Jason Dessen lives a pretty mundane life. He teaches physics at a local college and lives in Chicago with his wife Daniela and son Charlie. One evening, he is abducted by a masked man who drugs him. When he wakes up, he stumbles out of a black cube into a laboratory. A large group of people descend upon him, and he basically pieces together that another version of him in this world, who he dubs Jason2.
Jason2 is the chief scientist of the laboratory, and has invented the black cube, a machine which transports poeple between multiple alternate universes created of every possible outcome of every event. In this world, he is single, and Charlie isn’t even in the picture. Desperate to get back to his own world, he escapes into the cube with his counselor Amanda, and after a few trials and errors, finally reaches his own reality.
Here he discovers several alternate Jasons have arrived, each from an alternate outcome of an event in his journey from Jason2’s world to his own. Jason2 attempts to kill him, but he manages to convince Daniela and Charlie that he is the true one, and escapes with them into the cube, to an unknown alternate world.
An excellent, well-written sci-fi thriller, with a thought-provoking premise and realistic characters. It was a joy to read, and the ending is also well-constructed, where Jason has to face off against numerous alternate versions of himself, all of whom want the same thing and all have an equal claim on the prize. Strongly recommend.