by Blake Crouch
“That surprises you?”
“Actually, it makes perfect sense. The environment outside the door is interacting with the interior of the box. It destabilized the quantum state.”
I turn back to the open door and hold the lantern out in front of me. All I can see is the ground directly ahead.
Cracked pavement.
Oil stains.
When I step down, glass crunches under my feet.
I help Amanda out, and as we venture the first few steps, the light diffuses, hits a concrete column.
A van.
A convertible.
A sedan.
It’s a parking garage.
We move up a slight incline with cars on either side of us, following the remnants of a white paint stripe that divides the left and right lanes.
The box is a ways behind us now and out of sight, tucked away in the pitch-black.
We pass a sign with an arrow pointing left beside the words—
EXIT TO STREET
Turning a corner, we begin to climb the next ramp.
All along the right side, chunks have fallen out of the ceiling and crushed the windshields, hoods, and roofs of the vehicles. The farther we go, the worse it gets, until we’re scrambling over concrete boulders and weaving around knifelike projections of rusted rebar.
Halfway up the next level, we’re stopped in our tracks by an impassable wall of debris.
“Maybe we should just go back,” I say.
“Look…” She grabs the lantern and I follow her over to a stairwell entry.
The door is cracked open, and Amanda forces it back the rest of the way.
Total darkness.
We ascend to the door at the top of the stairs.
It takes both of us to drag it open.
Wind blows through the lobby straight ahead.
There’s some semblance of ambient light coming through the empty steel frames of what used to be immense, two-story windows.
At first, I think it’s snow on the floor, but it isn’t cold.
I kneel, grasp a handful. It’s dry and a foot deep over the marble flooring. It slides through my fingers.
We trudge past a long reception desk with the name of a hotel still attached in artful block letters across the façade.
At the entrance, we pass between a pair of giant planters holding trees withered down to gnarled branches and brittle leaf shards twittering in the breeze.
Amanda turns off the lantern.
We step through the glassless revolving doors.
Even though it isn’t nearly cold enough, it looks like a raging snowstorm outside.
I walk out into the street and stare up between the dark buildings at a sky tinged with the faintest suggestion of red. It glows the way a city does when the clouds are low and all the lights from the buildings are reflecting off the moisture in the sky.
But there are no lights.
Not a single one as far as I can see.
Though they fall like snow, in torrent-like curtains, the particles that strike my face carry no sting.
“It’s ash,” Amanda says.
A blizzard of ash.
Out here in the street, it’s knee-deep, and the air smells like a cold fireplace the morning after, before the ashes have been carried off.
A dead, burnt stench.
The ash is falling hard enough to obscure the upper stories of the skyscrapers, and there’s no sound but the wind blowing between the buildings and through the buildings and the whoosh of the ash as it piles into gray drifts against long-abandoned cars and buses.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
That I’m actually standing in a world that isn’t mine.
We walk up the middle of the street, our backs to the wind.
I can’t shake the feeling that the blackness of the skyscrapers is all wrong. They’re skeletons, nothing but ominous profiles in the pouring ash. Closer to a range of improbable mountains than anything man-made. Some are leaning, and some have toppled, and in the hardest gusts, high above us, I can hear the groan of steel framework torquing past its tensile strength.
I note a sudden tightening in the space behind my eyes.
It comes and goes in less than a second, like something turning off.
Amanda asks, “Did you just feel that too?”
“That pressure behind your eyes?”
“Exactly.”
“I did. I bet it’s the drug wearing off.”
After several blocks, the buildings end. We arrive at a guardrail that runs along the top of a seawall. The lake yawns out for miles under the radioactive sky, and it doesn’t even resemble Lake Michigan anymore, but instead a vast gray desert, the ash accumulating on the surface of the water and undulating like a waterbed as black foam waves crash against the seawall.
The walk back is into the wind.
Ash streaming into our eyes and mouths.
Our tracks already covered.
When we’re a block from the hotel, a sound like sustained thunder begins in the near distance.
The ground trembles beneath our feet.
Another building falls to its knees.
—
The box is waiting where we left it, in a remote corner on the parking garage’s lowest level.
We’re both covered in ash, and we take a moment at the door to brush it off our clothes, out of our hair.
Back inside, the lock shoots home after us.
We’re in a simple, finite box again.
Four walls.
A door.
A lantern.
A backpack.
And two bewildered human beings.
—
Amanda sits hugging her knees into her chest.
“What do you think happened up there?” she asks.
“Supervolcano. Asteroid strike. Nuclear war. No telling.”
“Are we in the future?”
“No, the box would only connect us to alternate realities at the same point in space and time. But I suppose some worlds might seem like the future if they’ve made technological advancements that ours never figured out.”
“What if they’re all destroyed like this one?”
I say, “We should take the drug again. I don’t think we’re exactly safe under this crumbling skyscraper.”
Amanda pulls off her flats and shakes the ash out of them.
I say, “What you did for me back at the lab…You saved my life.”
She looks at me, her bottom lip threatening to quiver. “I used to dream about those first pilots who went into the box. Nightmares. I can’t believe this is happening.”
I unzip the backpack and start pulling out the contents to catalog them.
I find the leather bag containing the ampoules and injection kits.
Three notebooks sealed in plastic.
Box of pens.
A knife in a nylon sheath.
First-aid kit.
Space blanket.
Rain poncho.
Toiletry kit.
Two rolls of cash.
Geiger counter.
Compass.
Two one-liter water bottles, both full.
Six MREs.
“You packed all this?” I ask.
“No, I just grabbed it from the stockroom. It’s standard issue, what everyone takes into the box. We should be wearing space suits, but I didn’t have time to grab any.”
“No kidding. A world like that? Radiation levels could be off the charts, or the atmospheric makeup drastically altered. If the pressure is off—too low, for instance—our blood and all the liquids in our bodies will boil.”
The water bottles are calling out to me. I haven’t had anything to drink in hours, since lunch. My thirst is blaring.
I open the leather bag. It looks custom-made for the ampoules, each glass vial held in its own miniature sleeve.
I begin to count them.
“Fifty,” Amanda says. “Well, forty-eight now. I would’ve grabbed two back
packs, but…”
“You weren’t planning to come with me.”
“How fucked are we?” she asks. “Be honest.”
“I don’t know. But this is our spaceship. We’d better learn to fly it.”
As I begin to cram everything back into the pack, Amanda reaches for the injection kits.
This time, we break the necks of the ampoules and drink the drug, the liquid sliding across my tongue with a sweet, borderline unpleasant sting.
Forty-six ampoules remaining.
I start the timer on Amanda’s watch and ask, “How many times can we take this stuff and not fry our brains?”
“We did some testing a while back.”
“Pulled some homeless guy off the street?”
She almost smiles. “Nobody died. We learned that repeated use definitely strains neurological functioning and builds up a tolerance. The good news is the half-life is really short, so as long as we’re not slamming one ampoule right after another, we should be all right.” She slides her feet back into her flats, looks at me. “Are you impressed with yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“You built this thing.”
“Yeah, but I still don’t know how. I understand the theory, but creating a stable quantum state for human beings is…”
“An impossible breakthrough?”
Of course. The hair on the back of my neck stands up as the improbability of it all makes sense.
I say, “It’s a one in a billion chance, but we’re dealing with the multiverse. With infinity. Maybe there are a million worlds like yours, where I never figured it out. But all it takes is one where I did.”
At the thirty-minute mark, I note the first sensation of the drug taking effect—the flickering of a shining, bright euphoria.
A beautiful disengagement.
Though not quite as intense as in the Velocity Laboratories box.
I look at Amanda.
I say, “I think I feel it.”
She says, “Me too.”
And we’re back in the corridor.
I ask, “Is your watch still running?”
Amanda tugs back the sleeve of her sweater and illuminates the watch face into tritium green.
31:15.
31:16.
31:17.
I say, “So a little over thirty-one minutes since we took the drug. Do you know how long it’s supposed to alter our brain chemistry?”
“I’ve heard about an hour.”
“Let’s clock it to be sure.”
I move back toward the door to the parking garage and pull it open.
Now I’m staring into a forest.
Except there’s no trace of green.
No trace of life.
Just scorched trunks as far as I can see.
The trees look haunted, their spindly branches like black spiderwebs against a charcoal sky.
I close the door.
It automatically locks.
Vertigo hits me as I watch the box push out away from me again, smearing off into infinity.
I unlock the door, drag it back open.
The corridor collapses again.
The dead forest is still there.
I say, “Okay, so now we know that the connections between the doors and these worlds only hold during a given session on the drug. That’s why none of your pilots ever made it back to the lab.”
“So when the drug kicks in, the corridor resets?”
“I think so.”
“Then how do we ever find our way home?”
—
Amanda begins to walk.
Faster and faster.
Until she’s jogging.
Then running.
Into a darkness that never changes.
Never ends.
The backstage of the multiverse.
The exertion is making me sweat and ratcheting my thirst to an unbearable level, but I say nothing, thinking maybe she needs this. Needs to burn through some energy. Needs to see that no matter how far she goes, this corridor will never end.
I suppose we’re both just trying to come to terms with how horrifying infinity really is.
—
Eventually, she burns out.
Slows down.
There’s nothing but the sound of our footfalls echoing into the darkness ahead of us.
I’m light-headed with hunger and thirst, and I can’t stop thinking about those two liters of water in our backpack, wanting them, but knowing we should save them.
Now we move methodically down the corridor.
I hold the lantern so I can inspect every wall of every box.
I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly.
A break in the uniformity, perhaps.
Anything that might let us exert some measure of control over where we end up.
All the while, my thoughts race in the dark—
What will happen when the water’s gone?
When the food is gone?
When the batteries that power this lantern—our only source of light—fail?
How will I ever find my way home?
I wonder how many hours have passed since we first entered the box back at the Velocity Laboratories hangar.
I’ve lost all sense of time.
I’m faltering.
Exhaustion bears down so hard on me that sleep seems sexier than water.
I glance over at Amanda, her features cold but beautiful in the blue light.
She looks terrified.
“Hungry yet?” she asks.
“Getting there.”
“I’m really thirsty, but we should save the water, right?”
“I think that’s the smart thing to do.”
She says, “I feel so disoriented, and it’s getting worse by the moment. I grew up in North Dakota, and we used to get these wild blizzards. Whiteouts. You’d be driving out on the plains, and the snow would start blowing so hard you’d lose all sense of direction. Blowing so hard it’d make you dizzy just looking at it through the windshield. You’d have to pull over on the side of the road, wait it out. And sitting in the cold car, it was like the world was gone. That’s how I feel right now.”
“I’m scared too. But I’m working this problem.”
“How?”
“Well, first, we have to find out exactly how much corridor time this drug will give us. Down to the minute.”
“How far do you want to wind out the clock?”
“If you’re saying we have about an hour, then our deadline is ninety minutes on your watch. That accounts for thirty minutes for the drug to kick in, plus the sixty minutes we’re under its influence.”
“I weigh less than you. What if it affects me for longer?”
“It doesn’t matter. The moment it stops working on one of us, that person will decohere the quantum state and collapse the corridor. Just to be safe, let’s start opening doors at the eighty-five-minute mark.”
“And hope for what exactly?”
“A world that doesn’t eat us alive.”
She stops and looks at me. “I know you didn’t actually build this box, but you must have some idea of how all this works.”
“Look, this is light-years beyond anything I could’ve—”
“So is that a ‘No, I don’t have any idea’?”
“What are you asking me, Amanda?”
“Are we lost?”
“We’re gathering information. We’re working a problem.”
“But the problem is that we’re lost. Right?”
“We’re exploring.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wandering down this never-ending tunnel.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But you’re working on it?”
“Yes. I’m working on it.”
“And we’re not lost.”
We are so
fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes.
“We’re not lost.”
“Good.” She smiles. “Then I’ll postpone freaking out.”
—
We move along in silence for a while.
The metal walls are smooth and featureless, nothing to distinguish one from the next and the next and the next.
Amanda asks, “What worlds do you think we actually have access to?”
“I’ve been trying to puzzle that out. Let’s assume the multiverse began with a single event—the Big Bang. That’s the starting point, the base of the trunk of the most immense, elaborate tree you could fathom. As time unfolded and matter began to organize into stars and planets in all possible permutations, this tree sprouted branches, and those branches sprouted branches, and on and on, until somewhere, fourteen billion years down the line, my birth triggered a new branch. And from that moment, every choice I made or didn’t make, and the actions of others that affected me—those all gave rise to more branches, to an infinite number of Jason Dessens living in parallel worlds, some very similar to the one I call home, some mind-bogglingly different.
“Everything that can happen will happen. Everything. I mean, somewhere along this corridor, there’s a version of you and me that never made it into the box when you tried to help me escape. And now we’re being tortured or already dead.”
“Thanks for the morale boost.”
“Could be worse. I don’t think we have access to the entire breadth of the multiverse. I mean, if there’s a world where the sun burned out just as prokaryotes—the first life-forms—were appearing on Earth, I don’t think any of these doors open into that world.”
“So we can only walk into worlds that…”
“If I had to guess, worlds that are adjacent to ours somehow. Worlds that split off at some point in the recent past, which are next door to ours. That we exist in, or existed in at some point. How far back they branched, I don’t know, but my suspicion is there’s some form of conditional selection at work. This is just my working hypothesis.”
“But we’re still talking about an infinite number of worlds, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
I lift her wrist and press the light feature on her watch.
The tiny square of luminous green shows…
84:50.
84:51.
I say, “The drug should wear off in the next five minutes. I guess it’s time.”