Mason was trudging drowsily through the pedestrian subway when he fell into a lightless hole in space. Groaning from the impact, he turned on his phone’s flashlight. The beam reflected off the familiar tiles of the tunnel, but he could see no end either way, and no people. It was absolutely silent.
Nobody answered his cries. He started walking, but twenty minutes later there was still nothing but a straight, unbranched tunnel. He marched until he was too tired, sleeping on the floor with his briefcase as a pillow. After a few days, the dehydration made him first strangely euphoric, then delirious, and eventually it killed him.
ITERATION
Mason was walking through the tunnel when he fell through a hole in space into an empty and seemingly endless version of the same subway. His flashlight revealed an emaciated, mummified corpse that looked exactly like him, lying beside a hole in the wall. The hole tunneled up, ending in dry, brown earth after a few meters.
A legal pad lay beside the corpse, filled with his own handwriting: ‘There’s no way out. We are trying to dig up to the surface. Cut pieces off of me to eat and survive longer. The eyes are easy and full of water.’ Mason saw dozens of dirty metal pens with worn tips on the floor; he had one of those in his briefcase, he realized. Copies of his phone and his briefcase were strewn all around. He saw something in the distance. More identical corpses, shriveled as ancient mummies. Hundreds of them lined the walls, some mutilated with bits of meat cut out of their legs and buttocks. Many were eyeless, their sockets empty holes. Mason started sobbing.
INTROSPECTION
Mason was walking through the tunnel when he fell into a hole in space. He landed on what felt and smelled like an old sofa that something had rotted on. Gagging and retching, he saw in the blueish beam of his flashlight that he was surrounded by mummified corpses. They all looked like him. He noticed a lone legal pad inside a big hole in the wall. It read: ‘We tried to dig our way out. The shaft just loops back to the opposite side of the wall, even though it’s completely straight.’ Mason turned around and saw a roughly hewed hole in the floor near the opposite wall.
‘We keep being pulled into this other universe, or whatever it is. One Mason dies, the next arrives. We don’t know why, or how. When will it end? Do we need to atone for our sins? Are we just copies and the real Mason is already home? I don’t know. All we can do is stay alive and maybe figure out how to make things easier for the next guy. Maybe the sensible choice is to choose a quick death. You make the call. Good luck, brother.’ Mason was surrounded by silence, darkness, and death, and contemplated his choices.
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