The Reincarnated Copy Boy

A New World

The first thing he noticed was the light.

Not the harsh fluorescent yellow of the copy room, and not the blinding glare of headlights. This was a softer light, warm and diffuse, the kind that suggested late afternoon on a day with no particular agenda. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, the way light behaves in very old churches or in memories of childhood summers.

The second thing he noticed was that he was standing, which seemed very unlikely given the most recent events.

The third thing he noticed was the man.

He was sitting in an armchair that had no obvious reason to be in the middle of an infinite white space, but carried itself with the confidence of furniture that has never questioned its own placement. The man, if that was the right word for him, Ben sensed it was only approximately the right word, the man was old in the way that mountains are old, not as an affliction but as a fundamental quality of his existence. He had a white beard of considerable dignity and the calm, unhurried expression of someone who has not been surprised by anything in a very long time.

He was also, Ben noticed, looking at him with an expression that was unmistakably apologetic.

“Benjamin,” the man said. His voice was the sort of voice that seemed to have existed before words were even invented, and had simply been waiting for them to catch up. “Please, sit down.”

There was a second armchair. Ben didn’t remember it being there a moment ago, but that seemed like a small concern in the context of everything else. So He sat.

“Am I dead?” Ben asked.

“Yes,” the man said. “I’m afraid you are and I am truly sorry about that. Genuinely.”

Ben considered this. “Was it The lorry.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He looked around at the soft, limitless white. “So Is this?”

“It is something in the vicinity of what your world’s various traditions have called by various names,” the man said, with the measured diplomacy of someone who has had this conversation across a significant number of cultures and prefers not to take any sides. “ But Heaven will do, if you need a word for it.”

“Right.” Ben sat with that for a moment. “Am I in trouble? I wasn’t exactly, I mean, I wasn’t a bad person. I don’t think. But I wasn’t really religious either.”

“You’re not in trouble,” the man said. He leaned forward slightly, and the apology in his expression deepened. “Ben. I need to tell you something, and I want to apologise in advance, because it is going to be somewhat difficult to hear.”

“More difficult than finding out I’m dead?”

A small pause. “Comparably difficult, perhaps.” He folded his hands together. “Your death was a mistake.”

Ben stared at him. “What do you mean A mistake?”

“The strings of fate, the mechanisms by which events are arranged and ordered are extraordinarily complex. There are more of them than there are stars in every universe, and they interact in ways that are, even by my standards, occasionally difficult to anticipate.” He paused. “There was a miscalculation. A crossing of threads that should not have crossed. The lorry was not supposed to be on that street at that time. You were not supposed to step off that kerb when you did. The two events were meant to occupy entirely different positions in the weave of things.” Another pause. “But They didn’t.”

The silence that followed had considerable weight.

“So your telling me,” Ben said carefully. “I died because of an admin error.”

“I suppose That is one way to frame it.”

“So The universe made a typo and now I’m dead.”

The man winced very slightly. “I understand that framing too.”

Ben leaned back in his armchair. He thought about Sandra and the Brennan contracts. He thought about the green button. He thought about his father’s voice and his mother’s inflection and the Sunday lunches and the stairwell canteen and all twenty five minutes, or thirty if the lights were against him, of the walk home he would no longer be taking.

“It explains rather a lot, actually,” he said at last.

The man tilted his head.

“The whole everything. The job. The family. The feeling that things were slightly more against me than they really ought to be.” Ben gestured vaguely. “I always thought I was just unlucky. Turns out I was literally cosmically miscalculated.”

“I would not express it exactly”

“Was any of it supposed to happen the way it did? The job, the school, all of it?”

The man looked, for the first time, somewhat uncomfortable. “The specifics of your particular thread were,”

“Worse than they should have been. Weren’t they.”

A long pause. “Let’s just say You were not supposed to spend your life in a copy room,” the man said quietly.

Ben nodded slowly. There was a feeling moving through him that he couldn’t quite name. Not anger, exactly. Not grief. Something closer to the sensation of a very long held breath finally being let go. He had always known, somewhere below the level of words, that the world’s attitude towards him was slightly more dismissive than it had any right to be. Hearing a deity confirm it was, in a bizarre way, something close to a relief.

“Alright,” he said. “So what happens now?”

The man brightened slightly, with the cautious relief of someone delivering bad news who has reached the part where things might improve. “That is precisely what I wanted to discuss with you.” He straightened. “Ben, I cannot give you back your previous life. The thread, once broken, cannot be re-woven into the same pattern. The world you came from has continued without you, and the mechanisms of fate, though imperfect, do not permit the same canvas to be unrolled twice.”

“Okay.”

“What I can do, what I am offering to do, is recompense for the error that was made. It’s something rather different.” He paused with the timing of a man who has had a very long time to practise dramatic effect. “There is another world intact there are many, Ben. Let’s be Frank, it’s Not your world. Its A different one entirely. Different rules, different geography, different history. A world in which the weave of possibility is much wider, and where a man with the right gifts might make of himself whatever he has the will to become.”

Ben looked at him. “You want to send me to another world.”

“I want to offer you a life on another world. There is a distinction.”

“What kind of world?”

“One with considerably more magic than yours,” the man said. “Among other things. Systems of power, systems of trade, structures of society both ancient and evolving. It is a world with considerable room in it for a person of resource and capability.”

“I am not a person of resource and capability,” Ben said. “I’m a copy boy.”

“You were,” the man said. “Here is the other thing I am offering. In recognition of the particular nature of what was taken from you, the unlived potential that you missed out on, the miscalculated thread, I am willing to endow you with certain abilities. Unique ones. Abilities that will serve as the foundation of whatever you choose to build in your new life.”

Ben was quiet for a moment. “What kind of abilities?”

“Abilities,” the man said, and there was something almost warm in his ancient voice now, something that wasn’t quite a smile but lived in the same neighbourhood, “that I think suit you rather specifically.” He rose from the armchair with the unhurried ease of a man who has never once had to rush anywhere. “There are those who are given the gift of combat, or magic, or leadership. These are common enough gifts in the place you are going. But I have thought about you Ben, about your particular story, about what was taken and what might have been, and I believe the gifts I have chosen for you are far more interesting.”

“What are they?” Ben asked. He was leaning forward now, almost without meaning to.

“Your old world had a saying,” the man said. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In your new world, Ben, that principle will be rather more literally true than most people would think possible.” He tilted his head, and the light around him seemed to deepen for just a moment. “And there is another gift, related to a different kind of exchange. A kind of commerce. A connection between things and people and value that most people in your new world will not even know to look for.”

Ben opened his mouth to ask another question, and the man raised one hand.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I truly am. For all of it.” The apology was simple and direct, and it carried a weight that made Ben, inexplicably, believe it completely. “You deserved better than the life you had. And I hope the life you’re being given will be, in time, worth more to you than the one that was lost.”

“Wait,” Ben said, because the light in the room was changing in a way that made the back of his neck prickle with sudden urgency. “Can I, wait, I have questions. A lot of questions. What world? Where? What are the gifts, specifically? Is there anything I need to know? Will I be able to,”

The man smiled. It was a broad, genuine, slightly apologetic smile.

And he snapped his fingers.

The first thing Ben became aware of was the smell.

Pine resin and wet earth and something green and cold and alive that he didn’t have a name for, a smell that simply did not exist in any city he had ever been in. It hit him before anything else did, before the light or the sound or the feeling of ground beneath him, and for a moment all that was all there was, that smell, wild and complicated, telling him without any ambiguity whatsoever that wherever he was, he was not in a copy room.

Then everything else arrived at once.

He was lying on his back. Beneath him was ground, real ground, uneven and slightly damp, covered in a thick layering of dead leaves and moss and the spongy, forgiving give of soil that had never been paved over. Above him, through a canopy of branches so dense they formed something close to a ceiling, he could see slivers of sky in a blue so deep and clean it looked almost artificial.

He sat up straight.

He was in a forest.

Not a park. Not a managed wood with signposted footpaths and dog walkers and litter bins. A forest old and vast and indifferent, the kind that existed on its own terms and acknowledged the presence of human beings only in the most peripheral sense. Trees rose around him in every direction, their trunks broader than he could wrap his arms around, their roots surfacing from the earth in great knotted waves before plunging back down. The undergrowth between them was thick and varied, ferns unfurling in large pale spirals, bushes covered in berries he couldn’t identify, fallen logs so thoroughly colonised by moss and fungi that they had become more landscape than timber.

The light that filtered through the canopy was golden and thick, suggesting late afternoon, but it was a different afternoon than any he had known. Warmer and more golden, with a quality that reminded him of illustrations in childhood books about magical kingdoms.

He was wearing different clothes. He noticed this gradually, in the way you notice something that has been added to a room you know well. His grey office jacket was gone. In its place he wore a plain linen shirt the colour of wheat, a pair of trousers in dark wool that fitted him well, and boots, actual leather boots, heavier than trainers and much more convincingly constructed. There was a pack on the ground beside him a canvas bag, worn but solid, with a buckled flap. He didn’t open it yet.

He stood up. His legs were steady. He was not cold, or hungry, or in pain. Whatever machinery or magic had delivered him here had apparently taken the trouble to do it properly.

He turned in a slow circle.

Forest. In every direction, as far as he could see through the trees and the filtering green gold light, forest. No path. No sign. No building, no road, no sound of traffic or machinery or human activity of any kind. Just the wind moving through the canopy far above, and somewhere in the middle distance, the low, constant sound of running water.

“Alright then,” he said aloud, because it seemed important to establish that he was still capable of speech. His voice sounded very small in all that space. “Okay.”

He had been hit by a lorry. He had been to what was functionally heaven. A being of considerable cosmic seniority had apologised to him for the clerical error that had ended his life and offered him a new one. He had been given unexplained gifts and deposited in an unfamiliar forest on an entirely different world.

He took a long, slow breath of that wild, complicated air.

“It is,” he said, to no one in particular, “still a better Tuesday than the one I was having.”

He reached for the canvas pack and crouched to open the flap. Inside: a water skin, full, a cloth wrapped around what smelled like bread, a small knife in a leather sheath, and beneath all of it, wrapped carefully in oilcloth, a small folded piece of paper. He took it out and unfolded it.

Written on it, in handwriting he didn’t recognise but found oddly legible, were two lines.

The water to the east will find you company.

The gifts you where given will announce themselves.

He folded it back up and put it in his pocket.

The gifts will announce themselves.

He straightened, re buckled the pack, and swung it over one shoulder. The weight of it was reassuring in the way that any concrete, physical thing was reassuring against the vast strangeness of everything else. He turned, trying to locate the sound of running water, and found it somewhere to his right, which given that he had absolutely no idea which direction east was, he decided to take as a reasonable interpretation of the instruction.

He began to walk.

The forest floor was uneven and demanded attention. Roots surfaced unexpectedly, the ground rose and fell in ways that a paved surface never did, and twice he had to duck under branches that seemed to have positioned themselves specifically to catch someone who wasn’t paying attention. But the walking itself was fine. More than fine, actually. There was something in the physicality of it, the requirement to be present and careful, that pushed everything else slightly back and let him simply move.

He thought about what the man had said. Another world, with considerably more magic. Systems of power and trade. A world with considerable room in it.

He thought about the gifts. More interesting than combat or magic or leadership. Your particular story. What was taken and what might have been.

A principle of imitation. And something to do with commerce. With exchange.

He thought about the copy room, and the green button, and the warm smell of toner, and then, with a deliberate effort, he thought about them as something that had happened to someone else in another world, in another life, in a thread that had been cut and could not be re woven.

The sound of water was growing louder. Through the trees ahead he could see the light changing, the canopy thinning, the gold of the afternoon falling in broader shafts to the ground. And he could see, yes, the glint of moving water.

He was perhaps thirty feet from the tree line when it happened.