The bare lightbulb in the ceiling rains down a naked and flickering illumination on the tiny cell. I’m strapped to a steel-frame bed, ankles and wrists chained together with restraints and connected, via locking carabiners, to eyebolts in the concrete wall.
Three locks retract in the door, but I’m too sedated to even startle.
It swings open.
Leighton wears a tux.
Wire-rim glasses.
As he approaches, I catch a whiff of cologne, and then alcohol on his breath. Champagne? I wonder where he’s just come from. A party? A benefit? There’s a pink ribbon still pinned to the satin breast of his jacket.
Leighton eases down onto the edge of the paper-thin mattress.
He looks grave.
And unbelievably sad.
“I’m sure you have some things you want to say, Jason, but I hope you’ll let me go first. I take a lot of blame for what happened. You came back, and we weren’t prepared for you to be as…unwell as you were. As you are. We failed you, and I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I just…I hate everything that’s happened. Your return should have been a celebration.”
Even through the heavy sedation, I’m shaking with grief.
With rage.
“The man who came to Daniela’s apartment—did you send him after me?” I ask.
“You left me no choice. Even the possibility you had told her about this
place—”
“Did you tell him to kill her?”
“Jason—”
“Did you?”
He doesn’t answer, but it is an answer.
I stare into Leighton’s eyes, and all I can think about is ripping his face
off down to his skull.
“You fucking…”
I break down.
Sobbing.
I cannot exile from my brain the image of blood running down Daniela’s bare foot.
“I’m so sorry, brother.” Leighton reaches out, puts his hand on my arm, and I nearly dislocate my shoulder trying to pull away.
“Don’t touch me!”
“You’ve been in this cell almost twenty-four hours. It gives me no pleasure to keep you restrained and sedated, but as long as you’re a danger to yourself or others, this situation can’t change. You need to eat and drink
something. Are you willing to do that?”
I focus on a crack in the wall.
I imagine using Leighton’s head to open another one.
Driving it into the concrete again and again and again until there’s nothing left but red paste.
“Jason, it’s either you let them feed you, or I run a G-tube into your stomach.”
I want to tell him that I’m going to kill him. Him and everyone in this lab. I can feel the words coming up my throat, but better judgment prevails —I’m completely at this man’s mercy.
“I know what you saw in that apartment was horrible, and I’m sorry for that. I wish it had never happened, but sometimes, a situation is so far gone…Look, please know that I am so, so sorry you had to see that.”
Leighton rises, moves toward the door, pulls it open.
Standing in the threshold, he looks back at me, his face half in light, half in shadow.
He says, “Maybe you can’t hear this right now, but this place wouldn’t exist without you. None of us would be here, but for your work, your brilliance. I’m not going to let anyone forget that, most of all you.”
—
I calm down.
I pretend to calm down.
Because staying chained up in this tiny cell isn’t accomplishing a goddamn thing.
From the bed, I stare up into the surveillance camera mounted over the door and ask for Leighton.
Five minutes later, he’s unlocking my restraints and saying, “I think I’m probably as happy as you are to get you out of these things.”
He gives me a hand up.
My wrists have been rubbed raw from the leather bindings.
My mouth is dry.
I’m delirious with thirst.
He asks, “You feeling any better?”
It occurs to me that my first inclination when I woke up in this place was the right one. Be the man they think I am. The only way to pull that off is to pretend my memories and my identity have abandoned me. Let them fill in the blanks. Because if I’m not the man they think I am, then they have no
use for me.
Then I never leave this lab alive.
I tell him, “I was scared. That’s why I ran.”
“I totally get it.”
“I’m sorry I put you all through this, but you have to understand—I’m lost here. There’s just this gaping hole where the last ten years should be.”
“And we’re going to do everything in our power to help you recover those memories. To get you better. We’re firing up the MRI. We’re going to
screen you for PTSD. Our psychiatrist, Amanda Lucas, will be speaking with you shortly. You have my word—no stone will be left unturned until we fix this. Until we have you fully back.”
“Thank you.”
“You’d do the same for me. Look, I have no idea what you’ve been through these last fourteen months, but the man I’ve known for eleven years, my colleague and friend who built this place with me? He’s locked away somewhere in that head of yours, and there is nothing I won’t do to find him.”
A terrifying thought—what if he’s right?
I think I know who I am.
But there’s a part of me that wonders…What if the recollection I have of my real life—husband, father, professor—isn’t real?
What if it’s a by-product of brain damage I received while working in this lab?
What if I’m actually the man who everyone in this world believes I am?
No.
I know who I am.
Leighton has been sitting on the edge of the mattress.
Now he props his feet up and leans back against the footboard.
“I have to ask,” he says. “What were you doing at that woman’s
apartment?”
Lie.
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“How did you know her?”
I fight to hide the tears and rage.
“I dated her a long time ago.”
“Let’s go back to the beginning. After you escaped through the bathroom window three nights ago, how did you get to your home in Logan Square?”
“A cab.”
“Did you tell the driver anything about where you’d just come from?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay, and after you managed to elude us at your house, then where’d you go?”
Lie.
“I wandered around all night. I was disoriented, afraid. The next day I saw this poster for Daniela’s art show. That’s how I found her.”
“Did you talk to anyone else besides Daniela?”
Ryan.
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. I went back to her apartment, and it was just the two of us until…”
“You have to understand—we’ve dedicated everything to this place. To your work. We’re all in. Any one of us would lay down our lives to protect
it. Including you.”
The gunshot.
The black hole between her eyes.
“It breaks my heart to see you like this, Jason.”
He says this with genuine bitterness and regret.
I can see it in his eyes.
“We were friends?” I ask.
He nods, his jaw tight, as if he’s holding back a wave of emotion.
I say, “I’m just having a hard time understanding how murdering someone to protect this lab would be acceptable to you or any of these people.”
“The Jason Dessen I knew wouldn’t have given a second thought to what happened to Daniela Vargas. I’m not saying he would’ve been happy about it. None of us are. It makes me sick. But he would’ve been willing.”
I shake my head.
He says, “You’ve forgotten what we built together.”
“So show me.”
—
They clean me up, give me new clothes, and feed me.
After lunch, Leighton and I ride a service elevator down to sublevel four.
Last time I walked this corridor, it was lined with plastic, and I had no idea where I was.
I haven’t been threatened.
Haven’t been told specifically that I can’t leave.
But I’ve already noticed that Leighton and I are rarely alone. Two men who carry themselves like cops are always on the periphery. I remember these guards from my first night here.
“It’s basically four levels,” Leighton says. “Gym, rec room, mess hall, and a few dormitories on one. Labs, cleanrooms, conference rooms on two.
Sublevel three is dedicated to fabrication. Four is the infirmary and mission control.”
We’re moving toward a pair of vaultlike doors that look formidable enough to secure national secrets.
Leighton stops at a touchscreen mounted to the wall beside them.
He pulls a keycard from his pocket and holds it under the scanner.
A computerized female voice says, Name, please.
He leans in close. “Leighton Vance.”
Passcode.
“One-one-eight-seven.”
Voice recognition confirmed. Welcome, Dr. Vance.
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 recall 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.
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.
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 the 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.
