I first read Imposter, which is the first story by the great, late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick that I had ever read, many years ago. It's the fourth short story I'm reviewing from the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953). Maybe you know of it from the 2002 feature-length film starring Gary Sinise, but Dick's original tale only was only 17 paperback pages long...the movie obviously added a lot of extraneous material, something I don't dig at all...
The premise of Imposter is simple enough: Earth in a not-to-distant future time is at war with unseen beings called Outspacers, from Alpha Centauri. The enemy's technology is developed to the point where they can create duplicate android robots that are indistinguishable from real people...and they can tailor them to copy specific persons, even their own memories. Spence Olham is employed on a crucial project to develop a super weapon and gets up one morning with his wife Mary to get ready for another grueling day of work. When the "bug" comes by to pick him up, he sees his friend and colleague Nelson...accompanied by a stranger, whom he learns is Major Peters. After a little conversation, Peters explains his mission: the arrest of Olham, accused of being a robotic Outlander spy! Nelson and Peters grab and restrain Olham and then transport him to the moon for safe disposal, for they have been informed that the robot has a very destructive u-bomb within him and that it is activated by an unknown, specific phrase spoken aloud. Olham loudly proclaims that he is himself, not an imposter...but Peters and Nelson always have an answer to each protestation...and Nelson seethes with hatred as he believes that the imposter killed his best friend in order to replace him...
The rest of this short story deals with Olham's struggle for survival and determination to clear himself by finding the real robot, which he believes is in a crashed ship in the woods nearby his home. You can read it all for yourself (here's a link to it: [link]), but I'll just say that the ending was pretty surprising and abrupt...with a memorable final line. I rather doubt that a drawn-out movie with its distracting subplots could have come anywhere close to capturing this compact tale's feel and effect...
If our memories are based within the complex neurological framework of our physical brains...and these can be duplicated...then it raises the question as to what constitutes one's sense of selfness, that is of having an identity, of being "me". Have I been "me" my whole life and how could I prove it: no matter what calendar moment the "now" is resting on, at that moment I have access to my physically-based memories...but that in itself just means that I am "here" at this moment with access to them and not that I have been here in the past forming them. This can get a bit overly metaphysical and speculative, but that's a trademark of Philip K. Dick, who was always trying to get his readers to stretch themselves...
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