As I sat up in the grass, I realized that it had all been fake. The entire second reality, the insane Kitagawa and even the supposed brain damage I was suffering from. It had all been another part of their simulation.

I grew angry before rage overtook me.

“The fuck do you think you’re doing? This is fucked up! I fuck thought it was real! I thought… This is insane. Why don’t you just get me out of here right now and-“

“Mr. Purlow, I like to inform you,” a voice popped out of nowhere. “In form 48, paragraph 4, point C you specifically agreed to-“

“Yeah, well, fuck off!” I screamed in answer.

This time the voice didn’t anything else.

I stood up and looked around. I was in a meadow and further ahead was a small lake. The moment I saw it, nostalgia washed over me. I knew this lake! It was the one that had been right next to the village my grandparents had lived at.

I let my eyes wander around and I recognized the old cherry tree nearby, the dirt path that led from the like to the village and even the distant forests. How in the hell had they created all this? Had they researched my past or had they somehow scanned my memories? Was something like that even possible?

After a while, not knowing what else to do, I began walking up the path that should lead me to the village. I was stuck in here anyway, without a way to end the simulation myself. And I had to admit, I wanted to see the old village.

I’d barely taken a few steps when I found an old bike lying in the grass. I noticed the black-red metallic color, the old, dirty gears, and the rusted bell. It was the mountain bike I’d owned as a kid. The memories of childhood returned to me and I saw myself racing down dirt paths and forest tracks. I couldn’t help but smile. Things were so different back then. For a moment I considered picking up the bike, but I was way too tall to drive it, anyway.

The path from the lake led to a tiny hill and once I’d made it up there my eyes grew wide. I couldn’t believe it. Once more I wondered how they’d created all this. For a while, I stood there marveling at the sight below.

There was the huge old farmstead. Here were the holiday homes at the edge of the village. Further away was the major part of the village with the church in its center. In front of me, though, was the part that my eyes rested on the longest. It was the lower part of the village which consisted of only a handful of houses, one of them my grandparents’. It had been over fifteen years since I’d last been there.

As I went on my way, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how real everything was. I felt the grass against my legs, the sun on my face, and I smelled the fresh summer air. You could almost forget you were in a simulation, I thought.

No, I reminded myself, don’t fall for it again, you idiot! Not a second time, hell, not a third time!

My steps led me to my grandparent’s house almost on autopilot. It was a small house, with a barn next to it. They’d been farmers for the better part of their life. When I was born though, they’d already abandoned the old trade and had opted for a more relaxed way of living.

The closer I got, the more memories returned to me. I felt goosebumps on my arm when I saw a cat in the grass nearby. It eyed me curiously and when I noticed the brownish, grey stripes on his back, I knew that it had to be my grandma’s old cat, Leo.

The cat watched me for a few more moments before it came over to me, purring and rubbing itself against my legs.

“Hey little fellow,” I greeted it and leaned down to pet it.

I wondered how they’d got everything right up to the smallest detail. Then I wondered if this was really what grandma’s cat had looked like. What if they’d created a vague image of a cat and my brain made the necessary connections that weren’t there and filled in the gaps? Was that how they did all this? Providing nothing but a vague framework for the rest of the brain to work with?

While I stood there, petting the cat and thinking about this, the sky suddenly grew darker. Within moments thick clouds had formed and blocked out the sun before it began to rain. It wasn’t long before the rain had turned into a full-on downpour.

Sure, it was a simulation, but I still felt myself getting wet and I felt the cold gusty wind. Within moments I was freezing and hurried to the open front door of the house. I watched as the downpour continued and saw Leo rush away into the barn. They’d done it all, to the minutest detail.

As I stood there, I wondered why they’d thrown me into a simulation like this. Why my grandparents’ house?

Then, something crawled back into my mind. As I stood there in the small entry hall, I shivered as a memory came back to me. The memory of the single worst day of my entire childhood. I’d never told them about that day! Hell, I’d buried it so deep inside my mind, I hadn’t even remembered it until now! So how did they know about it!?

No, I told myself, I wouldn’t go in. I wouldn’t enter this house. They couldn’t make me, could they? I rushed back outside. All care about the downpour or the cold had vanished. I’d make it to one of the other houses, or just over to the barn.

I don’t know what I was expecting if I thought I could actually do anything.

What I wasn’t expecting were the spiders that suddenly swarmed the ground. At first, there were only a few, but soon it was hundreds, thousands. They covered the grass, the trees, the barn, everything. Everything but my grandparents’ house.

For a moment I closed my eyes. If I don’t see them, they can’t hurt me, right? None of this was real, it was a simulation! Just run, you damned idiot, run, and get away from here.

Yet, I’d barely taken a few steps when I could feel them crawling all over me. They made their way up my legs, my back, and even my arms. I shuddered, tried to ignore it, but finally, I screamed, opened my eyes, and swatted them off me. I was shaking and as I looked ahead I saw that the entire village, no, the entire outside world was covered in thick, heavy spider webs. This whole simulation had become some arachnophobic hell!

When I couldn’t fight it anymore, when my phobia kicked in with full force I rushed back into the house. I didn’t want to go there again, but my body didn’t seem to listen to me anymore.

Still, I knew why they forced me back here. This time they couldn’t make me. No, I wouldn’t move. I’d stay down here, next to the front door. Once more the dreaded memory pushed itself into my head. I lost my balance and started shaking and sweating.

“You goddamn pieces of shit! Fuck you!” I screamed up at the empty, quiet house.

The last time I’d been here was a few days after my grandma had died. After that day, I’d never been to that house again, and I’d never wanted to return to it.

My grandpa had died when I was ten years old and after his death, my grandma had lived on her own. She died one year later. I shuddered thinking about the day I found her.

I sat down on the ground and didn’t do a damn thing. All I did was breathe slowly and steadily to keep the panic at bay as I watched the spiders outside.

“Mr. Purlow, we have to inform you again that you’re required to participate in the simulation. We are aware that you know where you’re supposed to go. Should you remain there without continuing, we’re forced to-“

“Just shut the fuck up! I’m not doing it! I’m not going there!” I screamed again without moving a single inch.

I tried, I honestly tried, but how can you fight something that you’ve got no control over. What can you do in a world that can become anything and do anything to you?

I sat there, unmoving, but after a short while, the spiders outside grew restless before they rushed towards the building. I could barely throw the front door shut, but I could feel it, the pressure of thousands of spiders trying to force their way in. Then I heard it, the sounds, the sounds of spiders crawling and skittering all over the walls outside. As I desperately pushed myself against the door, I saw the windows, the glass, the cracks. A moment later the glass gave way, and a flood of spiders made its way inside. They weren’t crawling inside, they swept into the building; it was nothing but an endless wave of eight-legged horrors. Within moments, they filled the entire first floor of the building.

In my panicked state, I picked the only direction that wasn’t covered in them, the stairs to the second floor. The spiders were coming after me, chasing me. I could feel them on my legs, my arms, felt them tearing at my skin and biting into my flesh. In a panic, I ripped them from my body by the dozens before I threw myself into the only room that wasn’t infested with them.

I was a shivering, shaking mess. Bloody bites covered my arms and legs. Tears stream from my eyes, and I was too exhausted even to curse.

It was only after a few minutes after I’d calmed down that I noticed the sweet, disgusting smell that wafted through the air. I realized where I was.

In a state of shock, I turned away from the door to take in the sight in front of me. It was my grandma’s bedroom. She was right there, lying in her bed, unmoving. The same as she’d been when I was eleven years old. This time though, I knew what was in front of me.

Right there, between the sheets, was the decomposing body of my grandma.

She’d been dead for almost four days when I found her. Back then my parents and lived in a small town only a few kilometers away from her. One day, on a whim, I decided to go visit her. After grandpa’s death, she’d become a lonely woman and had isolated herself from the rest of the world. Still, I loved my grandma, and I thought she’d be happy to see me.

When I didn’t find her outside, I searched the house and finally found her up in her bedroom. A wave of a disgusting sweet smell me when I opened the door. The same smell I’d known from bad, rotten apples. I remember walking up to my grandma to wake her, telling her there must be some apples that had gone bad. It was only at this point that I saw the state she was in. Her face was not that of my grandma anymore. Because of the summer heat and the stuffy air inside the room, it had become a bloated, mushy heap of flesh, covered by maggots and flies. I remember screaming and running from the house only to be found by a neighbor. It was he who’d called the doctor and the mortician. For years the memory of her rotten face and the sweet smell of her rotting body had stayed with me before I’d been able to bury it.

It was this same sweet smell that now crawled up my nostrils. I froze, unable to move or do anything. Suddenly I was eleven years old again. I was not Andre Purlow, the twenty-seven-year-old man in a virtual reality simulation anymore. No, I was little Andy, a scared eleven-year-old boy in his dead grandma’s bedroom.

After the initial shock was over, I turned back to the door of the room, but I couldn’t see it anymore. Where the door had been was now nothing but a solid wall. I looked around, confused, but there was no hint of it anymore. The door had vanished.

I went forward, hitting and beating against the wall hoping to find a way out. With each passing second, the smell of rot grew more and more intense. I gagged, pushed myself as far away from the bed as I could, back into the corner of the room.

I cried, I screamed and pleaded with them to end the simulation. The money didn’t matter anymore, nothing did. All I wanted was to get out of the simulation.

As I sat there, rambling on and on I heard a different sound. At first, I thought it was the spiders again, but then I heard it again, a quiet wet squishing. I almost vomited when a fresh wave of the rotten stink hit me. My eyes watered. I blinked once, twice, and then I saw it.

In front of me, between the sheets, grandma’s body was… moving. I thought it was a reaction because of the decay, but it wasn’t. In sheer and total horror I watched as her rotten corpse got up and her bloated, mushy face focused on me. Her lips were gone, her eyes were tiny, shriveled up like dried raisins. The worst though was the maggots that now fell from it in droves.

I screamed, scrambled back against the wall, began beating it, throwing myself against it, to get away somehow, but it was futile.

“Oh, my dear little Andy,” I heard a distorted version of her voice. The words were barely distinguishable from one another, not much more than a wet gurgle.

“How nice of you to come to visit your old grandma!”

The bedsheets parted, and I could see the full, disgusting horror of her rotten body. The bed was almost a sea of body fluids and she was nothing but an amalgamation of wet, mushy flesh. Her body was torn open, revealing her insides. As she pushed herself to her feet, something big and wet burst from her abdomen and onto the bedsheets below. For a moment she wavered, almost collapsed into herself, but then she moved, crawled towards me.

“Oh, how grandma missed you, little Andy.”

And then, as she touched me, as I felt a wet, squishy hand on my shoulder, despair overtook me. The world stopped existing at this point. My mind broke, and I clawed at the wall. I ripped at the wallpaper, dug into the plaster and brickwork below until my fingers were nothing but bloody stumps. My consciousness retreated and became an audience to my perils and could do nothing as I mutilated my body.

At first, the only sounds I heard was the scratching of my flesh and bones against the plaster, but then, the same wet gurgling started again. Grandma was singing an old nursery rhyme, the one she’d sang me when I couldn’t fall asleep. As I lay there, as I couldn’t go on anymore, she closed her rotten arms around my crippled, mutilated body.

I don’t know how long the embrace lasted. Every second felt like an eternity and her song seemed to go in endless repetition. All the while her body decomposed further and further as she held me.

I can’t tell you when or how the simulation ended. I only remembered struggling against the grip of other people. The details are nothing but a blur. There was security personal, an ambulance, and finally, I awoke in a hospital in Berlin.

A plump nurse was checking my vital signs and looked up in surprise when she saw I was awake. As she rushed from the room, everything felt different. It was my head, my brain.

As the memory of grandma’s rotting body came back to me, I screamed again. They gave me a heavy dosage of sedatives, and once I’d calmed down enough one of the doctors explained what had happened.

After the test of some electronic device had gone horribly wrong, they had brought here me. Apart from a few bruises, there was no visible external damage. Most of the injuries I’d suffered were related to the brain and the nervous system.

Shock washed over me and I tried to push myself up, but my hands and fingers didn’t react. I tried again, but I could barely move them, couldn’t even ball my hands into fists. As I stared at my almost useless appendages, tears streamed from my eyes.

The doctor stood there, an expression of misery visible on his face. He spoke, but I barely listened. Full recovery was out of the question, partial functionality might be possible, various approaches, therapy, and on and on he went. Somehow, though, I could tell that I was damaged beyond repair. I knew, and I cried.

The brain damage I’d sustained was more severe than originally thought. I’d trouble to recall certain memories and anything beyond simple math problems was impossible for me. I don’t know if I’d ever been smart before all this, but I knew I wasn’t anymore.

The most serious issue was the complete loss of my sense of smell. The doctors don’t know why, but I know the reason. I know that while the rotten corpse of my grandma held me, the smell must’ve been too much for my psyche. My brain must’ve cut off my sense of smell.

I stayed at the hospital for months. Once I could leave, people urged me to sue ImagiCom. I went to a lawyer, explained my situation, but it was not even a week before he got back to me. There wouldn’t be a case. ImagiCom was a subsidiary of a huge international conglomerate. They had all the money in the world to bury any case against them. Even worse though, they’d provided him with all the forms I’d signed and in them, I’d agreed to pretty much anything. Even the eventuality of lasting damage to my body. There was nothing that could be done.

It’s been more than a year since the entire thing happened, but I’ve only been able to write it down now. It was a long and arduous process with only the two fingers of my left hand who remained functional after all this.

But there’s one last thing I have to mention. The funniest, most fucked up thing about all this. The day I was released from the hospital and had gotten back home, I’d checked my bank account.

I laughed for hours when I saw the huge six-digit number of 100.000 Euros that had been transferred to my account the day the beta test ended. They’d fucking paid me. They’d paid me in full, just like they’d promised.

I have enough money now, enough to get rid of my debt. I’d gotten a second chance in life. Only now, as damaged as I was, I wouldn’t be able to make anything of it.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You arrived here at our Munich facility this morning to test our new immersion rig.”

With that, Dr. Kitagawa pointed at a different contraption. One I’d never seen before. It looked almost like a giant wheel a person could be strapped to. A variety of gadgets, a visor, a headset, and gloves were connected to it.

“You signed up for our beta test for compensation of 1.000 Euros. The test is scheduled to last between two and four days.”

“Wait, hold on, this is bullshit,” I laughed, but it came out more nervous than I’d hoped for. “I’m still IN the simulation.”

“People who suffer from damage to their visual cortex can often suffer from a different perception of reality. This can not only lead to false interpretations of what’s in front of you, but can also lead to distorted memories. It’s often influenced by the person’s subconscious beliefs and wishes.”

“All right, very funny, first of all, the equipment I used was totally different, and I was offered a compensation of,” but I broke up.

Distorted memories influenced by personal wishes? When I thought about it, would anyone really pay a hundred grand to test some piece of technology?

“For now I’ll have a look at the test results and see if what I found might impede you from joining the test. Depending on those results, it might be better to schedule an examination at a nearby hospital. For now, though, we should start on the general physical examination.”

I nodded and smiled, but I couldn’t shake off the weird feeling that flooded over me. This was a simulation, wasn’t it? They were just trying to fuck with my brain again. There was no damned way I could’ve imagined any of the stuff that happened before!

All right, Jesus Andre, don’t fall for their shit again. You’re in a freaking simulation, and none of this is real.

“Right,” I said to Kitagawa, “let’s go do the stupid fitness test then.”

The man frowned at my answer, but nodded.

The test was way simpler than before. Kitagawa led me to an exercise bike in the back of the room and tested my heart rate and my general stamina, nothing else. The same was true for the psychological evaluation. He just asked me a handful of questions, and that was it. Once it was all over, he called an assistant that led me from the room.

When I stepped outside, I stopped for a moment. The hallway was different. There weren’t any pristine white walls. Instead, it looked like any other office building I’d seen before. Nothing about the place screamed high-tech or fancy.

The same was true for my private quarters. It reminded me of a room in a simple hostel. There was a bunk bed, a small nightstand, and an old cupboard. The assistant who’d led me here excused himself and hurried away.

Once he’d left, I slumped down on the bed and took out my phone.

I opened up WhatsApp and had a look at my messages. The last one I’d sent was to my best friend, telling him about a beta test in Munich I would take part in.

‘Yeah, it’s not a lot of money, but at least I won’t have to eat just ramen for a month,’ I’d written to him.

I frowned at that. It sounded like me. Exactly the way I’d talk about myself, but I didn’t remember writing that message. Hell, I had told no one about the amount of compensation I’d be paid.

“This is bullshit.”

With that, I dropped the phone on the bed next to me and leaned back. None of this was real, anyway. A few minutes later I got up and hit my fist against the wall. I don’t know why I did it, but the result was as expected. The resulting pain felt real enough.

I picked up the phone again and had a look at my emails. It was all there, the instructions, the compensation for my travels, everything. Only the details were all different.

While I read through the emails, someone knocked against the door. When I opened it a nervous man stood outside.

His eyes were wide and darted left and right before he pushed himself past me.

“Hey, what are you-?”

“Quiet. Close the door!”

I laughed and did as he told me. All right, what now?

“Listen, I know this will sound weird, but everything that’s going on here is not what it’s supposed to be.”

“Yeah, no shit,” I said. “This is all just a simulation.”

The man’s face turned grim and a wordless curse escaped his mouth. Then he leaned forward, putting his face right in front of mine.

“All right. You’re NOT in a simulation. They are trying to make you believe you are in one, but that’s not what’s going on here. This whole damn thing has got NOTHING to do with any new virtual reality technology. Did you inspect the damned rig, and all those gadgets? Why’d you need all that for virtual reality? It’s all a front! They’ll run you through test after test after test, reschedule them before they tell you they found some anomaly. Let me guess your brain or your heart, right?”

When I looked up, the man smiled knowingly.

“Where do you think you’re at? Where’s that simulation you’re in taking place?”

“Berlin,” I said in a quiet voice.

The guy grinned. “Mine was scheduled in Dortmund. We’ve got someone here who said they were in Hamburg, another guy just two rooms further down said he went to Munich.”

“So, where the hell are we?”

The guy laughed.

“Don’t you get it? No one knows! We all think we’re in different locations! You might think you’re in Munich or Dresden or Hamburg, but that’s not where we are. Did they give you anything to drink when you arrived? Coffee, water, or maybe a soda?”

I nodded once more.

“They spiced it with some shit, some new, fucked up drug that scrambles up your memory. Once you’re in here, you won’t have a clue anymore what’s real and what’s not. It’s all because of that damned drug! None of the participants here have a clue what’s going on!”

I went back to the bed and picked up my phone. Once more I went over the emails. That’s when I noticed that something else was wrong. The dates. I’d talked to them for almost two weeks, so why were all the emails from the beginning of this month? Then I checked the date on my phone.

I stared at it, confused. Wait, why was it only the 4th? I got here on the 12th, didn’t I? The WhatsApp message I’d sent to my friend yesterday was dated the 3rd. If this was-

“That’s how they get you,” the guy cut me off.

It was right at this point that the door opened again. I recognized Brandt by his trained smile right away.

“Mr. Purlow, nice to meet you, I’m Mr. Zimmer, the CEO of ImagiCom. I can see you’ve already met Mr. Schuster, one of our other participants.”

Schuster’s face changed, and for a moment an expression of pure terror was visible. He fought hard to suppress it before he turned to the supposed CEO.

“Mr. Zimmer, I better get going. I’m sure you have, eh, things to talk about with Mr. Purlow here.”

With that, he gave me and Brandt, no Zimmer, a nod, and hurried from the room.

“All right, Mr. Zimmer,” I started and emphasized the name. “Where’s Mr. Brandt?”

“Brandt? We don’t have anyone working here by that name. I’m not sure who you’re referring to.”

“I’m talking about the man who showed me the introduction video and-“

“Ah, Dr. Kitagawa. His first name is Satoshi, in case you’re wondering. Brilliant man. He informed me about the anomaly he’d discovered during your brain scans. However, he already said it doesn’t seem to be serious. If we make a few changes to the simulation, there shouldn’t be any problems with the beta test.”

He continued to ramble on about the test and what was to come, but I didn’t listen anymore. My head was throbbing. This was all too damn real and way too fucking strange. Would anyone even go through all this effort and create a simulation like this? Why?

As I stood there, I thought about what you’re supposed to do when you find yourself in a dream and want to wake up. Would something like that even work in a simulation? Shit, I had no clue.

“… until then you’re at your leisure, Mr. Purlow. We’d like you to stay in your room if possible, but we understand if you’re interested in the project itself. If you need any additional information, our promotional manager, Mr. Wittich in room 14.B, would be more than happy to have a talk with you. Well, I got to leave now. Thanks again for joining our beta test. Please be at the ready at four to continue with the schedule.”

With that, he left the room. For a moment I stood there, trying to figure out how to prove what was real and what wasn’t. As my eyes scanned the room, I noticed something. It was small and partway hidden behind the ceiling lamp. I could only see it from a certain position. Was that a… camera? Why was it up there and why was it hidden like this? Were they spying on me? I stared at it for a while before I turned away.

Was this really a simulation? Would they put all those details in? Shit, this entire thing was driving me insane.

I couldn’t stay in this room anymore. The longer I sat still, the more confused I got. A few moments later I was outside again and started to walk down the hallway.

A lot of other people in office attire flocked the hallway, going through their normal workday. Yet, somehow, when I passed them, they all looked up, watched me, and whispered to one another. It made my skin crawl in the worst possible way. Something was definitely wrong here.

As I continued, I wondered how big this place was. It felt like the hallway went on forever. I passed room after room and other identical hallways. For a moment I felt disoriented, as if I was trapped in a maze.

I was about to follow down a different hallway when I bumped into Schuster. He looked up at me with a serious expression.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he whispered at me.

“What?”

“I just saw, I saw what they’re doing to, good god,” he shivered before he got a hold of my arm and pulled me after himself.

Schuster walked normally, trying his best to make a bit of small talk. As he dragged me along, I saw how sweaty he was and how much he fought to keep the anxiety at bay.

“What did you see?” I asked him again.

“I, I don’t know, there are people strapped to these things, but they’re bleeding and,” he broke up again. There was yet another group of office workers ahead of me that eyed us with curious interest.

Schuster seemed to be as disoriented as I was, his eyes darting left and right as he chose his directions haphazardly. Finally, though, we arrived at an enormous glass door. Schuster pushed it open, and we entered a giant lobby.

The moment we got there, the woman behind the reception desk looked up.

“Mr. Purlow, Mr. Schuster, can I help you?”

Schuster didn’t say a thing. Instead, he hurried towards the building’s entrance door. He pushed, then threw himself against it, but the door didn’t budge. For a moment, as I looked at the receptionist, I could’ve sworn I saw a smile on her face.

“Mr. Schuster, we’ve been over this before,” she started in a warm, friendly voice. “Unfortunately you’re not allowed to leave the premise until the end of your clinical trial.”

“No, fuck your trial! I’m getting out of here! You’re all insane, this entire thing here’s insane!”

When Schuster beat against the door with all the force he could muster, the receptionist pressed a button. A few moments later two men in suits appeared in the lobby. When Schuster saw them, he freaked out, screamed obscenities at them. The man didn’t waver, walked up to him, and restrained him with next to no effort.

“Mr. Schuster, everything’s all right,” one of them whispered at him while he struggled against their grip.

“It’s just the aftereffects of the new medication. Everything’s all right,” the other chimed in.

As they said this, Schuster was still screaming, still struggling while they dragged him back through the glass door.

“What the hell’s going on here?” I yelled at the receptionist.

“I’m very sorry about that Mr. Purlow. Mr. Schuster is part of a different test group, a test for a new type of medication against certain mental issues. Unfortunately, some test subjects suffered from mild cases of reality distortion and paranoia. I assure you though, it’s normal and no reason for concern.”

“No reason for… what? He was freaking screaming! What the hell are you even-? You know what I’m out of here. It doesn’t even matter if this is some fucked up simulation or if this is real, but I’m fucking out!”

“It’s all standard procedure, Mr. Purlow,” she continued. “Might I remind you of paragraph 5 on form 27? ’Unless there’s the imminent danger of brain damage or curricular arrest, the beta test will continue.’ Now, of course, you’re free to end the test here and now, Mr. Purlow, but we will pay no compensation in that case. Furthermore, as paragraph 11 on form 41 states: ‘Should a person quit the beta test after giving their official consent, ImagiCom will be forced to take legal action, which might include fines of substantial height.”

I stood there and listened as she rambled on about some damned legal matters.

“The hell are you talking about? What’s that about those damned forms? You can’t just-“

But I broke up when the two men that had taken Schuster away appeared again.

“We can assure you, Mr. Purlow, we can indeed.”

With that, the two men got a hold of my arms. I struggled against their grip but soon realized that they were much stronger than me. As they dragged me back towards the hallway, they whispered the same calming words they had at Schuster before. They didn’t even react when I called them out on their bullshit.

I thought they’d bring me back to my room, but they dragged me to the examination room. Kitagawa was already there, waiting for me, smiling.

“Excellent news, Mr. Purlow,” he said with excitement. “We’ve just got confirmation that you’re eligible to take part in our rest.”

Kitagawa’s face transformed, twisted by a sadistic smile.

“The fuck kind of test are you-“

I couldn’t keep talking anymore, because one of the two men pushed a gag into my mouth.

“Well then, why don’t you take Mr. Purlow down to hall B, I think model thirteen should be free at the moment.”

With that, they dragged me outside again, down the hallway. The few office workers who were still around watched the entire ordeal with excited faces.

“You should be honored, Mr. Purlow, you’ll be contributing to the advancement of human society!” Kitagawa rambled on.

I wanted to say something, scream at him, and call him insane, but the damned gag didn’t allow for any of it. All that escaped my mouth were muffled, indistinguishable sounds.

It wasn’t long before Kitagawa pushed open the door to another room, much bigger than any I’d been in before. The moment we entered, the iron smell of blood reached me and I could hear the low moans and muffled screams of the other participants.

They were all strapped to one of the wheel-like contraptions Kitagawa had called their new immersion rig. The moment I saw them, I fought against the grip of the two men once more.

The first participant was twisting and shaking against the restraints of the contraption. A gag covered another’s mouth, but I could see the blood that streamed from the visor, could hear his muffled screams. Yet another’s teeth were grinding against one another before they started biting at his lips and leaving them a tattered, bloody mess. And then, way further down, in the last contraption, I saw Schuster. He was barely recognizable anymore. Blood leaked from his mouth, the visor, and the headphones. His arms and legs looked different, twisted as if the joints had popped and his tendons had snapped. He dangled there almost lifelessly, only twitching once in a while.

Kitagawa’s eyes wandered to the man.

“Well, guess model seventeen is available for a new participant already,” he said with a smile.

I stared at the man wide-eyed.

“Oh, don’t you worry Mr. Purlow, it’s all standard procedure! There’s not a thing you’ve got to worry about!”

As the two men started to strap me to model thirteen I inhaled sharply, mustered up all my strength, and threw myself forward. One restraint snapped open, then another one, and I was free. Adrenaline rushed through my veins and I could somehow avoid both men’s outstretched arms. In an instant, I was out in the hallway.

I heard Kitagawa scream after me and a second later the two men came running after me.

All I could do was run. I pushed on, down one hallway, then another. I ran left, then right, almost crashed into a group of office workers before I changed directions again. Where the hell was I even going? I no idea where the damned lobby was. Everything looked the same, the walls, the room, even the people.

I hurried around another corner and threw myself into the first room I saw. With shaking hands, I took out my phone. I dialed the number for the police, but nothing happened. Fuck, I realized, I didn’t have a signal.

I scanned the room and instantly saw the glass paneling that separated me from the outside world. If nothing else, then… I picked up a chair standing in the room and hurled it against the panel.

The chair crashed against the glass right as my two pursuers stormed into the room. They were still smiling the same smile, still uttering the same reassuring words. I avoided the first man’s grip, threw him to the ground, but right at that moment the second man tackled me. His body crashed into mine and I was thrown backward.

I felt the impact as my body crashed against the glass paneling. Then there was the sound of shattering glass as the surface exploded into a thousand pieces.

For the blink of an eye, I was weightless.

There was no impact, though. Instead, I lay in the soft grass.

I freaked out, jumped up, but felt no pain. There was no damage, no blood, and no glass. When I turned around though, the office building had vanished, too.

It had all been fake, a farce.

It had been nothing but another one of their fucked up simulations.

“Hitting rock bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there.” – Michelle Parsons

That was the reason I found myself in front of a small, mundane office building in the outskirts of Berlin.

It should be the greatest mistake of my life, even more so than all the shit I’d pulled before.

To make a lengthy story short, I had massed a serious debt. Let’s just say I thought I was far smarter than I was and made a few questionable investments.

I tried to find a way out, I did, but there weren’t many options available for a university dropout like me. Before long I scurried the less reputable parts of the internet for ways of making a few quick bucks. Nestled between shady offers and medical trials, I found one that picked my interest.

“Company Searching for Beta Testers of New Virtual Reality Technology”

I’d skimmed the article, but the moment I read that they’d pay me 100.000 Euros I laughed and told myself it was nothing but a hoax or a scam.

After a few phone calls, half a dozen exchanged emails, and a bit of research, I learned that the company, and their offer, were genuine. Why they offered to pay that much I didn’t know, but damn could I use it.

To be honest, I’d expected to find high-tech building, the type that consisted of nothing but glass and steel. The reality, as so often before, proved to be different.

The moment I entered, the young woman behind the reception desk greeted me.

“Welcome, may I help you? Are you here for the beta test?”

“Yeah, I mean, yes I am.”

I handed her the invitation letter they had sent me and after giving it a short look, she nodded.

“Great, we still have a bit of time, so please have a seat in the waiting area over there.”

She pointed at a compact room to my left. There was nothing inside the room apart from a few lonely chairs. Everything here gave me the impression of being quickly put together. The walls were bleak and empty, almost sterile. Was this really the office of some high-tech company?

I took out my phone and went to ImagiCom’s website again, to see if I’d somehow messed things up when I heard a door opening. A well-groomed man in an expensive-looking suit walked up to me.

“Mr. Purlow, welcome to ImagiCom! It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said and shook my hand.

“My name is Gabriel Brandt, I’m responsible for the beta test. We’re stunned to have you with us,” he said with a smile that was so typical to business people. He’d probably perfected it over many years.

“Likewise. Now, just a question, how come you’re paying that much money for a test like this?”

His smile didn’t waver for even a second, but I could see a slight squinting of the eyes.

“Let’s discuss the details in my office. We’ve got quite a few things to talk about, anyway.”

I thought about pressing the issue, but I might as well listen to the rest of his proposal.

“Sure, lead on.”

He led me through a short hallway as bleak as the rest of the building. It seemed we were the only people there apart from the reception lady. Before I could look around more though, Brandt opened a door and led me into his office.

The room looked different from the rest of the building. It was almost completely white and seemed far more modern, almost futuristic in design. A sleek white table filled the center of the room and one wall was nothing but a giant wall display.

Brandt motioned for me to sit down on a chair. Once he’d taken a seat opposite me, he pressed a button somewhere below the table and a video started to play on the display.

It started with the catch line ‘ImagiCom presents, the most immersive virtual reality experience ever.’

The video showed a quick succession of various photorealistic environments from a person’s point of view. Then the system itself was showcased. It differed from anything I’d seen before. There was no bulky headset, no gloves, nothing like that. Instead, it showed a pair of connectors placed on a person’s head, a sort of membrane one wore over the face, and a small black box responsible for connecting to ImagiCom’s cloud.

“So, what do you think?” Brandt asked once the video was over.

“Is this real? That looks like it’s from a science-fiction movie.”

Brandt smiled, but for the first time, his emotions seemed to be genuine. There was an edge to his expression, however, something sharp.

“Well, Mr. Purlow, reality isn’t so different from science-fiction anymore.”

“So if this is a beta test, I’ll get to use one of those things, right?”

Somehow I wasn’t convinced. This seemed way too advanced. To be honest, I expected the video was nothing but a marketing ploy to get more investors. The actual system was probably way different.

“Indeed, you’ll be the very first person to test our new system.”

“Outside of your company, I assume?”

“Naturally,” he answered, and once more he showed me his trained smile.

“Now, let me ask you again, why are you paying such an exorbitant amount of money?”

Brandt pressed another button and a small touch-display activated on the table in front of me.

“Well, to be honest, I’m only responsible for scheduling the beta test. You can find all the other details in the contract forms in front of you. Please take your time to read through them and sign them. Should you have questions, feel free to ask me.”

I started to read the first form. It was a simple non-disclosure agreement. The second one handled the eventuality of damaging the system itself, while the third one was on the company’s terms and conditions. The fourth was another non-disclosure agreement, this time about the virtual environments. It was the fifth form that discussed the payment. It was a new revolutionary system. The compensation was so high because they required absolute secrecy about the system itself and the virtual environments showcased. Here and there details about the payment popped up, but there were dozens of these forms. I read the first few carefully, but before long I started to skim. Then I only took a few looks and eventually signed them without so much as reading the title. It still took me more than an hour to work through all of them.

“Well, that’s that, all done,” I said after I signed the last one.

“Perfect,” Brandt said, and the display in front of me vanished again. A moment later a similar one appeared in front of him.

“Let me just cross-check everything. It should only take a few minutes.”

After a little while, he pressed another button. “Cynthia, something to drink please, how about coffee?” he said out loud.

A few minutes later the reception lady entered the room and brought each of us a hot steaming cup of coffee.

She’d barely put it down when I took the first sip.

God, I was tired. They’d scheduled the test to start at eight in the morning. Not such an unusual time, you might say. The problem was I had to make it to Berlin first. The company offered to book me a train ticket and pay for it, but it also meant I had to get up at three in the morning if I wanted to make it in time.

I finished the whole cup in a matter of minutes, but it didn’t seem to help one bit. I sat there drowsily while Brandt took his time going through the documents.

“Well, Mr. Purlow,” he said and brought me back from my half-asleep state. “It seems everything’s in order. We’re happy to start with the examinations right away.”

“Examinations?”

“It’s all standard procedure. As explained in form 32, section D you’re required to pass a few additional evaluations. Please follow me.”

Before I could so much as frown, he pressed another button and the wall behind him slid open, revealing another hallway. I hadn’t even noticed the sliding-door until now.

This part of the building was much more modern. The walls were pristine and stainless, the complete opposite of what I’d seen so far. It felt like we weren’t even in the same building anymore. For the first time, I saw other people apart from Brandt and Cynthia, the reception lady. There was a group ahead chatting next to a futuristic vending machine and others hurried up and down the long hallway.

I was about to ask Brandt about the company, but we’d already made it to the examination room.

“Hello there, I’m Doctor Kitagawa,” a man in a lab coat introduced himself. He followed it up with a lengthy list and honors and explained he was an expert in neuroscience. Brandt gave him a brief nod before he hurried from the room.

The evaluations lasted almost the entire day.

They started with a detailed assessment of my general health and fitness. It was to make sure I didn’t suffer from any serious health conditions like respiratory or cardiovascular problems.

After that came several brain scans. Kitagawa explained that certain brain conditions could influence our perception of reality. A certain percentage of the population wouldn’t be able to discern between the real and a simulated reality. For those people, the possibility of actual injury existed, even in a simulation. The most common one was hurting or overstraining your muscles. The second, rarer one was nerve damage because of the brain believing that a simulated injury was a genuine one. To avoid any of those, they had to make sure I didn’t suffer from any of those brain conditions.

I don’t even know what sort of brain scans they did. Kitagawa threw around so many terms, half of which I hadn’t even heard before. CT, MRI, MRA, MRS, you name it. Once those were done it was time for the last part, the psychological evaluation.

The questions were all standard. Did I suffer from depression? Had I been diagnosed with any mental illnesses? Did I have any mental condition they might want to know about?

The only ‘condition’ I could tell them about was the ADHD I suffered from and sometimes used medication for. They didn’t linger on the topic for too long and assured me it would be no problem.

What they seemed to linger on though was phobias, general fears, and anxiety. After they’d asked me more than a dozen questions on the topic, I spoke up.

Kitagawa assured me it was all standard procedure and important for the design of the simulation and a smooth run of the beta test itself.

So I explained that I suffered from slight bouts of anxiety because of my situation. As for phobias, I told them I suffered from arachnophobia but I also added, embarrassed, that I wasn’t fond of dark, confined places either.

Once the psychological evaluation was over, it was already early evening. I realized I’d been here for more than half a day already and the test hadn’t even started yet. Still, I was exhausted and apart from a quick lunch after the first half of the examination, I also hadn’t eaten a damned thing.

Thankfully, the company had prepared for all that.

I’d expected them to have booked me a hotel or some other accommodation. Instead, they lead to what they referred to as my ‘private quarters’ for the duration of the beta test.

The room was as modern as the rest of the complex. Half of it was made up of a bed that looked more comfortable than anything I’d ever slept in. There was also another one of the giant wall displays opposite the bed. Before I could even ask, they informed me that dinner would be served in a few minutes.

It was a juicy, tender piece of beef with a side of vegetables. After eating nothing but fast food and microwaved meals, it felt like heaven to me.

Once I was done with the meal, I threw myself on the bed, activated the wall display, and switched through the available media. Most of it was long videos about nature with low, relaxing background music. For a while, I watched colorful fish and stunning coral reefs before I felt myself dozing off.

When I woke up again, I couldn’t feel the soft bedding anymore. Instead, I lay on a cold, damp floor. It took me a few moments to realize that I was somewhere different.

I jerked up, confused, and when I looked around, I noticed that I was in an empty, dark room. The surrounding walls were damp, dirty, and covered in moss.

A quick check revealed that I was still wearing my clothes and my phone was still with me. The screen showed that it was already long past midnight and that I didn’t have a signal.

Once the shock was over, I used the phone’s flashlight to illuminate the area I was in. Old, brown stains covered the floor and a pair of rusty chains dangled from a wall behind me. A few meters ahead of me was an opening that led into a tunnel. There was no other light source apart from my phone.

Shit, what the hell was going on? How did I get here? Had I been kidnapped and put into some sort of torture dungeon? Had it all been a farce to lure me here? But why go through the effort to… No, wait, think, Andre, that’s not it. This room, the tunnel ahead, I realized as fear washed over me. It was a dark, confined space, wasn’t it?

I remembered the evaluation, the questions about fears and phobias. As I realized I grinned. They must’ve waited till I fell asleep and started the test. How I hadn’t woken up through that ordeal though was a mystery to me. Still, where I was right now had to be a simulation, and I was sure they wanted to see how I’d react to the situation I found myself in.

“Well, you got me,” I said to no one in particular.

“So, what now? You want me to explore or something?”

No answer.

I crossed the room and put my hands against the walls. They felt cold, solid, and musty. If I hadn’t known I was in a simulation, I wouldn’t have believed it. As a fresh surge of anxiety washed over me, I took a deep breath before I entered the tunnel.

Now here’s the thing, you might know things aren’t real and that you’re in a simulation, but it doesn’t help a single bit. However much I tried to convince myself, things felt and looked way too damn real.

With each step, the sound of my footsteps reverberated through the gloomy tunnel ahead and I couldn’t help but cringe. The only other sound was the slow dripping of water from the ceiling.

It didn’t stay like that for long though.

After only a minute I heard other, weirder sounds. The distant rattling of chains and the sound of shuffling feet made me shiver.

“There’s nothing here that can hurt you. None of it is real.”

I repeated those two lines over and over again like a mantra.

I considered going back, to retreat to the room I’d come from, but then what? Wait till they turned the damned thing off? And how long would that take? Slowly, another thought crawled into my mind and scratched at my sanity. It was the stupid, impossible thought of what if this was no simulation after all?

“Calm down, Andre, calm down,” I told myself and pushed the thought back into the back of my mind.

Still, this simulation was too damned real. They’d explained before that they were simulating all sorts of sensual inputs and transferring them into the brain. That’s why it all felt so real. Once more I reached out a shaking hand to touch the wall next to me. Cold, damp, and solid. If this wasn’t real, shouldn’t I be able to-

Suddenly, a hand jerked from a hole in the wall I hadn’t seen before.

“Shit!” I called out and cringed back. My heart skipped a beat as I stared at the outstretched hand.

“Who’s there?” I called out in a quiet voice, but all I heard was the rattling of chains from behind the wall. Whoever was behind there was panting, moaning, and after a few moments, the hand retreated.

I stood there, frozen, afraid, and as I illuminated the tunnel ahead I saw dozens of similar holes. Then, further ahead, I could make out a sturdy, wooden door. As I stood there, more chains rattled. I heard the erratic shuffling of feet and bodies. More hands reached out, clawing at the walls, and wordless screams seemed to be directed at me.

“Fucking hell,” I cursed as a hurried on and pushed me past all of them, repeating my mantra like before. Get away from here, I told myself, get away and reach the end, wherever that was.

Right at that point, a distant, lonely light started flickering at the end of the tunnel.

My steps got faster, passing hole after hole, but then I heard something. A growling ahead of me, then someone screamed. There was a loud bump, the creaking of wood, and then the sturdy door I’d seen before was pushed outwards. For a moment dust and wood splinters filled the air, but then I saw it. A giant, bulging figure pushed itself from the doorway and into the tunnel.

When I cursed up in surprise and shock and the figure turned towards me. I cringed back a single step, then another before I turned and ran back down towards the room I’d awoken in.

Behind me, another scream cut through the air before I heard heavy footfalls from behind me.

I ran with all the strength I could muster, but I didn’t make it far. A giant paw of a hand came to rest on my shoulder. I was ripped backward, saw a terrifying grinning face, and then all light vanished.

I screamed and struggled against something on top of me. When I opened my eyes, I was back in the same bed I’d fallen asleep in. What I’d struggled against were the bedsheets.

My heart was beating hard against my chest. As I lay there my eyes darted around the room, afraid to find the giant figure lurking somewhere inside of my room.

“You can calm down now, Mr. Purlow, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It was all part of our simulation,” a friendly, female voice said.

“What the hell was that?” I screamed. “Are you crazy? What if I’d gotten a heart attack? That thing was-“

“I can assure you that your heart is fine. As you might recall, during the examinations, we informed you that the simulation won’t put you in harm’s way. The chances of you suffering a heart attack from the previous simulations were evaluated and deemed to be zero.”

“Fucking hell,” I cursed, “I didn’t sign up for this surprise stuff!”

“You indeed did, Mr. Purlow. In section 2D of form 54, you gave full consent to be subjected to simulated inputs of any sort without proper-“

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I said with a sigh.

“Have a good night, Mr. Purlow,” the friendly voice said before she disconnected with an audible click.

“A good night, yeah right.”

Shit, what was that about a form 54? Then I remembered how I’d not given any of the later forms so much as a glance. Shit, how could I’ve been so stupid? How many of the freaking things had I signed?”

“Hey, I’ve got a question, can you hear me?”

Nothing.

“Shit, guess they won’t talk to me anymore,” I cursed once more.

If things got out of hand though, I should be able to tell them I was out, right? There are rules to these things, aren’t there?

Annoyed and slightly worried, I turned back to the wall display and turned it on. The fish and the ocean depths were gone. Instead, the display showed a beautiful beach and a similarly beautiful woman walking through the sand. Well, better than nothing, I thought and leaned back to listen to the quiet, relaxing background music.

As the video continued the woman approached the camera, getting closer with each step. The moment I could make out her face, I noticed that she was crying.

“Help me,” she spoke up.

All right, what the hell? While I searched for the display’s small remote she repeated it over and over.

“Help me, Andre,” she suddenly said, emphasizing the name, my name.

When I looked up again and found her eyes resting on me I felt goosebumps all over my arm.

“You have to,” she said once more, her face growing harder.

“What the hell?” I pressed out, confused.

“You dare not to help me?” she screamed at me.

I’d finally found the remote to turn the damned thing off, but whatever I pressed, there was no reaction.

Instead, her face grew angrier and angrier, becoming a distorted version of her former, beautiful self. And then, to my horror, she got even closer. By that point, her face filled out the entire display. A moment later she pushed her giant head forward, not against the display but out of it, right not my direction.

I screamed, jumped off the bed, and hurried for the door, but it didn’t open. When I turned around, I saw in disbelief that her giant head was inside of my room. It dangled from a long, stretched out neck that vanished somewhere in the depths of the wall.

“YOU DARE TO IGNORE ME?” the creature screamed again and my ears rang because of her bellowing scream. I pushed my hands over my ears, then threw myself against the door. Once, twice and then when I did it a third time the door sprang open, and I pushed myself outside.

“What the fuck was that shit?!”

The answer popped into my head right away. I was still in the simulation, I had to be. There was no doubt about it. The moment I’d woken up there had been no connectors, no facial mask, nothing at all. They must’ve ended one simulation and plunged me straight into the next one, a simulated version of my private quarters. They’d tricked me, complete with the call of an assistant to tell me the simulation was over. No, wait, that wasn’t correct. She’d never said a word about it being over, had she?

As I stood there, in the hallway, the same woman spoke up again.

“Mr. Purlow, if you’d please continue down the hallway to room number 34. Please take a seat there so we can continue with the test.”

I looked up, but there was no sign of where the voice was coming from. For a moment I looked around before I started on my way down the hallway. Everything looked the same as when I’d arrived here. The walls, the doors, only the people were gone.

But I was still in the simulation, I told myself. When I made it to room number 34, I saw that it was the examination room I’d been in before.

I looked around for a moment, but I was alone. Eventually, I popped down in one chair. Right away I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jerked around to find Doctor Kitagawa standing next to me.

“Mr. Purlow, are you all right?”

I looked at him in confusion.

“Wait, why are you,” I broke up and shook my head.

The man stared at me for a moment before he frowned.

“We were finishing your MRI when you passed out.”

“Yeah, sure I did. Hilarious. This is nothing but a simulation.”

His frown deepened and a worried expression replaced it.

“You haven’t entered the simulation yet, Mr. Purlow. Your tests are all scheduled for tomorrow and the day after. Today we’re evaluating your mental and physical capabilities.”

I laughed a bit. “Well, whatever you say. So what sort of test is this going to be?”

“Mr. Purlow,” he started again, his voice serious. “Do you often suffer from episodes such as this one?”

“What episodes? Oh, you mean ‘this’. No, never before I entered the simulation.”

His face still showed a worried expression.

“What I’m talking about are episodes of prolonged memory loss, distorted memories, vivid daydreams, or hallucinations.”

I didn’t react, instead, my eyes scanned the room.

“Can you come here for a moment?”

I got up and stepped over to one of the monitor.

“What you see here is a small swelling in your visual cortex. It’s not necessary anything malicious or dangerous, but, as I said, it might lead to various problems related to your memory. I’m asking since what you’re talking about might be an indicator for-“

“All right, is this a sick joke?” I called towards the ceiling of the room. “Did you put this into the simulation because of my stupid ADHD?”

“Mr. Purlow, please calm down, you’re disturbing the rest of the personal. Now, please tell me what you remember about your trip here to Munich.”

“The Wonderful Works of Nikolay the Wonderful,” he read out loud as he stared at the book I’d handed him.

His eyes returned from the book to me, and a questioning look formed on his face.

I couldn’t help but giggle. Nikolay was the smartest man I knew, a bona fide genius. Yet, whenever it came to things like social interactions or love, he acted like a young, innocent boy.

“It’s a present, a collection of all the memories we shared,” I blurted out and felt myself blushing a bit.

Each page of the book contained one memory I shared with Nikolay.

The very first page detailed how Nikolay and I had met. We were about the same age, but he was already a professor while I was nothing but a lowly research assistant. Nikolay seemed so distant. Not just to me, but to everyone. At first, I detested him because I mistook his social inaptitude for arrogance. In time, I learned that it was just how he was. He simply didn’t understand how people worked and so he didn’t bother with them. Once I looked behind the mask though, I learned how special he was.

On another page, I’d written about that long night we spent together, talking until the early morning hours. I was so fascinated with him. When you talked to Nikolay, it felt like he could answer all the questions you never thought of asking. As he laid open the mysteries of the universe, I laid open the ones about humans and social interactions.

I told him so many things in the book. I wrote how much I cherished our relationship. It differed from that of other people, but it was exactly why I liked it so much. As an introvert, I hated crowds, or to be honest, most people, in general.

There’d been those nights when I let fellow students or colleagues drag me along to a bar or a club. When they introduced me to their charming friends. During these nights I learned that I wasn’t made for those normal interactions either.

My relationship with Nikolay was so much different and because that our love flourished.

It wasn’t just stories though, I added pictures, newspaper clippings and details from his many research projects. I even added the interview that called him ‘one of the rising stars in the field of neuroscience.’

Nikolay’s reaction to the book was as simple as it could be.

“Oh,” was all he said before he gave me a nod, put the book down and returned to his work.

I was a bit shocked, but not in the least surprised. Nikolay didn’t function like normal people and there was no reason for me to be mad at him.

I was surprised the next day, though, when he asked me to marry him. I was so blown away, I couldn’t say a thing. Instead I threw myself at him, kissed him and nodded repeatedly.

Our wedding was a quick and private affair. No church ceremony and no big celebration. Instead we went to the registry and after that spend a bit of time with my parents.

I liked it that way and didn’t want to make a big deal out of it and Nikolay, I was sure, didn’t either.

After our marriage we continued to work at the university for a few more years.

During that time, Nikolay worked on countless projects. Some funded by the university, others by the private sector. When some of his discoveries were commercialized, he earned a small fortune.

It was nothing compared to what his sponsors made, of course. I remember how mad I was about it, how I told him they’d cheated him, but Nikolay didn’t care. All he cared for was his research and with the money he’d made, he could build his own private laboratory. Finally, he told me, he could indulge in his own independent research without relying on outside funding.

After his parents had died Nikolay had inherited their old home. It was a small colonial house, far away from the busy city and at the edge of a tiny village. Here Nikolay decided he’d build his laboratory.

He didn’t even need to ask me to come along. No, a life far away from the bustle of the city and its people sounded like a dream to me

The laboratory Nikolay had planned wasn’t big. It was nothing more than a few rooms in a small one-story building. Still, Nikolay was as happy as a little boy the night before Christmas when constructions began.

Once it was finished, he spent a sizeable chunk of his fortune on computers, state-of-the-art research equipment and all sorts of chemicals and contraptions.

Many people weren’t happy with his decision. I still remember how the university begged him to return and the checks they threw at him. Nikolay didn’t even bother to look at them. It was never about the money for him.

Worse even was the private sector. No day passed without new offers arriving, but Nikolay ignored them all. Eventually, they stopped chasing him and instead painted him a madman. The mad scientist, they called him. A man too obsessed with his own demons to further the advancement of mankind.

When I showed him the articles and asked how he could take it, he’d smile and tell me they might be right. Maybe he was mad. Back then I could still laugh at his words.

In the months to come, Nikolay would engross himself in his research. For days, sometimes even entire weeks, he’d lock himself away from the world, only leaving his laboratory to stock up on food or supplies.

One day I asked him about his research and what he was trying to do. He started explaining with his usual vigor, but after only a few minutes I had to stop him. I didn’t understand a single thing, so I pleaded with him to make it as simple as he could.

He tried to explain, he really did, but I still wasn’t able to make fully sense of it. The only thing I understood was that he tried to uncover ‘the mystery of life’ as he called it. From what I gathered, he was referring to the brain and its functions. One might be tempted to think he was talking about the soul or other less feasible things, but Nikolay was always practical, always logical.

I’d ask him if he needed any help, but he always declined. He had it all under control. He was making slow but steady progress, and the laboratory was too small for two people, anyway.

Oh, he’d gotten better at it, but I knew he was lying. Still, I couldn’t blame him. Deep down, I knew I didn’t understand what he was doing and would only be in the way.

Instead, I spent my days with my own interests, the ones I’d abandoned when I went to college and majored in science. Writing, arts, crafts and most of all painting.

I soon learned that these were other aspects of life that Nikolay didn’t understand. When I showed him the first painting I’d done in over a decade, he was more impressed than I’d ever seen him before.

It was always like that with him. So many things others couldn’t do came to him naturally, yet things easy to us were a mystery to him.

That night we made love like never before. Nikolay was so different and it was the first time he took charge of things.

At first, I was unsure, but after the sixth week, I knew I was pregnant. When I told Nikolay, he was dismissive at first, then panicky, but finally happy.

Our relationship had always been a distant one. I’d gotten used to not seeing him for days, yet it still hurt. The moment he’d learned about the pregnancy it all changed, Nikolay changed.

It was during this time, during those beautiful months we spent together, that I returned to the ‘Wonderful Works of Nikolay the Wonderful’.

No week passed without me adding a fresh page and filling it with pictures and memories. Other people might have called the things I added mundane, but to me they were special. There was a page about us watching a movie together. Another about spending the morning in bed cuddling and talking. I even wrote a long, lavish passage about a country walk we shared. Most of all, though, I wrote about all the times we sat together and talked about our child.

If it was a boy, he wanted to name him Alyosha, after his late grandfather who’d introduced him to the wondrous world of science. If it was a girl, he wanted to call her Ivana, after his sister who’d died during childbirth.

He had become an entirely different person. Sure, he still worked on his research, but not with the same vigor; gone was the time when he stayed at his laboratory for days on end. No, it seemed for the first time Nikolay had learned that there were things more important than research, books and science.

As I grew heavier and daily life became harder, Nikolay spend more and more time by my side.

I was happier than ever before and often imagined life with our child. I saw myself reading him or her fantastical stories while Nikolay’d talk about the stars that illuminated the universe.

Life was like a dream, a dream I’d never thought possible.

But like all dreams, it had to end. In a single moment, with nothing more than a missed step, it ended and turned into the worst nightmare imaginable.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and Nikolay’s call from downstairs awoke me. Breakfast was ready, he announced.

Still sleepy, I went through the ordeal of putting on my clothes before I waddled down the hallway to the stairs. For a moment I felt drowsy, like so often during these later weeks of the pregnancy. I staggered for a moment, but then I took a deep breath and prepared myself for the descent.

My hands reached out and clung to the railing on both sides. Yet, I’d barely taken the first couple of steps when a sudden, sharp pain shot through my entire body. I cringed, lost my balance, and one of my hands slipped off the railing. I called out in shock, tried to put my foot down to steady myself, but found nothing but thin air.

Do you know that horrible feeling when you realize something bad is about to happen, but there’s nothing you can do about it?

The moment my foot didn’t land on a step, I knew I would fall. My one hand still holding onto the railing slipped off, and I felt myself toppling forward. For a moment I felt weightless, as if gravity had stopped working before I crashed down.

I felt the pain only for a moment. A blazing pain that cut into my abdomen. I heard myself screaming before sweet oblivion took me away.

The time after the fall was the hardest in my entire life. So much of it just isn’t there, memories gone or reduced to unrelated bits and pieces.

I can still see Nikolay’s pained face when I woke up, and the stern and determined look of the doctor. I felt something was different about my body. There was something… missing.

There was no need for words. I knew what had happened, and I knew what I, we, had lost. Lying in the bed I cried, wept, screamed and wailed and then I went away. My consciousness retreated to a dark little place in the back of my mind.

I can’t tell for how long I was there. My memories during that time were hazy, as if hidden behind thick fog or mist.

In one I’m in my bed, with Nikolay standing above me, making me take some sort of medication. In another we’re at the family graveyard behind the house and Nikolay’s holding a small wooden box. Finally, I’m outside, sitting on the porch staring out at the empty fields ahead.

When I returned to myself I was alone at the house again. Nikolay was back at his laboratory, back working on his damned research. Fleeing from the real world like he’d done so many times before. I waited for him to come back, to take me into his arms, but he never came. Not that day, not the next, and not the one after.

I spent those days apathetic, staring out the window, bothering myself with chores that didn’t need doing or in bed in a medically induced sleep. Existence was strange, I was less a person and more an empty husk trudging along.

It was almost a week before I saw Nikolay again.

The moment he stepped through the front door, I gasped at how different he looked. Before the accident he’d been happy and healthy, now he was a scrawny, indifferent man. His face had grown dark and haggard, deep circles surrounded his eyes. I almost didn’t recognize him, and for a moment I thought some ghastly apparition had appeared in our house.

“My god, Nikolay, you look terrible,” I burst out.

He gave me the weakest hint of a smile, but there was something in his eyes, a strange glimmer.

“Just tired,” he mumbled and made his way towards the bedroom.

“Nikolay, wait-“ I started, but he didn’t react and soon vanished.

I told myself to go after him, to get in bed next to him, but I couldn’t because of those damned stairs. I took one step, but the memory of the fall made me cringe back and for a moment the pain I’d felt flared up inside of me again.

Eventually, I returned to the living room to sleep on the couch. It had become my sole little world, my safe haven.

I can’t say when the dreams started. Those terrible dreams of the baby I’d lost. In them I ran through the dark, unlit hospital corridors while the distant cries of my baby reached my ears.

When I woke up in the middle of the night, the cries of my baby still fresh and lingering, the only to return to sleep was Nikolay’s medication.

One day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I made my way to his laboratory and called out to him. But there was no reaction. He only noticed me when I pushed open the heavy doors. His face showed a mixture of surprise and anger.

“Nikolay, I thought I could prepare dinner for us. It would be the first time we ate together since,” I broke up for a moment, swallowing the saliva that had gathered in my mouth before I continued. “I thought it would be nice for us to eat together.”

“All right,” he said in a voice as thin as a whisper before he nuzzled me aside and closed the door behind himself.

The word dinner didn’t fit the meager meal I prepared for ourselves, yet I still hoped he’d appreciate the effort.

As we ate, Nikolay was quiet. His eyes wandered back to the window again and again, from which he nervously watched his laboratory. Finally, I had enough.

“Can’t you talk to me for once?” I confronted him.

“I know you’re suffering Nikolay, I know you do, but you’re not the only one! You’re not the only one who’s lost something that day and, and,” I couldn’t continue anymore.

“I need you, Nikolay, I need my husband!”

“I know, Lisa, but my work-“

There it was. The ‘but’, the ‘work’. This was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. As I pushed myself up my chair clattered to the floor behind me. I stared at him, but his eyes rested on the plate in front of him. He couldn’t even muster up the courage to look at me.

“It’s always work with you! I thought you’d changed, I thought we’d finally be a real,” I broke up, not able to say the word, and I felt my eyes welling up with tears.

God, how could I’ve ever thought I could be more important than his work!

I stormed from the room, leaving him there by himself. As I cried on the living room couch, there was a shimmer of hope in the back of my mind. He’d come into the room, put his arms around me and tell me how sorry he was.

That last, small shimmer vanished when I heard the front door and knew he was returning to his laboratory.

I knew then that our marriage had failed.

That evening I took out ‘The Wonderful Works of Nikolay the Wonderful’ once more. As I started reading it couldn’t help but call myself stupid. I cried as I read the parts about our would-be family and about our child.

When I fell asleep, the dreams came back to me. Once more the terrible cries of my unborn child haunted me. I woke up again, a crying and sobbing mess. As I lay there, the baby’s cries still lingering, I reached out for Nikolay’s medication. For a moment I held it in my hands before I threw it aside in a fit of anger.

As I got up, the baby’s cries seemed to follow me, to echo through my mind. A never-ending illusion that wasn’t satisfied anymore by haunting my dreams. Had I finally snapped, gone mad at last?

I crossed the room, then the hallway, and then I stepped outside into the cool, fresh night air. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know where I was going. All I knew was that I had enough, enough of all of this, this entire life.

The moon was bright and high in the sky, yet I couldn’t appreciate it. The baby’s cries were still torturing me, still not letting up. For a moment I screamed into the night, pushing my hands against my ears, desperate to drown them out.

At that moment though, when I pressed my hands against my ears, the cries almost vanished. They weren’t coming from inside my head, I realized, they were coming from somewhere… else.

In shock and horror, I listened more closely. My eyes wandered towards the family graveyard, but that’s not where they came from. No, they came from Nikolay’s laboratory.

In the bright moonlight, the place looked so different. A small, bone-white structure that stood in stark contrast to the dark and empty fields around it.

With each step, the crying grew more distinct, clearer, and my mind was ablaze with confusion and shock.

At first I thought it was something different and that the implications my mind was making were impossible. But somehow I knew that Nikolay had made the impossible possible, and that I was hearing the cries of my stillborn child from inside his laboratory.

When I reached the door, I put my ear against it. The crying ebbed down, got quieter, and finally vanished. I cracked the door, only an inch at a time, careful not to make any sound.

Inside I saw Nikolay, hurrying from one of his weird contraptions to the next. He was pushing buttons and punching numbers into computers before he rushed to something in the back of the laboratory.

I saw his face, and Nikolay, he was smiling. He went back to one of his computer, staring at the lines and lines of numbers that flooded the screen and an excited chuckle escaped his mouth.

That’s when I couldn’t take it anymore. This hunched over, haggard creature; was it really my husband?

I pushed open the door with all the strength I could muster to confront him.

“Nikolay, what’s going on!?”

This time the anger on his face was real. A hand shot up, urging me to be quiet as he leaned forward, almost pushing his face against the monitor.

“It works,” he pressed out in a low, awestruck voice. “It finally works,” he said again, this time louder and I could hear the triumph in his voice.

“What are you-?” I started, but broke up when the baby’s cries started again.

“My god, Nikolay, what’s going on in here!?”

That’s when I saw the tank at the back of the laboratory. There was something inside, something that was small, moving and crying for his parents, his mother!

Nikolay smiled at me, his mouth agape. All the anger was gone from his face and his eyes glowed with mad satisfaction.

I pushed him aside and rushed to the tank.

My eyes grew wide when I saw what was inside.

It was a small, gray lump of flesh. Countless cables were connected to it, shoved deep into the wet, grayish flesh.

I watched in horror as it moved, opened its tiny mouth, its black, empty eyes and then another cry followed.

My half-rotten, stillborn child was there, crying in front of me.

“It worked, Lisa, I brought him back. I brought our son back. Our dear little Alyosha,” I heard Nikolay mumble behind me.

And I, I just stood there, frozen and unable to say anything.

I stared down at the mutilated lump that would one day have been my son. I listened to those desperate, anxious cries, those heart-wrenching cries that should never come from a baby. And then I watched as my hands reached out. I carefully lifted the grayish abomination and held it in my hands.

My fingers almost slipped before they thank deep into the soft, wet flesh. He was so small, so tiny, I thought, and as I held him he giggled before crying again more intensely.

It was the worst thing I ever experienced. Worse than Nikolay’s abandonment, worse than the fall and worse even than the time that followed.

I started shaking as the tears streamed hot and heavy from my eyes. I realized how wrong all of this was. The thing I was holding in my hands, the machinery all around me, this goddamn laboratory and the research Nikolay conducted here.

Despair washed over me, the tiny form that would one day have been my son Alyosha slipped from my hands and I fell to the floor weeping.

There was a wet squish as he crashed back into the trunk and a moment later all sounds died down.

Nikolay rushed forward, kicking me aside, his attention focused on the thing in the trunk, the thing that was our son.

“No no no no no no,” he started in a panic and began frantically working on the small body.

He tore off the remainder of the cables before he pushed his hand deep into the small body, prying it open. There was a disgusting wet sound as the flesh parted. Then he began meticulously reattaching the cables before he pushed thick metal connectors deep into the baby’s organs.

“H-how could you,” I pressed out. “Nikolay, how could you do something like that?”

Yet he didn’t listen. He was too absorbed into his work as he hurried through the laboratory, trying to bring our child back once more.

“Why’d you bring him back?!” I finally screamed at him at the top of my lungs.

At that, Nikolay’s eyes focused on me, almost as if he’d forgotten I was still there. His face twisted into an innocent smile.

“So he could be the first.”

His face looked like that of a child, a child that didn’t understand what he was doing, no, what he’d done.

Or, I realized, a child that couldn’t understand.

Without another word, I got up and stumbled from the laboratory. I left Nikolay to his computers, his contraptions, his notes and data, and his ghastly research.

Back in the house, I picked up the book once more. The book I’d titled ‘The Wonderful Works of Nikolay the Wonderful.’

At first, I wanted to tear it apart, to burn it right then and there, but then I picked up a sharpie. I crossed out the title and in crude letters, I wrote ‘The Insane Works of Nikolay the Mad’ below it. I even laughed as I did it, and then I began to write.

I wrote down everything I’d witnessed that night, everything he’d done.

Once I was done with the last damned chapter of the book, I knew what I had to do.

I’d get a box of matches and some of the highly flammable chemicals he’d stored away.

And then, I’d return to his laboratory and burn it all to the ground. Him, his research, our son and myself.

The passing of time is a strange thing.

“Uncle Mike’s died,” mom told me over the phone.

I was devastated, but not shocked. My great uncle Mike had been an old man, very old indeed. He was in his mid-nineties when he died.

I’d only ever met him when I was a kid, so my memory of the man wasn’t too clear. When my mom called me to give me the news of his death, I hadn’t seen him in almost a decade.

That’s the reason I was so surprised to find that the old man had left something for me. It was an old, rusty metal box.

I carefully opened the lid. I’m not going to lie, I hoped he’d left me something interesting, knowing he was quite a collector. What I was greeted with was an assortment of strange items though.

The first was a black and white photograph of two people, dating back to the early 30s. One of them I assumed must’ve been my great uncle in young years. The man next to him was quite a bit older. He had short dark hair and a scar on the left side of his face. Probably his father or another relative, I thought. I put the picture aside after a few moments.

The next one was a simple postcard. It was a typical one from the German Democratic Republic, depicting the World Clock in Berlin. When I checked the back the only thing written on it was the name ‘Struganow.’

“Why is this postcard in here?” I wondered.

The other items all seemed to be products of the same period. One was an old portable radio, one an old egg whisk that appeared to have been part of a hand blender and there were a few metal badges. Why was this stuff in here? Was it some sort of elaborate joke? I mean, an egg whisk for Christ’s sake.

Uncle Mike even told me he’d never been a big fan of the era and was more than happy when German reunited.

The last item I found stored away below the rest was an old map. When I checked the print date, it was from the late years of the Weimar Republic. This made even less sense.

I took everything out of the box and searched for a note that would explain the weird collection. I found nothing.

When I opened the map, I saw that it was a map of his old home area or better the electoral district it used to belong to. I scanned it halfheartedly and found a few marks on it. They were all located on an empty patch of land. The longer I stared at it, the more frustrated I became. This was silly. I shook my head and put everything back in the box.

I kept the box nonetheless. Not because I thought any of the contents were particularly interesting, but as a sort of memorabilia of my late uncle. For years the box was merely stowed away on my shelf collecting dust.

I’d all but forgotten about its content when I got to know professor Neumann years later. By the time I was studying physics at university. Professor Neumann was a brilliant man who wasn’t shy of interacting with his students. Countless times he and a small group of students, including me sat together at our cafeteria.

Professor Neumann used to work as a researcher for the GDR and only started teaching after the reunion. Most of us laughed a bit when he mentioned the period, and a few asked what he’d been doing at the time. Not like the GDR made any bound breaking discoveries or developments.

The old man only smiled at that.

“We weren’t as useless as you might think, Markus,” he said to me. “If we put our minds together, we were still able to do astonishing feats. The problem was that we never got enough funding. We were always stuck working with second or third-grade equipment. Everything else the Russians took for themselves.”

“All for the motherland,” he said grimacing.

It was on another evening that I got together with the old man. He’d finished his last lecture for the day, and I’d approached him about one of the problems he’d discussed. While we walked to his office, he carefully reiterated things to me. Soon enough, he trailed off and started talking about other things. As we sat in his office, we soon got to talk about the GDR again. It seemed to be one of his favorite topics.

He’d just told me a story about Berlin and the World Clock when I suddenly remembered the odd box my uncle had left me.

Half joking I told him about the weird metal box on my shelf and the assortment of strange GDR things inside. The man laughed at first, but when I mentioned the items, he looked up, a serious look on his face.

“Wait, hold on a second, what items did you say your uncle had left in there?”

“It’s been so long. I’m not sure, there was a postcard, a portable radio a few metal badges oh and of course a freaking egg whisk. No clue what’s up with that.”

“An egg whisk?”

I nodded.

“Now, it might be nothing, but would you mind bringing those and showing them to me?”

“Well, sure, no problem. It’s only collecting dust anyways, but why do you want to see them?”

The man shook his head.

“It’s probably nothing, I’ve just got this stupid idea on my mind that’s all.”

I looked at him a bit confused, but then I shrugged and let it slide. Who knows, maybe he collects odd things as well. After all, he really seems to be into the GDR era and all that.

It was a few days later that I paid the professor another visit to his office. He looked up, surprised to see me, but welcomed me inside.

“So, what brings you here? Is it about that assignment for theoretical physics?”

“I brought the box. You said you wanted to see the stuff my uncle collected, right?”

In an instant, the man changed from half asleep to excited.

“Well, then don’t let me wait, let me see, let me see!”

I was yet again a bit confused by his reaction and handed him the box.

He opened the lid and then scanned the assortment of things inside. He opened up the map scanning the area and the marks curiously before he put it back down. After a while, his eyes grew wide.

“It can’t be,” he mumbled as he took out the postcard.

“My god.” He inhaled sharply, put his hand to his mouth and shook his head again and again.

“Struganow,” he whispered.

“What is it, professor?”

The man slowly looked up, almost as if he’d forgotten that I was even in the room. For a moment he looked at me but didn’t say a word.

“Hold on, I’ve got to look something up. Maybe he’s still…” The rest was inaudible as the man mumbled again. He seemed to be all over the place in his excitement because of… something.

I waited in my chair as the professor started to go through his notebooks. He picked up the phone in his office and quickly dialed a number. It was only moments later that he put it back down, cursing under his breath.

“Professor? What’s going on?”

Finally, the man seemed to have calmed down a bit and took a seat in his chair again. The postcard was still laying in front of him.

“Back in the day, when I worked as a researcher, we did a few, well, strange experiments you could say. It might sound like science-fiction to you, but during the Cold War Russia was interested in all sorts of weird things. One of them was time travel.”

I looked up and couldn’t help but laugh a bit.

“See, that’s exactly the reaction I’d expected. Now don’t get me wrong, I’d react exactly like you if I hadn’t worked on that project back then.”

“Alright, hold on, are you telling me you worked on a freaking time machine for the Soviets back in the day?”

A smile showed on the professor’s face.

“Exactly. But as you can imagine, it never worked. Well, at least that’s what everyone believed, but this here, these objects, I think it’s the ones we used in the later experiments.”

What the hell was he talking about? This had to be a joke. I’d never heard the man pull one before, but there was no other way. I started laughing.

“You almost got me there, professor, almost.”

“No,” he started shaking his head, “don’t you get it? If these things are really… then we have proof! I’ve got to tell Ivan I’ve got to show him. My god, if it really…”

I stared at the man. This was both the lamest and the most drawn-out attempt of a joke I’d ever seen.

The professor started to search through his many notebooks and documents again. Finally, he seemed to have found what he was looking for.

“I knew I had it written down somewhere,” he said grinning.

“What’s that now?”

“Say, Markus, do you want to find out where those items in your box came from?”

—

It was a few days later that I found myself in a car with Professor Neumann. We were on the way to his old research laboratory, the last address of his colleague Ivan Nikolayev.

“I’m really not sure if we’re going to find anything there, I’m sure he’s returned to Russia by now, but still,” the professor said.

I couldn’t believe that I went through with this whole thing. I’d planned to spend the weekend with friends, and now I found myself on a road trip with my university professor. Worse even, it was to figure out if his freaking time machine had worked of all things. It was ridiculous.

During the four-hour long car ride, Professor Neumann explained a lot of things to me. He almost talked the entire time. He went on about politics during the time of his and Ivan’s experiments. Moscow back then tried to desperately get ahead of America.

“Our project wasn’t the only one of its kind. They had a lot of these weird, secret projects, but I guess none of them ever brought them any results. Well, maybe one of them did after all. Too bad it’s a bit too late for these old Soviets.”

At other times he talked about the project. He tried to explain the theoretical background to me, but most of it went way over my head. By the time I was in my third semester of physics. I knew most of the terms he referred to but didn’t understand a thing about the principles he and Ivan employed. I just drove my car, dumbfounded, yet fascinated. Of course, I wasn’t convinced any of this was real.

When we finally arrived at the town, I could tell that the reunion hadn’t been kind to it. Sure there were some modern buildings, but most were the typical, old Soviet ones. Many looked neglected and most likely hadn’t been renovated in decades. Sure there was a new shopping mall in the center of town, but the rest felt like a relic of old times.

The address the old man had written down led us to a huge, old building complex. The professor’s eyes lit up when he saw the place.

“My god, it’s still standing,” he said in a low voice.

After I’d parked the car, we made our way towards the front entrance. The place really was huge, almost gigantic. By now though, it looked almost completely abandoned. Back in the day, the property seemed to have been protected by a metal fence, but now it stood wide open.

While I looked in awe at the size of the building, the professor hurried along towards the front entrance. I almost had to run to keep up with the old man.

“Can’t believe they left it like that, I was sure they’d torn it all down by now,” he said as he stepped to the front door.

I didn’t feel too happy about stepping inside with all the ‘No Trespassing’ signs around.

As soon as the professor pushed the door open some sort of alarm started to ring. I cursed out loud and was about to run off when it stopped as soon as it had begun.

A minute later a man as old as the professor came towards the door.

“Who the hell are you? Are you blind? Can’t you read the signs?” the man cursed at us in a heavy Russian accent. He broke up when his eyes focused on the professor.

“Sebastian?”

“As god made him, old friend. What are you still doing here? I’d have thought you’d run back to Mother Russia a long time ago.”

Both of them started to laugh and went forward to hug each other. I felt a bit awkward standing next to them.

“Well, what brings you here? I’m sure you’re not just here to say hello, right?”

“My god, you’re right Ivan! I’m here because of the machine. It might have worked after all!”

“What are you… wait you mean, THAT machine? What the hell are you talking about? We tried all the time, I tried, but it never-“

“There might be prove! Markus, you did bring the box like I told you, didn’t you?”

I nodded. Yet again I felt a bit awkward as both of them stared at me with wide eyes.

“Hold on, yes, here it is.” The moment I’d taken it out of my backpack the professor almost ripped it from my hands.

He opened it quickly and took out the postcard handing it to his friend.

His reaction was exactly the same as the professor’s had been a few days ago. His eyes grew wide, his mouth opened and he looked from the professor to me and back to the professor.

“Struganow,” Ivan said. His hands were shaking as he looked down at the postcard once more. His shock lasted for only a few moments though, before it was replaced by excitement.

He put the postcard back and took a look at each of the other items individually. At last, he took hold of the old portable radio.

“Come on Sebastian, come on, we’ve got to see if it’s true, you too young man, come on!”

Without waiting for an answer, the man rushed off into the complex. We followed him down a long corridor, then another one and then through a vast empty warehouse.

“Where are we going, professor?” I asked in a low voice.

“To my office, of course! That’s where I’ve got all my notes!” Ivan yelled back at us.

I wondered if it was a good idea to follow this strange guy along. God knows, he was acting weird. Who knows, maybe he’d snapped long ago and tried to lure us god knows where. When I looked over at the professor though, his face showed no doubt at all. He followed Ivan along with a bright smile on his face.

Soon enough Ivan announced that we’d made it. He pushed open the door we stepped into a barren looking office room. There was an old computer on a desk, a bookshelf and countless others filled with files and old data mediums.

“I can’t believe it, it’s still all here.” the professor reminisced.

“Well of course it is. After you left, someone had to take care of the place, you know.”

The professor laughed at that. “Well, I guess some things never change.”

Ivan put down the radio on his desk and started to search through the shelves.

“Well now, where did I put it… it should be..,. wait no, is it over there?”

I stood at the doorframe and watched the strange spectacle. Minutes passed as the strange Russian man searched through his office.

“Here it is!” he finally exclaimed. “Look at this Sebastian!”

“It can’t be, is this-?”

“It’s the same! The same radio!”

“What’s so great about those radios? I bet there are hundreds of thousands of them out there,” I mumbled.

“No, young man! You don’t know what I’m… just come over here! See that?” he asked as he pointed at a couple of Russian letters carved into the plastic of his radio.

“So?”

“Now look at that!”

With that, he picked up the one from my uncle’s box. He turned it around a few times before he found what he’d been looking for. It was the exact same carvings at the exact same place.

The professor next to me inhaled sharply. “So it really did work after all.”

While the professor stared in awe at the two radios, I stood there dumbfounded. What the hell was going on? Anyone could’ve carved the same letters into two freaking radios. What the hell’s the-

“My god, this is it! This proves it!”

I stared at Ivan who’d opened up the old map that was at the bottom of the box.

“Do you see this, young man!?” he asked, holding up the map, almost pushing it into my face. I had to shove it aside to even be able to answer the man.

“Yes, I see it, it’s a freaking map, I’ve seen it before it was in my-“

“No, pah, that’s not what I’m talking about,” he started to fidget around with it, turning a it bit, “what I mean is,” again he turned it, this time to the left, “right here!”

It took me a bit to see it, but I finally saw that there were a few notes that covered the map below the legend. They were in old German handwriting and most likely by my uncle. The professor was right next to me in an instant and almost shoved me aside to read them.

“Marked all the spots in which the strange items appeared. So far they only turned up on the meadow near town.”

Don’t tell me…

“Our machine actually worked, Ivan. I can’t believe it. This is…”

The professor broke off, and I could see a hint of tears in his eyes.

“All those years, I thought it was all…” he broke off again.

“Okay, you know what I’ve got no clue what the hell you’re talking about. Mr. Nikolayev, Professor, could you tell me what’s going on? Don’t tell me it’s all about this time machine thing.”

“Exactly, young man!”

How the hell had I ended up right in the middle of this lousy excuse of a science-fiction movie.

“Now look at this Sebastian,” I heard Ivan say as he brought out another handful of items.

The two of them went through my uncle’s box, comparing them to the ones inside. They were oohing and awing at the contents, laughing in excitement.

“Come here, young man. You see this?”

With that, Ivan pulled me aside and opened up one of the various files stored away on his shelves. Each page showed detailed information about the items that, as Ivan called it, had been ‘sent back in time.’ There was an entry about everything inside of the box except for the photograph.

I turned page after page, reading a bit here and there, but it was all so outlandish. There was even an entry about a freaking cat.

“Okay,” I turned to Ivan, “so you’re telling me that all those items my uncle collected and left to me in this box were sent back in time by you? Seriously?”

Ivan grinned. “You want to see it?”

“See what?”

“The machine of course!”

“It’s still operational, Ivan?” the professor called out.

“Of course! Come along, come along!” With that, he led us out into the complex again. This time on a path that went from one hallway to the next, until we descended into a huge basement area.

Countless gigantic computers lined the walls. There was a terminal in the center of the room and in front of it was a metal platform. The platform was about two meters in diameter and surrounded by bizarre machinery.

“I can’t believe it, Ivan! After all those years, but, but those are…”

“Well old friend, you think I’ve been doing nothing all those years?”

The professor was out of it and rushed into the room to check out the machinery and the many computers.

“So that’s your ‘time machine?'” I asked with not just a bit of sarcasm. The whole thing looked like a freaking prop from a movie.

Ivan though nodded.

“And you’re telling me this thing here can send things back in time? Yeah right, I bite, how is this thing even supposed to work?”

Ivan started telling me that the whole project began back in the seventies. Researching in time travel had been going on for some time, he said, but the first practical test site was constructed right here. At least the first one that was bigger than some basement.

The idea, the professor, chimed in, was much more complicated than sending items back in time. The initial test though never showed any success. The project was cut from funding and Moscow abandoned the idea.

“And those initial tests were what?” I asked in a half-serious voice.

They explained that it was a simple manipulation of space and time. They tried to send items to a different place at first, teleportation so to say. Other tests included sending them a few minutes into the future, but nothing ever happened. The items were left on the platform and didn’t disappear or anything.

“What we didn’t know, what we didn’t even take into consideration,” Ivan mumbled on as he walked through the room, “was that instead of actually sending the item itself, the machine would create an exact copy of it at a certain point in time. And that point, young man, was exactly when your uncle stumbled upon them and marked his findings on the very map you brought with you.”

“What about the cat? There was a file about a cat.”

“Struganow,” the professor said in a sad voice.

“It was a cat,” he began, “that had lingered around the complex. Soon some of the personnel adopted the little guy. During the experiments, we also tried organic material and eventually… live samples. I don’t know what must’ve ridden us, but we were desperate, so someday, someone suggested we should use Struganow. The result was… The poor thing was turned inside out. We tried with mice and other rodents we found, but the result was always the same: Excruciating death.”

“There was a fundamental mistake in our calculations,” Ivan elaborated. “Once we’d discovered it, it was clear that our process wouldn’t work with a living organism. It was not possible, never could be.”

Once the man had finished, I couldn’t help but smile.

“Alright, that’s a fine story, really, quite fine. Did you ever think of becoming a writer Mr. Nikolayev?”

For the first time, Ivan’s face showed clear signs of anger and frustration.

“You still don’t believe me? With all this here?”

“This machine could be anything! God knows it might not even do anything at all! For all I know those are just props from some old movie.”

“You want to try it?” the man suddenly asked, with a big grin on his face.

“Wait, Ivan, it’s still working? The funding was cut, and the project was abandoned, so how?” the professor cut in.

“Abandoned by everyone but me! Everyone walked away, even you, old friend, but I stayed. I continued this research for the past three decades. There still people who know about this project, people interested in. People with more than enough money.”

“Well then, turn it on,” I said. “But tell me one thing, if the machine just sends back a copy in time, how the hell are we supposed to know if it really works?”

“What about this?” Ivan said and took out a ballpoint pen made of metal and placed it in the middle of the platform.

I didn’t get it. How the hell would he be even able to prove that anything happened at all? Then it hit me. I understood what he was trying to do. All the other items had supposedly been found by my uncle. So if he’d actually sent back this pen, it had to be found too, right?

While I thought about this, Ivan was already tinkering with the computer terminal.

“Just have to make a few slight adjustments here… change this setting… input a few things… change that as well and… Start!”

The machinery around the platform began to buzz with activity. They all started to glow before light engulfed the platform. The pen began to shine more and more intensely before the room was flooded by a flash of light. After that, the room fell into darkness. It took a minute before the lights came back on.

The pen was still there on the platform. All that had changed was that it was still slightly glowing. Ivan went forward to pick it up.

“Well then, let’s see if it worked,” Ivan said to the professor and me before he rushed from the room to get back to his office.

On the way there I looked at my phone and sighed at myself for wasting my weekend out here. What the hell was I even doing? Why was I here? There was no way any of this was real. This crazy Russian must’ve lost his mind, being holed up here for the past thirty years. What about Professor Neumann though, did he actually believe Ivan? Shit, this was all way too weird.

Once we’d made it back to the office, the three of us took a look at the box.

I froze. Right there between all the other items was now a ballpoint pen. As I looked at it, I felt a slight pain in my head, and I was suddenly very unsure about it. I couldn’t tell anymore if this thing had been there all along.

Ivan next to me burst out in jubilation. He screamed up in excitement and actually jumped into the air.

“This hasn’t been here before. There’s no way! I’m positive about it! See, Sebastian, see the pen,” he turned to the professor. “I bought it back in the eighties, had it made specifically for me, remember?”

The professor nodded.

“Well, young man,” he turned to me, “tell me, how could your uncle have found this pen back in the day if it was made right before the fall of the Berlin Wall?”

I said nothing. Ivan though stepped closer to me and showed me another thing. On the pen was a beautiful engraving of Russian letters.

“For Ivan Nikolayev,” the professor read.

I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the box and at Ivan.

“We’ve got no time to lose, Sebastian,” he urged on the professor.

With that, the two of them carefully placed the content of the box on the office desk to catalog them. When Ivan found the old photograph though, he eyed it for a moment, before he handed it to me.

“A personal item?”

“Yeah, a picture of my great uncle and a relative,” I blurted out before I took it.

For a few minutes, I watched the two of them, before I spoke up and told them I had enough. This whole thing had been going on for way too long.

“I get it, Mr. Nikolayev, you tricked me, didn’t you? You snuck a second pen into the box while I wasn’t watching, right? There’s no other way, your delusions-“

“And of course the common mind can’t grasp it,” the man scoffed at me.

At this remark, I started laughing. “You’re insane. Being holed up here has driven you mad. Time travel, unbelievable,” with that I walked out of the office.

“Can’t believe I came here,” I said out loud.

I’d barely taken a few steps out into the corridor when Professor Neumann came after me.

“Markus, don’t be rash, don’t you see what we’re doing here? You saw it, didn’t you?”

“All I can see is a crazy Russian who’s made up stories about time travel, nothing else. I’m going to be in the car professor, but I really just want to drive off and forget about this whole thing.”

“Well, then go, I’ve got things to discuss with Ivan. I’m going to get back later by train. But thank you, you’ve got no idea, this box, those items,” he broke off shaking his head.

Instead, he gave me a quick hug before he told me to have a safe trip back.

When I finally drove off, I couldn’t believe the day I’d had. I cursed for letting myself being shoehorned into this whole damned trip.

—

This whole thing happened more than ten years ago. By now the story is nothing more than a funny anecdote that I tell friends and colleagues. It’s nothing but a ‘hey this weird little thing happened to me back in the day.’

After that day Professor Neumann never returned to the university though. After our visit with Ivan Nikolayev, the man quit his teaching job. We were told he started working elsewhere. It was never mentioned where exactly, but I was sure I knew.

My guess was confirmed a few months ago when a letter arrived. Professor Neumann wrote to me to tell me that he was still working on the same project. By now though, Ivan had died, and the professor himself was much too old to keep up with it. He mentioned that he was starting a new research team and wanted me to be part of it. You see, by now I’ve got my masters in theoretical physics and made a bit of a name for myself as a researcher.

I never answered his letter that is until today.

I recently moved into a new apartment. It was by sheer accident that I stumbled upon the old photograph of Uncle Mike and his supposed relative.

When I looked at it today though, I couldn’t help but shiver.

People can change a lot in a decade. A lot of things can happen. I’ve put on a bit of weight, and I now have much shorter hair than I used to. There’s one particular thing though. A few years ago, I got into a car accident. It was quite severe and left me with a permanent scar on my face. On the left side of my face.

When I stared at the old photograph today and the man by my Uncles’ side, my head started to spin.

The man in the picture has the same scar as me, but the more I look at him, the more things I notice. He has the same short hair as me and the same puffy face. I was sweating by now. This man in the picture… it couldn’t be, could it?

I quickly went through all my paperwork and found the letter by Professor Neumann. I’d never thrown it away yet for some reason. I reread it, this time more carefully. The same project he said. Was he still working on that damned teleportation device, no that ‘time machine’? What if the thing had actually been working all along?

For hours I told myself to forget about it and to get rid of both the letter and the photograph. Yet, I can’t seem to do so.

It’s as if something is stopping me from doing so. It’s almost as if a mysterious power is making decisions for me and I can’t do anything about it. The more I look at the photograph and its many implications, I feel that my path is already predestined. There never was a different one, was there?

I guess the passing of time is indeed a very strange thing.

Now that I’m finished typing this all out, it’s time to go through with it. It’s time to give old Professor Neumann a call.

The barn was the biggest building on the farm my friend Martin and his family lived at.

Martin and I go back a long while. We became friends during middle school when he lived in a boarding home and attended my school for a year.

The two of us bonded instantly. Neither of us was popular. Martin was the new kid and class, and well, I was a bit weird.

“Hey Gregor, you want to visit my family’s farm in the summer?” he asked me one day out of the blue.

I accepted instantly. I’d grown up a city child, born and raised in the concrete jungles that were once called East Berlin. Living there was almost suffocating. Rows upon rows of Soviet-style apartment buildings stretched on forever.

You can imagine how much I relished to get out of there.

I’d known he lived on a farm, but I’d thought he was talking about a small farmhouse, maybe a field or two and a chicken crop. I was in for a surprise, a big one.

He and his parents picked me up at the local bus station and the moment we reached their property my eyes grew wide.

It was so huge. We drove past endless cornfields. Once we reached the actual farm, there were more buildings than I could count.

It turned out that Martin’s family weren’t your typical small-time farmers. No, they were big corporate farmers. They owned a whole fleet of tractors, harvesters and other vehicles.

The chicken crop was a monstrosity that reminded me more of a factory than a home for animals. It was only dwarfed by one other building: the barn.

I understood why, when Martin showed me the herds of cattle they kept on the meadows. There must’ve been hundreds if not thousands of them.

It was nothing short of impressive.

While I stayed over, I also got to know the rest of the family.

There was Uncle Max. He was the picture book example of the odd uncle. He always pulled jokes, had collected an assortment of musical instruments and spent most of his days by himself. To be honest, he didn’t seem to belong on a farm at all.

His grandpa was the kindest, yet biggest man I knew. He wasn’t fat, he was stout, steeled by a long life of farming. The old man was a pure traditionalist. Work the fields, take care of the animals, rinse and repeat. His motto was honest and hard work. And that, he said, was how he made the farm what it was today.

Martin’s dad was the polar opposite. Not in regards to hard work mind you, but in his ideas about farming. The man was always looking for new technological improvements. New fertilizers, specialized crops, modern farming equipment, you name it. That was his world.

There was always a bit of banter and a few friendly scuffles between the two of them, but it was all in good spirit.

During this first visit, Martin and I hang around the farm, explored nearby areas and played with the animals.

When Martin started to attend a different school after a year, we still stayed friends. Each year I’d spent the summer at his farm.

As we got older though our interests shifted. We didn’t spend as much time on the farm. There was a lake nearby where most of the local teenagers met up. There was also a small town, and there were, of course, the girls living there.

Coming of age might have dispelled the magic I’d felt as a kid, but there were other reasons to appreciate the area now. Live felt different out here, and it was nice to relax from the constant buzz of the city that I usually had to endure.

At times I also did a bit of work at the farm. His dad was pleased to see my honest efforts, and he paid me nicely.

That’s how I got a bit closer to Martin’s dad and learned a bit more about the man. While Uncle Max kept to himself and his grandpa went to bed early, it was his dad that kept us company in the long summer evenings.

When I was young, he’d been this hard, but boisterous adult, now he became a sort of mentor to me. Unconsciously he might’ve even become a substitute for that father I never had.

At times we played cards, and once Martin and I were old enough the three of us shared the occasional beer together.

There were those few, rare evenings when Martin’s dad told us a few of the lessons he’d learned during his life. Success doesn’t happen overnight, nine-to-five won’t make you rich, the smartest one takes it all and similar tales. To be honest, I was thankful, but I wasn’t interested. Most of his advice as forgotten as soon as I went to bed.

There’s one night though that I’ll never forget. It was during my summer vacation five years ago.

As I arrived that year, there was some bad news waiting for me.

During the last winter, Martin’s grandpa had died. It had been a terrible accident due to overwork they told me. Soon after that Uncle Max left the farm and went away to find his luck elsewhere. The man had always been a free spirit, and he took his father’s death as an invitation to start a new life.

I was utterly devastated by the news, and it took me almost the first week of the vacation to get over the whole thing. Not that the world was okay afterward, it wasn’t, but I came to terms with it, you could say.

One evening near the end of the vacation, Martin his dad and I sat together and had a few beers. His dad told us yet another one of his many lessons about who deserved success and who doesn’t. A key point, he said, was the willingness to work much harder than others.

“Oh, that’s why you deserve it, and Uncle Max doesn’t right?”

His dad was quiet in an instant and turned to him. His face had turned from a gentle, slightly tipsy expression to a hard and serious one. His blue eyes seemed cold and almost piercing as he stared at his son. I inhaled sharply because I’d never seen the man like that.

“I told you never to mention that name in our house again,” he pressed out, and I could tell fought hard not to yell at his son.

“Yeah, sorry dad, I didn’t mean to-“

“Damn right you didn’t,” he now yelled bringing his fist down on the table. “Why don’t you ever fucking listen? How many times do I have to remind you?”

With that, he got up and stared at his son. “Well? How many times? How many freaking times until you learn?”

“Dad, I said I’m-“

“And of course that makes it alright. That’s exactly how ‘Uncle Max’ always acted! I should-“

“Steven, come on, the boy didn’t mean anything by it,” Martin’s mother said, who’d entered the room due to the commotion. I could see the fear in her eyes.

For a moment Martin’s dad just stood there. His face was red, his eyes cold, his whole posture was tense, and he seemed to burst with anger. I saw how his hands clenched and unclenched. Any moment now, I thought, he’d be striking out at Martin or even his wife, but then he leaned down to Martin. He reached out for his son’s face and brought it close to his own.

“I guess he really didn’t mean a thing,” he said to his son, his eyes cold as ice, “right, Martin?”

“Y-yeah dad, I swear,” Martin said in a low voice.

For another moment he held his son’s gaze before he turned to his wife and followed her from the room.

For the next minute or two, neither Martin nor I said a word. While we finished our beer, I couldn’t help but watch the doorframe. I was anxious that his dad would come back. In the many years, I knew the man I felt so many things for the man. Now I felt only one thing: fear.

It was the next day when Martin and I were off the farm that he told me what had happened between his uncle and his dad.

There’d always been a bit of bad blood between Uncle Max and his dad. While his dad spent all his time helping out on the farm, trying to find ways to improve the many tasks, Uncle Max never did a single thing. Sure, he’d attended university, but most of his time was spent with women or attending parties. Once he’d graduated though, he moved back in at the farm, busying himself with his own interests.

The situation escalated after Martin’s grandfather died.

It was evident to all that the farm was supposed to go to Steven, the older of his town sons. It was the natural thing to do. That was until his will was discovered. In it, Martin’s grandpa spoke out against Steven and in favor of Max and left the farm in his possession.

Max supposedly didn’t care a bit about the farm. He told everyone that he planned on stripping it and selling everything. Steven tried hard to reason with his brother, but Max didn’t budge.

It was by sheer chance that a lawyer cross-checked the will and discovered it to be a forgery. Steven had no doubt who’d done it. Everyone else’s doubts evaporated when Uncle Max vanished overnight.

There was an investigation, of course, but Max must’ve fled from persecution as soon as he’d been found out. By then, he’d up and vanished, taking quite a part of the family funds with him.

It was all due to his dad and his hard work, Martin said, that the farm was what it was now.

One thing Martin overheard was that Max was responsible for their father’s death. His dad thought Max was after the inheritance. He wanted to use it to pay off his many debts and to continue his lavish lifestyle.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This sounded like the plot from a movie. Wasn’t this real life? Family feuds, intrigues, forged documents, I couldn’t believe it. I’d thought they’d all been a happy family. Thinking back to Uncle Max and the way he’d acted around us…

After he’d ended the story, Martin told me to never mention Uncle Max, especially not in front of his dad. It was best to pretend that Uncle Max was dead as well, or better, had never existed at all. Thinking back to how his dad had acted, I did my best to heed the advice.

It was about three years later that I graduated from school and moved on to university. During my time there I’d only ever visited Martin and his family once.

After the New Year’s though, my workload went down considerably. Project work was almost finished, and I only had about a handful of lectures to attend. I decided that a few days or a week of absence wouldn’t be too big a deal.

So the next time I was on a call with Martin, I asked him how everything was at the farm and if I could visit them. He was quite surprised to hear from me, but he said their doors were always open to me. I was pretty much family, he said.

It was half a week later that I was on the same bus as so many times before. Martin waited for me at the station, and as we drove to the farm, he told me what I’d missed.

He started to tell me a couple stories about mutual friends in the nearby town, followed by some news about the farm. His dad had always been interested in new technologies. For the past years, he’d been looking more and more into genetically modified crops and livestock. He’d started to invest heavily in both fields, Martin said.

A big payoff was that he was willing to send Martin to study genetics at university. Martin was really excited about it. He didn’t mind working at the farm and all that, but he’d always hoped for other opportunities. This seemed to be it. I was quite happy for him.

We arrived at the farm about half an hour later. It looked so different in the winter. It was almost depressing to see the harvested fields and the empty meadows all around.

All those thoughts vanished the moment I met Martin’s parents again. They greeted me warmly and were genuinely happy to see me.

They asked me all sorts of questions and how university was going. In turn, I asked them about the farm. I was particularly interested in this new direction they wanted to go to. Martin’s dad though told me they still had a long way to go. He hoped to really get the ball started once Martin went to university.

I was quite intrigued but also exhausted from my long journey. In the end, I went to bed early the first day I stayed there.

It was on the second day that Martin and I went to the town nearby and met up with some of our old friends.

It was nice to hang out with the people there. Things were a bit different out here, simpler. Not everyone was online all the time or glued to their smartphones. Due to the lack of Social Media people seemed to actually be more social, more genuine. It was quite ironic. Now don’t get me wrong, WhatsApp and Facebook were a thing. Out here though, they didn’t replace regular interaction to the degree they did in the big cities.

We had a few drinks at a friend’s place and returned home in the evening. I was surprised to see Martin’s dad waiting for us. I lit a cigarette and walked up to the farm building.

“Let’s get inside boys, it’s quite late and the nights out here are cold,” he said and held the door open for us.

I smiled and took another puff of my cigarette.

“I’ll just finish my smoke,” I said, but I could feel the eyes of the man resting on me.

For a moment they seemed as cold as I remembered them from five years ago. They were gone right away, but I still couldn’t help but shiver. I hastily put out the cigarette and went inside.

Martin’s dad invited us to play cards together like in the old days. It was fun. I was a bit buzzed, but not really drunk. While we were playing his dad once more started to talk about life. His topic of choice that night was risk-taking.

“You can’t be afraid boys. At times you’ve got to take a risk and see what happens. Every great man in history was once at a point in life where he could decide to either stick to a normal, boring and safe life or go down a riskier path. Sure, not everyone makes it, but even the try should be well worth the risk.”

While he talked, I was more absorbed with my cards and tried to figure out how to play the next round. I only half listened to him. It was more of the same old talk again.

“There might very well be times, boys when you’ll have to make tough decisions. Even things you aren’t too proud off, but that’s just how things are.”

When I looked up, I saw a reminiscing look wash over his face. It was quickly replaced by a bright smile.

“But well, it wouldn’t be exciting otherwise, would it?”

Martin didn’t say a word, and I only nodded.

“Well, I guess this old man here is boring you. Let’s keep playing the game then!”

We continued the game for another couple rounds before we called it a night.

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Guess it’s going to be one of those nights, I thought. It was a couple minutes later that I put on my clothes and decided to go out for another smoke.

I tip-toed through the house and went out via the backdoor. I sat down on the bench on the back porch and lit a cigarette. I watched as the smoke rose into the air. The sky above was marvelous. The stars were so bright. In the city, you weren’t able to see them most nights, but out here, it was as if the sky was ablaze.

The night was gentle. It wasn’t too cold for a February night. I decided to have a walk around the farmstead while I finished my cigarette. It felt so nice. The air was fresh and clean, and there were no sounds. It was only me and the sounds of my footsteps.

I’d been out for almost half an hour and had lit another cigarette when my steps led me to the barn. The building had always been vast and impressive, but at night, it seemed almost eerie. It looked like a dark abomination, grown together from wood and plaster. As I got closer, I noticed various additions to the building. It was most likely related to the new interests of Martin’s dad. As if the building needed to be any bigger, I thought shaking my head.

I looked away and let my gaze run over the wide farmstead when I heard something. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but I heard it again after half a minute. It was quiet and faint, but it sounded almost like an animal.

I looked around to see if some wild animal was nearby, but I was all alone. I waited and listened carefully, and now I was sure that it was coming from the barn.

Had some predator snuck inside? Maybe a fox or something? Or it might be that some of the cattle had hurt himself or gotten lose. Whatever it was, I couldn’t ignore if there was any trouble.

A minute later I opened one of the small side doors and ventured inside. I walked along rows upon rows of cattle, stepping as lightly as I could. There was nothing wrong though. All was quiet, and the animals were resting or sleeping.

Yet, here it was again.

For a moment I tried to pinpoint the location, but the sound was way too low, almost muffled.

I looked around, but none of the cattle seemed agitated. Maybe I actually was imagining it?

Once I reached the edge of the barn, I was about to give up and turn back. Before I’d taken more than a few steps, I heard it again. This time I was sure it had to be coming from behind me. I looked around, baffled. Was it coming from outside after all?

At that moment I noticed a small metal door. When I pushed it open, I realized that it led to one of the many additions of the barn. I stepped inside and found myself in a half empty room. Shelves lined the walls, and there were a few empty containers, but that was about it. It was clear that the room was still being constructed. Where the hell was it coming from?

As I stepped forward though I noticed that my steps sounded a bit strange, almost as if the floor was hollow. After a bit of walking back and forth, I realized that it was only a particular spot where my steps sounded strange. I took out my phone and searched around. Finally, after a long minute of searching, I found a small opening in the floor. There was barely enough room to put my fingers in, but when I did, I realized that I could lift part of it. Don’t tell me… was this a trap door?

As I raised the trap door, I found something below. Once I’d opened it completely, I stood in front of a dark hole. I stood there, not sure what I’d found. I couldn’t suppress the urge to look back over my shoulder. Had I found a hidden place?

I almost jumped when I heard the sound again. Now that it was louder it almost sounded like a wailing of sorts. I stared at the dark hole in front of me. Now I at least knew where the sounds were coming from. They came from down there.

I carefully held out my phone.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said to myself. What I looked at was a metal ladder that led down a long shaft. As I moved forward and gazed down, I could actually see a low light down there. There was a sort of corridor down there.

What the hell kind of place had I found here? Most important of all, what should I do? This was none of my business, wasn’t it? What right did I have to go snoop around on the farm? Those people were like family to me.

Forget about it, whatever it is and go back to sleep, you idiot, I told myself. Just pretend it never happened.

I could tell everyone that I heard something while I was out for a smoke and that’s it. I was about to put the trap door back in place, but the longer I stared at the ladder, the more curious I got.

I’d half lowered the trap door back in place when I cursed and pushed it open again.

I got goosebumps about the whole thing. Once more I turned back towards the barn to see if anyone had noticed that I’d stumbled upon this place. No one was there.

Finally, I took a deep breath, called myself a dumbass and started my descent downwards. Once again curiosity had won over reason.

With each step further down I grew more anxious and antsy. Why was this shaft here? Was it some sort of old tunnel? Was it a bunker they’d built in case of a catastrophe? No, that made no sense at all, this was not America.

My mind conjured up scenario after scenario each more outlandish and stupid than the last. Suddenly, I heard the wailing again.

I almost slipped off the handle and barely held on to it. It really was much louder now, and much creepier. It sounded almost human… For a moment I had to take a deep breath and tell myself to calm down. For a while, I listened for steps down below or any sign of movement, but everything had turned quiet again. I continued my descent undisturbed.

The moment I entered the corridor I felt a drop of sweat running down my forehead. I quickly looked to my left and right, hand still on the ladder. There was no one down here. No hurt person, no animal, and no other creatures. The origin of the wailing though was still a mystery.

The first thing I noticed was the many dim lights on the ceiling. That must’ve been what I saw from above.

I took one step down the corridor and was surprised, almost shocked at how loud they were. It was as if they were reverberating between the walls, being amplified.

For a moment I froze.

What the hell was I even doing down here? A part of my mind was still appealing to me to get out of here, but my curiosity was much stronger and urged me on to explore. Only a bit more, I lied to myself, just until I knew what this place was. Then I’m going back out of here. Taking one step at a time, I inched forward. I’d crossed no more than a few meters when I saw a door ahead of me.

When I reached it, I saw how big and heavy it was. A small glass window was inserted. As I stepped forward, I felt goosebumps on my arm. What the hell was this place?

I had to press my face against the glass to see what was behind. I saw straw, a trough and then on the other side of the room the biggest and fattest pig I’d ever seen. It looked unreal, almost comical, a satirical twist of a normal pig. The creature seemed to be sick. Its tongue was hanging out, his eyes were only half open, and it seemed to breathe heavily. I wondered if purely existing was exhausting for it.

I stepped back and whispered a ‘what the fuck?’

Genetically modified livestock. The new direction Martin’s dad wanted to take the farm into. Hadn’t he said they’d barely gotten started and that there wasn’t much to talk about yet?

I was torn from my thoughts as I looked on and saw other, similar doors.

“Don’t tell me,” I whispered.

I was right. Behind each door another, similar room filled with straw and hay waited for me.

Each one held another, different type of animal. In one were chickens, much bigger than normal ones. Three of them were dead already. In another, I saw a cow with an udder way too big for the poor creature. It was red, swollen and sagged down to the ground. In yet another, I saw a cow that was skinny to the bone but with multiple udders.

Behind each of the doors a new, different, twisted horror waited for me. Sheep who were entangled in each other’s wool. Hybrids of different animals and strange disfigured mutations that made my brain hurt and pushed me into a state of anxiety.

As I stumbled forward, it was clear that this place must be some sort of weird testing ground or laboratory. It must be here that Martin’s dad tried out different types of experiments to enhance their animals.

‘There might very well be times, boys when you’ll have to make tough decisions. Even things you aren’t too proud of.’

The words from a few hours ago came back to my mind.

Why do it down here though? Why this hidden testing ground? It didn’t take me long to answer my own question. Any animal rights organization would give him hell for this. I was sure he also broke more than a few laws by doing these unethical things down here. Either way, if anyone found out about these disgusting experiments, the farm would be done for.

It must’ve been one of those creatures that made the weird wailing sound. The corridor was still going on, and the sound seemed to originate further down. I didn’t feel like looking at more of these poor creatures. By now, I wanted to get out of here and forget about the whole thing.

Suddenly the wailing resounded behind me again. It sounded animalistic, sure, but it also reminded me of a human. I started to shiver. What the hell.

I went forward to the next door but found only another strange pig. There were only two doors left.

One of them was empty. Behind the other was something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

The creature inside was no animal, but neither was it human. Yet it looked way too similar to a human being. It was as if the traits of different animals had manifested and grown out of it, transforming him into a weird hybrid. I saw horns, I saw a tail, a bulging gut and even something akin to a hove. While I stared at the glass, the thing suddenly looked up and stared at me.

I was frozen in sheer and utter terror and stumbled backward against the wall of the corridor. This couldn’t be another one of his animals. No, what was in front of me was without a doubt a deformed human.

The thing in the room stormed towards the door and started beating it, pressing its face against the small glass window. The sounds it was making. It sounded like ‘ep ep ep ep.’ I was still out of it, but I realized that these weren’t random sounds. No, the thing in front of me was trying to vocalize the word ‘help.’

I got up, and at that moment I saw something. It was a pair of blue eyes looking directly at me. They were almost the same as the eyes of Martin’s dad. The same dark blue eyes and the same cold look. And then I saw the few blond hairs still on his head. Oh god, I thought, dear god now. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t.

“Uncle Max?” I brought out in a shaking voice.

For a moment the creature, no Max, seemed to concentrate heard before it tried to repeat what I’d said. It started to nod a few times before wailing anew. Max threw himself against the door, again and again, getting into a state of terrible rage.

Only when the creature that was once Max finally stopped, did I hear a different noise.

I thought, no prayed, that it was one of the other animals. With each passing second though, it became clear that the noise didn’t originate down here. They were coming from upstairs.

I started to panic right away. My hands started shaking as I heard the hard above getting closer and closer. I knew whose steps they were.

It seemed Max knew too because he started wailing again and rushed to a corner of his cell.

I didn’t know what to do. My mind was a blank. If he finds me down here if he knows that I saw all this… oh god.

I thought about the empty room nearby and almost turned back, but then I saw a door at the end of the corridor. It was another heavy metal door, but not as sturdy as the rest. There was no glass frame on it. I rushed forward, pressed the handle and relieve flooded over me when it opened. Without thinking I practically jumped inside and closed it behind me.

The room I was in now, seemed to be another storage room. There were rows of shelves behind me. They were filled to the brim with all sorts of supplies, animal food, tools, and other, weirder things.

I stopped eying them when I heard someone on the ladder. Only moments later someone landed in the corridor. Slow, heavy footsteps made their way down into my direction. As quietly as I possibly could I put my eye against the keyhole. Outside I saw a tall figure. It was Martin’s dad.

Each of his steps was hard and well-measured. He stopped at each of the doors to take a look inside. At some he smiled at others he frowned. He continued on, and I soon saw that he was holding a long baton in his hand. Finally, he reached Max’s cell.

“Max, didn’t I tell you to keep your mouth shut? Guess you don’t remember, do you?”

With that, he got out a key and unlocked the heavy door. I could hear the angry, yet fearful wailing of Uncle Max.

“Guess I have to make you remember then.”

I saw how Martin’s dad raised the baton and stepped inside. Even from here I heard the heavy hits and Max’s painful screams.

“Do you remember now? Do you remember to keep your mouth shut? Do you!?”

Once more I heard the animalistic wailing of Max before it turned to quiet sobs.

“Well, isn’t that something, you actually can listen. I wonder for how long though, the way you’re now…”

The sobs continued.

“Oh come on now Max, you brought this all upon yourself. With dad things were so easy. It was no problem at all to get rid of the old man, yet you had to insist on your part of the inheritance. Why did you have to give me all this trouble? You should’ve just left, but instead, you had to go against me.”

“You deserve to suffer like this Max, you deserve it all!”

Another hit.

“You deserved to be locked up back then, and you deserve to be used like this now! At least you can do something for the farm now.”

There was a short laugh before he took a deep breath.

“Now, now, where was I, brother. Oh yes, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”

And then he said something that made my blood run cold.

“Where’s the boy?”

This time Max stayed quiet.

“I know he’s down here, Max and I know you saw him.”

Nothing again. Once more I heard the sound of the heavy hits.

“You know what happens if you oppose me, Max! I know he’s down here! Where. Did. He. Go? Or are you too retarded by now to understand me? Well? What’s it going to be Max?”

I heard yet another hit and finally Max’s animalistic voice.

“Ut ut ut ut ut,” I heard him say, followed by “ep ep ep ep.”

For a moment Martin’s dad was quiet.

“Out? Help?” he asked with more than a bit of sarcasm in his voice.

“So he went out to get help?” Martin’s dad continued.

Then he started beating down at his brother once more before he finally closed the door.

“Oh Gregor, why did you have to come down here. Such a shame… I really liked the boy.”

I felt my blood run cold as I heard my name. The way he was talking now, the way he was moving, it was as if he was a completely different person. He wasn’t the friendly, mentor-like man I knew, now he was plain evil.

For a moment he turned towards the door at the end of the corridor, and I could see his cold and hard blue eyes again.

My blood was ice in my veins, and I didn’t dare to even blink. In my mind I already saw him move towards me, ripping the door open and beating me to death with the baton like a crazed god of wrath. Finally, though, he turned around and made his way back towards the ladder.

I heard how he made his way back up and how he closed off the trap door. After that, I heard him walk through the barn before everything was quiet again.

I waited behind this door for almost an hour before I dared to move again. I sneaked towards the ladder and climbed up, only to find what I’d already anticipated, no way to open the trap door.

I tried to push it open with all my might, but it won’t budge. There’s probably some sort of mechanism that keeps it locked from outside.

I was without a doubt trapped.

I explored the rest of the underground area. There isn’t much else around. Only more rooms that held more twisted creatures and another storage room, but that was about it. I also found two more sturdy metal doors that might lead elsewhere, but there seems to be no way to open them.

I tried communicating with Uncle Max multiple times, but he’s out cold. There’s no way for me to even open the door to his cell. I tried everything, but nothing works.

I searched through the storage rooms but didn’t find anything that might help me escape. The only thing useful was some of the tools. They weren’t much good when I tried to open any of the doors.

What they might be good enough for though, is to knock-out a person. I don’t know what else to do. It’s only a matter of time until he realizes that I’m still down here.

Oh god, he’ll tell Martin and the rest that I left during the night, that he drove me to the bus station and that I’m gone again. What if he doesn’t just kill me, what if he… oh god no.

My only hope is to jump him when he comes down here. That’s my only hope of getting out.

Oh god, I can hear him again. He’s back. I can hear him at the trap door.

“My, my, Gregor,” I heard him say on the ladder in an almost excited voice.

Please help me, he’s coming for me.

If you’d seen Robert’s Repairs, you’d most likely think of it as a simple, small-town repair shop—the owner, Robert, just another typical grease monkey. In reality, there was much more to the shop and its owner.

The most interesting fact about Robert was that he could fix anything. I don’t remember when it started. One day, the people in my hometown found out that Robert was not a typical mechanic, but more of a jack of all trades. It made no difference to him if it was a car, a toy, household appliances or electronic devices. Good old Robert would fix it all. Something broke or was damaged? You brought it to Robert’s Repairs, and it was as good as new.

As a person too, Robert was fascinating. I remember that the first time I ever talked to him was when I got my bike back. The chain and the gears had all been entangled and damaged, so my parents brought it over to Robert. He told them to be back in a couple of days.

It was fixed entirely when I came back to the shop. He told me to be more careful while handling the gears. I was told to be sure to keep them sufficiently greased and oiled so that it wouldn’t happen again. I thanked him, and before I left, I asked how he was able to fix all the things that people would bring over to him. I had been interested in machines and mechanisms ever since I was little. You could say that, because of all the stories, Robert had become a sort of role model to me.

“It is simple,” he started to explain.

“Every mechanism, machine, or tool is made up of parts like this clock. See?”

He picked up a small clock he had found lying on his workbench.

“It doesn’t matter what it is. The bigger and more complex it is, the more parts there are, sure, but in the end, it is always the same principle.”

“What you do is disassemble it into all its parts.” With that, he opened the back of the clock to reveal the inner workings. He took out the various gears, springs, and other parts.

“Then, you have to find out which of them are broken, damaged, or causing problems. Take this one here.”

He held up a deformed spring.

“Now, you have to fix it or replace it and put it back together.”

Robert replaced the spring with a new one and put the clock back together with care. I stood there, dumbfounded.

For the nine-year-old me, it was as if I had found the Holy Grail. The biggest secret in the whole wide world had been revealed to me. Robert must have noticed because he started to laugh.

I am sure I must have just stood there, mouth agape, not saying anything.

From that day onward, I spent a lot of time at Robert’s shop. My parents knew and were happy about it. I had found a new hobby, and with luck, I’d be able to learn a thing or two.

In time, I grew to like Robert. Soon, I found out that he not only knew a lot about mechanics but also a variety of other topics. When he didn’t have to fix anything, he’d teach me about science, or he’d tell me things from history.

He even gave me a couple of his old books. Most were on math, but there were some on science and electronics, as well. I loved that stuff.

Robert was the smartest guy in the world to me. My opinion of him should get even higher.

One day a little boy with his pet came over to Robert’s shop. He was crying and said his kitty was sick and hurt, and he had no idea what to do or where to go. Robert, the good guy that he was, nodded and told the boy everything would be alright. He’d take care of it, and the boy should come back in a few days. It was precisely what he had told my parents when they had brought over my bike.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked Robert once the boy was gone.

“Are you going to take it to the hospital or call the animal doctor?”

Robert laughed.

“No need for that,” he said in his ever happy and euphoric way.

“Nothing I can’t take care of myself.”

“What do you mean, Robert?”

I stared at him wondering what he was talking about.

“Remember what I told you before? That everything is made up of parts?”

I nodded.

“Well, it is the same with animals too. They are just big, organic machines. You find the broken parts, fix them, and they’ll be fine again.”

“But that’s not how animals work!” I said in protest.

“We’ll see about that, shall we?”

With that, he took the hurt little cat in his hands and walked towards a door at the back of the shop. I started to follow him.

“Now, hold on a second, Mark, will you?”

With that, he vanished behind the door. A few moments later, he was back, but without the cat.

“What did you do to it?”

“I put it somewhere safe. Can’t have the little guy in here with all the grease and dirt around, can we?”

“What’s behind the door?” I asked him and went forward to open it and see for myself.

Robert put his arm in front of me. “Sorry, but that’s top secret.”

I pouted and complained for quite a while, but Robert didn’t give in. In the end, I spend the rest of the afternoon helping him repair an old TV set and afterward made my way home. On the way, I was thinking about what he had told me.

That same evening during dinner, I asked my parents how you’d fix animals. They laughed and soon changed the topic to something else.

When I went to Robert’s shop again a few days later, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Right at the front porch was a little kitty, sleeping and purring without a worry in the world.

I recognized it right away as the one that the little boy had brought over the other day. I went closer to the kitty and carefully started to pet it. It opened its eyes, looked at me, and then rubbed its little head against my hand. The kitty was perfectly fine.

Robert saw me playing with it and gave me a thumbs-up.

“Good as new.”

“How did you do it, Robert?”

“Exactly the way I told you: I fixed the broken parts.”

I made a sour face at his simple answer, but Robert ignored it.

When the little boy came over, he cried tears of joy. His little friend was alright. His parents, who’d accompanied him, thanked Robert for saving the cat. Robert smiled and nodded. From that day onward, people would not only bring all sorts of items and appliances to Robert. No, they also started to bring their sick pets.

It seemed Robert really could fix anything. A cat with broken legs? She’d be fine a few days later. A limping dog? Same thing. A dying hamster? He’d be fit and full of life again in no time.

During this time, I was at the store even more often than before. There’d always be animals around to play with. It was only the healthy ones, though, the ones that Robert had already fixed, as he used to say. He kept all the others in what Robert called the top secret room. I had no idea what exactly he did with them in there or how he went about fixing them.

The thought of how Robert was doing all the things he did stayed on my young mind for a long time. Did Robert have a secret medicine that no one else knew about?

More than once did I try to sneak into the room, but either I found the door locked or Robert caught me. In time, I accepted it as the way things were supposed to be. The room was off limits.

My doubts about Robert were reawakened in the middle of the summer break. It was then that Robert did something that even I, as a kid, knew to be completely and utterly impossible.

It was a typical Saturday afternoon, and I spend it at Robert’s shop as usual. I was playing with a cat and waiting for Robert to fix up an old bike. He had promised to teach me a few more things about electronics once he was done.

My attention was drawn from the cat to a car that arrived out of nowhere and came to a stop with squealing tires. A crying woman jumped out of the passenger seat, followed by a man on the driver’s seat.

The woman came running over towards Robert.

“You have to save her!” she cried, tears streaming down her face.

Robert walked towards her, his expression serious in an instant.

“What happened?”

The woman continued to talk to him, but I couldn’t make out most of it. I heard the words accident and car and then she was pleading him over and over to save her and to do it again. I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Robert motioned her to be quiet. Then he hurried over to the man who brought out the limp body of a little girl from the backseat.

“She was hit about ten minutes ago,” I heard the man say.

There was so much blood. It was everywhere. I was in shock and looked on wide-eyed. Her arms and legs were dangling from her body. She wasn’t moving at all. For a moment, I saw her face. Her eyes were completely empty.

“Go home for today, Mark. I’ll teach you another day,” he said to me as he motioned for the father to bring the girl inside.

I didn’t understand what was going on. Why did they bring the girl to Robert? I wanted to stay and started to follow them inside.

Robert noticed me after a few moments, and for the first time ever, he seemed to be mad at me.

“I told you to go home, Mark!” he yelled at me. It was the first time I had heard him like that. His voice had changed and was loud and serious, even a little frightening. I left right away.

I didn’t understand how he’d do it, but I already knew what was going to happen. The girl had been hurt, and her parents had brought her over so Robert would fix her.

Then, I told myself that it was stupid. They were there to call a hospital or a doctor. Animals were one thing, but humans are different, right? When I got home, I told my parents what had happened, but they only nodded, not really listening. They most likely didn’t believe me or didn’t understand what I was talking about. I must have been way too agitated.

I later heard the whole story of what had happened that day. The little girl’s name was Margaret Miller, and she was eleven years old. She was out with her parents. While they crossed the main street, she had dropped something. Without watching, she ran to get it. The driver of an oncoming car had no chance to stop in time, and she was run over. The people who saw it said that it was a terrible accident, and everyone was sure that the girl had died instantly.

That was when the parents took her and brought her over to Robert.

My skin started to crawl when I went over to Robert’s shop the next time. At first, I wasn’t sure, but soon, there was no mistaking it—a little girl was sitting on the bench in front of the store, beaming at me as I came closer. I stared at her wide-eyed for a moment.

“Who are you? Are you Robert’s daughter?”

“Hi! My name is Margaret,” she answered with a big smile and held her hand out to me.

While I shook her hand, I remembered the name. It was the same name as that of the little girl that had been hit by the car. What was this? I stammered something, unsure what to say. Before I spoke again, Robert, who had seen me, called me over.

“Mark, this is important. Don’t talk to her about anything you saw the other day, alright?”

“But why?”

“It is too early for her to remember something as scary as the accident.”

I nodded, but I felt as if this wasn’t the real reason.

“What did you do to her? Did you cure her?”

Or fix her, I thought, as he always referred to it for some reason.

“How did you do it?”

Robert smiled, and he gave me the same answer he had given me so many times before:

“You simply have to find the parts that are broken and fix them.”

That’s when I exploded at him. I had enough. Even at my age, I knew things weren’t as easy as he made them out to be.

“But that is not how it works! You can’t bring someone back to life by fixing their parts!”

Robert’s face changed to a soft and somewhat sad smile.

“You are right, Mark. Sometimes, there is no easy way to fix things. Sometimes, you have to replace all the parts that are irreparable.”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about at that time. Was he still talking about humans? Or was he talking about machines again? I was puzzled.

“It is like with this.” He turned away from me to find something to explain things. That’s when I saw my chance. I started to run for the door at the end of the shop. I pressed the handle, and with a loud noise that surprised even me, the door opened.

“Mark, what are you-” I heard Robert call out to me.

I came to a halt right away. I had no idea what I was seeing. To this day, I don’t know what the place I saw back then was exactly.

I saw futuristic machines and test tubes. There were various glass tanks and containers. Cabinets and computers lined the walls. An innumerable amount of cables connected it all together. The room stood in stark contrast to the rest of Robert’s shop. Everything else was dirty, greasy and old. This room here was new and clean, almost sterile.

In the middle of the room was a large table. Something was laying on it, covered by a large sheet of white cloth. I don’t know why, but I went forward and pulled. I saw a small white arm, then a shoulder, and finally a face. A female face.

It was right at that point that Robert reached me, pulled me away, and pushed me out of the room.

He was yelling at me, but I didn’t hear anything. I only saw it for a moment, but I knew whose face I had seen there. Once I had gathered myself, I confronted Robert.

“Why is she back there? She is outside, isn’t she?”

Robert’s expression changed again. The anger went away, and now his face showed a sad expression again.

“What do you do when something is broken beyond repair?”

I didn’t know. I couldn’t even think of an answer.

“In that case,” he said, “you have to replace the whole thing.”

It was this statement that freaked me out more than anything because I knew what he was implying. That little girl outside wasn’t Margaret Miller; she was a replacement. Robert didn’t say anything else or even try to stop me as I walked out.

I saw the little girl again. She was still where she had been when I had arrived. Her friendly but empty smile haunted me for the rest of the summer.

After that day, I never went back to Robert’s Repairs again. The place was wrong—unnatural. I never found out exactly what Robert had done, but I knew it was not normal.

As of this summer, that was more than ten years ago. I heard a lot more about Robert’s ordeals and antics throughout the years. There were other stories about more people he fixed. It was all so weird.

I mean, Robert never did anything wrong to anyone, but somehow, I knew that what he was doing was wrong.

Before you ask, yes, I told my parents about what I had seen, but they shrugged it off. They didn’t believe me and said I shouldn’t make up stories like that. The more I pleaded with them and assured them that what I’d seen was true, the more they ignored me.

It was right after I finished high school that I left town, and with it, Robert’s Repairs, behind. I couldn’t stay there anymore.

I am in a bigger city now, and I am going to college. I am majoring in the STEM field, which, I hate to admit, is due to Robert’s influence on me as a kid.

I recently visited my parents. We talked a lot about old memories and went through a couple of photo albums of my middle and high school years. It made me feel quite nostalgic.

Later that evening, after my parents had already gone to bed, I decided to have a look at a couple of the older albums. I remembered that my parents pretty much had created one for every year of my life. The first thing I noticed was that one of the albums was thinner than the rest. I was eight years old at the time. I looked through it and saw that it went from melting snow and early spring right to pictures of autumn.

The next day, I asked my mother about it and where the pictures of my eighth birthday were. She told me I had been very sick that year and had stayed at the hospital for some time. Her eyes betrayed her. She was never good at lying, and I noticed it right away. Even after calling her out on it, she insisted that it was true.

I tried to think back. Had I ever stayed at a hospital? I couldn’t remember anything like it. I thought back to my school days. I would have been in second grade back then. For some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint much about this time… or anything before it, for that matter. I felt cold all of a sudden.

I had seen the albums filled with pictures of me in kindergarten. I had seen me on my first day of school and during first grade.

Even when I tried my hardest, though, I couldn’t recall anything about it. It was as if all my memories before second grade were missing. Had I suffered a concussion and lost all my memory?

At that moment, something came back to me—the smell of oil and grease… the sound of machines and tools. There it was—the memory of sitting on a bench and my parents running towards me and hugging me. What were those images? Was it at the hospital? If so, why was I outside?

Then it hit me. The grease. The oil. The bench I was sitting on.

It was same as the little girl who had been sitting on the bench in front of Robert’s shop. It was precisely the same image, only that I saw it through my eyes. I had been sitting there too, on the same bench, waiting as well.

I was shaking now because I understood. This must have been when I was in second grade, almost a year before I had been visiting Robert regularly.

Long before Robert had fixed that little girl, he had fixed me too. That’s why her mother had been pleading him to do it again.

I had been fixed by Robert as well. The only question was:

What exactly had he done to me?