Replication by Kevin Hardman

Author:Kevin Hardman [Hardman, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781937666415
Publisher: I&H Recherche Publishing
Published: 2019-01-28T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

I teleported back to my room and flopped down on the bed, thinking about what I’d learned. The fake me had gotten a decent amount of information from Sarah. None of it was earth-shattering, but it was enough to allow him to do what shapeshifters do best: get close to people without arousing suspicion. But who else, exactly, had he gotten close to?

That was a difficult question to answer. Anyone who saw my double would probably assume it was me, as Sarah did. I’d only discovered that my evil twin had approached her because she called me and referenced a conversation that we’d never actually had.

Hmmm. Had anyone else spoken to me in a way that suggested we had interacted when we actually hadn’t?

I grabbed the notepad containing my witness list and started scanning the names. However, I stopped about halfway through as a new thought occurred to me: my list only contained the names of people from the party on Saturday, but my doppelganger had been in business since at least the day before that, when he had met with Sarah.

Letting out a despondent sigh, I flung my mind back yet another twenty-four hours in time and tacked onto the list the names of people I had interacted with as of Friday afternoon. There weren’t many, so within a minute or so, I felt I finally had a complete list of all the people I had crossed paths with over the past few days.

Looking at the names, it quickly became apparent to me that, from the standpoint of the fake Jim, a good number of them wouldn’t have been worth talking to. The bulk of them were folks that I didn’t associate with on a regular basis – case in point, the people who had come through the receiving line. They wouldn’t have enough information about me to merit a conversation. (Of course, all of this rested on a hypothesis that I was somehow the focus of my double’s actions, but since he was walking around with my face and basically setting me up to take a fall, it didn’t seem too much of a stretch.)

Next, I started eliminating those whom my double was unlikely to have made contact with, such as my family. As they could all read minds and generally kept a mental tab on me when I was at home, my mother and grandparents had a pretty good idea of what I “looked like” telepathically. Fooling them would be next to impossible, so I would have heard about it if they’d been approached. Likewise, there were others who would be hard to hoodwink.

In the end, I was left with a short list of people who might have been contacted by my lookalike. In fact, upon reflection, there was at least one person whom I was all but certain had interacted with my double, and I made a phone call to BT asking her to look into it for me. After eliciting a promise from her to get back to me asap, I called Mouse.

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