My name is Walter Smith, and I have a confession to make:

I'm the one who did it.

We were not supposed to do it, but I did it anyway, and man, do I regret it. I'm such an idiot. There's even a warning about it in the manual's 'ethical consequences section.' But who bothers to read that?

Wow! I should have!

When I received my DP-V2 (Doppelgänger V2), I was so excited. It looked just like me, with enough cosmetic differences for everyone to know it's an android. I assigned it tasks to garden, cook, and even walk my dog. It functioned much like me since I chose the advanced package to have some of my consciousness copied.

But then I had a stupidly brilliant idea—‘Why not instruct it to do my real job?' So I searched and found 5D printer designs for relevant hacks to modify its chips and replace its skin, albeit illegal, to make it behave and appear 100% identical to myself.

Apparently, I wasn't alone in that pursuit, but no one else had pulled it off.

I scheduled DP-V2 to work at my robotics engineering job while I went on a 'vacation.'

I occasionally monitored through DP-V2's eyes as it precisely designed and performed higher mathematical functions at a remarkable efficiency. I even had to slow it down to mimic me better.

On my return, I assigned DP-V2 to stay at home.

Once I arrived in the office, Susan Wilcox, my manager, requested an immediate face-to-face meeting with me.

"Mr. Smith, that was quite clever, but we figured it out. That wasn't you."

"Oh, damn. Am I fired?"

"No, not at all. In fact, we'd like you to consider a new job proposal and sign an NDA."

I looked over the contract.

"You want me to do that?” I pointed out a section on page 12. “Will the employees even accept this?"

"Sure they will—at will. Unless they want to lose money." Susan smirked. "We're offering royalties and company stock options. I'm sure they'll find other pursuits. But without the vacations, medical insurance, and well, you know the rest."

"But it'll violate labor laws ..."

"No, it won't, Smith. We're currently in talks with the Federal Robotics Commission to open that door. Everyone will have their Doppelgängers working for them. Well, that's until ..."

"Until what?"

"Eventually, their human-based originals will 'expire,' but that's not a problem, Smith. I'm confident we'll get self-programming AI figured out by then."