storytime!
Mistaken.
10/27/28
I can feel him staring from across the room as I open up my screenpads. I keep my head down. If I just work I can ignore it, but like an idiot I glance up anyway to see if I'm right. I am, he ducks his head down. I can see his uniform: he's a Feynman U. student. About a dozen of them have been wandering around the library in a daze, getting accustomed to unpressurized gravity. You can always tell when someone's been out to the Titan facility.
He's getting up. I suck in my breath and start closing down the portals I've just opened. If I am fast enough, I can go before he foots his way to me.
Too late. "Hey," he says, fidgeting. I don't answer, but flick a hostile gaze up at him; I hope it's enough.
"You changed your, your hair," he says. "It looks good."
"Excuse me," I say. My pack isn't even zipped up, but I push past him anyway.
"Come on!" he cries. "Have you at least seen Radha yet? You could have told me you were here."
I'm so relieved I could cry. She'd been a friend of his. Maybe more than a friend. That makes it easier to tell him.
"You've mistaken me for someone else," I say. "I'm not her."
His face is blank, uncomprehending, as I walk out the door.
They made it out to be such an honor. The geneticists fawned over me, producing glowing reports over it to their superiors in front of me. "You'll make history," they said. "Your DNA is superbly adaptable. It practically dances in stasis, it jumps into the splicer," they said. "Balanced and strong, don't you know that you'll change the world?"
I didn't know. I knew I was rarely sick, that my family was rarely sick. I knew that we were poor, and that selling my eggs was a good way to pull in six figures in eight months. At first, they were more than happy to have just the eggs. I was told that many pleased couples had babies with my eyes. Two years after the egg donations I was approached by the researchers, the biologists. They offered me a lump sum to have exclusive access to my skin cells, my hair, my saliva and blood. I didn't have the imagination to know what they would do with them, so I said yes. Maybe I would have agreed even if I had known: I'm not necessarily a good person.
I was in my last year of Uni when I saw one of them for the first time. It was a screenfeed broadcasting a oxygen plant explosion on Titan and she was there in the background. She was carrying a tank, wearing a hazmat suit with the hood down. She looked into the camera and it was me. My eyes, my lips, but not my hair or my brow. Me, if my father had been South Asian instead of British. She looked angry and tired.
As I walked home, my fingers traced our shared jawline, feeling a million miles away. Her face and my face.
I began to see more of them on feeds from Titan. Not many, but enough to shake me every time. They were miners, hospital orderlies, servants. Usually they had variations in their eyes or hair, but once in awhile I would see an exact twin. When I went out into public I started getting recognized. Well not recognized exactly, more like mistaken. Everyone who traveled to Titan ran into one of them at some point or another. They couldn't understand why I looked and acted so differently. Strangers were angry at me for breaking up with them, they were apologetic for being rude to me at the hyper-clinic, they begged me to give them back an item I had never borrowed from them. Usually feigning ignorance worked and they backed off, embarrassed and confused like the boy in the library. It's gotten to the point that I keep my head down as often as possible, I don't make eye contact, I rarely speak out loud to anyone anymore.
This new sighting has happened tonight. It's after eleven and I can't bear to watch any news, but I can't turn it off when the screenpad blinks on a twenty-five second newsblip. The military police on Titan have just apprehended a human trafficking ring. The flashes of the victims' faces go by and I can't see myself in them anywhere. I almost sit down when the last face freezes on the screen. It's one of my doppelgangers, an exact copy with no variations. My face bruised and swollen, with deadened eyes. All sound drops away into a white noise as I read the copy at the bottom of the screen:
"Freed Sex Slave; in captivity 18 mo."
5/18/29
I can't leave the house anymore.
I keep the windows closed and the screenfeeds off. I covered all the mirrors so I don't see one of them by accident. I can't let anyone see me, I have to stay inside. They must hate me. If they knew where they'd come from, they would hate me for it. I can't look at them anymore, I can't look, I can't let anybody see.