David Walton - Superposition

There would be a rescue crew, eventually, but we couldn’t afford to wait. I started picking up rocks from near the door and hurling them aside as fast as I could. I was haunted by the sight of their flickering images, wavering between life and death, like a macabre slot machine with more at stake than just a few coins.

In the early part of the twentieth century, when the quantum nature of subatomic particles was just beginning to be perceived, there was a dispute among scientists, some of whom found the notion of collapsing quantum waveforms to be too ridiculous to be true. One of the leading scientists of the day, Erwin Schrödinger, wrote a letter to Albert Einstein and others with a reductio ad absurdum argument, describing a thought experiment involving a cat in a box, meant to demonstrate that the probability wave concept was nonsense. In subsequent years, Schrödinger’s cat became even more well known than the scientist himself.

According to Schrödinger’s experiment, a cat was enclosed in a steel chamber along with a flask of hydrocyanic acid and a Geiger counter. In the Geiger counter was a tiny amount of a radioactive material, small enough that in the course of an hour, one of the atoms of that material might or might not decay, with equal probability. If the atom did decay, the Geiger counter would detect the emission, prompting a hammer to fall and shatter the flask, releasing cyanide gas that would kill the cat. If no atom decayed, no hammer would fall, and the cat would live.

The chance of radioactive decay was not a simple chance in the larger world, like flipping a coin, but a fundamental, subatomic, quantum probability. It meant that if the box were left closed for an hour, the atom would exist simultaneously in both states, decayed and not decayed, in a probability wave that had not yet collapsed. The cat, as a result, would be split: both alive and dead at the same time, entangled in the same probability wave that governed the atom. Until you opened the box.

Schrödinger’s thought experiment, ludicrous or not, was exactly the situation my family was now in. Both alive and dead, their probability waves would be indeterminate until I opened the door. The thought crossed my mind that I should stop digging, that it was better to be caught in a state between life and death than to be completely and irreconcilably dead. But that was no argument. The air inside would only last so long, and then there would be no living possibilities.

Eventually, a rescue crew arrived, and the work went much faster. The door was uncovered, the men shouted for anyone inside to stand back, and they smashed it open with a fire axe. A thin swirl of rock dust drifted out of the open doorway. I waited, holding my breath.

Elena emerged, coughing but smiling. “We’re all here,” she said. “We’re all okay.”

She ran to me, stumbling, and we had our reunion at last, colliding into an embrace despite our injuries and holding on to one another like we would never let go. The children came out next, Claire and Alessandra and Sean, bruised and burned but alive, completely alive. I hugged them each in turn, though as I reached Sean, I could tell that he was about to collapse. His skin was badly burned, and he was just starting to feel the pain, which I knew would get a lot worse before it got better. I held Alessandra close, thinking of Alex lying dead under tons of rock, and knowing that even if Alessandra remembered none of the last few months, she was still the same person I had come to love and admire.

The medics arrived with kits and stretchers. They took Sean and Elena and Marek away, loading their stretchers onto golf carts to take them to the elevators, and from there to waiting ambulances and to the hospital. Claire and Alessandra, unharmed, were left behind with me.

I hugged them both again. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” I said.

Claire gave me a tired smile. Somehow, even filthy with dust, she was beautiful. “Will the others be okay?”

“I think they will. Sean might be in for a long recovery, but he’ll make it.”

“I don’t understand,” Alessandra said. “What happened to Alex? What did she do?”

I explained as best I could about the final sacrifice she had made that had saved us all. I told Alessandra that Alex was dead, but not really dead, because everything Alex had been was part of who Alessandra was. They were the same, both of them, and I praised her for her quick intelligence and willingness to sacrifice herself for her family.

“But that wasn’t me,” Alessandra said.

I knew how it sounded, me heaping more praise and affection on a dead girl than I had ever shown to her. It would take time to turn that around. Time for me to demonstrate that I understood her better now, and loved her, not to the extent that she could be like Claire, but for herself.

“It was you,” I said. “It really was. You just don’t remember it.”

Though it was strange that she wouldn’t remember any of the last few months. I stopped to consider my own memories. I couldn’t bring to mind everything about what it was like to live in jail, but I could remember the horror of my first night there. I could remember all the time I had spent with Alex, but at the same time, I could remember enduring the trial from the perspective of the accused. Some of my memories had blown away into the clouds of what might have been, but some, from both sides, were as clear as daylight. Why couldn’t Alessandra remember some of those same things? Had the Alex I had known been lost entirely? Did this version of her really remember nothing?

Aid workers brought us blankets and bottles of water. A professional team arrived who regularly dealt with collapsed buildings and cave-ins and knew how to remove debris without risking further collapse.

“How many were in your party?” one of the professionals asked me.

“Six,” I said. “Myself, my wife, three children, and my friend Marek Svoboda. My wife and son were taken to the hospital, and these are my two girls.”

“We found another body in a chamber back that way.” He pointed. “We haven’t cleared enough to reach her yet, but she’s female, a child about the age of yours. You don’t know who she might be?”

I frowned. Alex shouldn’t have left a body behind. It should have disappeared when her waveform resolved, just as the other Jacob’s had. The truth hit me like a bath of icy water. When my two minds were coming together, and I was glimpsing flashes of both our memories, there was a moment when I felt like I might have resisted, might have held back or even prevented the collapse. It was an odd thought, scientifically, but wave collapse had always shared a strange connection to consciousness. If Alex had resisted collapse, however, then that meant…

“That’s my daughter, too,” I said. “And she’s still alive.”

“A little higher on the left,” I said. Alessandra lifted the left side of the Happy Birthday banner fractionally. “Perfect. Now climb down and help me with these balloons.”

The summer sun streamed through the windows, giving the dining room a bright, cheery air. Alessandra and I untangled the strings of a dozen latex balloons and tied them to the chair backs in pairs: two reds, two blues, two yellows, two greens. Claire walked through with a pile of presents, radiant herself in an orange sundress and ribbons in her blonde hair.

“Tell Sean to come down, will you?” I said. “He can help, too.”

Sean charged into the room at top speed and crashed into the opposite wall to stop his momentum. He had come home from the hospital just two weeks ago, but he was gaining in strength and energy every day. The plastic surgery had made the skin grafts on his face almost undetectable, and the doctors said that, given how young he was, the remaining scars would fade in time.