“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.
Mouse seemed to reflect for a moment. “Imagine you’ve got a couch that’s covered with a sheet. You can’t see the couch underneath, but the sheet gives the outline of it.”
“Okay,” I said, understanding but still not sure where he was going with this.
“Now imagine you take that same sheet, remove it from the couch, and then cover up another piece of furniture with it – say, a table. Is the sheet still going to have the shape of a couch?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s going to take on the shape of the table.”
“Exactly, and the same is true of your face.”
“So just putting my face on another person isn’t going to necessarily make them look like me.”
“Correct. The underlying features of their face will have to match as well.”
“What would that entail?” I asked.
“A good bit of surgery,” Mouse replied. “We’re talking about altering tissue, cartilage, bone structure and more. But I don’t see evidence of surgery of any sort, let alone what we’re discussing. For instance, there are no scars, nothing to indicate a surgical incision of any type.”
“But what if he had a really good plastic surgeon?”
Mouse let out a sigh. “Apparently I’m not explaining this very well, so I’ll try again. All surgery leaves a scar. So if a woman gets a facelift, she’s going to have scars. A good plastic surgeon is just adept at hiding them – like around the ear, in the hairline, or in natural folds of the skin. Scars can also fade and become less noticeable, but they don’t disappear entirely.”
“What about you?” I asked.
A baffled expression came across Mouse’s face. “What about me?”
“You once told me you had an arm chopped off,” I explained. “But I’ve seen your bare arms, and you don’t have any scars.”
Mouse seemed to reflect for a moment. My statement referred to a time when a group of aliens had taken him prisoner. It was before the two of us ever met and I’d never gotten the full details, but I’d never known Mouse to have anything less than a full complement of limbs, so something must have happened for him to get his arm back after the aliens hacked it off.
“Okay,” he said a few seconds later. “I’ll revise my earlier statement and say that surgery almost always leaves a scar. However, there are some pieces of sophisticated, avant-garde medical tech out there that can leave skin completely unmarred after surgery. But that type of gear is uncommon, and rarer still is the person with the knowledge and skill to operate it.”
“Give me a head count.”
“There’s maybe five people on the planet with the resources and know-how to do what you’re suggesting,” Mouse said. “But I know their handiwork, and I’m not seeing any sign of it here.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” I concluded, “you’re saying that this guy really is a dead ringer for me.”
“What I’m saying is that his face isn’t a graft or the result of surgical modification. Assuming he’s not naturally your doppelganger, the most likely conclusion is that he’s a shapeshifter.”
“There is another option,” I chimed in. “Magic.”
As I mentioned it, I thought back to when I’d first met Gossamer and Kane. To help fool some bad guys, Kane had cast a glamour over me back then which made me look like someone else.
“It’s a good thought, but I’ve already looked into it and don’t think that’s the case here.”
I raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You were able to assess and discard the possibility of magic just by looking at the video?”
“What I did was examine your twin’s fingerprints using an advanced form of photogrammetry,” Mouse clarified.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head in confusion. “Photo-what?”
“Photogrammetry,” he repeated. “It’s an area of science focused on taking measurements from images. It’s used a lot in the field of mapmaking, as it allows you to survey and measure land using things like aerial photographs.”
“Okay, so how does that apply to the current situation?”
“The guy in the video doesn’t do anything to hide from the camera, so there’s adequate footage of his hands,” Mouse stated, at the same time tapping on his computer tablet. “Using some cutting-edge photogrammetric algorithms, I created a 3-D model of his fingers – more specifically, his prints.”
As he finished speaking, Mouse gestured towards the laptop where the video of my lookalike had been playing. The footage was gone now, replaced by a three-dimensional image of a hand. (Obviously my mentor was controlling the laptop remotely.)
Mouse, continuing to fiddle with his tablet, went on, saying, “I then enlarged the image, which allowed me to see all kinds of ridge detail on his fingerprints – loops, whorls, arches.”
As he spoke, the image of the hand on the laptop vanished except for the fingertips, which lined up in a row before growing large enough in size to go from one side of the screen to the other. Leaning in for a better look, I noticed the patterns Mouse had mentioned.
“Alright, I can see different shapes on these prints,” I acknowledged.
“Good,” Mouse said. “I then compared those prints to yours.”
In conjunction with Mouse speaking, the prints on the laptop shrank in size and shifted to the left side of the screen. On the right side appeared another set of prints, which I intuitively understood to be mine. I frowned for a moment, wondering where and when Mouse had lifted my prints – then almost laughed at my own mental lapse. I was in Mouse’s lab all the time; he could get a copy of my prints practically without effort. (Not to mention the fact that he had cameras in his lab, and could have used photogrammetry to create a model of my prints within the last few minutes.)
I turned my attention back to the two images on the screen. “They’re about half the size they were a moment ago, but I can still identify features on the first set of prints, as well as
