Zoom's work-from-home employees got the shock of their lives recently when they discovered doppelgängers had been attending meetings in their place - face-to-face gatherings the real remote workers didn't even know existed until after the fact.
"I was just catching up on my recording of the quarterly budget review," said one pajama-clad programmer. "But the weirder thing was, I somehow already had notes from it! Pages covered in my handwriting, despite me sleeping through the whole damn thing."
It soon became clear that a sinister force was at play. While Zoom's homebound staff went about their daily routines, oblivious, ghostly replicas infiltrated the office. These supernatural pod people listened attentively in conference rooms, voted in virtual polls, and even helped themselves to catered lunch spreads.
"Think about how many closeup shots of people nodding got saved to our cloud storage," a veteran employee shuddered. "Those subtle facial tics and awkward lip smacks...they were a little too realistic, if you know what I mean." Rather than unblinking robot stares, these doppelgängers committed to replicating every mundane human quirk. They blinked excessively, sniffled at weird moments, tugged at collars, and slapped cheeks to stay awake - the sorts of nervous habits that would normally drive colleagues insane. Whether demonic tricksters or committed method actors, Zoom's spirit squatters nailed the imperfect humanness a bit too perfectly for comfort.
Theories abounded as to the nature of this unholy imbroglio. Had a containment mishap at X Development allowed a pocket dimension of corporate dopplegangers to cross over? Did a rogue machine learning model accidentally instantiate an entirely new workforce from browser cookies? Or was there a more ancient, arcane secret - an executive peddling souls to Beelzebub for higher Glassdoor ratings? "Let's just say the Q4 budget covered an unexpected line-item for...specialized materials," the haunted middle manager said cryptically. "I probably shouldn't go into details, but let's just say it involved cooled biohazard containers."
As the tech world reels from these revelations, Zoom has pledged to get to the bottom of the otherworldly imposters. Though at this point, who can say whether the supposedly "real" employees are the authentic ones or merely the next inter-dimensional layer of treachery?
