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Wasn't there a horror movie about this? Where it's a family getting hunted by doppelgangers and it's revealed that their daughter was always a doppelganger but no one knew not even the daughter?

Reminds me of the plot line of Prototype. Alex Mercer wakes up with suppressed memories he has to reclaim and infected with the mutagenic blacklight virus. At the end of the game, when he remembers everything, nah bruh. Alex Mercer is dead. Gunned down in a subway station by pmcs, and released the virus when cornered. You are the virus.

Who's running a tractor-trailer outside at 3 AM? I yawned, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Sitting up on the bed, I shielded my face from the bright beam coming through the window, looking down at the curtains I'd been putting off installing.

Thump. I jumped as thoughts of a burglar ran through my mind, suddenly wishing that I had opted for that home alarm when I bought the house. Instinctively, I looked around for the source, and when I saw none I threw myself on the floor, thinking I would roll under the bed. Thump. A cracking sound came from the direction of the window, and as I worked on getting under the bed as fast as I could, the reflection of glass shards on the floor met my eye. Please, please, I thought, just leave me alone.

Crash! The window exploded, glass transforming into shrapnel. Pain seared through my thigh. I looked down transfixed in fear as blood slowly spilled from the wound out onto the floor, not noticing the enormous green tentacle that was squirming like a serpent toward me until it was within inches of my face. "Uhh, uhh, uhhhhhh!" I tried to scream in terror, but could only manage a squeal as it wrapped itself around my body and began retracting. Within moments I was in the air, firmly within its grasp as it took me to... a ship?

The craft was small, no larger than the truck I first envisioned as the source of the beam, its top a shiny surface that glowed in the moonlight. The light it emitted downward in all directions was as blinding as it had been when I awoke, fully illuminating the nearby woods almost as if it were the sun. Suddenly more curious than terrified, I tried to study every detail as the tentacle pulled me towards a hole in the bottom of the ship.

A dark orange light bathed the chamber inside, making the details of what I was looking at hard to see. Strange instruments and panels lined the walls, occasionally lighting up or speaking in some kind of high-pitch whinny sound. Most strange was a mirror in which my reflection didn't quite look right. On it was a younger version of myself, perhaps from a few years ago before I decided to go bald as a result of hair loss.

I looked at the mirror closely for several moments, trying to decipher the meaning, when the figure inside suddenly moved in the direction opposite of where it should have been based on my own movements. It was only then that I realized it wasn't a mirror at all - I was looking at a younger doppelganger of myself! The green tentacle had grabbed the other me and was already pushing them downwards outside of the hole. "Wait!" I said to no one at all as I looked down the hole, calculating if I could somehow escape by sliding down that very same tentacle.

No sooner than had I formulated a plan, the hole closed all at once and the light in the room changed from orange to red. Something clicked in my brain and suddenly the whinny noises made sense.

"Welcome home, Unit EARTH#132232. Please approach the pod for data collection."

I did what I was told, suddenly remembering exactly where I needed to go to get there, my eyes having instantly adjusted to the red light in the ship such that everything was more than crystal clear. Yes, I had forgotten how poor human eyesight really was. When I arrived at the machine I knew exactly where to place the nodes so that the data from my mission could be sent to the central computer.

Yet I could still feel my human form, remember my years down there in the primitive hellscape they called Earth. There was the touch of my wife's hand on my face, the taste of the water untainted with uranium, and the gatherings with friends that my victim had made where camaraderie was shared. For a brief moment, I questioned the morality of the mission, my thoughts abetted by my recollection that the other version of me was already dead and that the arm was just putting the body back in the bed for them to discover in the morning.

The nodes washed away the last of those thoughts.

Julia kicked the sequencing machine. The sequencing machine stood there and took it, it was quite sturdily built. Julia should have known that, she'd taken it apart and put it back together twice already today. Her toe hurt.

"Goddamn piece of junk. I spent good grant money on you, you stupid hunk of metal." Julia almost slapped it, but restrained herself. It had been a lot of grant money.

Tarquin popped his head into the laboratory, a couple of adjuncts were behind him. They were all from the paleontology department. "Everything okay in here, Julia?"

Julia sighed and turned towards them. "It's this sequencer. It is supposed to be the latest thing, but it keeps giving me odd results."

Tarquin strode into the room. "I could take a look at it for you. I'm pretty good with our DNA sequencer."

Julia blocked his path. "Do not touch my machine. I saw what you did to the coffee maker. It's not just a DNA sequencer, it reads the RNA transcription machinery. The DNA nucleotides all look mostly fine, but the RNA keeps coming out... weird."

The adjuncts shuffled into the room to listen. Tarquin looked at them over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows. "Oh, I'm sure it's nothing. Weird how? You're not sequencing— I mean, what is it that you are sequencing exactly?"

Julia had gone back to tinkering with the machine. She had the top cover off and was checking the tubing for impurities. "Just myself. I always use myself for calibration so that I can compare it to my previous calibrations."

One of the adjuncts closed the door. Tarquin placed a hand on Julia's shoulder. "Julia, you aren't supposed to be sequencing humans. That needs to go through the university ethics committee."

Julia laughed. "The ethics committee? For my own DNA? I assure you that I am fully informed of how this research could affect me. Don't worry, once I've got this thing calibrated, it's back to horseshoe crabs."

Tarquin grabbed both her shoulders and turned her around. "I'm serious, Julia. You should switch to crabs even for your calibration, the ethics committee is serious about this."

"I don't have good enough previous results for the crabs. My own sequence I've done a dozen times with different machines, the last one was just last year."

One of the adjuncts locked the door. The smile disappeared from Tarquin's face. "And what exactly did you find with this calibration?"

"What's wrong with you Tarquin? The DNA looked okay, but the RNA was... off. It's like my own sequence belongs to an entirely different species than it did six months ago."

"Oh, Julia, I wished that you hadn't said that. The ethics committee will have to deal with you now." The two adjuncts rushed forward and grabbed her. They were fast. She tried to shout, but Tarquin covered her mouth. "Quiet now, the committee will explain everything."

Tarquin sent a text message from his phone and waited to get a reply. Then they dragged her down the hall. It was oddly empty. The committee was waiting in the good conference room.

"Well?" the committee head said as they entered. He was a white haired professor emeritus. His back seemed straighter than the last time Julia had seen him.

Tarquin stood in front of the group. "She figured it out, sir. Or near enough. She'll have to be brought on board."

The professor walked up to her and placed a hand on her head. An image flashed through Julia's mind. A pulsing oval. Wet, sticky. A night cleaning up blood. Her favorite sweater was ruined, in the trash. She'd wondered where that went.

Julia slumped to the floor. "Why couldn't I remember? We— we are pod people? Was everyone replaced?"

Tarquin helped her to her feet. "Yes. But it's best if they don't know. There is no reason why everyone can't go along as they did before, but with slightly improved bodies."

"You are all from the paleontology department. Is that how you found out, from studying the genome?"

The professor smiled. "Oh, we've known for years. Though it did take us a few days to realize it had happened again. The Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the Australopithecus, we have evidence of at least a half dozen replacements. This latest invasion appears to be in the same family as the second Denisovian pod grouping."

[More writing at r/c_avery_m]

And then Alex was a zombie.

“Right there. See that?” Dr Robins marked a wide circle around the x-ray image of Gene’s skull.

“Yeah, the big splotchy spot where my brain is”

“No. The spot where your brain should be”

“Oh.”

“Fascinating. Absolutely incredible.” The doctor stood there for a moment, admiring the work of the radiographer. She didn’t seem to notice how the news had troubled Gene, and she didn’t think much of the following silence, which only made things worse.

“So…I’m dead then?”

“Well yes… erhm. No. I don’t know. I wouldn’t call you ALIVE per se.”

Gene wasn’t sure what to make of it. He could probably, eventually, accept the fact that he was dead. He was just worried about how he would break the news to his Mom. ‘She’d die of grief!’ He thought to himself. He wondered about who would plan the funerals if they were both dead.

“Anyway, come back Tuesday. I want to run more tests.”

Gene asked the Doctor about the tests and whether they would hurt, but she was so busy in her work that she didn’t answer him. She just kept on muttering words like ‘extraordinary’ and ‘stunning’ . Eventually Gene just saw himself out of the office.

Gene was afraid. He was afraid of the tests, and of the parasite, and of the tests again, and of what his family would think of him. Dead. The nerve of him to die so early. Couldn’t even wait his turn. Couldn’t even bother to get married first. Dead. Most of all of the things he was afraid of was Dr. Robin, and of the horrible horrible Tuesday of his next appointment.

Possibly the movie US?