The first time Dr. Kara Ellison died, she was thirty-seven years old and alone in a sealed lab beneath the Nevada desert. The second time, she woke up in the same lab, same hour, same heartbeat—but the bullet was gone, and the man who pulled the trigger had vanished.

   She didn’t scream. She didn’t panic. She just stared at the bloodless floor and whispered, “It worked.”

   She had spent the last decade chasing the fringes of quantum theory, not for fame or funding, but for something deeper: a way to cheat death. 

   Literally. 

   Her obsession began the night her twin brother, Eli, died in a car crash. 

   They were born seconds apart, but Kara always felt like Eli was the older one—wiser, warmer, the one who made her laugh when equations failed and the world felt too sharp.

   After his death, she became a ghost in her own skin. She stopped teaching. Stopped dating. Stopped sleeping. She started building.

   The Reaper Protocol was her answer to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. 

   If every decision, every particle interaction, spawned a new universe, then somewhere—always—there existed a version of reality where she didn’t die. The trick was finding it. Or more precisely: falling into it.

   The protocol involved a neural lattice, a quantum entanglement chamber, and a moment of terminal collapse. The subject had to die. Not almost die. Not simulate death. Actual, irreversible biological death. The lattice would then collapse the wave function of her consciousness into the nearest viable universe where she survived.

   It was suicide as a vehicle. Resurrection as a side effect.

   She tested it on rats. Then monkeys. Then herself. And now she was alive.

   But something was wrong.

   The lab was quiet. Too quiet. Her assistant, Raj, was gone. The monitors were blank. The emergency lights flickered like dying stars. She checked the security feed. Nothing. No record of the man who shot her. No record of her death.

   She ran a diagnostic on the lattice. It had activated. She had jumped.

   But to where?

   She stepped outside the lab and found the desert unchanged. The sky was bruised with twilight. The stars blinked like indifferent gods. She drove to the nearest town—Dry Creek, population 412—and found it abandoned. Cars sat idle. Doors hung open. Radios played static.

   She wasn’t alone. But she wasn’t with people, either.

   She returned to the lab and ran a deeper scan. The lattice had collapsed her consciousness into a universe where she survived—but the parameters were off. Something had shifted. The world was similar, but not identical. A 0.01% deviation. Enough to erase a town. Enough to erase Raj.

   She tried again.

   This time, she used a syringe. Painless. Clean. She felt the cold rush of death and then—

   She woke up in the lab. Again.

   Raj was back. The monitors were active. The town was alive.

   But her hands were covered in blood.

  She hadn’t used a syringe. She had slit her wrists.

   She hadn’t died peacefully. She had screamed.

   And Raj was staring at her like she was a stranger.

   “Kara?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

   She nodded. “Just tired.”

   He didn’t remember the previous jump. Of course he didn’t. That version of Raj was gone. This was a new one. A nearby universe. A close echo.

   She ran a scan. The deviation was smaller this time. 0.005%.

   Better. But not perfect.

   She tried again. And again. And again.

   Each time, she woke up in a slightly different world. Sometimes the lab was colder. Sometimes Raj had a beard. Sometimes the town had a different mayor. Sometimes the stars were wrong.

   But she was always alive.

   She began to notice patterns. The more she jumped, the more the deviations accumulated. Her consciousness was drifting—like a boat caught in quantum tide. She was no longer collapsing into the nearest viable universe. She was sliding sideways, deeper into the multiverse.

   And something was following her.

   She saw it first in the corner of her eye. A shadow that didn’t belong. A flicker in the lattice. A whisper in the static.

   Then she saw it in the mirror.

   It looked like her. But older. Hollow. Eyes like black holes.

   She called it the shudder.

   It didn’t speak. It didn’t move. It just watched.

   She tried to jump away from it. She increased the lattice’s sensitivity. She recalibrated the entanglement vectors. She died a hundred more times.

   But the shudder followed.

   Sometimes it appeared in the lab. Sometimes in the town. Sometimes in her dreams.

   She began to suspect the truth. The shudder wasn't following her. It was her.

   A version of Kara who had jumped too many times. A version who had drifted too far. A version who had lost her anchor to reality.

   Quantum immortality had a cost.

   Each jump preserved her consciousness—but not her soul. Not her memory. Not her emotional continuity. She was becoming fragmented. Disconnected. A mosaic of selves.

   She stopped jumping. She tried to live. She reconnected with Raj. She rebuilt the lab. She wrote papers. She gave talks.

   But she couldn’t sleep. The shudder was always there. Watching. Waiting.

   One night, she confronted it. She stood in the lattice chamber and stared into the mirror.

   “I know what you are,” she said.

   The shudder tilted its head.

   “You’re me. The end of me. The version that forgot why she started. The version that kept jumping until nothing mattered.”

   The shudder smiled.

   It was the first time it had ever moved.

   “You’re not immortal,” Kara whispered. “You’re just lost.”

   The shudder stepped forward. Kara activated the lattice. But this time, she didn’t die.

   She inverted the protocol. Instead of collapsing into a universe where she survived, she collapsed into one where she never built the lattice.

   She woke up in a hospital bed.

   Her brother, Eli, was alive.

   She was thirty-seven. She was a physicist. But she had never chased quantum immortality. She had never built the Reaper Protocol. She had mourned Eli. She had healed.

   She cried for hours.

   Eli held her hand and said, “You okay, sis?”

   She nodded, “I think I am now.”

   She never spoke of the jumps. Never rebuilt the lattice. Never chased immortality.

  But sometimes, in the corner of her eye, she saw the shudder.

  And sometimes, in the darkness, she heard it whispering terrible things.