Twins

[Vlad]

To get up in the morning requires a certain amount of skill. Perhaps you even need some innate talent to do it. And every day over six billion people manage to do it. They are, of course, staggered twenty-four times, but it still makes for an astounding number. That means a quarter of a million get up at the same time as you do, give or take a few minutes.

 

When that quarter of a million people pop out of bed, most engage in some form of hygiene, maybe have a breakfast or two, and then head off to wherever they need to be. If we discount the elderly and very young, then there are only two hundred thousand left doing the things you do.

 

Now it becomes necessary to zone in on specifics. It is a well-known fact that only a little more than four out of every five people brush their teeth, and out of them, a bit more than half use Crest. This lowers it to a mere eighty thousand that mimic each other on a daily basis. Looking even deeper, a hefty portion of the populace works a nine to five job in a cubicle, so lets make fifty thousand have the same morning routine as you.

 

Fifty thousand mimickers is still a bit high though. After you take into account the most obvious factor, the false you are down to half of that. Gender invariably proves to be a valuable factor in deducing who can be a victim of this sort of identity theft. Statistics like these obviously warrant a cause for concern, but fortunately, many will fail to notice them. Should everybody report this massive breach of identity, the vastly under-worked governments of this world would all find themselves swamped with paperwork.

 

Fortunately for the bureaucracies of the world, not many have caught on to this greatest of all scams. All products can be easily manufactured in bulk. You have the same pant size as twenty-five thousand other people just like you. Every complaint you have, and problem you face, can be fixed en masse for twenty-five thousand people. Only one of them will have any difficulty in life, and I'm sorry to say that it will probably be you.

 

Now the true question arises. What can you do to find these social twins of yours, and what should you do to warn them about this global conspiracy? The most practical method would be to simply do nothing. Don’t give in to the system. Hope that one of your alter-selves will become the victim who gets faced with problems. Maybe even disappear from this world completely. Disappear despite the fact that twenty-five thousand depend on you to idiot-proof their products. Go ahead and take the coward’s way out.

 

If you’re still reading this, then obviously you are curious. It is the question that drives us, and you know what the question is. To find at least one of your twins, we must go back to the math. There are twenty-five thousand candidates out there, and six billion false leads. That means one out of every quarter million is your friend, ally, and compadre.

 

It’s much easier to find your target if you live in a big city such as New York, where the head-count numbers slightly over eighteen million for the tri-state area, so consider moving if you’re in a dinky little suburb. There should be a good seventy chums for you to find. Fortunately, people of like ethnicity tend to live in the same region, which means you have roughly a hundred opportunities waiting.

 

The method you chose of searching is completely dependant on what your purposes for finding your targets. When worried about the risk of losing individuality, a hitman becomes a feasible option. If corporate monopolies are your concern, running through the streets screaming would work well enough. Just weigh the options, and chose what comes naturally, I’m not here to help you with that.

 

Now for the intriguing part: what to do when you discover your twin. Most of the time he or she won’t accept this possibility, and neither should you. Who would want to give up any meaning they thought their life had, anywyas? But everything depends on the reason you had for searching in the first place. Be advised though, showing them this writing could be potentially hazardous, after all – twenty five thousand authors will claim to have written it.