By the third day, things started to take a bizarre turn.
Ethan was still in New York, staying at a hotel near Mason's place. He was scrolling through his phone that morning when a local news story caught his eye: Two identical 42-year-old women, dubbed "mirror humans", were discovered in Manhattan. Their life trajectories had split in 1993.
He clicked on the full report. Both women were named Linda Wang, born on the same day at the same hospital, raised on the same street. They'd attended the same elementary and middle schools. In 1993, one got into a top-tier high school, while the other failed her entrance exams and ended up in a vocational college.
The comment section was blowing up:
"Is this some kind of prank show?"
"This has to be photoshopped."
"This is giving me chills..."
Ethan kept scrolling, finding more similar posts pouring in. People were sharing screenshots, claiming the same phenomenon was happening in their cities—Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami... even a tiny town in Iowa had someone posting about meeting "their other self".
He called Mason. The moment the line connected, he could hear news reports blaring in the background.
"You've seen it too?" Mason's voice was heavy.
"It's not just us two," Ethan said.
"I've been crunching the numbers," Mason replied. "Since last night, the number of discussions about 'meeting your doppelgänger' on Twitter has skyrocketed by 1,700%. Related videos on TikTok have racked up over a billion views. This isn't a coincidence."
At three o'clock that afternoon, CNN interrupted its regular broadcast with a brief announcement: Relevant federal authorities were monitoring the "mirror human" phenomenon, urging the public to remain calm and refrain from spreading unverified information.
But panic was already spreading like wildfire.