got the knife out. I don't want to talk about the rest. It took a long time. He injured me. He never changed shape, but like I said, a Replacement wouldn't have.
And now it's done. I don't think a Replacement would be able to reproduce guilt. I want to believe that it's a sentimental genuine part of the human spirit.
But if there are no Replacements, then I didn't need to kill him.
THE END