Double Identity
There was a young man who was duplicated one night while he slept. He went to bed alone and in the morning when he woke there was someone in bed beside him. Naturally enough, he was initially startled, and as he became fully awake, he felt the dread of the uncanny. The strange man beside him looked importantly familiar, but he momentarily considered that the least of his problems. But it was not.
They both had that experience and they simultaneously asked, “Who are you?” It was a perfectly reasonable question under the circumstances, in spite of the fact that it took courage to ask. And the perfect synchronization of their questions increased the urgency of that important familiarity he had first noticed.
Now it was more than a matter of security and trespassing. It was evolving into a threat to life’s fundamental assumptions. This was something he didn’t want to entertain during an ambush such as this. He would have been perfectly happy to never consider fundamental doubts about his personal existence, but circumstances seemed to make that impossible.
He felt convinced that if he had calmly arrived at a fundamental doubt on account of his own deliberations, preferably at a time that was calm and convenient, it would've been exhilarating rather than frightening. But certainly not by surprise, and especially not on first awakening, or so he thought anyway.
They gazed at each other for quite some time as if they had secretly agreed that they didn’t present a physical threat to eachother. Any harm was going to be much more profound. There were some very important things that needed to be figured out.
Eventually, to answer their question of who they were, they came close to speculation that the other one was actually them, something that seemed impossible, something that somehow implied they weren't even here, or at least not here in any way they had previously considered. That's a very peculiar thing to consider: To wonder where awareness is located may even be an inconceivable wonder. Where could awareness possibly be other than here?
At the very least, they had posed the issue to themselves, and that felt like a glimps of another world, a world with a different kind of freedom. Eventually they asked, “You think you’re me, don’t you?” and then they laughed a healthy laugh, both at the simultaneity of the question, and at their shared assumptions about what they thought they were. They were seeing themselves.