A man listens to a recording of a lecture by a thinker he has only vaguely heard of before, and is surprised, by the end of the lecture, to hear his own voice: unmistakably, he himself is asking dumb questions of the lecturer on this recording, making a fool of himself, wasting the lecturer's time. He calls his friends over for confirmation. They say, at the beginning, that yeah, it sort of sounds like him, could be him or someone who has a similar voice, but by the end they all believe he has arranged this as an elaborate prank: this was obviously him on the recording! This was very disturbing to him, and to them. Did he have repressed memories? Is there, somewhere, an exact duplicate of him, in all his mannerisms? This particular lecture was recorded, and after a great deal of work, he tracked down the only recording -- a 35mm print in a private university collection. He drove across the country to see it, thinking all the time about how the person on the phone had an eerily familiar voice -- it sounded just like his! After much wrangling and some bribery, he got some poor intern to set up the projector and show the film to him, and indeed, there he is, unmistakably, in the audience. However, wasn't this too long ago? In fact, this lecture occurred before he was born. Just as he realized that, the film began to change. His doppelganger on the film turned to the camera and began addressing him directly: a stream of lazy, crass insults.
