“I always suspected there was something off about him.” Almost everyone I know has said this to me. Well, truth be told, it was all in their heads. He’s pretty much like me.

Ten years ago, I was among hundreds who were abducted by aliens. They appeared to hand us back a few weeks later, but the returnees were just very sophisticated copies.
They were instantly swarmed by both the government and the press.
To their great disappointment, the returnees had no memory of the abduction, just a black hole in their memories. As all the excitement died down, many of the returnees went on to live the same life as us.
It’s very unnerving to a certain degree when you think about it. It would be one thing if they held meetings in secret or behaved oddly. But they were just exactly like us.
The ones who didn’t return to normal life underwent hypnosis to recover memories and formed very cultlike groups that each believed they were victims of a massive fantastical conspiracy.
There seemed to be almost particularly exciting that happened during our time in captivity. We spent almost all of it in a warehouse-like space with giant windows showing nothing but an empty black space. We were made to do basic menial tasks like maintenance work. We never saw our abductors, only heard human voices giving orders from a speaker. When we returned, we were subjected to various tests and interrogations. Then they did the same to the copies. After all that they locked up the copies and sent us home.
Sadly, we could not easily return to a normal life.
Our copies did such a good job at being us that our families could not accept they had spent the last ten years living a lie.
My family, like many of the others, acts very cold in my presence and will frequently talk about the “good old days”. I am certain they are talking about before they found out I was replaced.
This whole experience has been strangely enlightening. I have learned so much more about myself that I never would have noticed otherwise.
I wish for our families’ sake they would let the clones return to them. Because they became us. The ten year late strangers are not us. We were once us but now I think we have passed that point. The clones had already filled the position we were originally going to hold and did what we would do to get there. As for us? I think we should be relocated to start new lives elsewhere. Maybe we’d have the occasional chat with the copies to ask how things were going, but with things the way they are, this will never happen.
I received news recently that my copy had just escaped captivity. I wish him all the best. I’m not worried at all, I know I wouldn’t kill me.