Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Barb's commuting down the coast, and she asked me to baby-sit the twins for a few days. Chris
proposed to her last week, and she accepted; the world moves in mysterious ways - I mean, Cheryl
Anway's brother and Jason Klaasen's sister-in-law.
Chris creates face-mapping software programs for governments and big business. Chris can take your
face, pinpoint your nostrils, the ends of your lips, your retinas, and with a few more measurements
generate your unique unchangeable face-map. You can't fake a face, even with cosmetic surgery. It all
seems a bit spooky to me. I mean, this could be abused so easily, and I told Chris so when he was over
at our place for dinner.
"Chris, what if you took the face of a famous actor, and entered their facial proportions into your
database - would you find their . . . duplicate?"
"The term we use is 'analog.'"
"Come again?"
"Your analog isn't your twin or your clone. He or she is the person out there who's maybe a millimeter
away from having the same face as you."
"You're joking."
"Not at all. But the weird thing is, an analog doesn't even have to be the same sex, let alone the same
hair color or skin color. Put you and your analog into a room together and people are going to assume
the two of you are twins. If you're a boy and she's a girl, people will simply assume it's your twin in drag."
"This exists?"
"The government already has face-maps of all prison inmates and other people who float through the
judicial system."
Barb was particularly intrigued by this idea. Jason's father had made some very badly chosen comments
about the twins at Kent's memorial a few years back, and since then she's been on a crusade to learn
everything about twins she can. She began to discuss using face-maps to help twins who've been
separated when very young, and where the law prevents them from accessing closed files. She became
passionate, and there's nothing sexier than enthusiasm, and boy did Chris respond. First, he got her a job
at his company's Vancouver affiliate, and now they're engaged.
There's a lesson there.
I'm sitting here inputting this in Barb's home office beside the kitchen, looking around at all the bits of
things that make her house a home: flowers; a regularly culled cork notice board; obviously tended-toin
andout baskets; framed family photos (where does she get the energy to frame things - how does
anybody get the energy to frame things?); clean rugs - it's a long list. I love Jason dearly, but neither of us
is very gifted on the domestic front. We're not quite as bad as those people who plaster a Union Jack or
a Confederate flag up on the windows as curtains, and Molly Maid comes in once a month to
decontaminate the place with industrial vacuums and cleaning agents perfected during the Vietman War.
It's always hard for us afterward to make eye contact with the disgusted Russian and Honduran girls who
do the place. Is it so wrong to be a slob?
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