The Doppelganger Protocols

There are documented cases going back centuries in the record —
The Doppelganger, the fetch, the shade — each one anchored
In the folklore of every culture independently arrived —
Too consistent to be coincidence, too specific to have thrived.
On invention alone — something in the collective experience
Of the human species has produced this adherence:
The double, the copy, the thing that wears your face —
Is real, and it shows up to mark a specific case.
The Doppelganger protocols are not folklore but procedural —
A thing that wears your face appears when the temporal
Margin of your life approaches a specific threshold —
An apparition of the self when something’s about to unfold.
Same make, same model, same year, same color in the sun —
Same dent in the rear bumper from the parking structure’s run
I’d done six months ago — the same specific dent
in the same place —
And the plate was off by one digit in the race.
One digit different — as if a copy made in haste
That had almost all the information but had placed
A single character wrong in the sequence of the plate —
The kind of error a copy makes — authentic but too late.