Yeah, I resulted to be a clone of myself from an alternative-future-imaginary-world or something like that. Listen, is this going to affect my welfare check?
—Alan Moore, Tomorrow Stories
Tears... tears. Why am I crying? What... did this mean to me?
Carib: About as you'd expect. It's the sort of secret that gets heavier with time and age.
Han Solo: Yeah. I can imagine.
Carib: Excuse me, Solo, but you can't possibly imagine it. Every time one of us leaves this valley it's with the knowledge that every outside contact puts our lives and those of our families at risk. The knowledge that all it will take will be one person suddenly looking at us with new eyes, and the whole carefully created soap bubble of the ever-so-close Devist family will collapse into the fire of hatred and rage and murder.
You look in the mirror, but someone else looks back. You remember a life you never had, one that cannot be yours. You are the piece that does not fit, you don't belong in this game. The board has been knocked over, you shall be swept away...
My name is Jennifer Lucas. I'm not a factory part. I had toast for my breakfast. I wrote a letter to my mum. [...] I am Jennifer Lucas! I remember everything that happened in her entire life! Every birthday, every childhood illness. I feel everything she has ever felt, and more! I'm not a monster. I am me! Me! Me! Me! ME!
stirring themselves only to order us into fratricide?
...
Perhaps we are no longer even dwarves. When a work of art is copied, and that copy is copied again and again, the results become gross parodies of the original.
I fear that I am but a pale imitation of the First I once was, willingly killing myself in an absurd parody of narcissism.