I have shared this story before about when a look-alike almost landed me in a police cell...

It was very far from home, in another man’s state, during NYSC in Imo State. A friend and I went to visit some patients in the hospital to pray for them, and we met one who had had an accident — his leg was almost ruined. According to the mother of the 18-year-old boy, the bikeman who hit him ran away from the scene. So, as we got there, we decided to stay a little while to share some consoling moments with the boy in particular. Before I knew it, their uncle arrived and said he wouldn’t allow me to leave; he said he was calling the police because I was the one who hit the boy and ran away. According to the man, I was the exact biker.

Me?

Hit the boy?

How?

Do I have a bike?

Can’t you see I’m in uniform?

Oh yes — we had gone there in our NYSC khaki. The uncle, an elderly man in his fifties, refused to believe us. The whole thing looked like a joke. My friend and I were laughing at the scene, thinking they were crazy or probably cracking jokes, but the more we laughed, the more seriously they took it.

“For God’s sake! Are you not seeing we are in uniform?”

My friend screamed at them and went on to boast a little about my position — which was true. He said that just a call to the State capital would make police from the state capital arrive on the spot, and that was true because I held a very high position. That was when their senses came back.

Why the story?

No lies — just as the prompt stated, having a clone is good in many ways, but it has disadvantages too, even ones we haven’t thought of. My experience in the hospital is one of those cases that having a clone could cause.

If scientists offered to produce a replica of me with the same features, where we’d share everything, would I go for it? It sounds tempting, but no — I wouldn’t allow it.

Why?

I imagine that in the end the clone could cause problems for my real self that wouldn’t be obvious at the start. What if what we see in movies happened — where robots are taken over by someone else and used against the owner? What if it began to function in a way that whenever the clone feels pain, I feel it too? Yeah, it wouldn’t be stated or programmed that way, but you can’t trust technology completely.

They say the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. At least I know how life’s problems happen, and I wouldn’t want to invite trouble on myself by creating a problem I brought into being.

Thanks for reading.

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Oooppps! Expired prompt but I felt like writing