Trial Run: A Short Story

TRIAL RUN From Calder Ash, author of The Recall Threshold How many versions of you would die to keep living? Oliver Vale is terrified of death. Since losing his mother to cancer, every headache feels like a warning. Every missed heartbeat feels like a countdown. Desperate for relief, he signs up for Trial Run, a revolutionary therapy that promises to help people confront mortality through a fully immersive simulated death experience. For forty-five minutes, Oliver will experience his own death. Then he'll wake up cured. Instead, he wakes up in the wrong life. His flat isn't quite the same. His closest friend remembers a different past. His father is living somewhere he has never been. At first, the differences are small enough to ignore. Until Oliver discovers that Trial Run was never designed to treat fear. It was designed to break the barriers between realities. >If a better version of your life exists somewhere else... do you have the right to take it? Trial Run is a gripping psychological sci-fi thriller about grief, identity, and the dangerous temptation to outrun death. From the author of The Recall Threshold, another dark and thought-provoking tale exploring memory, consciousness, and the fragile nature of reality.

Pages: 79, Paperback, Independently published