"You look okay," he said, with the voice I'd only heard in old family videos.

My voice.

"Thanks..." I said. "You too."

"Bad joke," he said.

"I know," I said. "But since we share the same sense of humor..."

"Shut up."

Who ever thought it would be fun to embarrass your clone?

The morning after I took my clone home, he was standing at the door in full conference room regalia, suit and all.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Going to work," he said, casually.

"That's my job," I said. "Literally. My job."

"There's a big presentation today."

"I know, and I've been working on it..."

"Yeah. And guess what? We share each other's memories."

"True enough," I had to admit.

"So just let me handle this one. You're nervous, right?"

"Of course I am."

"I'll do it. Take the day off, maybe clean the house if you have the time."

Of course I had the time; without work, there was nothing else to do. I made the bed, scrubbed the kitchen tiles, even got old lime stains out of the bathroom shower.

When the clone came home, he reported a successful presentation, even showed me the congratulatory email from my boss.

That was it for work. Now I was free.

Free, except I had become maid to my own clone.

It was a part-time job. Monday I did the kitchen. Tuesday the bathroom and laundry. Wednesday, organizing the closet. Thursday, laundry again. Friday was my day off.

Somehow in all of it, I lost touch with old friends. That was fine; the clone was happy to go out Friday night. He even got my friends' inside jokes. They were shared memories, after all.

But in getting a clone to handle my days, I had lost everything that made my days worth waking up for.

"I can't take it anymore," I said. "Let me go to work just once a week."

"Don't we have a good thing going?" my clone asked. "You're free to do what you want, as long as you keep the house clean."

"Yeah, but what if what I want is a part of my old life back?"

"Why would you want that?"

"I don't know--for variety. You don't get sick of going to work?"

"It's not that. It's that I...well, who's going to trust a clone?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're my clone," he said. "Wait. Did no on tell you that you weren't the original?"

Shared memories, I remembered, except the procedure itself. I remembered applying for a clone, but not what I was going to use the clone for. It hit me all at once: I must have been planning to get my clone to do my housework.

No, not I. He.