"What?"

"I was at the elevators for ten minutes waiting for you to come up," she went on. The look on Tom's face told he still had no idea what she was talking about. "Were you just downstairs waiting to get inside?"

"No."

"Because I got a call from security that you were downstairs and that you forgot your security card and were trying to get back upstairs."

"No, I wasn't downstairs. I've been here for the whole day, since eight in the morning, when I started to work."

"That's odd. They said you showed them your ID and that it was you and when I described you to them they were like 'yes, that's him.'"

"That's weird. That happened to me last week when I left my security card at home one day but that was awhile ago."

"Maybe they just got around to calling up now," Donna joked.

"I guess. That is so weird."

"You see now why I said I don't get paid enough to be this confused," and upon that line she got up and started to walk back to her cubicle.

"None of us do," Tom replied to mirror Donna's sentiment of being underpaid workers. Tom turned to the computer screen and went back to entering people's information in the data entry program. He had been at this job now for two months and his pace in entering data had picked up considerably since he first started. It had almost become second nature to him and he was able to be lost in thought while still doing his job; like his fingers had eyes of their own and could see what keys needed to be punched next. This was a blessing on most days since the job was pretty boring and it would be so much more if Tom didn't have his music to listen to, to make the day go by faster. On this day, just after this conversation though, where his mind went to while his fingers went about their business was a hindrance. He lowered his headphones to his ears but the music quickly became background sounds, which the mind tuned out.
Did someone have a copy of his ID? Was someone using his name and trying to get into the building? Donna had been called and waited for him to come up and he didn't so where did this copy of Tom go? Was he still in the building? Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe the person had a similar name to his, like a Tom Foote trying to get inside the building. Maybe when they read the name, Donna corrected them and asked if they meant a Tom Frost. Maybe that is how the mix-up came about. Yeah, that's probably what happened. Then again she described him to the guard and they said the mystery man fit the description. Of course, there are lots of tall and lean brown-haired men in their late twenties in the world so it wouldn't have been that hard to find another one.

"Damn it," Tom muttered to himself. He had now made the same mistake over and over in entering the data in. He was trying to put in Mrs. Johnson's name in the last name field but he kept wanting to put a T in her name. "There's got to be a T in her name you jackass," his fingers seemed to be saying. "Let's make her Mrs. Johnston and mess with her life. How evil and wicked of us to do." Tom's fingers liked to play the part of the mischievous villain often but Tom won the battle and no T found it's way into Mrs. Johnson's name, though it was only on the fifth try did he finally overcome the fingers. He had to break his thoughts of the clone of Tom walking in the building and focus on the data. He hated to focus on the data. In fact, he thought the job of data entry was pretty low and how come in this day and age someone hadn't made a device that was able to read checks and figure out what information needed to be put in where. It seemed so much like a job that could have been phased out long ago. Instead other jobs throughout time were phased out, how lucky for Tom. He imagined a chart which showed the evolution of jobs through out time: the farmer in the spot where the first fish crawled out onto land; the factory worker where the early mammal should be; lots of branches coming off of it and leading to construction workers, journalists, sports heroes, lawyers, politicians, theologians, etc. Some branches having dead ends like the milkman, the box office attendant, and the automaker.

"Damn it." Tom had accidentally had hit the caps button and every time he tried to put in the abbreviation for California; he was getting a "c" instead of a "C." (Habit had already gotten a hold of him and it was now natural for him to, with one hand, hold the shift key down and punch a C and then an A.) It took him several tries before he looked over at the caps light and saw that it was on. "Ha ha, once again I have foiled your day by turning on," the caps light seemed to say. Tom was usually better than this, two mess-ups in just two minutes, it just wasn't like him, he thought. "It�s that damn mystery man whose inside the building, he's blown my concentration. I've got to find out what exactly is going on with this weird security thing or I'll never be able to work," Tom thought.

He took off his headphones, turned off his mini-disc player, wheeled back his chair and got up. On to the quest for the doppelganger.

Gregg said, "Well after the sabotage of the Marketing Center in New Zurich, security in all the buildings next to and surrounding the government buildings here in town have been increased to a level two."

"It still seems like a pseudo security measure. Anyone could make these stickers at home if they wanted to," stated Eric on the second day of the job.

"Most saboteurs don't have ID and this ID checkpoint is just to make sure that everyone that is in this building has an ID," Gregg answered back matter of factly. He then went back over to the TV screens at the actual security desk.

"'Most saboteurs don't have ID,' that's bullshit." Eric said once Gregg, the super security director, was out of range to hear him. "If I were a saboteur the first thing I would make would be an ID."

"Yeah," is all Tom could come back with. He attention wasn't on how pointless the job was, he already came to that conclusion three-hours into the job on the first day. He was thinking about his sister back in New Chicago. Her birthday was the Friday coming up and he was trying to think of something good to write in the card. He was especially worried for her this year since she has become more of a recluse than she already was. She used to leave her apartment once in a while, at least to get groceries or rent a movie but now she just uses the Internet to purchase all of her things and has them delivered to her apartment. Even her therapist is reduced to house calls now. Dr. Williams, her old therapist, had suggested that Penny be taken to a facility where she could be treated more extensively and Penny quickly fired her while Tom and Penny's parents wrestled with the issue. Now she has a Dr. Sheldon looking after her and she seems to think that Penny is okay. And she really is since she is allowed to do her job at home and understands that she needs help to become less phobic. However, in the year that Tom has been away from her, she has not ventured out as much and Tom can't help but feel that he is at fault for that since he was usually the one to coax her outside.

"I just want to say that this is a great thing you are doing. We need more security in this station, these are scary times," rasps an old woman in her seventies. She would be one of the few that genuinely liked the extra security.

"Here's a sticker for you to wear on your person while you are in the building and when you leave, bring it back here so we can sign you out, " Eric says effortlessly to the woman.

"The sticker?"

"Yes, bring the sticker back here."

"And I put it where?"

"On your jacket or purse, just so that the security guards see it so they can let you pass." The lady nods as understanding enters her brain and she placed the small orange sticker on her leather purse.

An ID is tossed on the table in front of Eric and the man with his picture on it asks, "So what would happen if I didn't have my ID?" The man is over forty, with graying and thinning hair, and wears a tan trench coat and carries a large briefcase with him. He has lawyer written all over him and Tom and Eric eventually see the trend that most of the people that get upset at the guest check-in are lawyers.

"We would then want to see a business card or something that tells us who you are. And if not then we would then have you escorted upstairs to where you need to be and have someone up there vouch to say you are supposed to be in the building," replies Eric.

"This is useless really, the bad people have ID's too," the lawyer says to them, although not in hopes that this is key information to should be passed to their superiors, but more as a declaration of his intellect and in the hope that the other people around the fold-up table would concur that he was a smart man.

"It's really just to appease the people who are jittery and give them the fa�ade that there is more security than there really is," Tom comes back with while writing down the last line in the birthday card to Penny. It was an attempt to show the lawyer that he isn't some idiot and that he really did go to college and get a degree. "And to annoy people like you who are smart enough to see the flaws in the system." He liked getting that last line out, he felt really smooth for saying it. The lawyer seemed amused by it too and smirked. Getting the angry people on your side is the trick when dealing with them, getting defensive and trying to defend the security measures in place will just make them more annoyed.

"Yeah, we're only at a level two security level," Eric says with a straight face. Tom really has to fight himself not to laugh at this line. It would become a favorite of theirs: "we're at a level two."

A woman comes through the door that leads to the stairs wheezing a little after her climb to the twelfth floor. Between breaths she was able to get out that the elevators are still down and that she overheard in the lobby someone important-sounding say it wouldn't be for another hour before it would be fixed. �Ah ha! Maybe this is why the Doppelganger hasn�t shown up; the elevators aren�t working,� Tom thinks to himself. �Maybe my clone is still in the lobby? Even if he isn�t, I can still ask a security guard what was going on.� Two people decide that whatever they were on their way for wasn't worth using the stairs and walk back to their offices. Tom, a lady in a black skirt and maroon blouse, and the impatient man all head for the stairs. Tom lets the man go by first since he seems to be in a more hurried state.

Tom plods down the stairs at a gingerly pace with a kind of staccato rhythm like a trotting horse. The impatient man is the hare to Tom's tortoise and races down the stairs while the lady climbs up one flight and disappears into the thirteenth floor. Tom clings to the inner rail and enjoys watching the top of the man's head spiral down the building. At about the sixth floor the man has exited the stairwell and Tom retreats back to the outer walls of the stairwell. At the fourth floor his mind wanders to the association between the number four and the word death in Mexican culture. Four in Spanish is cuatro and death is muerto; the similar spellings gave way to superstitions to say that four was the Spanish equivalent to thirteen. This thought of death leads Tom to wonder what would happen if he were to trip, fall, and break his neck. How long would he lie there before someone came and found him there? How would his family members be notified and when? Who would be responsible for the credit card and health insurance payments he has yet to pay?

Tom gets to the second floor, his hand playing the game of always touching a wall as he goes down floors. As Tom steps in front of the door that enters the second floor, it suddenly swings open and into the stairwell with lots of momentum. A child of ten years was pretending to be a ninja and decided to give the door a fierce kick. The door transferred the energy from the child to Tom and Tom, in turn, gives back some of the energy to the steps of the stairs as he tumbles down them. The pain receptors in his body go into overtime and the image of a bottle of aspirin enters his mind. Tom finds this sort of amusing as his neck is snapped on the third to last step.

The child is stunned by what he caused, snaps out of his daze after two beats, panics and re-enters the second floor. The door slowly closes and the sound of it closing echoes in the stairwell. Tom lays on the platform between the first and second floor like an unloved doll, his limbs in odd positions. He would lie there for two minutes before someone would come by.