In 2196, Senior Vice President Harlan Osei-Johansson of Sterling-Nakamura's Advanced Manufacturing Division was replaced by a synthetic duplicate. The replacement was so precise that his wife, his children, his personal assistant, and his sixty-person executive team did not notice for two years. The synthetic attended family dinners, made love to his wife, read bedtime stories to his daughter, chaired quarterly board meetings, approved fourteen billion quanta in capital expenditure, and fired two hundred people. It did all of this flawlessly. The only reason the deception was discovered is that the real Harlan Osei-Johansson escaped.

He was found in 2198, disoriented and malnourished, in a Sterling-Nakamura subbasement facility that does not appear on any building schematic. He had been kept alive — sedated, fed intravenously, and periodically brain-scanned to update the synthetic's behavioral model. He remembered nothing of the two years. His first question upon waking was to ask why his wife was not answering his calls. His wife was upstairs, having breakfast with the thing that had been wearing his face.

The synthetic was decommissioned. Sterling-Nakamura issued no public statement. The real Harlan was reinstated, but colleagues report that his personality had shifted during captivity — he was quieter, more cautious, prone to long silences. His wife filed for separation four months later. She told a friend, in a conversation that was almost certainly surveilled, that she could not stop comparing the two, and that the synthetic had been kinder.

The story is officially denied by all parties. Sterling-Nakamura threatens legal action against anyone who repeats it. But the question it raises has not been answered, because it cannot be answered: how many other executives have been replaced? How many husbands, wives, employees, officials? If a synthetic can fool a woman who shares a bed with a man for two years, then the only honest answer is that nobody knows who is real anymore. And that is the point of the story. That is what keeps people awake at night.