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.”
“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
backpacks, 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.”
I move toward the next door, hand Amanda the lantern, and grip the handle.
Turning the lever, I pull the door open one inch.
I see a concrete floor.
Two inches.
A familiar glass window straight ahead.
Three.
Amanda says, “It’s the hangar.”
“What do you want to do?”
She pushes past me and steps out of the box.
I follow, the lights shining down on us.
Mission control is empty.
The hangar quiet.
We stop at the corner of the box and peer around the edge toward the vault doors.
I say, “This isn’t safe.” My words carry through the expanse of the
hangar like whispers in a cathedral.
“And the box is?”
With a thunderous clang, the vault doors disengage and begin to part.
Panicked voices bleeding through the opening.
I say, “Let’s go. Right now.”
A woman is fighting to squeeze through the space between the doors.
Amanda says, “Oh my God.”
The vault doors are only fifty feet away, and I know we should go back into the box, but I can’t stop watching.
The woman pushes through the doors into the hangar, and then reaches back and gives a hand to the man behind her.
The woman is Amanda.
The man’s face is so swollen and battered I wouldn’t have known right away that he was me except he’s wearing clothes identical to mine.
As they begin running toward us, I start to involuntarily retreat to the door of the box.
But they only make it ten feet before Leighton’s men rush through the doors behind them.
A gunshot stops Jason and Amanda in their tracks.
My Amanda starts toward them, but I pull her back.
“We have to help them,” she whispers.
“We can’t.”
Peeking around the corner of the box, we watch our doppelgängers turn
slowly to face Leighton’s men.
We should leave.
I know this.
Part of me is screaming to go.
But I can’t tear myself away.
My first thought is that we’ve gone back in time, but of course that’s impossible. There’s no time travel in the box. This is simply a world where Amanda and I escaped several hours later.
Or failed to.
Leighton’s men have their guns drawn, and they’re moving deliberately into the hangar toward Jason and Amanda.
As Leighton steps in after them, I hear this other version of myself say, “It’s not her fault. I threatened her. I made her do this.”
Leighton looks at Amanda.
He asks, “Is this true? He made you? Because I’ve known you for more than a decade, and I’ve never seen anyone make you do anything.”
Amanda looks scared, but also defiant.
Her voice trembles as she says, “I won’t stand by and let you keep hurting people. I’m done.”
“Oh. Well, in that case…”
Leighton places his hand on the thick shoulder of the man to his right.
The gunshot is deafening.
The muzzle flash is blinding.
Amanda drops like someone flipped a power switch, and next to me, my Amanda lets slip a stifled shriek.
As this other Jason rushes Leighton, the second guard executes a lightning-fast Taser draw and brings him down screaming and twitching on
the floor of the hangar.
My Amanda’s shriek has given us away.
Leighton is staring right at us with a look of pure confusion.
He shouts, “Hey!”
They start after us.
I grab Amanda by the arm and drag her back through the door of the box and slam it home.
The door locks, the corridor reconstitutes, but the drug will be wearing off any moment now.
Amanda is quaking, and I want to tell her everything is fine, but it isn’t.
She just witnessed her own murder.
“That isn’t you out there,” I tell her. “You’re standing right here beside me. Alive and well. That is not you.”
Even in the bad light I can tell she’s crying.
Tears streak down through the grime on her face like running eyeliner.
“It’s some part of me,” she says. “Or was.”
Gently, I reach down and lift her arm, turning it so I can see the watch.
We’re forty-five seconds shy of the ninety-minute mark.
I say, “We have to go.”
I start down the corridor.
“Amanda, come on!”
When she catches up, I open a door.
Total darkness.
No sound, no smell. Just a void.
I slam it shut.
Trying not to panic, but I need to be opening more doors, giving us a shot
at finding someplace to rest and reset.
I open the next door.
Ten feet away, standing in weeds in front of a teetering chain-link fence, a wolf glares at me through large amber eyes. Lowering its head, it growls.
As it starts toward me, I shove the door closed.
Amanda grabs hold of my hand.
We keep walking.
I should be opening more doors, but the truth is I’m terrified. I’ve lost faith we’ll find a world that’s safe.
I blink and we’re confined to a single box again.
The drug has worn off for one of us.
This time, she opens the door.
Snow streams into the box.
A shot of bitter cold hits my face.
Through a curtain of falling snow, I glimpse the silhouettes of trees
nearby and houses in the distance.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I think I don’t want to be in this box for another fucking second.”
Amanda steps down into the snow and sinks to her knees in the soft
powder.
She immediately begins to shiver.
I feel the drug wink out for me, and this time the sensation is like an ice
pick through my left eye.
Intense but fleeting.
I follow Amanda out of the box, and we head in the general direction of the neighborhood.
Beyond the initial layer of powder, I can feel myself continuing to sink— the weight of each step slowly breaking through a deeper, older crust of compacted snow.
I catch up with Amanda.
We trudge through a clearing toward a neighborhood, which seems to be slowly vanishing before my eyes.
While I’m marginally protected from the cold in my pair of jeans and hoodie, Amanda is suffering in her red skirt, black sweater, and flats.
I’ve lived most of my life in the Midwest, and I’ve never known cold like this. My ears and cheekbones are rocketing toward frostbite, and I’m already beginning to lose the fine-motor control in my hands.
A driving wind blasts us straight-on, and as the snow intensifies, the world ahead takes on the appearance of a furiously shaken snow globe.
We push on through the snow, moving as quickly as we can, but it’s getting deeper and nearly impossible to navigate with anything approaching
efficiency.
Amanda’s cheeks have gone blue.
She’s violently shivering.
Her hair is matted with snow.
“We should go back,” I say through chattering teeth.
The wind has grown deafening.
Amanda looks at me, confused, then nods.
I glance back, but the box is gone.
My fear spikes.
The snow is blowing sideways, and the houses in the distance have vanished.
In every direction, it all looks the same.
Amanda’s head is nodding up and down, and I keep squeezing my hands into fists, trying to force warm blood through to my fingertips, but it’s a losing battle. My ring of thread is encrusted with ice.
My thought processes are beginning to spin out.
I’m shaking with cold.
We fucked up.
It isn’t just cold. It’s way-below-zero cold.
Lethally cold.
I have no idea how far we’ve come from the box.
Does it even matter anymore, when we’re functionally blind?
This cold will kill us in a matter of minutes.
Keep moving.
Amanda has a faraway look in her eyes, and I wonder if it’s the shock setting in.
Her bare legs are in direct contact with the snow.
“It hurts,” she says.
Bending down, I lift her in my arms and stagger into the storm, holding Amanda tightly against me as her entire body shakes.
We’re standing in a vortex of wind and snow and killing cold, and it all looks exactly the same. If I don’t stare down at my legs, the motion of it all
induces vertigo.
It occurs to me: we’re going to die.
But I keep going.
One foot in front of the other, my face now on fire from the cold, my arms aching from holding Amanda, my feet in agony as the snow works down into my shoes.
Minutes pass and the snow falls harder and the cold keeps biting.
Amanda is mumbling, delirious.
I can’t keep doing this.
Can’t keep walking.
Can’t keep holding her.
Soon—so soon—I will have to stop. Will sit in the snow and hold this woman I barely know, and we will freeze to death together in this awful
world that isn’t even ours.
I think about my family.
Think about not ever seeing them again, and I try to process what that means as my control over the fear finally slips— There’s a house in front of us.
Or rather, the second story of a house, because its first floor has been completely buried in snow that’s drifted all the way up to a trio of dormer windows.
“Amanda.”
Her eyes are closed.
“Amanda!”
She opens them. Barely.
“Stay with me.”
I set her down in the snow against the roof, stumble toward the middle dormer, and put my foot through the window.
When I’ve kicked out all the sharpest jags of glass, I take hold of Amanda by her arms and pull her down into a child’s bedroom—a little
girl’s, by the looks of it.
Stuffed animals.
A wooden dollhouse.
Princess paraphernalia.
A Barbie flashlight on the bedside table.
I drag Amanda far enough into the room that the snow pouring through the window can’t reach her. Then I grab the Barbie flashlight and move through the doorway into an upstairs hall.
I call out, “Hello?”
The house swallows my voice, gives nothing back.
All the bedrooms on the second floor stand empty. In most of them, the furniture has been removed.
Turning on the flashlight, I head down the staircase.
The batteries are low. The bulb emits a weak beam.
Moving off the stairs, I pass the front door into what used to be a dining room. Boards have been nailed across the window frames to support the glass against the pressure of the snow, which fills the frames entirely. An ax leans on the remnants of a dining-room table that’s been chopped down into burnable pieces of kindling.
I step through a doorway that opens into a smaller room.
The tepid light beam strikes a couch.
A pair of chairs almost completely stripped of their leather.
A television mounted above a fireplace overflowing with ashes.
A box of candles.
A stack of books.
Sleeping bags, blankets, and pillows have been spread across the floor in the vicinity of the fireplace, and there are people inside them.
A man.
A woman.
Two teenage boys.
A young girl.
Eyes closed.
Not moving.
Their faces blue and emaciated.
A framed photograph of the family at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, in a better time, rests on the woman’s chest, her blackened fingers still clutched around it.
Along the hearth, I see matchboxes, stacks of newspaper, a pile of wood shavings harvested from a cutlery block.
A second doorway out of the family room brings me into the kitchen. The refrigerator is open and barren, and the cabinets too. The countertops are
covered with empty metal cans.
Creamed corn.
Kidney beans.
Black beans.
Whole, peeled tomatoes.
Soups.
Peaches.
The stuff that lives in the backs of cabinets and usually just expires from neglect.
Even the condiment jars have been scraped clean—mustards, mayonnaise, jellies.
Behind the overflowing trash can, I see a frozen puddle of blood and a skeleton—small, feline—stripped to the bone.
These people didn’t freeze to death.
They starved.
—
Firelight glows on the walls of the family room. I’m naked in a sleeping bag that’s inside of a sleeping bag that’s covered in blankets.
Amanda thaws out beside me in two sleeping bags of her own.
Our wet clothes are drying on the brick hearth, and we’re lying close enough to the fire that I can feel the warmth of it lapping at my face.
Outside, the storm rages on, the entire framework of the house creaking
in the strongest gusts of wind.
Amanda’s eyes are open.
She’s been awake a little while, and we’ve already killed the two bottles of water, which are now packed with snow and standing on the hearth near the fire.
“What do you think happened to whoever lived here?” she asks.
Truth: I dragged their bodies into an office so she wouldn’t see them.
But I say, “I don’t know. Maybe they went somewhere warm?”
She smiles. “Liar. We’re not doing so hot with our spaceship.”
“I think this is what they call a steep learning curve.”
She draws in a long, deep breath, lets it out.
Says, “I’m forty-one. It wasn’t the most amazing life, but it was mine. I had a career. An apartment. A dog. Friends. TV shows I liked to watch. This guy, John, I’d seen three times. Wine.” She looks at me. “I’m never going to
see any of that again, am I?”
I’m not certain how to respond.
She continues, “At least you have a destination. A world you want to get back to. I can’t return to mine, so where does that leave me?”
She stares at me.
Tense.
Unblinking.
I have no answer.
—
The next time I come to consciousness, the fire has reduced itself to a pile of glowing embers, and the snow near the tops of the windows is backlit and sparkling as threads of sunlight attempt to sneak through.
Even inside the house, it is inconceivably cold.
Reaching a hand out of the sleeping bag, I touch our clothes on the hearth, relieved to find them dry. I pull my hand back inside and turn toward Amanda. She has the sleeping bag pulled over her face, and I can see her breath pushing through the down in puffs of steam that have formed a structure of ice crystals on the surface of the bag.
I put on my clothes and build a new fire and hold my hands in the heat just in time to keep my fingers from going numb.
Leaving Amanda to sleep, I walk through the dining room, where the sun cutting through the snow at the top of the windows casts just enough
illumination to light my way.
Up the dark staircase.
Down the hall.
Back into the girl’s room, where snow has blown in and covered most of the floor.
I climb through the window frame and squint against the painful light, the glare coming off the ice so intense that for five seconds I can’t see a
thing.
The snow is waist-deep.
The sky a perfect blue.
No sound of birds.
No sound of life.
There’s not even a whisper of wind and no trace of our tracks. Everything smoothed-over and drifted.
The temperature must be miles below zero, because even in the direct sun, I’m not anywhere close to warm.
Beyond this neighborhood, the skyline of Chicago looms, the towers snow-blown and ice-encrusted and glittering in the sun.
A white city.
A world of ice.
Across the street, I survey the open field where we nearly froze to death
yesterday.
There’s no sign of the box.
—
Back inside, I find Amanda awake, sitting up at the edge of the hearth with the sleeping bags and blankets wrapped around her.
I head into the kitchen, locate some silverware.
Then I open the backpack and dig out a couple of MREs.
They’re cold but rich.
We eat ravenously.
Amanda asks, “Did you see the box?”
“No, I think it’s buried under the snow.”
“Fantastic.” She looks at me, then back into the flames, says, “I don’t know whether to be mad at you or grateful.”
“What are you talking about?”
“While you were upstairs, I had to use the bathroom. I stumbled into the
office.”
“So you saw them.”
“They starved, didn’t they? Before they ran out of fuel for the fire.”
“Looks like it.”
As I stare into the flames, I feel something needling the back of my brain.
An inkling.
It started when I was outside a moment ago, looking at the field, thinking about us almost dying in that whiteout.
I say, “Remember what you said about the corridor? How it reminded
you of being trapped in a whiteout?”
She stops eating, looks at me.
“The doors in the corridor are the connections to an infinite array of parallel worlds, right? But what if we’re defining these connections?”
“How?”
“What if it’s like dream-building, where we’re somehow choosing these specific worlds?”
“You’re saying that, out of an infinite number of realities, I intentionally picked this shithole?”
“Not intentionally. Maybe it’s a reflection of what you were feeling at the moment you opened the door.”
She takes the last bite of food and tosses her empty MRE packet into the fire.
I say, “Think about the first world we saw—that ruined Chicago, with the buildings crumbling all around us. What was our emotional state as we walked into that parking garage?”
“Fear. Terror. Despair. Oh my God. Jason.”
“What?”
“Before we opened the door to the hangar and saw the other versions of you and me getting caught, you had mentioned that very thing happening.”
“Did I?”
“You were talking about the idea of the multiverse, and everything that can happen will happen, and you said that somewhere there was a version of you and me that never made it into the box. Moments later, you opened a door and we watched that exact scenario play out.”
I feel the spine-tingling rush of a revelation sweeping over me.
I say, “This whole time, we’ve been wondering where the controls are—”
“But we’re the controls.”
“Yep. And if that’s the case, then we have the ability to go wherever we want. Including home.”
—
Early the next morning, we stand in the midst of this silent neighborhood, waist-deep in snow and shivering, even though we’re wearing layer upon layer of that poor family’s winter clothes, which we raided from the coat closet.
In the field ahead of us, there’s no sign of our tracks. No sign of the box.
Nothing but smooth, unbroken snow.
The field is huge and the box is tiny.
The chances of us stumbling upon it through blind luck are minuscule.
With the sun just creeping above the trees, the cold is unreal.
“What are we supposed to do, Jason? Take a guess? Start digging?”
I glance back at the half-buried house, wondering for a terrifying moment how long we could survive there. How long before the firewood ran out?
Before our food ran out? Before we gave up and perished like all the others?
I can feel a dark pressure mounting in my chest—fear pushing in.
I draw a deep breath into my lungs, and the air is so cold it makes me
cough.
Panic stalks me from all sides.
Finding the box is impossible.
It’s too cold out here.
There won’t be enough time, and when the next storm comes, and the next, the box is going to be buried so deep we’ll never have a chance of
reaching it.
Unless… I let the backpack slide off my shoulders into the snow and unzip it with
trembling fingers.
“What are you doing?” Amanda asks.
“Throwing a Hail Mary.”
It takes me a moment to find what I’m looking for.
Grasping the compass, I leave Amanda and the pack and wade into the field.
She follows, shouting for me to wait up.
Fifty feet out, I stop to let her catch up to me.
“Look at this,” I say, touching the face of the compass. “We’re in South Chicago, right?” I point toward the distant skyline. “So magnetic north is that way. But this compass says otherwise. See how the needle is pointing east toward the lake?”
Her face lights up. “Of course. It’s the box’s magnetic field, pushing the
compass needle away from it.”
We posthole through the deep powder.
In the middle of the field, the needle swings from east to west.
“We’re right on top of it.”
I begin to dig, my bare hands aching from the snow, but I don’t stop.
Four feet down, I hit the edge of the box, and I keep digging, faster now, my sleeves pulled forward to protect my hands, which are passing from a cold-driven agony into numbness.
When my half-frozen fingers finally graze the top of the open door, I let out a shout that echoes through the frozen world.
—
Ten minutes later, we’re back inside the box, drinking ampoule forty-six and ampoule forty-five.
Amanda starts the timer on her watch, kills the lantern to preserve the batteries, and as we sit beside each other in the frigid dark, waiting for the drug to hit, she says, “Never thought I’d be glad to see our shitty little
lifeboat again.”
“Right?”
She leans her head against my shoulder.
“Thank you, Jason.”
“For what?”
“Not letting me freeze to death out there.”
“Does this mean we’re even?”
She laughs. “Not even close. I mean, let’s not forget, this is still all your fault.”
It’s a strange exercise in sensory deprivation to sit in the total darkness and silence of the box. The only physical sensations are the chill of the metal bleeding through my clothes and the pressure of Amanda’s head against my shoulder.
“You’re different than him,” she says.
“Who?”
“My Jason.”
“How so?”
“Softer. He had a real hard edge when you got down to it. The most
driven human being I’ve ever met.”
“Were you his therapist?”
“Sometimes.”
“Was he happy?”
I sense her pondering my question in the dark.
“What?” I ask. “Am I putting you in a doctor-patient confidentiality quandary?”
“Technically, you two are the same person. It’s new territory for sure. But no. I wouldn’t say he was happy. He lived an intellectually stimulating but ultimately one-dimensional life. All he did was work. In the last five years, he didn’t have a life outside the lab. He practically lived there.”
“You know your Jason is the one who did this to me. I’m here right now because several nights ago, someone abducted me at gunpoint while I was walking home. He took me to an abandoned power plant, drugged me, asked me a bunch of questions about my life and the choices I’d made. If I was happy. If I would’ve done things differently. The memories are back now. Then I woke up in your lab. In your world. I think your Jason did this to me.”
“You’re suggesting that he went into the box, somehow found your world, your life, and switched places with you?”
“Do you think he was capable?”
“I don’t know. That’s crazy.”
“Who else would’ve done this to me?”
Amanda is quiet for a moment.
She says finally, “Jason was obsessed with the path not taken. He talked
about it all the time.”
Now I feel the anger coming back.
I say, “There’s still a part of me that doesn’t want to believe it. I mean, if he wanted my life, he could’ve just killed me. But he went to the trouble of injecting me, not only with an ampoule, but ketamine, which rendered me unconscious and blurred my memories of the box and what he’d done. Then he actually brought me back to his world. Why?”
“It actually makes a lot of sense.”
“You think?”
“He wasn’t a monster. If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior. In your world, are
you a renowned physicist?”
“No, I teach at a second-rate college.”
“Are you wealthy?”
“Professionally and financially speaking, I can’t hold a candle to your Jason.”
“There you go. He tells himself he’s giving you the chance of a lifetime.
He wants a shot at the path not taken. Why wouldn’t you? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying that’s how a good man works himself up to do a terrible thing. It’s Human Behavior 101.”
She must sense my rage building, because she says, “Jason, you don’t have the luxury of freaking out right now. In a minute, we’re going back into that corridor. We’re the controls. Your words. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“If that’s the truth, if it’s our emotional state that’s somehow selecting these worlds, to what kind of a place is your rage and jealousy going to take us? You can’t hold on to this energy as you open a new door. You have to
find a way to let it go.”
I can feel the drug coming.
My muscles relax.
For a moment, the anger vanishes into a river of peace and calm I would give anything to make last, to have carry me through.
When Amanda turns on the lantern, the walls perpendicular to the door are gone.
I look down at the leather bag that holds the remaining ampoules, thinking, If the asshole who did this to me figured out how to navigate the
box, then I will too.
In the blue light, Amanda watches me.
I say, “We have forty-four ampoules left. Twenty-two chances to get this right. How many did the other Jason take with him into the box?”
“A hundred.”
Shit.
I feel a glimmer of panic course through me, but I smile in spite of it.
“I guess it’s lucky for us I’m way smarter than him, right?”
Amanda laughs, rises to her feet, and offers me her hand.
“We have one hour,” she says. “You up for this?”
“Absolutely.”
