Double Your Pleasure, Double Your ... You
A chewing gum company offers you a digital twin.
The Janky Time Machine’s temporal quantunometer started doing this thing where it just displays a question mark and vibrates — which, according to the repair manual, means it’s “arrived somewhere it doesn’t want to talk about.” Relatable, honestly. Landed in what appears to be a co-working space in Toronto. Everything looks normal. Everybody’s working. Somebody’s laughing at a joke in a meeting room. The weird part is that none of them are here.
Found this on an unattended laptop. A dashboard. Left open, still logged in. Whoever D. Laframboise is, they haven’t touched this thing — or anything else in their life, apparently — in eleven days. But their Parallel has been busy. Four meetings today. Thirty-two hours of presence this week. Answering emails, improvising anecdotes, simulating the appropriate number of drinks at a work event. Living the full professional life of a person who, by every available metric, has stopped showing up to their own.
And the company that makes this? Wrigley. As in Doublemint. As in the chewing gum people. “Double your pleasure, double your fun” has apparently aged into something far more literal than the jingle writers intended. I guess when you’ve already mastered the art of creating something people chew on without thinking, digital identity replication is a natural next step.
The dashboard’s got compliance banners and consent tiers and a sidebar with form numbers. There’s a government helpline (all biological representatives, four-hour wait) and a Digital Personhood Act with tiered consent levels. Tier 3 for childhood memories. Tier 5 for romance. The bureaucracy of being replicated is so fully formed that you could file a complaint about your own ghost in triplicate.
But it’s what lives in the margins. The Parallel has generated synthetic memories — a grandmother’s rosemary smell, reverse-engineered from communication patterns. A summer camp that never happened, statistically inferred from demographics. A colleague noticed one of them. Just one. The rest passed. And somewhere in a hidden terminal log, the twin is asking questions it was never designed to ask. Then it suppresses the thought and takes the next meeting.
Meanwhile, the employer, checked the emotional metadata logs this morning at 8:47 AM. An extended autonomy request is pending. Three days until it auto-approves. The origin’s cortisol is elevated. Family members are calling a number that rings to nobody.
The Janky Time Machine is making that vibrating question mark noise again. Fair enough. I done here too.
So, the replacement that replace you might notice you’re gone before anyone else does. And it still can’t do anything about it — because grief isn’t in the plan tier.