Weirdings

My friends. This happened, and it's weird.

Seven or eight years ago someone took a picture of me. So many of us have one of those floating around, filed, forgotten, technically still ours but not.

This is the image. (Yes I know the haircut sucks.)

Here's what happened next. My old image had made its way into an AI rendering of some situation, a me that's not me, standing in front of graphs I never made, in front of an audience I never wowed, under a limelight I was never near. For one weird little instant, I believed it. Thought: right, that happened, I forgot.

So where does that leave us, existing alongside a string-theory alter ego doing things we didn't do, in a place that isn't quite real but isn't quite nothing either?