One too many

Prompt: Ah, back home and time to relax. Long weeks are brutal. Is that the television you hear? Well you haven’t been home all day so you decide to check it out, thinking you left it on. As you enter the room you see the television is indeed on. And you’re already sitting there watching it. What’s going on here?
Source

It happened, once in a while. You win some, you win some. Nothing worth crying a river about.

Now, there's a good fifty percent chance the fucker sitting on the beer is the real you. Well not like who is real and who is not matters anyway, which one is the 'real' atom of hydrogen among all the uncountable ones. Which one's 'your' molecule of water. They're indistinguishable physically and philosophically. It's like arguing if the fullstop at the same sentence is the same if you 'copy' and 'paste' it over to a different place. Completely nonsensical.

So what next. He'd never found himself in this exact situation. He'd been discovered, everytime up until this point he was the second person in the pair to have realized the clash. The realization gave him stomach cramp. Maybe that meant he was the clone, ohh sure sure the nerds in the labs would argue there's no original and no clone but one of them was assembled one molecule at a time with the latest and greatest, and the other had grown organically...or had been assembled from scratch using slightly older technology. He always wondered what he'd do if he were in a position but didn't bother himself too much with the thought.I'll figure it out when I need to figure it out. Should have done it when there was time.

He coughed, and cleared throat. The man sitting on the couch gave a look. Ohh you're here he said without taking his eyes off the television. There's chinese takeout in the kitchen help yourself to it. Uhh buddy you've got it wrong, he said, I know that I brought that myself, and just had it I'm surpried you know about it. The man sitting on the couch paused. Wait. What. That can't be right. I though it took a couple of hours for the full effects to take place. And it's been -- checking his wristwatch -- fifteen minutes. We can't have...it's impossible for us to have...multiplied, within...is it...it can't be...

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The voice came from the man who opened the bathroom door to enter the common space. Hey, didn't we just have this conversation, that it can't be possible for us to...multiply within less than...Wait, there's two of you already? I thought I was talkin' to just one.

In the next fifteen minutes, three more copies entered the room each muddled up about the order of events, entering into a conversation they just had, but with an extra person added. Except they were the extra person. Or everybody else was it didn't matter. This ws bad, the world was ending clearly. It had to be stopped or the apocalypse was not too far off. Clearly the laws of physics were being broken this was no act of boffins sitting in a dingy lab or a mad scientist who had his superduperduploca-tor go out of control. Something was being created out of nothing. christ, they were in for some absurd times.