In the end, it turned out there were others. Others who couldn’t collapse the wave function — a certain consistent percentage of the population who looked like us, and acted like us, but lacked this fundamental quality of humanity. Though Satish was careful not to use the term “soul” in his late night phone calls, we heard it in the gaps between the words. We heard it in the things he didn’t say.
I pictured him on the other end of the line, sitting in some dark hotel room, fighting a growing insomnia, fighting the terrible loneliness of what he was doing.
Point Machine sought comfort in elaborately constructed phylogenies and retreated into his cladograms. But there was no comfort for him there. “There’s no frequency distribution curve,” he told me. “No disequilibrium between ethnographic populations, nothing I can get traction on.”
He pored over Satish’s data, looking for the pattern that would make sense of it all.
“Distribution is random,” he said. “It doesn’t act like a trait.”
“Then maybe it’s not,” I said.
He shook his head. “Then who are they, some kind of empty-set? Nonplayer characters in the indeterminate system? Part of the game?”
Satish had his own ideas, of course.
“Why none of the scientists?” I asked him one night, phone to my ear. “If it’s random, why none of us?”
“If they’re part of the indeterminate system, why would they become scientists?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like a virtual construct,” Satish said. “You write the code, a series of response algorithms. Wind them up and let them go.”
“This is crazy.”
“I didn’t make the rules.”
“Do they even know what you’re testing them for, when they look at your little light? Do they know they’re different?”
“One of them,” he said. He was silent for a moment. “One of them knew.”
And then days later, the final late night call. From Denver. The last time I’d ever speak to him.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do this,” he said, voice strangely harsh.
I rubbed my eyes, sitting up in bed.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to build this kind of thing,” he said. “The flaw in reality that you talked about… I don’t think we were expected to take advantage of it this way. To make a test.”
“What happened?”
“I saw the boy again.”
“Who?”
“The boy from New York,” he said. “He came here to see me.” And then he hung up.
Ten days later, Satish disappeared, along with his special little box. He got off a plane in Boston, but didn’t make it home. I was at the lab when I got the call from his wife.
“No,” I said. “Not for days.”
She was crying into the phone.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I lied.
When I hung up, I grabbed my coat and headed for the door. Bought a fifth of vodka and drove home to the hotel.
Stared in the mirror. Eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal.
I spun the cap off the bottle and smelled the burn. Music filtered through the thin walls, a soft melody, a woman’s voice. I imagined my life different. I imagined that I could stop here. Not take the first drink.
My hands trembled.
The first sip brought tears to my eyes. Then I upended the bottle and drank deep. I tried to have a vision. I tried to picture Satish happy and healthy in a bar somewhere, working on a three-day binge, but the image wouldn’t come. That was me, not Satish. Satish didn’t drink. I tried to picture him coming home again. I couldn’t see that either.
When the bottle was half empty, I walked to the desk and picked up the envelope marked “screen results.” Then I looked at the gun. I imagined what a .357 round could do to a skull — lay it open wide and deep. Reveal that place where self resides — expose it to the air where it would evaporate like liquid nitrogen, sizzling, steaming, gone. A gun could be many things, including a vehicle to return you to the implicate. The dream within a dream.
I imagined the world like an Escher drawing, part of either of two different scenes, and our brains decide which to see.
The more complex the system, the more ways it can go wrong. Point Machine had said that.
And things go wrong. That spotlight. Little engines of wave function collapse. Humans are blind to the beauty; the truth is beyond us. We can’t see reality as it is: only observe it into existence.
But what if you could control that spotlight, dilate it like the pupil of an eye? Stare deep into the implicate order. What would you see? What if you could slide between the sheaths of the subjective and objective? Maybe there have always been people like that. Mistakes. People who walk among us, but are not us. Only now there was a test. A test to point them out.
And maybe they didn’t want to be found.
I pulled the sheet of paper out of the envelope.
I unfolded it and spread it out flat on the desk. I looked at the results — and in so doing, finally collapsed the probability wave of the experiment I’d run all those months ago.
I stared at what was on the paper, a series of shaded semicircles — a now familiar pattern of light and dark.
Though, of course, the results had been there all along.
Over the last five years, Ted Kosmatka has published more than a dozen stories in places like
Ted was born in Indiana, not far from Lake Michigan. He studied biology at Indiana University and since then has gradually assembled one of those crazy work histories that writers so often seem to have. Among other things, he’s been a zookeeper, a chem tech, and a laborer in a steel mill. More recently, he worked in a research laboratory where he ran an electron microscope. He left the lab in 2009 to take a job writing for a video game company. He now lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.
A MEMORY OF WIND
Rachel Swirsky
FROM THE AUTHOR: In the spring of 2006, I attended a production of Euripedes’
