Avram Rubinstein was in torment. This was his Gehinnom, the Spiritual Washing Machine to cleanse his dirty soul. Or maybe, this was just a particularly unlucky side effect of messing with forces beyond human understanding. Or could it be both? After all, of all people in the world, Avram was the only one who knew for a fact that God was a completely real, mundane being who manipulated the laws of physics via some advanced technology. He even managed to annoy that God by pestering him with quantum telegrams, theological prank calls via advanced technology.

  And then, in his hubris, Avram manipulated this God to help him commit a murder and a suicide, just to spite his captors and go out with a particularly interesting bang.

  So it only made sense that the cosmic punishment would be being resurrected and stranded alone with the same murderous thug Avram managed to kill once. Worse, it stranded them in some kind of science-defying wilderness, where the mercenary had all the advantages, and the Doctor had none.

  All the suicidal bravery that he mustered when rigging the Device evaporated. When they woke up in a meadow sandwiched between a rocky wall, and a seemingly endless swamp, his captor was no longer as affable as before his death. Rather, all the polite calm he displayed before was transformed into icy professionalism. He ordered Avram around, and mercilessly questioned him, as if trying to milk his brain dry. He asked all kinds of questions about the Device, the possible explanations for their predicament, and the underlying physics of both.

  To his chagrin, Avram realized that none of his students ever asked such thorough and rational questions. It was clear that Theo Danton was not a theoretical physicist, but it seemed like he was intent on becoming a practical physicist, post haste.

  Avram was fed, kept warm, and relatively safe. Danton dragged him across the landscape, occasionally leaving him stuffed in a hole in the ground, or dragged up a tree, when he went to hunt and scavenge. Sometimes they even managed to start a modest fire going. They spent one night holed up in a hollow of an old oak, while some sinister beasts howled and laughed outside. Few nights later, they were stalked by a group of otters the size of rottweilers. Danton left Rubinstein alone in the open, as bait, and merged into the shadows with a sharpened shard of an antler in hand.

  The next day, they roasted a chunk of otter meat over the fire.

  When Danton exhausted every bit of useful information on the nature of Project Echo and the Device that Avram could share, he started querying him about the world around them. Normally, Rubinstein would be ecstatic to be able to explore, and share his theories about this science-defying world they found themselves in. But Danton’s rapacious attention and inhuman focus sapped all the joy out of it.

  Danton never hurt him. He did not have to. The threat of the mercenary abandoning him to fend off for himself was more than enough. Avram was a survivor, and the only way to survive now was to give that man what he wanted. So he gave and gave, and answered the same questions over and over, from every possible angle, until he felt like he was going crazy.

  Rubinstein met plenty of psychopaths in his life, but Danton was genuinely the purest example he ever encountered.

  Not even evil, simply alien, like a vampire or a giant spider that slowly sucked his mind out of his head to increase its chances of survival. They brainstormed over everything from the possibility of going back home, and the nature of their captor, to mundane things like star constellations, edible plants, and the optimal ways to start a fire with friction.

  With every word said and thought shared, Rubinstein felt less and less needed, and more like a dead ballast to Danton. He did not want to know what would happen if they passed that threshold.

  So, begrudgingly, he did what he thought would delay the inevitable, and kept engaging Danton in conversation, like Sheherezade spinning her One Thousand and One Night Tale to stave off her execution.

  “Look, Mister Danton, I do not want to dishearten you, but I do not think you really considered the implications of our situation,” he panted out, trying to keep up with his captor who was trekking through the woods at a brisk pace.

  Danton stopped and looked back.

  “What do you mean, Doctor?” The man no longer looked like the sleek and stylish professional Avram saw in that Swiss basement. He was covered head to toe in mud, to fend off mosquitoes. He had a spear with a fire-hardened tip in hand, and a sharpened antler tucked behind a loincloth woven out of strips of otter fur. Completing the picture was a giant bamboo tube they used as a canteen, and a dried, smoked strip of meat hanging over his shoulder. Somehow, without missing a beat, Danton transformed from a high-tech mercenary into a Stone Age hunter. Only the pale blue eyes remained the same, somehow both focused and mildly amused at the same time, as if they were not fighting for their lives, but participating in an exciting game.

  “I mean, well…,” Avram stuttered, his carefully prepared speech crumbling under Danton’s undivided attention, “I assume you plan to reach civilization, then find a way to build a copy of the Device and contact whoever had us recreated here, and presumably, have the process reversed. You wish to go back.”

  “That is one of the options I'm considering,” Danton nodded, took a swig off his canteen and shared it with Avram.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  “Then,” Rubinstein wanted to put it as diplomatically as possible, “I need you to understand that this is impossible. You won’t be able to recreate the Device. It is possible I could manage to do that, if we found ourselves in a well-stocked laboratory. But you must understand that even then, you’d not be able to go back.”

  Danton considered him silently for a minute, the stare making Avram sweat even more than he did before. There was no lying to Danton, no manipulating him. The man was a walking lie detector with all the emotional capacity of a lizard.

  “You said we were recreated, Doctor. What do you mean by that? I assumed that we were teleported, or possibly copied.”

  Avram sat on the ground, unable to withstand both the soreness of his legs and Danton’s creepy stare at the same time.

  “There is no such thing as teleportation,” he sighed. “That is what I was trying to tell you, even before I blew the both of us to smithereens. You cannot send matter anywhere at superluminal speeds. It's not impossible per se, just unfathomably difficult to do, and certainly not what has happened to us. So at least we can be reasonably sure of one thing, we were not kidnapped by God and stranded here, and you cannot negotiate our return.”

  “So, we are copies? The way your Device used entanglement to copy information, rather than mass, across a distance, and thus break the speed of light?”

  Avram shook his head. “Not even that, I'm afraid. The Device most likely detonated before we were sent here, because we both remember the coils evacuating, which is what happens immediately before they blow up. As the explosion was caused by a collapse of a tiny, but sufficient amount of antimatter, there is no possibility enough of us would be left to copy, nor would there even be time enough for the copying to occur.”

  “But yet we stand here. Alive.” Danton gestured at himself.

  “Someone is standing here, alive.” Avram looked at his hands, which looked perfectly familiar, with all the wrinkles, scars, and liver spots in their right places. But were those the real hands of the real doctor Avram Rubinstein? “Whatever process recreated us, definitely did not work with a recent version of us, nor could possibly copy us with perfect veracity. Even if the God we angered can somehow bend space and time, they cannot turn off entropy. ”

  “What are you saying, Doctor? That we are not who we think we are? Artificial? Virtual?”

  “I cannot say, but my guess is that the two of us are merely good enough approximations of Theo Danton and Avram Rubinstein, that used to exist in our previous reality, and not continuations of those men. Most likely, the God simply had us passively scanned at all times, and cobbled together acceptable facsimiles of us, probably filling the gaps with whatever generic memories and thoughts would make the most sense given the context of our death.”

  He saw Danton wince almost imperceptibly, and it gave him an ounce of satisfaction. Ah, there it was. Like most psychopaths, Danton was likely in love with himself, and a pang of existential dread was a new and unwelcome feeling for a narcissistic mind.

  “So, you’re telling me the real us are dead, and we are merely flawed copies? ”

  “Yes, but what I'm also trying to tell you, is that if you ever tried to go back, then this version of you, the one standing before me, would not go anywhere. Any attempt to recreate the Device and parlay with God again is just an elaborate way to commit suicide, with the hope that a brain roughly similar to yours would be created somewhere else.”

  Danton flashed him a thin smile. ”Interesting. I took you for a man who believes in the existence of the soul. A soul that presumably would be indestructible and continuous across the disparate versions of our bodies. Has our adventure turned you into an atheist? Such a shame, you were the rare man of science who was also a man of deep faith.” He pulled the doctor up, and nodded for him to follow. “No matter. We have all the time we need to iron out the philosophical conundrums before we are even able to find someone with a ham radio, let alone a miniature particle collider you need. Now, come along, we need to find a new shelter before sundown.”

  The trek took them most of the day, until they reached the shores of an enormous river. Avram half-crawled, half-staggered his way towards the water, drank deep mouthfuls heedless of the danger of its waterborne bacteria, and then dipped his tortured feet in it.

  Danton almost sat next to him, when some animalistic instinct made him whip his head to the side, and grab his spear. He silenced Avram with a gesture and stalked into the woods.

  Soon, Avram himself heard voices.

  Human voices, some excited, some anxious.

  A group of people shouting one over another.

  He wanted to shout back, he wanted to run to them. He wanted to warn them about the monster that Danton was. He never managed to do any of those things, because a hand clasped over his mouth, and his captor reappeared right next to him.

  “See Doctor, I think you might have been misleading me a little bit.” Danton said casually, tightening his grip over Avram’s face and throat. “I just saw a whole gaggle of people, all of them clearly copies, just like you and I. Naked, terrified, stranded in the woods. I strongly suspect not one of them was engaged in clandestine quantum communicator research, and yet, all of them ended up here.”

  Avram struggled, kicked, and scratched at Danton to no avail. His vision started to wobble, suffocation slowly robbing his brain of its last bits of mental coherence.

  “Which,” Danton continued, his tone casual, “makes me believe you were wrong about all of it. I do not really need you anymore, and the solution to my entrapment lies elsewhere. Dragging your ancient carcass around was enough of a chore already. Moreover, I cannot have you spill our secrets and the circumstances of our meeting to my new friends. As you said, I'm a brand new copy, not the old Theo, so I’d rather start with a clean slate.”

  These were the last words Doctor Avram Rubinstein heard.

  They were followed by Danton grabbing his head in a two-handed grip and twisting it sharply to the side with a wet crack.

  A crack that made his body go limp and his mind go gray and fuzzy, as he was slowly submerged in the river.

  Before Avram died, this time for good, he saw his killer through the murky green surface of the water.

  Motes of debris swirled on it, like unruly subatomic particles.