After the subway accident, Alan visits his hometown in hopes of taking a trip down memory lane, but finds only a confused frustration. No one seems to recognize or remember him, and his memories of his Aunt Mildred are supplanted by the harsh truth that such a person may never have existed. Everyone he thinks he knows suffers the same fate, and a visit to his parents’ graves triggers a disturbing memory: the name Walter Ryder, carved into the tombstone, seems to hold the key to his identity, but Alan has no clues left to cling to.
After struggling with and forcefully quelling a fit of homicidal rage, Alan is made aware of his true nature as an android, for lack of a better term, when he sees threads under the peeling flesh of his arm. After deciding to meet the elusive Walter, Alan realizes that the man is his double (or rather, synthetic copy) and that his creator used real memories of Couerville to give Alan a sense of self. As Walter rambles on about his self-proclaimed genius and how Alan is supposed to be the perfect synthetic version of him, Alan is enraged, horrified by the callous cruelty of someone who plays God without an understanding of the consequences of creation.
Over time, it becomes clear that Walter doesn’t understand his synthetic offspring – worse, he doesn’t even try to understand his pain – which explains Alan’s murderous impulses that manifest as a result of this neglect and trauma. This anguish is similar to what replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) experiments in “Blade Runner”, where a climactic encounter with his creator ends in an act of patricide, where Roy gouges out Tyrell’s eyes.
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