T h e D o p p e l g a n g e r s

The year was 2067, and the date was the 2nd of September, a Friday. The sun was glaring upon the Lemon household. Akira Lemon was still asleep, flying through the skies and swimming through the oceans that flooded her dreams. Her dog, Hiro, a two-year-old Siberian Husky, just sat beside her bed waiting for his master to open her eyes and to start the day when a knock was heard. It comprised small, regular raps showing how impatient the guest was. Mrs. Lemon appeared from the kitchen to look through the peeping hole.

“Ugh, him again,” she whispered through gritted teeth and opened the door to reveal a tall man in his mid-thirties. His pearl white shone so brightly they rivaled the shine of the sun.

“Hello Mrs Lemon,” the man murmured, “Would you like to help us in improving The System by giving this quick survey?” He spoke in a monotonous voice, the kind you’d expect to hear from a robot.

“You can stop, you know. You guys disturb us every day and nothing really ‘improves’ in this System of yours.”

“It will only take a few -“

“Alright, whatever. Just give it to me.”

The conversation woke Akira up. As it turns out, the house The System gave them was too small for private conversations. She got off the bed remorsefully, played with Hiro a little and got ready for the day. When she came out of her room, she saw her Mom giving another survey for the Robo-man, a term of ‘endearment’ she used for him because of his dreary tone. He was here, at their door, every Friday morning, ready to give them another dose of his mechanized company.

Just as Akira arrived in the hall, her mother finished up the survey and handed it back to the peculiar individual. Once again he spoke in his humdrum accent, “Thank you for giving us your pre-“

And once again he was cut short by the beyond irritated Mrs Lemon, “Yeah, yeah, now get out of my house.” She shooed him away, as if he was some stray cat.

“Robo-man showed up again?” Akira asked her mother.

“Yeah, he did. And for Merlin’s sake don’t call him a robot. I’ve told you a hundred times he’s not one.”

“But don’t you notice the way he speaks? That same tone and repeating those same mundane lines every day? Normal people aren’t capable of such speech, mom.”

“Well, looks like he is. And stop with this ‘robot’ nonsense of yours. There ain’t gonna be any robot invading in a thousand years in this boring neighborhood. So scurry along, you’re getting late for the shop.”

Her mother always shunned her theories like this. With a long face, she got ready for work and left for her father’s shop. On her way, though, she saw the same Robo-man arguing, if that was possible given the way he spoke, with another guy in a dark and narrow alley. Akira hid behind the nearest trashcan and tried her best to hear the debate.

“-you don’t know that,” Robo-man said.

“And do you? You are leading us all towards destruction!” the other guy spoke. He sounded just like the Robo-man, minus the lifelessness and with a hint of haste and fear. He had his back towards Akira so she couldn’t make out his face. She rose a bit from her position to study the men who were too busy in their exchange to notice her.

“This is not destruction. The System cares for you and always will.”

“To hell with your System! I will tell everyone about you people. You just wait -“

Akira heard a gasp. After concentrating more on the scene before her, she saw a taser in Robo-man’s hand with which he had apparently knocked the other man unconscious. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Tasers were definitely not allowed in her block, and to stun someone with it was more terrifying.

When Robo-man lifted the fainted guy, Akira noticed another astonishing detail: the now passed out guy had the same face as his carrier. They had matching eyes, an identical nose; even the cut of their face was the same. She couldn’t think of any other explanation but the same old robots. So, to prove her mother wrong, she decided to follow Robo-man to gather evidence. There had to be some System involvement in this accident, and she took it upon herself to find the answers.

After following the men for another ten minutes and after passing through four almost hidden, secret passages, Akira reached a big laboratory. Robo-man took his passed out lookalike through a door which wasn’t as much appealing as the lab was. Akira opted to stay back and explore the empty hall. After scouting for another twenty minutes she saw a door labelled ‘Do Not Enter’. So, without thinking about it much, she entered the room.

What lay in front of her devastated her even more: dead bodies. And two of them looked like her own parents.

Akira placed two and two together. The System wasn’t secretly building an army of robots. It was producing clones, doppelgangers. And the room she was standing in seemed to be full of failed experiments, some missing an arm or some having weird colors. She was so engulfed in shock that she hadn’t heard the door open behind her. The next thing she remembered was a man with a taser and blacking out.

***

Sofia woke up with a gasp. It was just a dream. Nothing she saw in the dream was real, at least not now. She relaxed a bit and got up from her bed. She had no dog running around, and that saddened her. Ignoring the vision, Sofia went to the washroom to clean up when she noticed herself in the mirror. She no longer had the face of Akira Lemon, only Sofia Brown. Akira Lemon was dead to the society.

But one thing remained the same: her thirst for exposing The System. She now knew that The System was not being run by robots as she had imagined before, but by clones. And today was the day of the revolution. The revolution of the Doppelgangers.