Nathan said the word carefully. "Doppelgänger."
He watched my face instead of explaining. "It's German," he said. "Literally means double-walker."
I knew the word, but at this moment, it sounded like a lethal incantation. "In the old stories," Nathan continued, "seeing your own Doppelgänger was a bad sign. Not a haunting. Not possession." He paused. "It meant that something else had started living your life."
My stomach tightened. "In the traditional versions," he said, "the double doesn't attack you. Most of the time, you're not even the first to see it. Other people meet it. Talk to it. Trust it." He added, "Sometimes, they prefer it."
I stayed silent, a dull, internal chill spreading through me. I thought of Luna—how she was becoming more like me each day, and how easily people accepted her.
"The double is usually described as calmer," Nathan said. "More stable. Less hesitation. In some records, it's even described as… kinder." "And the original?" I asked. "The original doesn't get expelled," Nathan said. "They start losing relevance. In Scandinavian accounts, people become socially invisible. Missed invitations. Unreturned greetings. Family members who can't remember the last time they spoke to them."
"That's folklore," I whispered, my voice too weak even to convince myself. Nathan didn't argue. He opened his laptop and turned the screen toward me. The page was dense with citations and footnotes—clinical, impersonal.
"I found a paper from the nineties," he said. "Cambridge. Comparative anthropology. The author was Adrian Keller."
"He argued that the term Doppelgänger is misleading because it implies duplication. What he was describing wasn't duplication—it was substitution. He called it ontological replacement."
The words landed with surgical precision. "It means the replacement doesn't just take your social role," Nathan said. "It takes your position as a valid instance of yourself."
My breath hitched, and my fingers instinctively gripped the fabric over my knees. I felt a violent sense of incongruity, as if my body were becoming translucent in this very room. I opened my mouth to protest, but my throat was too dry to make a sound.
"People notice," Nathan said, as if sensing my tremor. "At first. Keller believed replacement is a process, not an event. There's overlap. Confusion. That's when things still feel wrong. Like your parents' initial hesitation. Like the slight pause from the officers when they checked your ID."
I looked at the yellowed photocopy. My younger self stared back at me, smiling without restraint. In that moment, I had the fleeting illusion that the person in the photo was the real one, and the bruised, trembling version of me sitting here was the fading phantom.
"And when it finishes?" I asked, my voice shaking.
Nathan didn't answer immediately. "When there's no system left that recognizes you," he said, his eyes filled with a bottomless dread, "and not a single person who can accurately remember you—" He stopped. "You're not missing. You're revoked."
The word hit hard. "If this completes," I asked, "what happens to the person who was there first?"
Nathan's jaw tightened. "When the last trace is removed, there's nothing left for the world to reference. That person doesn't die. They stop being a recognized entity."
Cold spread through me. Nathan closed the laptop. "There's one more thing," he said. "Keller continued tracking this phenomenon in later work. It's always been a marginal line of research. Almost no citations. But he didn't stop. He's in his sixties now, still working on the same problem."
My heart began to pound. "You found him?" Nathan nodded. "It took some effort. But he's still in academia. I reached him. He replied."
Hope ignited in my chest.