October 14, 1952 — Revision 3
I've been back for three weeks. The house is the same. The wallpaper is the same shade of faded yellow. The smell of pot roast is exactly as I recorded it in my Chronicle. My wife, Martha, is wearing the same blue dress she wore on the day I disappeared.
BUT IT ISN'T HER.
Revision 1 I wasn't sure. Revision 2 I was beginning to suspect. By Revision 3 I was certain.
Revision 3. He rewrote this entry three times. The first two versions are in the margins in a smaller hand. I find the progression more disturbing than the conclusion.
October 14 — continued
The Loop Authority thinks they're clever. They matched her DNA to the fifth decimal point. They gave her every memory of our wedding. But they forgot that I am an Echo. I can feel the Vibration.
When this "Martha" laughs, the pitch is off by 0.004Hz. When she looks at me, there is a mechanical lag in her pupils that tells me she is a Recursive Template being streamed from a server in the Future Era.
0.004Hz. He measured it. He sat across from his wife at dinner and measured the pitch of her laugh. I want to tell him this is the Capgras Delusion, a known psychological response to temporal displacement. I want to tell him that. I don't know if it's true.
October 15, 1952
I suspect the "Real" Martha was redacted during the 1947 Shattering. The Authority couldn't fix the hole she left, so they inserted this thing Capgras-Impostor. She does everything a wife should do, but she has no Emotional Mass (μ).
Yesterday, I found a CTH Glyph carved into the back of her neck, hidden under her hair. It was the symbol for "STABILITY."
We have no record of a Glyph implant at this address. We have no record of any intervention here at all. I have been over the files six times. Either he is wrong about all of it, or we are wrong about all of it.
October 16, 1952 — last entry
I can't sleep in the same bed as a tax code. I'd rather be alone in the static than live in a house full of perfect strangers who know my name.
I'm leaving tonight.
If you find this, Martha, I'm sorry. I just can't find you in the symmetry anymore.
[JOURNAL RECOVERED 48 HOURS AFTER DEPARTURE. ANCHOR SITE SUBSEQUENTLY VACATED. "MARTHA" RECLASSIFIED AS STANDARD TEMPLATE — REASSIGNED TO NEW ANCHOR. NO FURTHER ACTION REQUIRED. — Sector 9, Single-Face Surveillance]
No further action required. Martha — whatever she was — was reassigned the same week. She's somewhere else now, wearing a different name, laughing at a slightly different pitch. Waiting for someone to notice. Or not notice. I cannot determine which outcome the Authority prefers.