by Blake Crouch
The sound of a buzzer startles me, its echo fading down the corridor behind us.
The doors open slowly.
I step into a hangar.
From the rafters high above, lights blaze down, illuminating a twelve-foot cube the color of gunmetal.
My pulse rate kicks up.
I can’t believe what I’m looking at.
Leighton must sense my awe, because he says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
It is exquisitely beautiful.
At first, I think the hum inside the hangar is coming from the lights, but it can’t be. It’s so deep I can feel it at the base of my spine, like the ultralow-frequency vibration of a massive engine.
I drift toward the box, mesmerized.
I never fathomed I would see it in the flesh at this scale.
Up close, it isn’t smooth but an irregular surface that reflects the light in such a way as to make it seem multifaceted, almost translucent.
Leighton gestures to the pristine concrete floor gleaming under the lights. “We found you unconscious right over there.”
We walk slowly alongside the box.
I reach out, let my fingers graze the surface.
It’s cold to the touch.
Leighton says, “Eleven years ago, after you won the Pavia, we came to you and said we had five billion dollars. We could’ve built a spaceship, but we gave it all to you. To see what you could accomplish with unlimited resources.”
I ask, “Is my work here? My notes?”
“Of course.”
We reach the far side of the box.
He leads me around the next corner.
On this side, a door has been cut into the cube.
“What’s inside?” I ask.
“See for yourself.”
The base of the door frame sits about a foot off the surface of the hangar.
I lower the handle, push it open, start to step inside.
Leighton puts a hand on my shoulder.
“No further,” he says. “For your own safety.”
“It’s dangerous?”
“You were the third person to go inside. Two more went in after you. So far, you’re the only one to return.”
“What happened to them?”
“We don’t know. Recording devices can’t be used inside. The only report we can hope for at this point has to come from someone who manages to make it back. Like you did.”
The inside of the box is empty, unadorned, and dark.
Walls, floor, and ceiling made of the same material as the exterior.
Leighton says, “It’s soundproof, radiation-proof, airtight, and, as you might have guessed, puts out a strong magnetic field.”
As I close the door, a deadbolt thunks into place on the other side.
Staring at the box is like seeing a failed dream raised from the dead.
My work in my late twenties involved a box much like this one. Only it was a one-inch cube designed to put a macroscopic object into superposition.
Into what we physicists sometimes call, in what passes for humor among scientists, cat state.
As in Schrödinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment.
Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying.
It’s an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead.
And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states.
In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes.
For instance, a dead cat.
And that becomes our reality.
But then things get really weird.
Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead?
The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes.
That when we open the box, there’s a branch.
One universe where we discover a dead cat.
One where we discover a live one.
And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live.
And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird.
Because those kinds of observations happen all the time.
So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there’s an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse—where everything that can happen will happen.
My concept for my tiny cube was to create an environment protected from observation and external stimuli so my macroscopic object—an aluminum nitride disc measuring 40 µm in length and consisting of around a trillion atoms—could be free to exist in that undetermined cat state and not decohere due to interactions with its environment.
I never cracked that problem before my funding evaporated, but apparently some other version of me did. And then scaled the entire concept up to an inconceivable level. Because if what Leighton is saying is true, this box does something that, according to everything I know about physics, is impossible.
I feel shamed, like I lost a race to a better opponent. A man of epic vision built this box.
A smarter, better me.
I look at Leighton.
“Does it work?”
He says, “The fact that you’re standing here beside me would appear to suggest that it does.”
“I don’t get it. If you wanted to put a particle in a quantum state in a lab, you’d create a deprivation chamber. Remove all light, suck out the air, turn down the temperature to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It would kill a human being. And the larger you go, the more fragile it all becomes. Even though we’re underground, there are all sorts of particles—neutrinos, cosmic rays—passing through that cube that could disturb a quantum state. The challenge seems insurmountable.”
“I don’t know what to tell you….You surmounted it.”
“How?”
Leighton smiles. “Look, it made sense when you explained it to me, but I can’t exactly explain it back. You should read your notes. What I can tell you is that box creates and sustains an environment where everyday objects can exist in a quantum superposition.”
“Including us?”
“Including us.”
Okay.
Though everything I know tells me it’s impossible, I apparently figured out a way to create a fertile quantum environment at the macro scale, perhaps utilizing the magnetic field to couple objects on the inside to the atomic-scale quantum system.
But what about the occupant inside the box?
Occupants are observers too.
We live in a state of decoherence, in one reality, because we’re constantly observing our environment and collapsing our own wave function.
There has to be something else at work.
“Come on,” Leighton says. “I want to show you something.”
He leads me toward a bank of windows on the side of the hangar that faces the door to the box.
Swiping his keycard at another secured door, he shows me into a room that resembles a com center or mission control.
At the moment, only one of the workstations is occupied, by a woman with her feet kicked up on a desk, jamming out to a pair of headphones, oblivious to our entry.
“That station is manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We all take turns waiting for someone to return.”
Leighton slides in behind a computer terminal, inputs a series of passcodes, and dives through several folders until he finds what he’s looking for.
He opens a video
file.
It’s HD, shot from a camera facing the door of the box, probably positioned right above these windows in mission control.
Across the bottom of the screen, I see a timestamp from fourteen months ago, the clock keeping time down to a hundredth of a second.
A man moves into frame and approaches the box.
He wears a backpack over a streamlined space suit, the helmet for which he carries under his left arm.
At the door, he turns the lever and pushes it open. Before stepping inside, he looks back over his shoulder, straight into the camera.
It’s me.
I wave, step into the box, and shut myself inside.
Leighton accelerates the playback speed.
I watch the box sit motionless as fifty minutes races by.
He slows the video back down when someone new emerges into frame.
A woman with long brown hair walks toward the box and opens the door.
The camera feed switches to a head-mounted GoPro.
It pans the interior of the box, a light shining across the naked walls and floor, glinting off the uneven surface of the metal.
“And poof,” Leighton says. “You’re gone. Until…” He fires up another file. “Three and a half days ago.”
I see myself stagger out of the box and crash to the floor, almost like I was pushed out.
More time elapses, and then I watch the hazmat team appear and hoist me onto a gurney.
I can’t get over how entirely surreal it feels to be viewing a playback of the exact moment when the nightmare that is now my life began.
My first seconds in this brave, new, fucked-up world.
—
One of the sleeping quarters on sublevel one has been prepared for me, and it’s a welcome upgrade from the cell.
Luxurious bed.
Full bath.
A desk with a vase of fresh-cut flowers that have perfumed the entire space.
Leighton says, “I hope you’ll be more comfortable here. I’m just going to say it: please don’t try to kill yourself, because we’re all on the lookout for it. There will be people right outside this door to stop you, and then you’ll have to live in a straitjacket in that disgusting cell downstairs. If you start feeling desperate, just pick up the phone and tell whoever answers to come find me. Don’t suffer in silence.”
He touches the laptop sitting on the desk.
“It’s loaded with your work product from the last fifteen years. Even goes back to your pre–Velocity Laboratories research. There’s no password. Feel free to explore. Maybe it’ll jog something loose.” On his way out the door, he glances back, says, “By the way, this is going to stay locked.” He smiles. “But only for your safety.”
—
I sit in bed with the laptop, attempting to wrap my head around the sheer volume of information contained in the tens of thousands of folders.
The organization is by year, and it goes back to before I won the Pavia, to my grad-school days, when the first intimation of my life’s ambition began to present itself.
The early folders contain work familiar to me—drafts of a paper that would ultimately become my first published work, abstracts from related articles, everything building toward my stint in that University of Chicago lab and the construction of the first tiny cube.
The cleanroom data is meticulously sorted.
I read the files on the laptop until I start seeing double, and even then I push on, watching my work advance beyond where I know it stopped in my version of my life.
It’s like forgetting everything about yourself and then reading your own biography.
I worked every day.
My notes became better, more thorough, more specific.
But still I struggled to find a way to create the superposition of my macroscopic disc, the frustration and despair bleeding into my notes.
I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.
Killing the light on the bedside table, I pull up the blankets.
It’s pitch-black in here.
The sole point of light in the room is a green dot high up the wall that faces my bed.
It’s a camera, filming in night vision.
Someone is watching my every move, my every breath.
I close my eyes, try to tune it out.
But I see the same thing that haunts me every time I shut my eyes: the blood running down her ankle, across her bare foot.
The black hole between her eyes.
It would be so easy to crack.
To fly apart.
In the darkness, I touch the piece of thread on my ring finger and remind myself that my other life is real, that it’s still out there somewhere.
Like standing on a beach as the tide sucks the sand beneath my feet back out to sea, I can feel my native world, and the reality that supports it, pulling away.
I wonder: If I don’t fight hard enough against it, will this reality slowly click in and carry me off?
—
I slam awake.
Someone is knocking on the door.
I hit the light and stumble out of bed, disoriented, no idea how long I’ve been sleeping.
The knocking gets louder.
I say, “I’m coming!”
I try to open the door, but it’s locked from the outside.
I hear a deadbolt turn.
The door opens.
It takes me a moment to realize when and where I’ve seen this woman in a black wrap dress, standing in the hallway holding two cups of coffee and a notebook under one arm. Then it hits me—here. She ran, or tried to run, that bizarre debriefing on the night I came to consciousness outside the box.
“Jason, hi. Amanda Lucas.”
“Right, yes.”
“Sorry, I didn’t want to just barge in.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Do you have some time to speak with me?”
“Um, sure.”
I let her in and close the door.
I pull out the chair from the desk for her.
She holds up a paper cup. “I brought you coffee if you’re interested.”
“Please,” I say, taking it. “Thank you.”
I sit on the end of the bed.
The coffee warms my hands.
She says, “They had this chocolate-hazelnut nonsense, but you like straight-up regular, right?”
I take a sip. “Yeah, this is perfect.”
She sips her coffee, says, “So this must be strange for you.”
“You could say that.”
“Leighton said he mentioned that I might come talk with you?”
“He did.”
“Good. I’m the lab psychiatrist. I’ve been here almost nine years. I’m board-certified and all that. Ran a private practice before I joined Velocity Laboratories. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
“Okay.”
“You reported to Leighton…” She opens her notebook. “Quote, ‘There’s just this gaping hole where the last ten years should be.’ Is that accurate?”
“It is.”
She scribbles something with a pencil onto the page.
“Jason, have you recently experienced or witnessed a life-threatening event that caused intense fear, helplessness, or horror?”
“I saw Daniela Vargas shot in the head right in front of me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You people murdered my…this woman I was with. Right before I was brought here.” Amanda looks legitimately stunned. “Wait. You didn’t know about that?”
Swallowing, she recovers her composure.
“That must have been horrifying, Jason.” She says it like she doesn’t believe me.
“Do you think I’m making it up?”
“I’m curious if you remember anything from the box itself, or your travels during the last fourteen months.”
“Like I said, I have no memory of it.”
She makes another note, says, “Interestingly, and maybe you don’t r
ecall this…but during that very short debriefing, you did say your last memory was of being in a bar in Logan Square.”
“I don’t remember saying that. I was pretty out of it at the time.”
“Of course. So no memories from the box. All right, these next few are yes-or-no questions. Any problems sleeping?”
“No.”
“Increased irritability or anger?”
“Not really.”
“Problems concentrating?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you feel on guard?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Have you noticed that you have an exaggerated startle response?”
“I’m…not sure.”
“Sometimes, an extreme stress situation can trigger what’s called psychogenic amnesia, which is abnormal memory functioning in the absence of structural brain damage. I have a feeling we’re going to rule out any structural damage with the MRI today. Which means your memories from the last fourteen months are still there. They’re just buried deep in your mind. It’ll be my job to help you recover them.”
I sip the coffee. “How exactly?”
“There are a number of treatment options we can explore. Psychotherapy, cognitive therapy, creative therapy. Even clinical hypnosis. I just want you to know that nothing is more important to me than helping you through this.”
Amanda stares into my eyes with a sudden, unnerving intensity, searching them as if the mysteries of our existence have been written on my corneas.
“You really don’t know me?” she asks.
“No.”
Rising from the chair, she takes her things.
“Leighton will be up soon to take you down for the MRI. I just want to help you, Jason, however I can. If you don’t remember me, that’s okay. Just know that I’m your friend. Everyone in this place is your friend. We’re here because of you. We’re all taking it for granted that you know that, so please hear me: we’re in awe of you and your mind and this thing you built.”
At the door she stops, looks back at me.
“What’s the woman’s name again? The one you think you saw murdered.”
“I don’t think I saw. I saw. And her name is Daniela Vargas.”
—
I spend the rest of the morning at the desk, eating breakfast and scrolling through files that chronicle scientific achievements of which I have no memory.
Despite my present circumstances, it’s exhilarating to read my notes, see them progressing toward my breakthrough with the miniature cube.