Face-to-face interpersonal interactions with evil twins can be pretty stressful, so if you decide to try that, you need to choose people who are only “slightly evil twins,” so to speak. A substantive encounter with a full-blown evil twin can be so toxic that it takes years to get over it. Worse, if you fail to get over it, the encounter can grow into a deeply resentful “us vs. them” philosophy of life, built entirely on top of one encounter.
—Venkatesh Rao, SHADOWBOXING WITH EVIL TWINS
Come, knight of the typewriter, into my wood-paneled lair, and let me be pepper to your salt. For quite some time now you’ve been interfering with my activities, calling out my business plays, exposing my meetings. I am of the world, and you are of the people, and what are we to make of that? Only a dance of thrust and parry, only a play of shadows.
Cries for mythic parallel, our waltz. I saw you at my gala, hovering around conversations like the sword of Damocles in a rented tux. When someone engaged you smirked and rolled eyes over your wine glass, deflected with asinine wit, noncommittal. Inviting their push so you can ambush them with the things they didn’t know you know. You flirted with everyone and made yourself available to no-one.
You must have been a real operator, in your own mind, all mystery and attack? Their wives sure liked you, they must have asked their husbands for a good lashing later on. Did you really think you were twisting fingers this way, that you would read their faces for tells? No, I don’t think you’re quite that foolhardy. Because you did everything to make your disdain felt except one thing: leave. You stayed where there was a use for you, a delicious sparring partner for those who could wipe you off with an email, a rare mineral among stony faces grown dull with perversity. You were a diversion and you knew it—you enjoyed it.
What’s this? A gun? Dear God, a revolver? Short-stubbed, forty-five? You must be having me on. What did you think this would be, a chase down smoky alleys? I am more than a man, sir. I am corporate power-talk inaccessible to Plebeians. I am closed-door policies at leadership conferences. I am mattress-strewn suites where private capital meets public office. I am Monte Carlo, Panama, Cyprus. I am hush money or else.
You cannot kill me any more than you could kill the Hydra if the Hydra were made of one hundred department heads angling for the same promotion. May I point out that you tripped a silent alarm breaking in? By all means, sir make a case for martyrdom. We will go down in a perfectly romantic fatal embrace, two snakes intertwined forever.
For we are alike, sir, though you play at impotent rage. I know all about the manipulations on your side of this drama. Our methods, our drive, don’t differ, only our aims, and that in a most limited sense. Doesn’t it alarm you that after every exposé you print our prices prick up like excited nipples? Yes, I’ll admit, several people have asked to take delivery of your head, and you did strongarm some overdue policy turns. But all injured parties are below-the-penthouse people, sir, or were asking for an elbowing, and I think you know that. The waltz has been going long enough for us to know that it flows best when we both follow the steps.
I think, Mr. S, that you didn’t come here looking for a showdown, but for an interview.
My dogs are hungry, sir, and your hand is trembling. I think it’s looking to rest not on a trigger, but in a handshake.
the Budafoki amended 
seen