The other day I woke up on a tiny uninhabited planet with nothing but a replicating machine for company. There were lots of jobs to do, so I decided to copy myself a couple of hundred times, but the "mes" that emerged were all permanently anxious - and so unpleasant and unreasonable.

I realised that as I had stepped into the machine, I had been worried about the outcome - and so had produced two hundred worried self-facsimiles. So I reproduced myself again, but one at a time and under different conditions - just after I'd woken up, just before dinner, while thinking about my girlfriend, while looking up at the stars, and so on - under every mental, emotional and physiological state I could experience or recreate.

This worked out well - I managed to create two hundred different me's - similar style,  but very different priorities, sensitivities and intelligences - who were able to function as a diverse unit. The only problem was that the first two hundred mes, the permanently neurotic ones, had by this time formed a rapacious corporate state, used up the planets resources and made it impossible for all of us to survive together.

As we all sat huddled on the devastated rock, ravished and dying of hunger, we listened to the me I'd replicated while in deep sleep, as he sung to us of the strange art of dying - at which point we all strobed blue and white, shot up into four hundred glowing balls which whammed together and rocketed into the sun.

(n.b. I have since discovered that quite a lot of people have had similar experiences)