“Doubled Reflection”
by Adam Aouassar
After waking from a long sleep, I hate that brief but terrifying moment where you cannot tell where the rest of the world ends, and you begin.
This time, fluorescent lighting screamed at me as soon as my eyes peeked open. Thinking a clear thought was difficult through the pain washing over my head in waves. I pushed myself upright and fought through the grogginess to make sense of my surroundings.
I sat on a bed in what looked like a hospital room. A floor-to-ceiling window on one wall showed an empty hallway running past the room. Across the room, someone else sat upright in an identical bed that faced the window the way mine did.
It took me a few moments of staring to realize what I found so uncanny about the woman’s appearance. She had short dirty-blonde hair and a lean figure. Her facial features were sharp. She clutched her head with one hand and stared back at me with a groggy expression.
I realized that all her features were exactly like my own. Like looking at a photo instead of your reflection in the mirror, you don’t immediately recognize yourself. Her eyes widened into discs as she pulled her hand away from her face.
I dropped out of my bed onto my bare feet. The woman did the same, her eyes locked on me with anxiety.
“Who are you?” she breathed out.
“I’m Ashley Marmot,” I raised a finger toward my face.
“That’s my name…” Her posture straightened, and I recognize her calculating expression.
“Is that so?” I whispered. My mind raced. I saw the woman was wearing a set of light-purple hospital clothes. Looking down revealed that my set of clothes were a light-orange color instead. I could still not be sure that she was really me.
“What’s the password?” I spoke up to her. After watching a movie about time travel in middle school, I came up with and memorized a secret password that a time-traveling version of myself could use to prove to me that they were a time traveler. It made sense that it would be helpful here as well, even if time travel wasn’t involved. The whole point of the exercise was to never say it outside of that scenario, so knowing it would be irrefutable evidence of being me.
“Water balloons.”
“How can you be me when I’m me?” I cried back. My breathing became labored. I stepped forward to stare.
“I don’t know!” she said exasperatedly. “I can’t remember where I was last.” She clutched her hand back to her head.
My stomach dropped. That had been worrying me since I had woken up too. My head had not stopped pounding with pain, and I could not recall where I was before being in the room.
“My legs are killing me,” I moaned. I had only then begun to realize how sore my body really was.
“My neck feels like it’s made of plastic.” The other woman doubled over slightly and stepped backwards.
I felt the same stiffness in my neck. It felt nauseating to agree with her. Even if she knew my password, I could not help but feel on edge.
“I’m glad it’s just my legs then, my neck feels fine.” It felt good to draw a line with a lie. I began to hobble back to my bed to rest.
“Well, that’s funny, I guess I’m glad my legs are okay then.” She stood in place for a moment as if to give credit to what she said, but she eventually turned to sit back on her bed with a sigh.
“Are you okay, Ashley?” A voice from a speaker startled me.
We both turned towards the window. Standing over an audio receiver was someone bundled in medical scrubs and protective equipment. A mask hung under his chin revealing a face with a patchy black beard and a hurried wide-eyed expression behind a squared pair of glasses.
“You can speak into the microphone there,” he said after catching his breath and neither of us had yet reacted.
The other me was closest to the receiver on the wall and reached over to hold down a button next to it.
“What is all this? Where am I?” she asked.
“You are at a hospital, don’t panic,” he said firmly. “I just need you to let me know how you’re feeling, okay?”
“How can I not panic?” She cut him off before he could continue and pointed at me. “Who is she? Why am I here?”
“Well, what do you remember?” he relented.
“I know who I am, I’m Ashley,” I stepped forward and spoke up. My voice wavered slightly from the frustration of having to answer that same question again. “But I can’t remember where I was before this.”
“I understand, I can fill you in then.” Hearing me speak seemed to surprise him, but he quickly recovered. “Two weeks ago, you were in a bullet train crash.” he spoke more softly now. “When the emergency team finally recovered you out of the wreck, they found your spine and heart were critically injured.”
Both my other self and I reached back to touch our necks at the same time. The synchronized gesture made us turn our heads to one another. The description of the spine prompted a phantom sensation of its gruesomeness. It was eerie to see someone else experiencing my feelings so identically. We stared awkwardly for a beat while the doctor paused as well. I quickly put down my hand attempting to beat her to it, but she mirrored that motion as well.
“Your treatment was experimental,” the doctor continued. “After getting approval from your medical proxy, we attempted to use a last resort method to heal the damage. It involved the rapid multiplication of your cells.” He stopped to sigh sheepishly. “It’s admittedly not my area of expertise, but my consultants and I had seen promising results in the previous trials. A case in 2111 and another in 2119 succeeded with only minor side effects.”
“I am not a side effect!” my other self bellowed. “I am myself!” I felt myself begin to shake as the implications of what I was hearing began to fall into place. My rage matched hers.
The doctor seemed paralyzed. I knew our expressions gave us away. Hiding my anger felt unacceptable.
“You were cloned, for lack of a medical term. There’s no precedent for it.”
“Which one is real?!” The two of us screamed in unison. The room trilled with an echo.
My mind floated on air and everything in my vision seemed to rush away from me. I stress-tested whatever memories I could recall. Making a Halloween costume with my mother in middle school. My uncle Jean handing me the keys to my first car. Stressing out over a job interview. They had to be legitimate, right? The woman beside me was just an imitation.
“We haven’t found a way to determine who the original was. But that doesn’t mean one of you is fake,” the doctor asserted. He leaned forward and his expression had become animated.
I looked back at the doctor in bewilderment. The glass window between us reflected the image of my other self and I, one in orange and the other in purple. The ashen complexion of my face stared back. I tried to meet the eyes of my double’s reflection, but her hair was just long enough to block her eyeline from where I stood.
“You’re both here now, like it or not,” the doctor said. His voice was strained. “Downstairs, there are some officials here that are going to try and help get your affairs in order.”
“Affairs?” I snap. “What affairs?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “What happens to your job? Your bank account? Your social security benefits? I’m sure there’s going to be a way to smooth things out in a way that doesn’t invalidate one of you.”
“They’re going to let this thing take my job?” my other self shrieked. “You have to let me speak to them, now!”
Again, I could easily read her thought patterns because they were the ones I had myself. She knew that the first of us to make contact with another authority on our future would have a better position from which to argue they were the original. It seemed minor, but it was the only advantage I could think to make.
I needed to make that argument.
“As your physician, I cannot allow you to make any decisions right now. We’d like to keep you quarantined for a bit longer until we can be sure of your recovery. You don’t look so good right now.”
I looked over to see an airlock door in the corner of the room. My anxiety skyrocketed. Turning back to the doctor, his thoughtful but stern expression told me that he had no intention of letting me plead my case after the hysteria he had seen. I could only look back at my other self.
I saw someone who was scary yet scared. Someone who thought a whole lot about herself but never about what she could do. I stood paralyzed in awe of the simplicity of it all.
Suddenly, I saw a way, and I saw my other self see it too.
We lunged at one another, throwing fists at one another’s faces only to have them deflected. I grabbed for her wrist but had to duck away from a jab to the chest. It was odd fighting myself. My only combat experience came from a karate camp from fifth grade, but conventional tactics seemed trivial in the face of an opponent who knew your every thought. I wondered how long it would take before our thoughts began to desynchronize. I heard the doctor yelling at us though the speakers.
Eventually, I turned to see the physician walking through the airlock, his mask now pulled over his face and protective equipment fastened securely on his body. He walked and spoke slowly, but I could not hear what he said.
In an instant, my other self and I turned toward the doctor and tackled him. Knocking him violently on the chin, we clamored over his stumbling body and towards the airlock.
Even after our short plan born of mutual self-interest was complete, there was no time to try to stop my other self. As we entered the hallway, we could see nurses and security officers down one end rushing towards us. All we could do was sprint in the other direction.
I pumped my legs with all of what little energy I had left. My other self ran right beside me. At the end of the hallway, I saw a foyer open up with an elevator at one end. A glance behind me measured just enough distance between me and the hospital staff to try to call it.
Far ahead of me, I saw our washed-out reflection in the metal elevator doors as I approached the foyer, one purple smear, and an orange one right beside it. I stared transfixed at it while hearing our footsteps slap against the floor in a strange unison. We were so close together I couldn’t make out who was in the lead from the reflection. I couldn’t see the ghastly look I was sure to be on my face. I didn’t dare gaze to my side to check if I was ahead at all, I kept looking only at the doors. I dreaded the thought of seeing the face of that woman again, though I knew I would have to if I reached the end of the hallway.
But just short of reaching the foyer, something in my tired legs gave out. I crumpled to the floor and the front of my skull smashed into the linoleum. I heard a similar sound just ahead of me. Everything around me felt endless. My numb body felt like just another part of the floor and the walls and everything beyond them. When darkness fell into my eyes, I was terrified I had disappeared.
