Trial Run: A Short Story

By Calder Ash

TRIAL RUN

From Calder Ash, author of The Recall Threshold

How many versions of you would die to keep living?

Oliver Vale is terrified of death.
Since losing his mother to cancer, every headache feels like a warning. Every missed heartbeat feels like a countdown. Desperate for relief, he signs up for Trial Run, a revolutionary therapy that promises to help people confront mortality through a fully immersive simulated death experience.
For forty-five minutes, Oliver will experience his own death.
Then he'll wake up cured.
Instead, he wakes up in the wrong life.
His flat isn't quite the same. His closest friend remembers a different past. His father is living somewhere he has never been. At first, the differences are small enough to ignore.
Until Oliver discovers that Trial Run was never designed to treat fear.
It was designed to break the barriers between realities.
As the truth behind the experiment unravels, Oliver finds himself trapped between competing versions of existence, pursued by the brilliant and ruthless scientist who started it all. To find his way home, he must answer a terrifying question:

If a better version of your life exists somewhere else... do you have the right to take it?

Trial Run is a gripping psychological sci-fi thriller about grief, identity, and the dangerous temptation to outrun death.

From the author of The Recall Threshold, another dark and thought-provoking tale exploring memory, consciousness, and the fragile nature of reality.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H4SF9DNJ
• ISBN13: 9798180953803
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"