"Double Exposure" - May 29, 2025
In a not-to-distant future, an officer of the law encounters a mystery in now-common teleportation...
Every Thursday, Silver Gecko Publishing highlights one of my stories, either a work of short fiction, a novel, or an audiobook. This week’s selection is the short story “Double Exposure,” from the anthology THE GHOST READERS AND OTHER STORIES, available on Kindle, and in paperback.
This is one of my many stories that straddles the genres of science fiction and horror. In the excerpt presented here, you’ll mostly see the science fiction elements. And from that perspective, I have a great love of the setting.
This is a story that inhabits a world of science fiction I have always enjoyed, one of the not-to-distant future that is colored differently mostly by a giant leap in a certain form of technology.
Like Stephen King’s short story “The Jaunt,” this examines some of the ideas around teleportation. Unlike the stories in the Star Trek universe, this takes a darker look at the technology. However, it do not fall into the darkness of whether teleportation is simply annihilation and reconstruction of a copy rather than the original being. That’s for another story.
Still, if you stick with this story, you’ll find some other things lurking in the background.
It is about this time during which I often cut to the Notes section of the published anthology to offer you some insight. However, if I did that here, it would be painfully spoiler-filled.
Still, I enjoy this story so much that I want to offer it to you all for free to see some of my longer-form writing (topping 7000 words, which was long for a short story by a struggling writer in the 90s). So, over the next three weeks, I will be serializing it here. Perhaps by the third installment, I might include my original Notes.
…or as teen author Judy Blume once said: Then again, maybe I won’t.
In either case, enjoy a look into the dark future with “Double Exposure”…
-Kevin Carr
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Illustration by fszalai (@fszalai) from Pixabay
Double Exposure by Kevin Carr
What started out as a fairly routine two-day leave ended in a nightmare for me Friday afternoon. The vacation was ruined before it ever began. And still, even at the very end, there is a mystery.
Things began when I first arrived in the Tele-Depot, as if I simply popped into existence at the start of a movie.
God, I hate re-entry, I thought, running a thick, veined hand through my heavy locks of bright blonde hair. I saw the Tele-Depot erupt into existence around me. Then I hiccupped. I always hiccupped after using telepods. The reassembly procedure shocked my system enough to cause slight discomfort, but never enough to induce Telepod Bends, or TB, a condition involving intense abdominal pain and migraine headaches that five percent of the population suffered.
I moved out of the telepod and into the waiting area of the Tele-Depot. Across the room, reading a hologram, was the short, stubby figure of Jacob McCormick. Half-way through my approach to him, Jacob raised his head from the small display before him. Instantly the tiny man stood and smiled.
“Hi Jacob,” I said, meeting his eyes.
“David,” Jacob said. He stood with his eyes barely up to my chest. I am not a terribly tall man, but I towered over my friend. And with my well-toned physique, even under the thick black trench coat that I wore, I seemed a giant.
But Jacob was a giant in his own way. While short and stubby, roly-poly at only four-foot-ten, Jacob was one of the greatest geniuses of the century. Twelve years ago at the ripe age of fifteen, Jacob developed the “Heisenberg Algorithm,” a massive systematic software package that compensated for the uncertainty experienced in the reassembling of matter in a telepod receiver. That piece of programming alone ushered in the safety net the FCC was waiting for. It allowed human beings free roam of the airwaves in the form of electromagnetic energy signatures. Although he did not create the telepods or the system that ran them – Jacob had not even been born on that advent – he was widely recognized as the pioneer of human travel.
But I did not care about Jacob’s fame any more that I cared about the man’s skimpy height or generous weight. We had been friends ever since grade school, and we enjoyed spending time with each other. We rarely had a chance to meet and catch up on things because of my involvement in the Solar Navy. I was often off-world on an assignment, and Jacob worked far too much and too often to find the time. But for me, Jacob etched out a night or two every few months to spend some quality time with an old friend.
“Been working on anything interesting?” I asked Jacob. Following the influx of patent payments from his Heisenberg Algorithm, he had enough money to retire from his rat race job. However, he kept himself more busy as a freelancer, sometimes tinkering with technical aspects, but other times simply inventing different uses for existing technology.
“A few things,” Jacob replied. A moment of fear washed over his face as he glanced around the Depot. Then, he added softly, “In fact, I’m just wrapping up a project for your types.”
“I thought you didn’t like to take military work.”
“I don’t. I hate the deadlines. I hate the attitudes. I hate the bureaucracy. But I don’t hate the pay. For what they shelled out, I would invent a new use for my own grandmother.”
“C’mon Jacob,” I said. “You don’t need the money. You’ve got enough socked away from other projects to last you ten lifetimes.”
“If that’s right,” a voice called from behind us, “then you won’t mind loaning a bit of that to me then, will ya’?”
We slowly turned around. Behind us stood an emaciated man with long, greasy hair, wearing a soiled woolen coat that stretched to his knees. His eyes were blasted through from repeated use of narcotics and ultra-hallucinogens. A thin bridge of drool connected his lip to his vomit-covered lapel. In his right hand, he held a third-level disrupter.
I almost made a grab for my own Solar Navy issued disrupter, but soon realized that any attempt would be in vain. I was on a two-day leave. It was against regulations to carry a weapon off-duty. Plus, I had just teleported. One of the FCC guidelines is that no firearms or other deadly weapons could be carried on a person through a teleport sequence. Even if contraband was brought into the telepod, the monitoring computers would detect it, and it just wouldn’t come through. Then, it would be lost forever – absorbed into the electromagnetic network, never to rematerialize again.
“Look buddy,” Jacob said, a hint of irritation dancing in his voice. “I don’t carry the cash with me.”
“Don’t shit me,” the man said. “You gotta have something between the two of you. I want it now.” His hand shook on the last word for emphasis. I cringed, half expecting the disrupter to accidentally fire and wipe away half of my torso.
“Here,” Jacob said, holding his arms up. “I’ll give you my cards. I’ll even give you the PIN numbers.”
“I want the cash!”
“I don’t have the cash,” Jacob said, slowly opening his coat in plain view for the mugger to see. “I told you that you can have what I got.”
I felt my gut turn over. What the hell are you doing, Jake? I thought to myself. This man is an ultra-hallucinogenic junkie. There is no reasoning with them. Give him something, even if it is your cheap ninety dollar watch!
“Jacob,” I whispered. “Watch it.”
“I’m just getting my wallet,” Jacob said, apparently to both of us.
But the mugger must not have heard him. Either that, or he did not care. When he saw Jacob reaching inside his coat, he emptied the disrupter’s charger directly into my friend’s chest. A hot sizzling sound ripped through the air as the blaster fire struck home on Jacob’s flesh. Immediately, I reacted.
Leaping forward, I wrenched the gun from the mugger’s hand. He looked into my eyes with fear and surprise. Under the psychotic delusions that framed his face, I saw sanity. This was no ultra-junkie. A real ultra-junkie’s eyes become practically useless, a side effect of the drugs. They never can focus quite right. But this man had the eyes of a sane man. His appearance only gave the semblance of a vagrant.
“Don’t...” he whispered. “I only needed to zap him. They didn’t pay me to kill you.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
He never answered. The murderer darted away, aiming himself toward the nearest exit. But I was fast with the gun; my Solar Navy training paid off, in speed, anyway. Two quick presses of the trigger took care of the criminal. The first blast sailed low and truncated the man’s left leg at the hip, instantly cauterizing the wound. The second shot was the fatal one. As aimed, it would have taken off an arm and kept him disabled, but alive. However, the assassin had faltered the moment his leg left him. Instead, the shot burst over half his torso, disintegrating most of the man’s upper body. What was left – just a half-moon of a man – fell to the dirty floor of the Tele-Depot.
I powered off the disrupter and turned to find out the fate of my friend. When I saw the body, I wished I had never taken my leave.
Jacob lay quartered on the ground. The disrupter blast had completely removed his chest and abdominal area, leaving only his arms, legs, and a lifeless head staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.
Obviously, the junkie was not what he seemed. He was a professional assassin that had been hired for a quick hit. If I had not jumped on him, he would have escaped easily. Probably, he would have ended up dead within a day at the hands of his employers, whoever they might be. But I had inadvertently taken care of that loose end for them. First rule of assassination: kill the assassin.
Shortly after I had fired upon the counterfeit junkie, the interior security cameras alerted the police. Within two minutes, the Depot security was on the scene, and the county police followed not ten minutes later. I was detained for a barrage of questioning and paperwork – all of it routine, but none of it helpful. The entire incident was captured on the security holograms. Even an amateur analysis of the crime footage would reveal that it was an aggravated assault and I had every right to attempt to detain the man. Only dumb luck for the junkie had allowed him to be killed by the disrupter fire.
Fortunately, the cameras’ audio recorders could not discern the tiny snatch of conversation I shared with the assassin. I was not planning on offering that to the authorities just yet. After all, I still did not know who had hired the man.
Following the filling out of the paperwork and answering all of the questions, I finally caught an unscheduled teleport over the thirty mile distance between the Tele-Depot in downtown Cleveland to my suburban apartment in I kept when I was not needed at the base.
It was late when I got home. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed and fall asleep. After entering my apartment, I keyed in the lock-out code on the door and headed to the bathroom. There, I disrobed to my underwear, urinated, and brushed my teeth. As I exited the bathroom and headed for the comfort of my bed, I realized something.
Jacob was a well known figure throughout the country and the world. He was not really someone who the public would eyeball out of a crowd, but his name carried the fame. When the press got a hold of the Tele-Depot incident, obituaries would be spread across the information super-highway. I, as one of his closest friends, would be an excellent target for personal interviews about the biggest genius of the land, dead at twenty-seven. The tabloid press – and mainstream press, for that matter – would all scramble for the vulturous invasion into grieving lives. There would be questions about ultra-hallucinogenic drugs and if they were the root cause of the crime. There would be questions about the “reformable” (a politically-correct term for the drug addicted crazies in society) and his poverty. Did that drive him to the crime? Was society responsible? Was I right in taking his life? Could he have been raised differently as a child? If he had survived his crime, would he be deserving of the death penalty, the human-guinea-pig experiment sentence, or the psychic probe guilt sentence?
I did not feel up to answering those questions in the next few days – or for any indeterminate amount of time for that matter. Although I alone knew the man was an assassin, and not a real junkie, I would voice my own personal feelings on their questions. My responses would be bitter and seemingly cruel, cutting too close to the bleeding hearts of the world:
“Yes, the bastard deserved it,” I would say. “I didn’t mean to disintegrate half his body, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. If I had it to do again, I would have even let him suffer a bit before I shot him. After all, he took my friend’s life.”
That would definitely be far too bitter for the media. Although it rang with truth, it would not improve my appearance as a semi-public military figure. I knew that I would calm down in time and not feel their vindictiveness, but I would never change my mind on the fate of the man who murdered my friend. I killed the bastard, and he got what he deserved. I only wished that I could have extracted the information of the man’s employers before he rose in flaming ashes.
I was not up for the calls I would get, so I bypassed my bedroom and entered the dark kitchen to disconnect my media and intercom system. As I was unplugging the unit from the power supply, I heard a voice echo from behind me.
“What the hell happened tonight, David?” it said.
Slowly, I turned around to see a shadowy figure sitting in the chair on the far side of my kitchen table. Ice rippled through my innards, creating a vast emptiness inside.
Could it be? I thought.
My hand fumbled behind me for the light switch on the wall. After some scrambling, my middle finger found it and flipped it on. The kitchen came to life with light, and I saw the identity of the man in my apartment.
It was the last person I expected to see.
It was Jacob McCormick!…
TO BE CONTINUED!