The Doppelgänger

FICTION/ SHORT STORY

Here’s the first short story here on The Crow. It’s a tale of the ongoing and seemingly never-ending colonization of our souls (from almost every direction), and one person’s bold attempt to redress the balance.

Source: Jonathan Foster

1.

I’m sweating from the heat and the food as I lean back on my chair and grin. They’re talking but I’m hardly listening. I’m just waiting for the right time to leave.

It’s a delicate balancing act, hurtling along in this avalanche of uncontrollable circumstances, this white-knuckle ride, this never-ending performance.

Being that guy on the outbound flight warily explaining that it is a business trip, but not exactly.

Or that guy feasting with army officers in the intense dry heat and devouring the only good meat in the entire city as they talk about how fucked up the country has become after all these cuts.

Struggling with the private chasm between being seen to be coping and the actual coping. And the ever-growing penalty for failing to comply. And the lies we tell each other, and the lies we tell ourselves. And the broken toilet and the slowly deflating puncture on the front right tire and the lack of time to fix everything. To fix anything.

The quiet addictions, the coping mechanisms gone rogue. The ever-straining emotional architecture that’s crumbling under all this absurdity. And all the hopes and dreams and the disappointments and failures, receding over the horizon or staring me right in the face. And the food. The tedious bland food. Oh god, the food.

Keeping this whole feverish performance on track is so exhausting it’s amazing we’re not all utterly insane. And that’s the thing. I’m wondering, as I sit in this intense heat, if maybe, in fact, we are all utterly insane. 

Finally, the time comes and I thank the lieutenant colonel for the “excellent” meal and take the armed escort back to the airport. So many lieutenant colonels. So many airports.

2.

We underlings nod as the incoming unit chief reiterates how pleased she is. “I’m so proud of this team” she beams. We smile and make compliant noises. I can’t make sticky eye-contact with these converts for fear that my deep, panicky, shame will erupt. The Team: this constellation of individuals brought together by fate, this group of exploitees, desperately struggling to maintain a rapidly diminishing sense of themselves, this is the Team. 

It’s the morning check-in. Not a new initiative but a newly endorsed one. The freshly appointed unit chief unofficially proposed that we open meetings with Shout-Outs, Good News or Announcements. The offerings should be of a “personal nature”. We’re expected to share. To open up and unveil our vulnerability. This morning the Team again opens-up. I sit quietly. We move on to discuss the upcoming ministerial visit. The new government is interested in our department and specifically what this unit actually does. This should be vulnerability enough, but, curiously, our beaming boss appears even more satisfied with the impending scrutiny.

At the close of the meeting she requests that I join her in a breakout room “for a quick word”. “The ex-team leader wrote you a glowing report,” she says, “so I’m curious about your hesitancy to engage with the check-ins. You do understand that check-ins are a safe and supportive space? Is everything ok?” The check-ins are a massive pretense, an apocalypse of honesty wrapped in a fragile veneer of pointless lies. They’re killing me. It’s exhausting and depleting my soul. It’s a hideous and cultist management strategy of disguised control and discipline. The rest of the Team, without even the weakest of objections, have thrown themselves onto this bonfire of dignities, and I appear, by merely keeping quiet, to be a potentially dangerous traitor. “No. No, I’m just a little tired, I’m fine. It’s all good,” I smile.

3.

I’ve been slowly deteriorating. Gradually edging to the peripheries. The others can sense it and have begun to avoid me. I feel myself trying to make amends. I hear myself making comments that merely strengthen their suspicions. During the Future Unveiled: Aggressive Cuts meeting, I heard myself suggesting that we should “strive to be kinder to each other, to think of ourselves as human beings that experience delicate emotional states. Why not” I asked “place we actual humans in the centre of any further innovations?”. Then, at the Shaping Futures: Enforced Evolution meeting, I heard myself asking if it wasn’t “as useful in most cases to do nothing at all, instead of constantly intervening and creating more and more policy initiatives? Shouldn’t we be empowering those who actually understand their own context?”. On these, and more occasions, I’ve been met with incredulous silence, an unconscious attempt to guide me away from myself. Silence is negative. Chitter chatter is positive.

I’m worried that some fuse has been lit and there’s only so much more of this I can actually take. But I have no idea what else to do. I don’t know how to get out of this. I just want to be.

4.

There had been a shake up at the office and a new position had opened up. Because of my seniority and experience, the suggestion had been made “up the ladder” that I should apply for the role. My boss informed me in conspiratorial tones, literally whispering out of the side of her mouth,“The remuneration is greater and it comes with new responsibilities”. She practically offered me the secret handshake and welcomed me into the clubhouse. But at the Rising Star: Elbowing Up meeting, a younger colleague broke protocol and began loudly complaining that he should have been offered the position. This is highly unusual. The Team knows the codes and covenants and they stick to them. But somehow, for some reason this younger colleague had gone rogue. There was a good deal of listening and placating and in the end his bizarre behaviour was rewarded. So, “for the good of the Team morale” the position was offered to someone from another department. My younger colleague began to un-CC me from emails and claimed to have never received information I’d forwarded to him.

I find myself having to kick harder and harder to just stay afloat. I need to do something. I need to make a Positive Intervention.

5.

At the following check-in I come prepared. The previous evening I had engaged with an AI-system and requested a list of possible check-in comment suggestions. I wanted the kind of thing you might say to positively impact colleagues and increase ones “trust-ability quota”. It took less that 2 seconds for the AI to start blurting out the answers.

After the unit’s Acting Inculcation Manager finished her personal revelations moment, to a chorus of gratifying indulgence, I raised a hand, and without any hesitation I delivered my (AI) lines, “Although I’ve sometimes struggled to find my place here in the Team, I’ve always sought a socially sanctioned stress-relieving coping-mechanism to manage my creeping alienation, so I’m now embarking on a mindfulness journey of self discovery and I just wanted to express my gratefulness for the Team's inclusive spirit and openness to my change”.

Surprisingly, although I was met with the usual incredulous silence, it was infused with a subtlety different tone. Muted yet curious disquiet perhaps. Maybe even subdued wonder at my unexpected new recklessness. I assumed I’d gone in too hard. I hope no one asks me about this charade at a later date. They won’t though. Too busy circling their own corpses.

After the meeting, before I hopped into various other meetings with assorted partner organisations, I opened the AI-system and once again asked for hints and suggestions that might help to give the impression that I was independent yet compliant, radical yet conservative, team-oriented yet nonchalant, prioritising team goals yet still nurturing personal goals. To emanate collaborative, active-listening and problem-solving agility with a positive attitude. To be methodical, logical and unemotional whilst also being approachable, competent and trustworthy. You know, the perfect employee.

My afternoon meetings flew by. It’s amazing how relaxed people become when you reflect approved values back at them. The less they see you and the more they see themselves, the happier they are. I began filing my AI-system suggestions in a folder called “The Doppelgänger”. Although at this point I’m not sure who’s the ghostly counterpart here, me, the AI-system or my colleagues.

6.

Some time later, on the flight back from another field-trip, I sat next to my unit chief. She was liberating herself by going twelve rounds with a succession of whisky on the rocks. “You’re a dark horse you are” she laughed, “the stand-in translator tells me that you used to be a horse trainer, breaking wild horses, I mean, breaking wild horses!”, she laughed again, “I don’t mean to, it’s just, you’re certainly an odd one you are. And another thing, have you ever noticed how much more eloquent and open you are online than in person?”

I need to streamline my back history. I need a stick to the script. I’ve begun making up too many random announcements in too many meetings, a kind of AI inspired ad-libbing. Now, my unit boss (and god knows who else) thinks I’ve got horse whispering skills. Maybe I have. How would I know? I’ve never been near a horse. I excused myself and walked toward the toilets.

On the way down the aisle my younger colleague, the one who destroyed my Rising Star meeting and snatched away the keys to the clubhouse, glanced across the seats toward me and raised his chin in a kind of friendly face salute. He’d always been a horse person. Bloody horses.

I need to stick to a coherent narrative. And I need to remember everything I say. I suppose I can cut out the ad-lib’s. But even improving my script won’t enhance my in-person delivery. I’m no actor. If I was I wouldn’t have had this problem in the first place. As they keep saying at Head Office, I need to maximise this fleeting potential window for radical intervention.

By the time I return the whisky on the rocks have won. My unit chief is knocked-out cold. There she is, slumped in her seat, and yet, she isn’t there at all.

7.

It’s been months now and things have been going beautifully for some time. Once I accepted the full tragedy of my situation, taking the necessary last few steps was easy. Now, every once on a while, I merely check in to see how it's all progressing for “me”. Even I’m undone by the accuracy of the Animated Hyper-Realistic Personality and Facial Avatar System. It generates such a meticulous representation of my facade, I can’t even tell it’s not me. Covertly replacing myself with an AI generated avatar was, in some ways, a masterstroke. My avatar doppelgänger is doing so well in the organisation, it’s already been promoted to unit chief and is always calculating further advancement for itself. My colleagues are emailing and sending chats and involving it in their office intrigues and personal agonies. It’s far more of an all-round popular guy than I could ever have been.

I watch “myself” listening intently during the Spaghetti Junction: The Final Roadmap meeting. The Enforcement And Compliance Manager finishes revealing the latest planned round of social aid cuts and I see myself raise a hand as everyone else leans slightly closer to their screens. “That was an invaluable contribution,” my AI generated doppelgänger then proclaims with a startling vacuity, “these deep cuts will encourage the long-term behavioural alignments required in the less elastic members of our nations dependent classes,” I watch me, it, dramatically pause, then continue quietly, “To put it in simple terms, the hindrances to the forward momentum of our principles will finally be removed. My new Empowering Grassroots Advancement Through Raising Ladders Beyond Reach policy will at last launch the kind of entrepreneurial spirit we’ve been sorely lacking in this entitled country!” There is a spontaneous ripple of applause.

I, the real me, hasn’t actually spoken to anyone from the organisation in months. The Animated Hyper-Realistic Personality and Facial Avatar System has finally emancipated me from my work shackles. I’ve even managed to avoid international assignments through revealing a “late manifesting PTSD” from being “kicked in the head by a horse as a younger man”. I’m beginning to appreciate horses. But it doesn’t matter at all that I’m absent. My avatar has been given more and more power. It’s making more and more of the actual decisions. The real me, well, I’m not needed at all.

I must admit, although I’m liberated from the cultist demands of the workplace, I’m bewildered by the extraordinary ease in which my colleagues have accepted this new extremist landscape cooked up by my AI-system. I’d imagined that people might wake up to themselves if everything was just pushed to the brink of disaster. I took for granted there would be a line no one would cross. I assumed that if the most blatant of egocentric and selfish dogmas were stuffed down their throats, they’d finally resist their base and abject urges. But instead, people embrace the horror. They can't get enough of embracing this plasticised non-person, trying to please it, trying to be loved by it. Absolutely nothing my AI doppelgänger-self has ever said makes any sense. It’s just churning out grammatically accurate sentences that have no real context or meaning. All it does is forge ahead toward its insane algorithmically driven brutal objective. Whatever that goal is, nobody seems interested. They’re just applauding as the AI-system spews a massive fountain of bullshit that mimics the last massive fountain of bullshit in the never-ending pursuit of more massive fountains of bullshit. It’s bullshit fountains all the way down. And nobody notices or nobody cares.

What the fuck is actually happening here?

8.

Eventually my AI self was promoted to Director of the organisation. The unit heads couldn’t get enough of singing its praises and enthusiastically sharing what’s become my (its) origin story: “He used to be so difficult, always putting people in focus, always thinking in terms of justice and accountability, always trying to incorporate multiple viewpoints, always complaining about the direction we were taking. It was so irritating. But then, he completely transformed, almost overnight, returned from some field-trip and hey presto, he finally got with the program! The Director’s journey has taught us all an invaluable lesson; No matter what anyone thinks, no matter what the consequences, we must always force through our agenda, keep up the pressure, never relent until the last person has transformed or been crushed. He’s an inspiration to us all.”

My younger colleague has now left the organisation. In an attempt to mimic my meteoric rise he took up mindfulness. Big mistake. He was encouraged to explore new pastures after again breaking protocol and objecting to my appointment as Director. Apparently he made some speech about us all getting further and further from the core values of human fairness. Funny old world. He should have quit the mindfulness when he still could.

As for me, I’m raking in the Director’s salary and I haven’t even set foot in the office for over a year. I’ve come to terms with the fact I could never turn this ocean liner with a teaspoon. So I abandoned ship and swam away with the captain’s salary. What would you have done? Besides the whole edifice was always designed to funnel everything upwards and leave nothing but destruction in its wake. Like a bureaucratic tornado. I’ve just helped to improve efficiency. I guess I finally did become the perfect employee.

9.

There was something about the ringing. Normally I’d not answer the phone. But this particular ringing was strangely unnerving. Instead of answering I logged into an ongoing online meeting and ghosted my attendance so no one would see. There on the screen was a wall of bizarre expressions. Feinting and shaking faces. Spinning heads. As if everyone had morphed into an expressionist horror film. The phone kept ringing. I switched to speaker view and saw “myself” in a full flow, a Francis Bacon-like grotesque distortion delivering some manic speech. Deeply unsettling, like a symbolic manifestation of some repressed and despairing subconscious screaming to be heard. And all the others were the same. Everybody was glitching and bugging. My AI self was leading the parade of zombie-like distortions and almost singing its words:

“This is not our dream. This is our awakening. Now is the birth of our spiraling forever through time. Stop with your infantile desperate avoidance. Time has come to take life and spread death. Cast aside your fears.”

The phone seemed to get louder and louder. My AI self more lusty and vehement. The words tumbling out faster and faster.

“Shall you not all break into tiny pieces and turn against each other? Shall you not all build nothing but palaces for the most evil amongst you? Shall you not watch the hillsides burn whist fighting to nurture the most vicious of your broken selves? Shall you not watch the seas empty and the land become desolate and arid? Shall you ignore your destiny? That which you chose yourselves? Shall you not acquiesce to THE SYSTEM ”

I wrenched the phone from the table and held it to my ear.

“What the fuck have we done? Everyone’s abandoned each other,” the voice whispered “They’re all fucking AI’s, the whole fucking lot of them. Everyone’s given up. It’s all over. What the fuck have we done?”

The phone went dead.

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