by Blake Crouch
The solution to creating the superposition of my disc?
Superconducting qubits integrated with an array of resonators capable of registering simultaneous states as vibrations. Sounds incomprehensibly boring, but it’s groundbreaking.
It won me the Pavia.
It apparently landed me here.
Ten years ago, my first day on the job at Velocity Laboratories, I wrote an intriguing mission statement to the entire team, essentially bringing them up to speed on the concepts of quantum mechanics and the multiverse.
One section in particular, a discussion about dimensionality, catches my eye.
I wrote…
We perceive our environment in three dimensions, but we don’t actually live in a 3-D world. 3-D is static. A snapshot. We have to add a fourth dimension to begin to describe the nature of our existence.
The 4-D tesseract doesn’t add a spatial dimension. It adds a temporal one.
It adds time, a stream of 3-D cubes, representing space as it moves along time’s arrow.
This is best illustrated by looking up into the night sky at stars whose brilliance took fifty light-years to reach our eyes. Or five hundred. Or five billion. We’re not just looking into space, we’re looking back through time.
Our path through this 4-D spacetime is our worldline (reality), beginning with our birth and ending with our death. Four coordinates (x, y, z, and t [time]) locate a point within the tesseract.
And we think it stops there, but that’s only true if every outcome is inevitable, if free will is an illusion, and our worldline is solitary.
What if our worldline is just one of an infinite number of worldlines, some only slightly altered from the life we know, others drastically different?
The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe.
What if that’s true?
What if we live in a fifth-dimensional probability space?
What if we actually inhabit the multiverse, but our brains have evolved in such a way as to equip us with a firewall that limits what we perceive to a single universe? One worldline. The one we choose, moment to moment. It makes sense if you think about it. We couldn’t possibly contend with simultaneously observing all possible realities at once.
So how do we access this 5-D probability space?
And if we could, where would it take us?
—
Leighton finally comes for me in the early evening.
We take the stairwell this time, but instead of heading all the way down to the infirmary, we get off on sublevel two.
“Slight change of plan,” he tells me.
“No MRI?”
“Not just yet.”
He shows me into a place I’ve been before—the conference room where Amanda Lucas tried to debrief me the night I woke up outside the box.
The lights have been dimmed.
I ask, “What’s going on?”
“Have a seat, Jason.”
“I don’t under—”
“Have a seat.”
I pull out the chair.
Leighton sits across from me.
He says, “I hear you’ve been going through your old files.”
I nod.
“Ringing any bells?”
“Not really.”
“That’s too bad. I was hoping a trip down memory lane might spark something.”
He straightens.
His chair creaks.
It’s so quiet I can hear the lightbulbs humming above me.
From across the table, he watches me.
Something feels off.
Wrong.
Leighton says, “My father founded Velocity forty-five years ago. In my old man’s time, things were different. We built jet engines and turbofans, and it was more about keeping the big government and corporate contracts than doing cutting-edge scientific exploration. There’s just twenty-three of us now, but one thing hasn’t changed. This company has always been a family, and our lifeblood is complete and total trust.”
He turns away from me and gives a nod.
The lights kick on.
I can see beyond the smoked-glass enclosure into the small theater, and it’s filled, just like on that first night, with fifteen or twenty people.
Except no one is standing and applauding.
No one is smiling.
They’re all staring down at me.
Grim.
Tense.
I note the first twinge of panic looming on my horizon.
“Why are they all here?” I ask.
“I told you. We’re a family. We clean up our messes together.”
“I’m not following—”
“You’re lying, Jason. You’re not who you say you are. You’re not one of us.”
“I explained—”
“I know, you don’t remember anything about the box. The last ten years are a black hole.”
“Exactly.”
“Sure you want to stick with that?”
Leighton opens the laptop on the table and types something.
He stands it up, types something on the touchscreen.
“What is this?” I ask. “What’s happening?”
“We’re going to finish what we started the night you returned. I’m going to ask questions, and this time, you’re going to answer them.”
I rise from the chair, move to the door, try to pull it open.
Locked.
“Sit!”
Leighton’s voice is as loud as a gunshot.
“I want to leave.”
“And I want you to start telling the truth.”
“I told you the truth.”
“No, you told Daniela Vargas the truth.”
On the other side of the glass, a door opens and a man staggers into the theater, led by one of the guards clutching the back of his neck.
The first man’s face is crushed up against the glass.
Jesus Christ.
Ryan’s nose looks misshapen, and one eye is completely shut.
His bruised and swollen face streaks blood across the glass.
“You told Ryan Holder the truth,” Leighton says.
I rush over to Ryan and say his name.
He tries to respond, but I can’t hear him through the barrier.
I glare down at Leighton.
He says, “Sit, or I will have someone come in here and strap you to that chair.”
The rage from earlier comes flooding back. This man is responsible for Daniela’s death. Now this. I wonder how much damage I could inflict before they pulled me off of him.
But I sit.
I ask, “You tracked him down?”
“No, Ryan came to me, disturbed by the things you told him at Daniela’s apartment. It’s those particular things I want to hear about right now.”
As I watch the guards force Ryan into a chair in the front row, it hits me—Ryan created the missing piece that makes the box function, this “compound” he mentioned at Daniela’s art installation. If our brain is wired to prevent us from perceiving our own quantum state, then perhaps there’s a drug that can disable this mechanism—the “firewall” I wrote about in that mission statement.
The Ryan from my world had been studying the prefrontal cortex and its role in generating consciousness. It’s not that far of a leap to think this Ryan might have created a drug that changes the way our brain perceives reality. That stops us from decohering our environment and collapsing our wave functions.
I crash back into the moment.
“Why did you hurt him?” I ask.
“You told Ryan you’re a professor at Lakemont College, that you have a son, and that Daniela Vargas was actually your wife. You told him you were abducted one night while walking home, after which you woke up here. You told him this isn’t your world. Do you admit to saying these things?
”
I wonder again how much damage I could do before someone hauled me away. Break his nose? Knock out teeth? Kill him?
My voice comes like a growl. “You murdered a woman I love, because she talked to me. You’ve beaten my friend. You’re holding me here against my will. And you want me to answer your questions? Fuck you.” I stare through the glass. “Fuck all of you.”
Leighton says, “Maybe you’re not the Jason I know and love. Maybe you’re just a shadow of that man with a fraction of his ambition and intellect, but certainly you can grasp this question: What if the box works? That means we’re sitting on the greatest scientific breakthrough of all time, with applications we can’t even begin to fathom, and you’re quibbling that we go to extremes to protect it?”
“I want to leave.”
“You want to leave. Huh. Keep in mind everything I just said, and now consider that you’re the only person who’s successfully flown that thing. You’re in possession of critical knowledge that we’ve spent billions and a decade of our lives trying to acquire. I’m not saying this to scare you, only to appeal to your logical reasoning—do you think there’s anything we won’t do to extract that information from you?”
He lets the question hang.
In the brutal silence, I glance across the theater.
I look at Ryan.
I look at Amanda. She won’t make eye contact. Tears glisten in her eyes, but her jaw is tense and rigid, like she’s fighting with everything she has to hold herself together.
“I want you to listen very closely,” Leighton says. “Right here, right now, in this room—this is as easy as it’s ever going to be for you. I want you to try very hard to make the most of this moment. Now, look at me.”
I look at him.
“Did you build the box?”
I say nothing.
“Did you build the box?”
Still nothing.
“Where did you come from?”
My thoughts run rampant, playing out all possible scenarios—tell them everything I know, tell them nothing, tell them something. But if something, what specifically?
“Is this your world, Jason?”
The dynamics of my situation haven’t materially changed. My safety still depends on my usefulness. As long as they want something from me, I have leverage. The moment I tell them everything I know, all my power goes away.
I look up from the table and meet Leighton’s eyes.
I say, “I’m not going to talk to you right now.”
He lets out a sigh.
Cracks his neck.
Then says to no one in particular, “I guess we’re done here.”
The door behind me opens.
I turn, but before I can see who’s there, I’m lifted out of my chair and slammed against the floor.
Someone sits on my back, their knees driving into my spine.
They hold my head in place as a needle slides into my neck.
—
I regain consciousness on a hard, thin mattress that feels depressingly familiar.
Whatever drug they injected me with kicks out a nasty hangover—feels like a rift has opened down the center of my skull.
A voice is whispering into my ear.
I start to sit up, but the slightest movement takes the pounding in my head to a whole new level of agony.
“Jason?”
I know this voice.
“Ryan.”
“Hey.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“They carried you in here a little while ago.”
I force my eyes to open.
I’m back in that cell on the steel-frame cot, and Ryan is kneeling beside me.
Up close, he looks even worse.
“Jason, I’m so sorry.”
“None of this is your fault.”
“No, what Leighton said is true. After I left you and Daniela that night, I called him. Told him I’d seen you. Told him where.” Ryan closes his one functional eye, his face breaking as he says, “I had no idea they would hurt her.”
“How’d you end up in the lab?”
“I guess you weren’t giving them the information they wanted, so they came for me in the middle of the night. Were you with her when she died?”
“Happened right in front of me. A man just broke into her apartment and shot her between the eyes.”
“Oh God.”
Climbing onto the cot, he sits beside me, both of us leaning back against the concrete wall.
He says, “I thought if I told them what you said to me and Daniela, that maybe they’d finally bring me in on the research. Reward me somehow. Instead, they just beat me. Accused me of not telling them everything.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You kept me in the dark. I never even knew what this place was. I did all that work for you and Leighton, but you—”
“I didn’t keep you in the dark about anything, Ryan. That wasn’t me.”
He looks over at me, as if trying to process the magnitude of that statement.
“So the stuff you said at Daniela’s—that was all true?”
Leaning in close, I whisper, “Every word. Keep your voice low. They’re probably listening.”
“How did you get here?” Ryan whispers. “Into this world?”
“Right outside this cell, there’s a hangar, and in that hangar, a metal box, which another version of me built.”
“And this box does what exactly?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s a gateway to the multiverse.”
He looks at me like I’m crazy. “How is that possible?”
“I just need you to listen. The night after I escaped from this place, I went to a hospital. They ran a tox screen that returned traces of a mysterious psychoactive compound. When I saw you at Daniela’s art reception, you asked me if the ‘compound’ had worked out. What exactly were you working on for me?”
“You asked me to build a drug that would temporarily alter the functioning of brain chemistry in three Brodmann areas of the prefrontal cortex. It took me four years. At least you paid me well.”
“Alter how?”
“Put them to sleep for a little while. I had no idea what the application was.”
“You understand the concept behind Schrödinger’s cat?”
“Sure.”
“And how observation determines reality?”
“Yes.”
“This other version of me was trying to put a human being into superposition. Theoretically impossible, considering our consciousness and force of observation would never allow it. But if there was a mechanism in the brain that was responsible for the observer effect…”
“You wanted to turn it off.”
“Exactly.”
“So my drug stops us from decohering?”
“I think so.”
“But it doesn’t stop others from decohering us. It doesn’t stop their observer effect from determining our reality.”
“That’s where the box comes in.”
“Holy shit. So you figured out a way to turn a human being into a living and dead cat? That’s…terrifying.”
The cell door unlocks and opens.
We both look up, see Leighton standing in the threshold, flanked by his guards—two middle-aged men with too-tight polo shirts tucked into their jeans and slightly past-prime physiques.
They strike me as men for whom violence is just work.
Leighton says, “Ryan, would you come with us, please?”
Ryan hesitates.
“Drag him out of there.”
“I’m coming.”
Ryan rises and limps to the door.
The guards each take an arm and haul him away, but Leighton stays behind.
He looks at me.
“This is not who I am, Jason. I hate this. I hate that you’re forcing me to be this monster. What’s about to happen? It’s not my choice. It’s yours.”
I lunge off the bed and charge Leighton, but he slams the door in
my face.
—
They kill the lights to my cell.
All I can see is the glowing green dot from the surveillance camera that watches me over the door.
I sit in the corner in the dark, thinking how I’ve been on a collision course with this moment since I first heard those footsteps rushing up behind me in my neighborhood, in my world, five impossible days ago.
Since I saw a geisha mask and a gun, and fear and confusion became the only stars in my sky.
In this moment, there is no logic.
No problem-solving.
No scientific method.
I am simply devastated, broken, terrified, and on the brink of just wanting it all to end.
I watched as the love of my life was murdered right in front of me.
My old friend is likely being tortured as I sit here.
And these people will undoubtedly make me suffer before my end comes.
I am so afraid.
I miss Charlie.
I miss Daniela.
I miss my run-down brownstone that I never had the money to properly remodel.
I miss our rusty Suburban.
I miss my office on campus.
My students.
I miss the life that’s mine.
And there in the darkness, like the filaments of a lightbulb warming to life, the truth finds me.
I hear the voice of my abductor, somehow familiar, asking questions about my life.
My job.
My wife.
If I ever called her “Dani.”
He knew who Ryan Holder was.
Jesus.
He took me to an abandoned power plant.
Drugged me.
Asked me questions about my life.
Took my phone, my clothes.
Holy fuck.
It’s staring me in the face now.
My heart shuddering with rage.
He did these things so he could step into my shoes.
So he could have the life that’s mine.
The woman I love.
My son.
My job.
My house.
Because that man was me.
This other Jason, the one who built the box—he did this to me.
As the green light of the surveillance camera goes dark, I realize that on some level, I’ve known since I first laid eyes on the box.
Just haven’t been willing to look it in the eye.
And why would I?
It’s one thing to be lost in a world that’s not your own.