I sat on the sofa in the main room while I sat at my desk in the office, and she stood in the archway between us, deliberately not looking in the direction of the sofa.
“This is just too weird,” she muttered to herself.
“You’re telling me?” We spoke in chorus, which brought the heels of her hands against her temples. I didn’t blame her. I was getting quite a headache myself.
“Okay, stop it!” She didn’t address either of us but shouted into empty space instead. Her reaction was startling, since she wasn’t really a shouter. She wasn’t in a very good place.
“Sorry.” I wanted so much to rush over and hug her, but I didn’t dare move or else my other self would do the same, and we weren’t supposed to have contact, so I gripped the sofa cushion and the arms of the office chair to restrain myself, while my stereoscopic response made her roar in frustration.
“Right!” She used her decisive voice, which meant she was completely fed up. In long, brisk strides, she stormed to the key bowl next to the hallway door, announcing, “I’m going out for coffee! When I get back, you had better have this all worked out! Get me?”
“Yes, dear!” I cringed a little calling her that after we had just met, but it was already second nature to me after months of living together.
“You don’t get to say that,” she snapped, pointing at me angrily. Confusion momentarily crossed her fine features, and she glanced between the sofa and the office before yanking the door open in a huff and slamming it after her. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit if she never came back.
“She’s taking things well,” I told myself in stereo. “Considering…”
It was a bit too much for me as well. I wasn’t sure what was real anymore. Was I some guy that woke up one day next to a gorgeous woman that I had no memory of, with a life that was completely different from the one that I knew when I had gone to sleep that night, or was I just some idiot that stumbled into a time/space machine and accidentally became inextricably linked with a matrix of data that could fry my brain if I wasn’t careful? Right at that moment, I was both, and not only that, but both of us were literally thinking with the same mind and feeling with the same heart. We not only reacted and responded the exact same way to things, but we knew intimate details of both lives that we’d previously led separately, and it was all bringing on a massive migraine. But which of us was the real one? Was there even a real one? Or were we both it?
It was a bit too much for me to handle, or even fathom. We were synched in a way that couldn’t have been natural. But could someone have done that to us? And how? Why? And most importantly, what the heck were we going to do about it?
The more sci-fi me had a sudden epiphany, but I decided to put the kibosh on it immediately.
“Don’t,” I warned from the desk.
“Well, you must admit,” I argued with myself, “She’s way out of your league. You thought so yourself!”
“I’ve had plenty of time to work through it!” I wasn’t going to hash it out all over again. I’d been through enough already.
“Oh, yeah. That’s what all the therapy was for. I know!” I peered into the office and looked down at the keyboard to avoid eye contact. It was a mind-bending experience doing it simultaneously like that; I just hoped that it didn’t eventually bend things to the breaking point. “But it’s still there, isn’t it?”
“Leave it alone,” I warned me. I wasn’t going to let the sofa me ruin months of work and I knew his frustration, so I quietly traced the embedded pattern on the sofa’s arm while I stared uselessly at the keyboard, and it still felt weird experiencing both at the same time. But neither of us could let it go for long.
“She’s just a bit too perfect, don’t you think?” I quietly asked from the sofa.
I didn’t like what I was implying. “She isn’t responsible for this!”
“Maybe not,” I pointed out. “But you must admit that she has a pretty high tolerance for weirdness, so why would seeing the two of us like this upset her so easily?”
“Will you listen to yourself?” I looked up from the keyboard to make my point clear. “She only had to deal with mental illness before! Or a concussion, or amnesia, or even a chemical imbalance, I don’t know! But that’s pretty normal stuff! Then, you come along and -!”
“-and it suddenly becomes sci-fi!” It was a good point. “Okay, so bad idea there. Maybe we should look elsewhere?”
I had to think for a moment, so I leaned back, me on the sofa, me in the office chair, and thought. It wasn’t hard to come up with questions, though. But answers?
“Why us?”
The office chair creaked as I leaned forward. “What?”
The sofa cushion crushed audibly as I leaned forward to repeat myself, and to elaborate. “Why us? Why are we affected by this, and no one else?”
I shook my head. “Are we certain that we’re the only ones affected?”
“Good point.” I had to concede that. “So, you’re by the computer. Can you look and see if anyone else has reported exact doubles of themselves recently?”
I scowled pensively. “Do you think that’s something someone is going to report, though?”
I shifted forward on the sofa and spread my hands in the intergalactic gesture of “How the hell should I know?” I rolled my eyes irritably but brought up the browser and typed in the keywords anyway. The search was flooded with doppelganger hits, but even glancing at them, I could tell that the stories were either too old or they were complete rubbish.
“Call one up anyway,” I suggested from the sofa. “Pick a promising one!”
Irritated at myself for thinking that I was an idiot, I did it anyway, and the one I found was nothing like my situation. Our situation, that is. Nothing about exact same thoughts and reactions, just evil look-alikes.
“I don’t think I’m the evil one,” I called from the sofa. “Are you?”
“Doubt it,” I muttered and closed the session. “Any other bright ideas?”
“No,” I muttered and dropped back into the sofa. “But I did notice that we’re not in perfect synch anymore.”
I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed that already. “What do you think it means?”
“Maybe too early to tell.” I was talking out of my ass as usual. A short hop to the past to stop an extinction level event didn’t make me an expert on anything, so I didn’t even try to pretend. “But I think we can agree that ours is a unique situation?”
“Which means, we’re the target of something.” I was amazingly astute. It was quite shocking, really. “Do you have any enemies that would…?”
I was insulted. “Why me? Just because I’m the one from the time machine?”
I spread my hands in the international gesture of, “Obviously, yes!”
“Okay, fine,” I conceded. “But your situation is hardly normal, either! I mean, who wakes up in a completely different -!”
A sudden thought struck, stopping me in mid-sentence. My stomach churned a little. I felt it at the desk, too. We both knew what was wrong, or at least, strongly suspected it.
“This is your fault!”
I shot up from the sofa. “How was I supposed to know? I’m an idiot, remember?”
I rolled my head irritably. “You broke time!”
“I tried to repair it!” My protest sounded hollow, even to my own ears. I was ignorant of time, space, and the repercussions of messing with them. Who knew that in putting an extinction level event back in place to restore the normal timeline, I might have inadvertently created another crisis?
No! That couldn’t be it! I fixed things! Didn’t I? I began pacing the front room. “No. Wait! We don’t know that! We don’t know anything for sure! We need to focus a bit! We need to think this through!”
“We need your friends,” I pointed out from the desk. “We need them to think for us!”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how to reach them, now, do I?” Okay, that was a little too peevish, but I couldn’t help it. I’d messed up and was in way over my head. Again! And I didn’t need me reminding myself how useless I was!
“Do you really think she won’t come looking for you?” I had to ask. We really needed her help.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, halting in mid pace. “When we first met, her only thought was getting rid of me, so…”
“I don’t think she’s that petty,” I pointed out. “Not anymore.”
I rolled the idea around for a bit. “Maybe. But I have no idea how she’s going to find me.”
“Come to Earth?” I suggested. “Look around a bit?”
“Funny.” I hadn’t realized before how dry my humor was. No wonder no one ever laughed. “She’s probably got a whole slew of gadgets for that.”
Speaking of gadgets reminded me that I still had one in my pocket. I pulled out the high-tech magic wand with all the little knobbly bits on it and presented it to myself. “Think this might help?”
“I don’t think you should mess with that,” I advised myself. “You don’t know what it might do.”
The thought of suddenly making all of time and space explode the moment I activated the device made me put it back in my pocket. “Good call. Maybe later.”
I shrugged. “Still getting nowhere, though.”
“Yeah.” I had to admit; the situation was much higher over my head than I realized.
“Oh, for crying out loud!”
That wasn’t my voice. It wasn’t hers, or that of the friends I had left behind. It was different. Raspy and slithery, and it ended the sentence with a sharp snap of teeth. I knew that voice, and that snap, but before I could exclaim that it couldn’t be, they just phased into existence right in front of the breakfast bar, the short red and black feathers on their pate ruffled irritably.
“I guess two heads aren’t better than one when it comes to you two!” they sniped peevishly.
