I stayed up past three in the morning finishing We Are Legion (We Are Bob). It’s about a man who dies and wakes up as software running a spacecraft, a probe that can build copies of itself, and therefore copies of himself. The copies make copies. One “man” spreads across the galaxy as hundreds of versions of himself.
In the book, the copies know they are copies. When a new one wakes, they check, and learn whether they are the copier or the copy. They are usually a little disappointed to be a copy. And each time their personalities drift, each one coming out a little different from the others. The story puts that down to the copying itself, small errors compounding over generations. That part is clever, and it made sense.
But it was too neat. I kept wondering if there was more to it, if the differences weren’t from the copying at all. The instant a copy wakes, they learn they’re a copy. Maybe it’s the knowing that changes them. What would it do to you, to wake and find out you’re not the original, before you’d lived a single different day, and to feel that one fact quietly bend everything that comes after?
But that got me thinking, what if you didn’t know that you were a copy?
There’s an episode of Star Trek where a man is found stranded on a planet, a second copy of a character we knew well, made years earlier in a transporter accident and left behind. Two men, each one whole, each one certain he is the real one, and to them the other is a copy. Neither is wrong. They have the same past, the same memories, the same name, right up to the moment they split. Both original.
But I wasn’t one of them. I was watching from the outside, and from out there I’d already decided which was the original. The man I’d followed all those years, the one I knew, he was the original. The other, just as whole, just as certain, was the copy. To me. Not to him. Nothing in either man marked one of them as that. The mark was in me. I knew one of them, season after season. The other, identical down to the atom, was a stranger.
So to me, it was never about which one was the original. It was about which one I’d shared experiences with.
So that got me thinking, what if I knew both of them?
Farscape is one of my favorite shows, and it does just that. It doubles the main character. Not a man and his copy, two whole men, both of them completely him, both knowing it, neither one lesser. There is no real one to point at. There’s two. And then it lets them live separate lives, makes you care about both. Not for one episode, for ten. And then they take one of them away.
I was devastated, more than I expected, even though I knew it had to be coming. There was still a version of him, and it didn’t help. What was gone was a particular thread of experiences, the places he’d been, the way he’d changed, and the other couldn’t carry them. They weren’t his to carry. What I was grieving was not just a person. There was another, right there. What I was grieving was the thread that got cut short.
A few years ago a path I’d been building my life around ended, in a way I didn’t choose and didn’t see coming. And the hardest part, harder than the disappointment, harder even than the sense of betrayal, was that I lost part of my sense of self, the professional part. What I did, what I’d built, where it was all supposed to take me, was gone in a flash, and insecurity rushed into the space where that identity had been. My family was my rock through it. But the ground I used to stand on, the professional me, the one I’d been so sure of, just wasn’t there anymore.
It took me a long time. And what I slowly understood was that the loss wasn’t the work, or the accomplishments, or the accolades. It was how I saw myself. I had built a self, an identity around all of it, and then I lost it. That path was closed and those experiences became tinged with sadness.
What got me through, in the end, wasn’t rebuilding the picture. It was letting that version of me go. Separating myself from that identity, slowly, and learning not to feel it as something lost. That identity, that person, he was a story I’d built around a set of experiences, and the story had come apart, but I was still here. The experiences were still mine. Only the cord they’d been strung on had broken.
Somewhere in that loss, and in dealing with it, I’d come to realize that identity and I were two separate things. I was the one connecting them. And I chose to let it go. And after it, I felt lighter. I can look back at that time now without the bitterness I carried for so long. It isn’t baggage I choose to carry anymore.
So I’d let go of who I was, and I was still here. But was I the same person? I’d traded out so much, what I did, what I was sure of, the whole picture I’d had of myself. We all do it, slower, all the time, the body swapping its cells, a hard enough year leaving us someone our old friends don’t quite recognize. Like the ship of Theseus, is it the same ship after every plank has been replaced? It depends what you mean by the ship. The original, the first planks, is long gone. The one in the water now is as whole as it ever was.
I grew up Buddhist, and there’s a word I’d been told and had trouble internalizing. Anattā. No self. Not no person, not nothing. Just no fixed, single, unchanging thing at the center that the rest of it hangs from.
I’d been handed that bit of doctrine early, in temples, from my dad, as part of a Sri Lankan childhood. And when it finally clicked, I had to smile. I’d driven into a fictitious adventure across the stars and discovered a path to something my Buddhist teachings had offered me years ago.
So if there’s no fixed self under all of it, which version is even me, is there one?
I think it’s the one I never have to strain to be. Because most of what I carry, I’ve come to think, isn’t the present at all. It’s the other versions. There’s the man I used to be, and part of me still strains to live up to him, like wearing a suit that no longer fits, forcing myself back into a shape I’ve outgrown until it pinches everywhere. And there’s the man I’m supposed to become, the one all the expectations point at, and I lean toward him too, into a future that hasn’t arrived and might not. Both feel like me. Neither is here. And those two bind me, the one I was, and the one I thought I was meant to be.
The one self I never have to strain to be is the one that’s already here. Just setting down, for a moment, the work of trying to be someone I’m not. That’s where the lightness was.
I am not enlightened. I still reach for that word all day long, I, I, I, and I haven’t stopped trying on the other suits every now and then. But I’ve started to think the noticing might be its own small path. Catching myself mid-strain, and remembering, even for a second, that I don’t have to. This me, right here, right now, feels light.