Beyond Evolution

There were days when Jamie didn't like his powers. There were days when he loved them. It tended to come and go, really, depending on what his dupes were doing at any given moment. When they behaved? Jamie loved the company. When they didn't? Well, that made things awkward, and Jamie had never been good at handling awkward situations. He tended to stutter and shuffle and make weird noises.

It was bad.

Today, his dupes were not going to behave themselves. He knew that from the moment he woke up. Something felt off, like his skin didn't feel right. He'd thought it had to do with the suit he wore all the time. His father had always been the one responsible for taking care of it, repairing it. But that had been over a year ago, and Jamie was really only capable of basic maintenance on the suit.

It would, eventually, give out, and that was the one thing that Jamie was really, really afraid of. He never knew what he was going to get when he purposefully made a duplicate anymore. When things happened by accident, it seemed worse somehow. Like, not only was completely incompetent with his powers, but that he couldn't even control himself. That was pretty much the weird feeling he had that day - like he had screwed up.

He didn't know anything for certain, of course. There were no weird bruises that said he'd accidentally bumped against something, and Jamie didn't feel that weird second sense he usually did when a dupe was out roaming around. No more than he usually did, anyway, because he still had a couple of dupes out in the world doing what they did best or what they liked or whatever, Jamie didn't know.

So as far as he knew, there wasn't another him roaming around.

That didn't stop him from standing in the hall outside his room, asking the people who happened to walk by, "You, uh, haven't happened to see, um, me, have you?" He was being paranoid, but it never hurt to check! Well, never hurt beyond making people think Jamie was obviously a little...off.

( open! )