by Blake Crouch
Another thing entirely to know you’ve been replaced in yours.
That a better version of you has stepped into your life.
He’s smarter than I am, no question.
Is he also a better father to Charlie?
A better husband to Daniela?
A better lover?
He did this to me.
No.
It’s way more fucked up than that.
I did this to me.
When I hear the locks in the door retract, I instinctively scoot back against the wall.
This is it.
They’ve come for me.
The door opens slowly, revealing a single person standing in the threshold, profiled against the light beyond.
They step inside, close the door after them.
I can’t see a thing.
But I can smell her—trace of perfume, body wash.
“Amanda?”
She whispers, “Keep your voice down.”
“Where’s Ryan?”
“He’s gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
She sounds on the verge of tears, of breaking down. “They killed him. I’m so sorry, Jason. I thought they were just going to scare him, but…”
“He’s dead?”
“They’re coming for you any minute now.”
“Why are you—?”
“Because I didn’t sign up for this shit. What they did to Daniela. To Holder. What they’re about to do to you. They crossed lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Not for science. Not for anything.”
“Can you get me out of this lab?”
“No, and it wouldn’t do you any good with your face all over the news.”
“What are you talking about? Why am I on the news?”
“The police are looking for you. They think you killed Daniela.”
“You people framed me?”
“I am so sorry. Look, I can’t get you out of this lab, but I can get you into the hangar.”
“Do you know how the box works?” I ask.
I feel her stare, even though I can’t see it.
“No idea. But it’s your one way out.”
“From everything I’ve heard, stepping inside that thing is like jumping out of an airplane and not knowing if your chute is going to open.”
“If the plane’s going down anyway, does it really matter?”
“What about the camera?”
“The one in here? I turned it off.”
I hear Amanda move toward the door.
A vertical line of light appears and widens.
When the cell door is open all the way, I see that she’s shouldering a backpack. Stepping out into the corridor, she adjusts her red pencil skirt and looks back at me.
“You coming?”
I use the bed frame to drag myself onto my feet.
Must have been hours in the dark, because the light in the corridor is almost too much to bear. My eyes burn against the sudden brilliance.
For the moment, we have it all to ourselves.
Amanda is already moving away from me toward the vault doors at the far end.
She glances back, whispers, “Let’s go!”
I quietly follow, the panels of fluorescent lighting streaming past overhead.
Aside from the echoes of our footfalls, the corridor is soundless.
By the time I reach the touchscreen, Amanda is holding her keycard under the scanner.
“Won’t there be someone in mission control?” I ask. “I thought there was always someone monitoring—”
“I’m on duty tonight. I got you covered.”
“They’ll know you helped me.”
“By the time they realize, I’ll be out of here.”
The computerized female voice says, Name, please.
“Amanda Lucas.”
Passcode.
“Two-two-three-seven.”
Access denied.
“Oh shit.”
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“Someone must have seen us on the corridor cams and frozen my clearance. Leighton will know in a matter of seconds.”
“Give it another shot.”
She scans her card again.
Name, please.
“Amanda Lucas.”
Passcode.
She speaks slowly this time, overenunciating her words: “Two-two-three-seven.”
Access denied.
“Goddammit.”
A door at the opposite end of the corridor opens.
When Leighton’s men step out, Amanda’s face pales with fear, and a sharp, metallic taste coats the roof of my mouth.
I ask, “Do the employees create their own passcodes or are they assigned?”
“We create them.”
“Give me your card.”
“Why?”
“Because maybe no one thought to freeze my clearance.”
As she hands it over, Leighton emerges from the same door.
He shouts my name.
I look back down the corridor as Leighton and his men start toward us.
I scan the card.
Name, please.
“Jason Dessen.”
Passcode.
Of course. This guy is me.
Month and year of my birthday backwards.
“Three-seven-two-one.”
Voice recognition confirmed. Welcome, Dr. Dessen.
The buzzer rakes my nerves.
As the doors begin to inch apart, I watch helplessly as the men rush toward us—red-faced, arms pumping.
Four or five seconds away.
The moment there’s enough space between the vault doors, Amanda squeezes through.
I follow her into the hangar, racing across the smooth concrete toward the box.
Mission control is empty, the lights beating down from high above, and it’s dawning on me that there is no possible scenario where we make it out of this.
We’re closing in on the box, Amanda yelling, “We just have to get inside!”
I glance back as the first man explodes through the wide-open vault doors, a gun or Taser in his right hand, a smear of what I assume is Ryan’s blood across his face.
He clocks me, raises his weapon, but I round the corner of the box before he can fire.
Amanda is pushing open the door, and as an alarm blares through the hangar, she disappears inside.
I’m right on her heels, launching myself over the threshold, into the box.
She shoves me out of the way and digs her shoulder back into the door.
I hear voices and approaching footsteps.
Amanda is struggling, so I throw my weight into the door alongside her.
It must weigh a ton.
At last, it begins to move, swinging back.
Fingers appear across the door frame, but we’ve got inertia working in our favor.
The door thunders home, and a massive bolt fires into its housing.
It’s quiet.
And pitch-black—the darkness so instantly pure and unbroken it creates the sensation of spinning.
I stagger toward the nearest wall and put my hands on the metal, just needing to tether myself to something solid as I try to wrap my mind around the idea that I’m actually inside this thing.
“Can they get through the door?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. It’s supposed to stay locked for ten minutes. Kind of like a built-in safeguard.”
“Safeguard against what?”
“I don’t know. People chasing you? Getting out of dangerous situations? You designed it. Seems to be working.”
I hear a rustling in the dark.
A battery-powered Coleman lantern glows to life, illuminating the interior of the box with a bluish light.
It’s strange, frightening, but also undeniably exhilarating to finally be in here, enclosed by these thick, nearly indestructible walls.
The first thing I notice in the new light are four fingers at the foot of the door, severed at th
e second knuckle.
Amanda is kneeling over an open backpack, her arm thrust in to her shoulder, and considering how everything just exploded in her face, she seems remarkably composed, calmly triaging the situation.
She pulls out a small leather bag.
It’s filled with syringes, needles, and tiny ampoules of a clear liquid that I’m guessing contains Ryan’s compound.
I say, “So you’re doing this with me?”
“As opposed to what? Walking back out there and explaining to Leighton how I betrayed him and everything we’ve been working toward?”
“I have no idea how the box works.”
“Well, that makes two of us, so I guess we can look forward to some fun times ahead.” She checks her watch. “I set a timer when the door locked. They come through in eight minutes, fifty-six seconds. If there were no time pressure, we could just drink one of these ampoules or do an intramuscular injection, but now we have to find a vein. Ever inject yourself?”
“No.”
“Pull up your sleeve.”
She ties a rubber band above my elbow, grabs my arm, and holds it in the light of the lantern.
“See this vein that’s anterior to your elbow? That’s your antecubital. That’s the one you want to hit.”
“Shouldn’t you be doing this?”
“You’ll be fine.”
She hands me a packet containing an alcohol wipe.
I rip it open, wipe down a large swath of skin.
Next, she gives me a 3ml syringe, two needles, and a single ampoule.
“This is a filtered needle,” she says, touching one of them. “Use that one to draw up the liquid so you don’t catch a glass shard. Then switch to the other needle to inject yourself. Got it?”
“I think so.” I insert the filtered needle into the syringe, pull off the cap, and then snap the neck of the glass vial. “All of it?” I ask.
She’s tying a rubber band around her arm now and cleaning her injection site.
“Yep.”
I carefully draw the contents of the ampoule up into the syringe and swap needles.
Amanda says, “Make sure you always tap the syringe and push out a tiny bit of liquid through the needle. You don’t want to be injecting air bubbles into your vascular system.”
She shows me her watch again: 7:39…
7:38.
7:37.
I thump the syringe and squeeze a drop of Ryan’s chemical compound through the needle.
I say, “So I just…”
“Stick it in the vein at a forty-five-degree angle, with the hole in the end of the needle facing up. I know this is a lot to think about. You’re doing great.”
There’s so much adrenaline raging through my system I barely even feel the penetration.
“Now what?”
“Make sure you’re in the vein.”
“How do I—?”
“Pull back a little on the plunger.”
I pull it back.
“See blood?”
“Yeah.”
“Good job. You hit it. Now untie the tourniquet and slowly inject.”
As I depress the plunger, I ask, “So how long until it takes effect?”
“Pretty close to instantaneous, if I had to…”
I don’t even register the end of her sentence.
The drug crashes into me.
I slump back against the wall and lose time until Amanda is in my face again, saying words that I’m trying and failing to comprehend.
Looking down, I watch her pull the needle out of my arm and press an alcohol pad against the tiny puncture wound.
I finally realize what she’s saying: “Keep pressure on it.”
Now I watch Amanda extend her arm under the glow of the lantern, and as she sticks a needle into her vein and loosens the tourniquet, my focus lands on her watch face and the numbers counting down toward zero.
Soon Amanda is lying stretched out on the floor like a junkie who just shot up, and the time is still running out, but that doesn’t matter anymore.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
I sit up.
Clearheaded and alert.
Amanda isn’t lying on the floor anymore. She’s standing several feet away with her back to me.
I call out to her, ask if she’s okay, but she doesn’t answer.
I struggle onto my feet.
Amanda is holding the lantern, and as I move toward her, I see that the light isn’t striking the wall of the box, which should be straight ahead of us.
I walk past her.
She follows with the lantern.
The light reveals another door, identical to the one we just came through from the hangar.
I continue walking.
Another twelve feet brings us to another door.
And then another.
And another.
The lantern only exudes the brilliance of a single, sixty-watt bulb, and beyond seventy or eighty feet, the light dwindles off into haunting shreds of illumination, glinting off the cold surface of the metal walls on one side, the perfectly spaced doors on the other.
Beyond our sphere of light—absolute darkness.
I stop, awestruck and speechless.
I think of the thousands of articles and books I’ve read in my lifetime. Tests taken. Classes taught. Theories memorized. Equations scribbled on blackboards. I think of the months I spent in that cleanroom trying to build something that was a pale imitation of this place.
For students of physics and cosmology, the closest one can ever get to the tangible implications of research are ancient galaxies seen through telescopes. Data readouts following particle collisions we know occurred but can never see.
There’s always a boundary, a barrier between the equations and the reality they represent.
But no more. Not for me at least.
I can’t stop thinking, I am here. I am actually in this place. It exists.
At least for a moment, fear has left me.
I’m filled with wonder.
I say, “ ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.’ ”
Amanda looks at me.
“Einstein’s words, not mine.”
“Is this place even real?” she asks.
“What do you mean by ‘real’?”
“Are we standing in a physical location?”
“I think it’s a manifestation of the mind as it attempts to visually explain something our brains haven’t evolved to comprehend.”
“Which is?”
“Superposition.”
“So we’re experiencing a quantum state right now?”
I glance back down the corridor. Then into the darkness ahead. Even in the low light, there’s a recursive quality to the space, like two mirrors facing each other.
“Yeah. It looks like a corridor, but I think it’s actually the box repeating itself across all possible realities that share the same point in space and time.”
“Like a cross-section?”
“Exactly. In some presentations of quantum mechanics, the thing that contains all the information for the system—before it collapses due to an observation—is called a wave function. I’m thinking this corridor is our minds’ way of visualizing the content of the wave function, of all possible outcomes, for our superposed quantum state.”
“So where does this corridor lead?” she asks. “If we just kept walking, where would we end up?”
As I say the words, the wonder recedes and the horror creeps in: “There is no end.”
—
We keep walking to see what happens, if anything will change, if we will change.
But it’s just door after door after door after door.
When we’ve been going a while, I say, “I’ve been counting them since we started down the corridor, and this is the four hundred and fortieth door. Each box repetition is twelve feet, which means we’ve already gone a full mile.”
Amanda stops and lets the backpack
slide off her shoulders.
She sits against the wall, and I take a seat beside her, with the lantern between us.
I say, “What if Leighton decides to take the drug and come charging in here after us?”
“He’d never do that.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s terrified of the box. We all are. Except for you, no one who went inside ever came out again. That’s why Leighton was willing to do anything to make you tell him how to fly it.”
“What happened to your test pilots?”
“The first one to enter the box was this guy named Matthew Snell. We had no idea what we were dealing with, so Snell was given clear and simple instructions. Enter the box. Close the door. Sit. Inject himself with the drug. No matter what happened, no matter what he saw, he was to sit in the same place, wait for the drug to wear off, and walk right back out into the hangar. Even if he had seen all this, he wouldn’t have left his box. He wouldn’t have moved.”
“So what happened?”
“An hour passed. He was overdue. We wanted to open the door, but we were afraid of interfering with whatever he was experiencing on the inside. Twenty-four hours later, we finally opened it.”
“And the box was empty.”
“Yep.” Amanda looks exhausted in the blue light. “Stepping into the box and taking the drug is like walking through a one-way door. There’s no coming back, and no one’s going to risk following us. We’re on our own here. So what do you want to do?”
“Like any good scientist, experiment. Try a door, see what happens.”
“And just to be clear, you have no idea what’s behind any of these doors?”
“None.”
I give Amanda a hand up. As I hoist the backpack onto my shoulders, I note the first mild twinge of thirst and wonder if she brought along any water.
We head down the corridor, and the truth is I’m hesitant to make a choice. If there is an endless possibility of doors, then from a statistical perspective, the choice itself means everything and nothing. Every choice is right. Every choice is wrong.
I finally stop and say, “This one?”
She shrugs. “Sure.”
Grasping the cold, metal handle, I ask, “We have the ampoules, right? Because that would be—”
“I checked the pack when we stopped a minute ago.”
I crank the lever down, hear the latch bolt slide, and pull back.
The door swings inward, clearing the frame.
She whispers, “What do you see out there?”
“Nothing yet. It’s too dark. Here, let me have that.” As I take the lantern from her, I notice that we’re standing in a single box again. “Look,” I say. “The corridor collapsed.”