Doppelgänger Buildings

Just watched a brief video about fake buildings. Now I’m familiar with the giant ventilation structure for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which became the outside of the Men in Black headquarters in the movies.

It put me in mind of an idea presented by Keith Baker in The Complete Guide to Doppelgängers that the life cycles of doppelgängers and mimics are connected and the end of development is a “doppelstadt,” an entire building or grove or, eventually, a large partof a city or forest that is telepathically aware and controls a shape-changing hive mind. Kind of an interesting idea; it reminds me of the changeling species in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, only with even more connections between beings.

Other interesting ideas about the ecology of doppelgängers are found in on Reddit (see also the post on mimics by the same author). There’s also rolling to seduce the monstrosity found at a few places on the web.

It’s fun to pretend to be someone else. It’s also fun to pretend to be someone pretending to be someone else. Once you go beyond that recursion kind of stops mattering, though.