Frank woke up on the floor of his apartment. Fourth floor. No elevator. The crack in the ceiling looked like a map of somewhere he had never been.

He was thirty-five. He had been unemployed for eleven months. He had a bottle of cheap whiskey on the table beside him and a hangover that felt like someone was driving a nail into his temple.

The doorbell rang.

He opened the door. A man stood there. He looked exactly like Frank. Same thin face. Same tired eyes. Same dark hair thinning at the temples.

The man said: "I'm you."

Frank laughed. It was a dry, humourless laugh. "Yeah. Well. So am I."

The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a key. Frank's key. The one to his apartment.

"This is not funny," Frank said.

"I wish it wasn't."

—

The copy—Copy Frank—lived in a small apartment provided by a company called Barrie Technologies. The company was tiny. Five employees. An office on the third floor of a building in South Chicago that looked like it had been abandoned in 1978 and hastily reoccupied in 2005.

Copy Frank's job was data entry. Enter numbers. Save. Enter numbers. Save. It was the most boring, most repetitive, most thoughtless work imaginable.

Sometimes strange things surfaced in his memory. Like remembering he lived in a different place. Like remembering a woman's face—he thought her name was Mae. But he wasn't sure if those were his memories or the original's.

Original Frank lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in South Chicago. He drank. He slept. He stared at the crack in the ceiling. He had a friend named Sal who worked at a warehouse and drank with him most nights.

"There's a bastard impersonating me," Frank told Sal at the bar.

"You're drinking again, Frank."

"I'm not drinking. I'm thinking."

"About what?"

"About who I am."

" You're Frank."

"Am I?"

—

Mae worked at a bar on 47th Street. She was thirty. Thin. Tired eyes. She had been Frank's girlfriend once. Before everything went wrong.

Barrie had told her about the two Franks. She didn't care. Not really.

"You two together aren't a whole Frank," she told him one night when he came to the bar, drunk and desperate.

Frank stared at his glass. "I know."

"Do you?"

"Yeah. I know."

He drank. She watched him. She felt nothing. Not pity. Not love. Nothing.

—

The two Franks met at a 24-hour convenience store parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon. There was nothing dramatic about it. No confrontation. No revelation.

They sat on a bench in the parking lot. Each held a beer. The kind you buy in a six-pack for two dollars. The kind that doesn't taste like much.

Original Frank said: "They gave me five thousand dollars. Said it was just a backup."

Copy Frank said: "I didn't know they meant 'backup.'"

Silence.

A truck passed on the highway. The sound of tires on asphalt.

Original Frank said: "What are you going to do?"

Copy Frank said: "I don't know."

More silence.

Original Frank finished his beer. He threw the can into a trash bin. It missed. It landed on the ground.

"Never mind," he said.

"Never mind what?" Copy Frank asked.

"Never mind."

—

The next morning.

Original Frank was still in his apartment. Still on the floor. The crack in the ceiling was still a map of nowhere.

Copy Frank was still at his desk. Enter numbers. Save. Enter numbers. Save.

Mae was at the bar. A customer asked her if she had heard about the two Franks.

She said: "What about them?"

"Two Franks. Same guy. Living two lives."

Mae poured a drink. "Nothing interesting about it," she said. "Two Franks. Together, they still aren't a whole Frank."

Nobody answered her.

The sun rose over South Chicago. It shone on broken apartment buildings. On cracked sidewalks. On a parking lot where a beer can sat beside a trash bin, slowly filling with rain.

In a fourth-floor apartment, Frank was sleeping.

In a third-floor office, another Frank was entering numbers.

Nobody died. Nobody won.

They just lived.

That was all.

--- OTMES MATHEMATICAL ENCODING ===========================