Free SNAP! and the Alter Ego Dimension by Ann Hite Kemp Page A

the man inquired again. “And what the hell’s going on here? Why is there a man that looks like my identical twin? Why is he dressed exactly like me? How did . . . did I . . . float here?”
    Hiroshi sighed aloud. Tammy thought he must be getting tired of repeating the same explanation over and over again. She definitely would be.
    The man is a murderer
, she thought,
should they be helping him? Perhaps they should just leave him, let him fend for himself.
    It should be fairly easy for him. After all, he was armed and could obviously defend himself against the other selves in this dimension. They should definitely not share their meager food supplies, the three little birds and the two tiny eggs, with a murderer.
    Tammy spoke up to save Hiroshi the effort of explaining everything again. “You’re not on earth anymore, Mister. The man that looked like you is a copy, a duplicate of . . . yourself.” She nearly said, ‘an evil copy’. But how could something be worse than the original, when the original was a cold blooded killer?
    “He’s your alter ego. Your good self, or your bad self, or your perfect self,” Ulrich put in. “We can’t tell.”
    “Go find him,” Tammy urged the man on. “Because he will keep trying to catch and overpower you. If he succeeds, you will be kept here, in storage, in this dimension, forever. Then he’ll replace you back on earth. You need to find him and kill him. Perhaps then you’ll return to earth. From wherever you came . . . ”
    The man looked at her without any expression on his face. Then he looked at the grayness that surrounded them all, to the tree with the perfect flat leaf canopy on a five meter square hill and the incongruous chunks of warehouse behind and above him. He shook his head in disbelief.
    “The man that you shot, it was him that was transferred here. You only came through because you were standing behind him. Everything that was reflected by that man’s computer screen, or stuff that the monitor could ‘see’ as if in a photo, came with him,” Tammy paused to let the man process what he heard.
    Hiroshi then added: “That’s how it works around here. And that is about all we know.”
    “Really?” the man asked, frowning. He rubbed his chin. “I’m not on planet earth anymore? We’re not on earth?”
    “Right. My other self called it the Alter Ego Dimension,” Tammy said.
    “The
what
? That’s crazy.”
    Everything was too incredible to be easily believed. Tammy looked at her friends, unsure what else she could tell him.
    “What the hell are we supposed to do here?” the man demanded.
    “Nothing,” Hiroshi said.
    It was obviously not explanation enough for the gunman, so Ulrich spoke out to keep him talking and keep him calm.
    “A person gets trapped here, forever, if his other self can overpower him. Sort of shut down, we think, like switching off a computer program. Unless you can overpower him. That’s why he ran away when he realized you were about to shoot him.”
    “So, you should go now. Catch and kill your other self. It’s your only hope,” Tammy wanted to be rid of the killer. “Go find you alter ego.”
    “But he’s got pistol,” Etsu whispered as she stepped even closer to Tammy. “We need the gun. We can shoot alter egos when we’re too weak to fight hand to hand.” She looked at the murderer and asked more loudly. “Why did you kill that man?”
    The man stared at Etsu for a few seconds.
    “I didn’t set out to kill him,” he began, pointing at the corpse. “He, Chris, was my boss. He wouldn’t give me a pay rise, just because his wife was coming on to me,” the man spread his hands and, for a moment, looked really sad. “But I didn’t want anything to do with his damned wife. The more I told him that, the less he listened. He was depressed. He even took drugs to help him, but nothing worked. The depression drove his wife further away from him. He was so miserable. The saddest man I’ve ever seen.” He