SNAP! and the Alter Ego Dimension

by Ann Hite Kemp

  Tammy took a long, hot shower, put her own clothes on and decided to go to bed. She was definitely not going to school today. She needed to catch up on a lot of sleep. Before she climbed into bed, she quickly checked her emails.

  Yes! There was an email message from Ulrich Zeiss.

  Her hands started to shake from excitement.

  Dear Tammy,

  I’m safely home and am very glad that you’re safe, too. I’ve been wondering where you would eventually end up after your hand slipped from mine. It was wonderful to get to know you, but it’s just as wonderful to be back home. Tomorrow we’re going to talk to the police. Somebody must block the Snap game on the Internet. It’s our duty to prevent more people being abducted and lost to the Alter Ego Dimension.

  Is Wayne back yet? He is the biggest, bravest hero of us all, you know? He came to look for you and helped to send us both back. He’s a wonderful guy and he cares about you very, very much. You’re very lucky to have such a special friend. I hope he makes it safely out of that dreadful place. Please let me know.

  I’m going to get into bed now and sleep like a log.

  Greetings.

  Ulrich.

  Tammy switched her computer off.

  Greetings. Just ‘Greetings,’ not Love. Ulrich had made his position clear.

  Yes, he was right. Wayne was a hero. She couldn’t wait to tell him that. She hoped and prayed that he would return as his old arrogant self. Because if it wasn’t for his unique personality, he would never have had the guts to go and look for her.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  "WE MUST WALK diagonally past the aluminum doors,” Nick said. “I haven’t yet walked in that direction. There could be something. What do you expect to find, Wayne?”

  “I don’t know. A computer of some kind. A machine. A robot.”

  “There is no electricity here. How would a machine work?”

  Wayne shook his head. The rucksack was hanging on his shoulders and the hunting knife was clutched in his hand.

  “I’ve no idea. Perhaps there is nothing. Perhaps the alter egos just developed a will of their own. Like a virus. An illness. Perhaps they brought something with them from earth.”

  Nick nodded his head. “A virus sounds plausible.”

  Hiroshi walked silently next to them with the sword resting on his right shoulder. Then he stopped, bent down, put the sword down in front of his feet and started to tie his shoelace. Locked in conversation, Wayne and Nick walked on.

  For Wayne it was a strange experience to walk in this grayness. He could see nothing, only a single shade of gray, but not like the fog in the mountains. The only color in this place was the walls, doors and furniture they came across periodically in their five pace radius.

  “Help!” Hiroshi yelled and Wayne swung around.

  Alter Hiroshi had one arm locked firmly around the huge bowtie on Hiroshi’s neck. His other hand held Hiroshi’s left arm against the side of his body. The sword was lying on the grayness at their feet.

  Very slowly Nick came up behind Wayne. He aimed in the direction of the two Hiroshi’s. Wayne, with the hunting-knife still in his hand, quickly put his index fingers in his ears.

  “Now!” Hiroshi shouted and bent down. He pulled alter Hiroshi with him over his back. Alter Hiroshi’s head and back were unmissable targets.

  The flash from a single shot erupted, the sound deadened, more like a cough than a bang, almost like shooting with a silenced weapon.

  The two Hiroshi’s vanished immediately.

  Wayne turned towards Nick and pulled his fingers from his ears. “Take five,” he said and they slapped their open hands against one another’s. “Now it’s only you and me, Nick. How many bullets are left?”

  “Two. One for you and one for me.”

  “It’s not really going to work like that, is it?” Wayne asked.

  “I doubt it. I don’t know what we’re going to do next.”

  Nick went to pick up Hiroshi’s sword. He showed four fingers to Wayne and then they walked on.

  “Ulrich and I had both promised Hiroshi to send him money to buy a new sword. I hope Ulrich will keep his word.”

  “What about you?” Wayne asked.

  “I have committed murder. If I go back to earth, I’m going to sit in jail for a very long time. Nobody will believe that it was an accident.” Nick shook his head. “Who carries a pistol with him and keeps his finger on the trigger? Here I’m free. If you leave your rucksack here, I’ll be able to keep going for a few weeks more. Maybe my alter ego doesn’t want to take my place. What is he going to gain by that? I think even an alter ego doesn’t want to go to jail. He’d be better off stored here. And, because I’m here in this dimension, my alter ego is also free. He can run around as he pleases. He’s not one of those specks of light anymore as we presume the alter egos are.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Fortunately not.”

  “But Chris was. Were there any kids?”

  “Luckily no. He wasn’t married long.”

  They walked further in silence. Wayne forced himself not to think of any schemes to get his alter ego in the open, because then it wouldn’t work. The plan with the shoelace and Hiroshi, was plan three. Tammy’s plan. While they were walking they showed three fingers to each other and initiated plan three. It worked out perfectly. Nobody had thought of anything, they had just acted and reacted.

  To shut off your thoughts like that is somewhat of a skill, Wayne thought. Something that he was sure all of them had learned how to do here, today. In this nightmarish dimension they had learned a lot of things. Things like: To cherish people as they are. To make strangers your friends. To put someone else before yourself.

  He hoped passionately that everyone had returned to their homes safely. Success in this self-ordained mission was everything to Wayne. It was the most important thing he had ever done. Or else his coming here was in vain.

  It was increasingly unlikely that Nick and he would escape this place so easily. By now their alter egos would probably realize that they had been outwitting the others one by one. Alter Wayne and Nick’s other self would be very careful. They would almost certainly hatch some scheme of their own, or perhaps just wait until their two victims were weak from hunger and thirst. And that could take weeks.

  Wayne didn’t want to hang around this place for weeks . . . The Alter Ego Dimension may be cold, but it isn’t cool.

  His parents must be anxious for his safety and furious because of his disobedience. He had ignored their specific instructions to leave any rescue attempt to Interpol. Should he ever get home, his mother would ground him for at least a year. He wondered if his dad had talked to Interpol yet. Would a heavily armed police force try and play Snap to come and rescue him? All his notes were still lying on his desk. If anybody should follow them precisely, they would be able to make the game appear. He just hoped his father wouldn’t insist on coming too, or even coming alone, since the game doesn’t tell you how to leave the Snap dimension again.

  Here you have to outwit your alter self.

  “Something smells bad,” Wayne said, after a while.

  “I smell it too. Maybe it’s the place where Ulrich and Hiroshi had left Chris’s body,” Nick answered. “You know, I feel really bad that he was just left there. We can’t even bury him, because the ground by the tree is barely a meter deep. If only we could take him back to earth.”

  A light pink wall came into sight and the bad smell intensified. Nick took a peek at the back of the wall and called to Wayne.

  “Yes, here lies poor Chris. Stripped of trousers, socks and shoes. Lucky he had underpants on. Your Tammy borrowed his clothes.”

  “My Tammy?” Wayne said. “I think she’s Ulrich’s now.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Nick laughed. “I reckon they weren’t much more than friends.”

  Wayne peered around the wall. The smell made his stomach turn. He felt nausea rise up inside him, a burning, bitter taste.
<
br />   “If your alter ego shows up, while you cling to Chris, I could make you vanish and you’d take Chris with you. Just like Ulrich took Tammy with him. We don’t know where Tammy went, but we know she’s gone from here.” Nick glanced at Wayne.

  Wayne shook his head. The smell and the thought of touching a dead body were very upsetting. Never in his life was he going to do that.

  Nick continued: “Maybe if you take him with you, he can be buried or be cremated back home.”

  “They might think I killed him,” Wayne said, but realized he could easily explain that he didn’t. “Do you have a phone number or address for his wife . . . widow?” Wayne held his left hand over his nose and stepped away from the wall. He was sick of the smell of the dead. It was predominant.

  “Yes, I’ll give them to you.”

  Wayne and Nick took out their phones from their pockets, switch them on and then Wayne saved Chris’s widow’s number and address into the phone memory. There were still no signal or messages on their phones and they switched them back off. Save the battery power, because it was of no use anyway in this dimension.

  “Hallo.”

  It was merely a whisper, but it made Wayne and Nick spin around and stand back to rucksack-back. Nick held the sword ready and Wayne his hunting knife.

  “Who’re . . . ? Wayne started to ask and then saw Nick’s head peering around the pink wall.

  “Don’t shoot, I want to talk,” the head said and Wayne assumed it must be the other Nick, because Nick with the scarf, was still behind him.

  “Step into the open so we can see you,” Nick ordered.

  With his hands above his head, alter Nick stepped from behind the wall.

  “I won’t try to overpower you, Nick, because you’re right. I don’t want to go to jail. But I can’t send you back until I die. Not unless you kill me. The Snap game changes things. You don’t come here as a speck of light or energy, but as a complete human being.” He paused and slowly lowered his hands. “Listen, Nick, if we work together, I’ll help you kill Wayne’s other self. Then Wayne can pull you back to earth with him.”

  He paused and slowly lowered his hands.

  “What’s going to happen to you then?” Nick demanded.

  “I’ll wander around here until you die on earth,” his alter ego answered. “When an alter ego takes on his human form in this dimension, he cannot go back into storage. He cannot become a speck of light again. My light has gone forever. But I don’t mind. I’ll help you. I have to help you, because you know, Nick, I’m your good other self. I could never have killed Chris.”

  “But I didn’t deliberately murder him . . . ”

  “Then why was your finger on the trigger?” asked alter Nick.

  “I don’t know.”

  The alter ego’s plan to come and help them sounded like an excellent idea to Wayne. It didn’t matter to him who had intended to pull the trigger or why. He wanted to get out of here. He wanted to go and see what had happened to Tammy.

  Plan number four had started. It was Nick’s plan. He had written down that they should start a conversation about jail to lure his alter ego out. They just hadn’t the slightest idea how it would pan out after the conversation started. Now they could see that it had gotten alter Nick thinking. And they were right—he didn’t want to go to jail.

  “Is there a computer or something here that controls the alter egos?” Wayne asked. While there was an alter someone or something here that he could actually hold a conversation with, he wanted answers to his questions.

  “Those millions of lights are alive, aren’t they?” the real Nick asked.

  “Billions of specks of light and energy. Of course they’re alive. I was one of them before you came here. It’s terrible to be one of them, stored there. You know you’re only hanging around with nothing to think about or do, waiting for a chance to go to earth for a few minutes. Now and then a speck will dare to float through this dull grayness. But it’s very, very lonely. As a speck, you can only float about.”

  “So who’s controlling you?” Wayne asked again. “Or what?”

  “I don’t really know. Somewhere in America, a brilliant professor had a son who was very bad, an evil child. The boy had to take medication just to be nearly normal. The professor experimented on his son, trying to split his personality in two. He used drugs and electric currents. Then suddenly, he had two identical boys. A good one and the other bad. Obviously, the professor liked the good one better and taught the alter ego to say ‘snap’ every time it approached so that he could quickly tell the two boys apart. Otherwise he would have to do a personality test or something. Because they were more than just identical. They were the same boy.

  “The professor had managed, in some way or another, to banish his real son as the alter ego. Something that would appear only occasionally, when the good son wants him. How he managed to do that, I really don’t know. I’m no scientist. It has something to do with nanotechnology, Skype, the Internet and invisible energy waves. It was from then on that we alter egos, through the Snap game, could become humans.”

  “So, a father permanently banished his real son to this dimension, and kept the alter ego on earth,” Wayne exclaimed. “That’s horrible!”

  “Wayne, I think you should start singing again. You mustn’t know my plan to get you home,” Nick ordered. He sounded in a hurry.

  “Okay.”

  Wayne went to sit with his rucksack on his back against the pink wall. He kept his hunting knife ready in front of him. Then he stared to sing “Every Breath You Take” aloud.

  Wayne could hear the two Nicks talking in the background, but because he was singing he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  Nick showed him with his hand that he could stop his singing.

  “Clear your mind, Wayne. Stop thinking,” said Nick with the scarf. “Take your rucksack from your back and take out that thick rope that you brought with you. Tie one end around your waist and give me the other end. Alter Nick and I are going for a little walk to do some more planning. Sing, if you don’t know how to keep your mind busy, but be on the lookout for your alter ego. Don’t hesitate to stab him with your knife. And stab to kill. It’s the only way you’re going to get home.”

  “But where’re you going?” Wayne didn’t want to be left alone.

  “Sing, Wayne, sing!” was the only answer he got and he knew that Nick didn’t want him to think about any plan. They couldn’t risk putting their plan to get home in jeopardy.

  He took the rucksack from his back and put it against the pink wall. Then he took the rope out and tied it around his waist. He went to sit with his back to the wall and could still smell the faint smell of the dead behind the wall.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  WHILE WAYNE WAS SINGING, he checked the knot in the rope that he had tied around his waist. The hook was hooked onto his belt. He followed the rope with his eyes up to the point where it disappeared behind the pink wall. He assumed that Nick had tied the rope around his own waist too, so that they could disappear together like Tammy and Ulrich. He was very curious about what Nick’s plan involved, but he knew that he wasn’t supposed to know and that he mustn’t try to work it out. His alter ego was just as clever as him. Alter Wayne would definitely put two and two together and get four. So, he had to keep watch and sing, sing at the top of his voice.

  After a short while, Nick with the scarf reappeared from behind the wall. Wayne immediately noticed that the rope wasn’t tied around his waist.

  “You sing rather nicely,” Nick said soothingly. “Did you sing in your school choir?”

  Nick came to sit next to him.

  Wayne frowned and then started to laugh.

  “Oh no, my dad said singing was for sissies. Did you sing in your school choir?” Wayne asked.

  He knew they must have this stupid conversation to distract his thoughts from any plans.

  “No, my other self wouldn’t let me. I mean, I’m no singer. But maybe my alte
r ego would have liked to sing, because he said he was my good self.”

  Wayne noticed that Nick didn’t have the sword and the pistol. But Wayne still had his hunting-knife. His other self could come, he thought, and he’d still be able to beat him.

  He stared at the scarf around Nick’s neck. It was the wrong . . .

  “Let’s sing, Nick,” he suggested hastily. “We must sing.”

  Wayne started to sing. Still his thoughts wandered too quickly. He hoped the other Wayne didn’t . . .

  He sang louder, concentrating on each word of the song.

  “Must I take you with me when I disappear, Nick?” Wayne asked.

  He couldn’t endure the strain much longer.

  “No, I can’t live on earth if the other Nick isn’t stored here.”

  Again Wayne started to sing. He must not think about what Nick had just said. He thought about his parents, and the words of the song, and Tammy, and the words, and . . .

  It felt as if he was going crazy.

  Was Tammy’s alter ego going to wander here forever? Or where was Tammy? In Pretoria or Frankfurt or still lost? Or did she make it home safely?

  He felt he was definitely going crazy, losing his focus, or being too focused? His thoughts kept wandering off. He couldn’t stop thinking.

  Just then alter Tammy came walking through the grayness in her bikini. The prettiest smile was on her full lips.

  Wayne’s mouth fell open. He stared at her. Was this how beautiful Tammy looked in her bikini? She has a nubile, supple body, long shapely legs and round hips . . .

  The other Tammy came closer. Wayne gaped at her.

  “Hallo, Wayne,” she greeted him, her voice deeper, suggestive. “I bet you’ve never seen me like this before? I’m prettier than your lovely Rosette. Did you know your Earthly Tammy wished she was as beautiful as Rosette? Look. Look at me. I’m the answer to her prayers. I’m so much prettier.”

  She came and stood in front of him and held out a slender hand to him.