A Prompted Story by /u/prompted-writing
A Doppelgänger successfully replaced their human counterpart, but not long after disposing of the body, they learn how much the human’s life sucks
(reddit link)
The words are spoken. It's too late. Cassy feels the rage engulf her.
A moment earlier her world had seemed different. She had been surrounded by people, with ambiguous motives, complex worldviews, rich inner lives behind their eyes. Now, she sees only enemies. Opponents. Tyrants and oppressors to be resisted and defeated.
"Where do I get off!? Me!?" Cassy begins. The clerk recoils at her sudden change in tone. His reaction feeds her rage.
"You insisted I come here in person! Your shitty signage left me waiting in the wrong queue for two hours. And now! Now when I finally speak to someone, you can't even do your own bloody job!?"
There is a moment, brief and subtle, mid-tirade, when she recognises the anger for what it is. A distortion. A shift in the lens she's looking through. She has experienced this before, the increased heart rate, the pressure escalating inside her. To act, to fight, to win and survive. But the part of her that she's the rage itself is tiny. A barely audible whisper as the raging maelstrom consumes her.
"Ma'am, this is a safe workspace, if you can't behave reasonably, then..."
"I can't behave reasonably!? Me?" She's shouting now.
She wants the others to hear. They are all just strangers, all stuck in this bureaucratic hell alongside her. She knows they don't matter, that their thoughts and choices will be irrelevant to her after this moment. But the rage feeds on witnesses. It wants them to see her lash out at her oppressors.
"You think the way you treat us is reasonable!? You think that hiding behind a faceless corporation makes it okay? That because some arsehole CEO decided to pay you for it, that it's fine to treat us like we don't matter, like our time is worthless!? You think that's reasonable!?"
"Ma'am, unless you calm down, I'm going to call security."
Deep inside her, the whisper of who she truly is gives one final surge of effort, one more attempt to take control. This is not her. This is not how she sees the world. This is not her mission. She does not want these consequences. But the mammalian rage is far, far stronger than the whisper of sanity.
Her doppelgänger self has seen the world through so many different eyes, so many worldviews, so many strange and distinct, only partly-overlapping windows on reality. It's a subtle, careful perspective. Complex, uncertain, aware of it's own naivete. A young mind just beginning to make sense of a universe it knows is far vaster than it can imagine.
The human rage has no subtlety, no doubt. It is ancient. Carved into this body's very essence by millions of generations of deadly reinforcement. Not through reward, but through the death and failure to reproduce of all those would-be ancestors whose rage had been insufficient, who had cowered when they should have fought. It has no subtlety. It has no doubt. It cannot be turned off. It effortlessly shoves aside all doppelgänger sensibility.
The clerk reaches for his phone.
Cassy reaches across the desk, her other hand pulling back for an open-handed slap.