When I was younger, okay a lot younger, I quite often got the old “you know who you look exactly like” approach. Usually I had to take their word for it, which I did immediately so we could move on, but in one case I was led to my twin. It was at a trade show in Atlanta. My escorts dragged me through several aisles of corporate America showing its wares before, “See, right over there.” I glanced in the indicated direction, a side view and hastily agreed so we could move on. Who really wants to see his twin?

I was reminded of my close encounter with my close resembler when I came across an article in the New York Times about people who look alike, complete with person A/person B photos taken by a Canadian artist, Francois Brunelle . The NYT calls them doppelgangers. The gist of the article is that there’s a good chance your hopefully not-so-evil twin is out there right now.

Yes, the resemblances in the article are striking. Giving poignancy to those movie scenes in which the tormented lover runs up to a lady retreating on the sidewalk, overtakes her and looks back ready to confront her for walking out on him all those years ago. No, but close.

The core of the argument is that with 8 billion faces in the world we are running out of originality. To quote the article, “there is, after all, only so many ways to build a face.” Which reminds me of the Groucho line: “when I was born they threw away the mold. Well, some of it grew back.”

The article connects with a topic I read in a physics book about ten years ago—which is a long time in the world of physics theory. In a chapter of Marcus Chown’s excellent The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Front Line of Science he explains how out in the universe somewhere there is an exact copy of you, me, all of us. The premise is fairly simple but still mind-boggling. Let’s say you take three dice and on each face put a random letter, so a mix of 3 X 6 sides or 18 letters. We roll the dice over and over getting a series of three letter results, some of which may even be words. It will not be long before sequences will start repeating and repeating ad infinitum.

Of course the atoms that make up a human are hugely more complex than three die and 18 letters but the universe is even more immense. So much so that we run out of unique atom combinations well before we run out of space. According to Chown, physicists can calculate how far away your doppelganger is from planet earth. I’ll forego wowing you with lines of zeroes and simply say it is way too far to ever have a chance of repeating my Atlanta experience. Which raises the question: if a copy is so far away that you have no earthly, or even universal chance of ever encountering it, does it matter whether it exists? Isn’t there a point where the real crosses over to theoretical?

Brunelle’s photos game the system by dressing dopple A and dopple B identically. In the lead picture the white male lookalikes have the same beard, similar glasses, identical sweaters. Their noses and ears are quite different but your eye works from the general so by the time you get to individual parts you are already sold on the deal. To be fair, half of Brunelle’s doppelgangers were recognized as identical by facial recognition software.

I’m not sure I buy the running-out-of-faces argument. Take the above “twins”. The US Census reports about 210 million whites in the US. Males are half of that total, so 105 million. Adult males maybe 60 million. Maybe there are two or three times the number of white adult males in the US than there were 50 years ago but that does not expand the white male universe all that significantly.

But let’s be generous and buy the argument that we are running out of unique faces and all of us have a twin out there. At that thought my mind turns to crime, writing about it, that is. Image the opportunities. Plant the bloody knife in your doppelganger’s house and voila no need to worry about encountering him ever again—unless you enjoy prison visits.

Crime fiction has made generous use of identical twins (often withholding one until the book’s later stages). The problem from a crime perspective is they know each other and are known in the world as twins. (Excepting the tortuous twins-separated-at birth story). Ah, but twins who have never met and live hundreds of miles from each other. The mind teems with possibilities.

Which leads my three steps to the perfect crime.  

1. Use D-ID software to clean up your image. This Israeli start up specializes in anti-facial recognition. Its software manipulates the pixels in an image so that, while it remains fully recognizable to humans, it fools those nosy computers so you can glide under the radar.
2. Use Clearview AI to locate your nearest twin. C-AI has controversially scraped over 20 billion faces from web pages and social media sites. It is the chosen method of crime fighting agencies throughout the world in tracking down suspects and perps.
3. Set up twin for the fall. I’ll leave the manifold opportunities to your imaginations. You too could be an on-line dater using an accurate photo yet still lying about it.

As for fiction, you’ve seen the movies. Computer screen drama is on a par with golf in its excitement. Give me grandpa’s old service revolver every time.