silph_co | Video

Hey there, kiddos!

So...

I'm guessing by this point you've all seen the dude that looks and sounds just like a really roughed up version of me.

That's Jack Number Two.

[He figures it's about time he addresses this situation, since it could end up being a sort of liability.]

Long ass story short, he's my doppelganger, he took an insanely high paying job to basically be a secondary me. And he was really good at it for a while, but then I guess some shit happened and I haven't seen him in years and he's all pissed off about things that happened when I wasn't even around.

[Like it's Jack's own fault that he ended up getting his ass kicked by terrorists and the casino went into lock down with Other Jack in it. The dude has Jack's DNA, he could have gotten out. Probably. Anyway the point was it wasn't anything that had been Jack's fault.]

He doesn't know I'm a high ranking member of this stupid organization. Don't mess with him or anything, cuz for one he's basically me and messing with me is a bad idea in general - I at least like most of you people. He doesn't.

And plus I'm trying to work shit out with him, so just leave him alone.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You're being an ass.

[He sighs.]

Look. Maybe you don't care if other people make the decision about what to do with your useless knock-offs, but I'd sure as hell want to make the decision for mine.

Yeah, happens sometimes when I'm right.

I've ridden this rodeo before, I know what I'm talking about. That other you is his own independent being and he's out there making decisions of his own. What if those decisions fucking suck?

I don't care what happens to my splinters any more because I can afford to stop giving a fuck. My point was more along the line of troubleshooting, say, this Tim guy growing a wild hair and deciding to really put that doppelganger opportunity he's got to use.

That's not a hypothetical to me, Dirk. What do you think is happening with the fake me back home?

I didn't get to make that decision. And I regret that every damn day.

What do I think is happening?

[....]

I think you're a shaky baby newborn taking his first wobbly footsteps into this topic and thinking you're ready to run Preakness. Then you ran into your first fence and now you think you've been robbed.

I get that. Really, I sympathise.

I'd cook up some substanceless thing like 'we've all been there' or some similarly tepid pablum to spoon into your edentulate oral cavity, but there is no 'we,' let alone an 'all.' You barely have.

So I'm gonna serve it hard and cold, and the hard, cold facts are that both the life 'you' are living and the life 'he' is living were, up to the point where I guess you entered this game, both equally 'real.'

Real, as a value, is so subjective as to be nearly meaningless. At least for you. We're talking first person here, and that's your whole problem. Your perspective is just too first-person.

Put another way: your personal perspective on the story isn't actually the fucking story. Assuming there even is one.

You're just not that special. If I'm right about this, the odds are marginally better than the zero average that you're any kind of special at all, but even then, how arrogant do you have to be to assume your narrative window is the defining factor of reality?

Wow. The mind boggles, it really does.

And here I thought I was the bad guy.

But now you're going to feel insulted and stop listening to anything I'm telling you, so this is where I'm going to make a cursory attempt to prevent that.

Because I'm really not saying this to be the bad guy, let alone your specific bad guy.

Even though I am, specifically, the bad guy. That's very much a thing.

But about this double of yours... whether or not he's the 'real' you... and that's making a lot of suppositions about the idea of being 'real,' not to mention the vastly more ontologically questionable supposition of 'you'... that ain't 'your' life he's living. He's living his life. Piggybacking on the investments you'd made into yours, I'm guessing, but you didn't lose those investments. I know because I know you don't have amnesia. You wouldn't be bitching so much if you did.

But you didn't get to control those circumstances--or possess the illusion of that control, if we're being really honest about how this works--and now you're worked up regretting what someone else does when you should be up doing something yourself.

Like... anything, really. Fuckin' anything that isn't arguing with me about someone else's duplicate?

You are such a little shit, Dirk.

One, I literally lost my investments to the goddamn fake me. My apartment, my bank account, my career, my legal identity, every goddamn asset I had.

Two, he is literally made of a pile of junk that an asshole in a gold mask brought to life and covered with an illusion to make everyone think he's me, so that said gold asshole could kidnap me.

Three, this is not about the control I didn't get in his creation. This is about how when I finally made it back home, I was stupid enough to listen to the people who took me in when they told me to let the Goddamn fake have my old life and make a new one, instead of taking my life back.

Edited 2020-03-03 02:46 (UTC)