Murder in the Multiverse

by R E McLean

  The interferometer was the device that made the Cheshire Cat experiment possible. It interfered with quantum particles and separated them from their properties. At least, that was the theory. Dr Katz wasn’t getting very far with it.

  She scanned her mental image of the room, trying to imagine where Dr Katz might have put her coat. There were no chairs in here, nowhere he could casually sling it.

  But there was a hook on the door behind her. She turned, very slowly, listening to her own breath in the darkness.

  She took a step forward. If she held her arms out in front, she would find the coat before she hit the door.

  She froze. Something had brushed past her leg. Something warm, and soft. Something that felt a lot like…

  No.

  She shook her head. “Stop it, ya twat,” she told herself, and took another step forwards.

  There was a yowl. Something thin and snakelike tugged its way out from under her foot and fled into the darkness.

  She had no idea where the light switch was.

  She took another tentative step forward. Something brushed her outstretched fingertips. It was soft, and warm, and purple, not that she could see that. But she knew.

  She grabbed her coat.

  It hit her in the face with an outstretched claw.

  “What the—?”

  She fell back and landed on the floor with a skidding thud. The benches revealed themselves to her as she flew into them, knocking a monitor onto her head.

  “Ow!”

  She caught the monitor before it could continue its journey to the floor, wanting to yell at her stupid coat for attacking her. But she didn’t want anyone knowing she was in here.

  Then she heard it. Scuffling, from the corner ahead of her, towards the door. Mice? This was an old building, but the lab was sealed. It had to be; if the quantum effects generated by the experiment leaked out to the rest of the building, the undergraduates might all turn into kittens.

  The scuffling approached, whatever it was, surely not her coat. She wondered if it could see her.

  “Hello?”

  It stopped moving.

  “Who are you? I’m armed.”

  Alex grabbed a pen from her shirt pocket and clicked it on. She’d read that you could kill someone with a loaded ballpoint pen, if you knew what you were doing.

  Alex was a twenty-four-year-old postdoctoral student from the Scottish borders. The most damage she’d ever done with a ballpoint pen was when she’d written E=Mc2 wrong on a toilet door and fifty-seven physics undergrads had failed their term paper as a result.

  She leaned forwards. It had to be a mouse. Someone had unblocked one of the holes that had been meticulously filled in before Dr Katz had started working in here. He liked to talk about the amount of work that went into getting this lab ready; it made him feel important.

  Alex wasn’t going to let a mouse scare her. She put up a hand to check she wasn’t going to hit her head, gathered up the monitor in her lap, and stood. She fumbled the monitor back onto the worktop.

  “Right. I’m getting my coat now. I don’t know where you are, but watch I don’t step on you.”

  “Meow.”

  “How did a cat get in here?”

  “Meow.”

  She rubbed her eyes. In the gloom of the corner next to where her coat should be, something was glowing.

  “How d’you get in here, puss?”

  She shuffled towards it, careful to keep her feet steady for fear of trailing wires. Her foot hit something and she heard clattering.

  “Aw, bum.”

  A smell engulfed the room; sharp, acrid, making her gag. She swallowed, then clamped her mouth shut.

  She took a stride forward, anxious to get out of there. She’d leave her coat behind; taking it would place her at the scene of the crime.

  “Meow.”

  “You again. Let’s get you out of here.”

  She stumbled into the door and her face landed in her coat. It smelled of the Big Mac Rik had dropped on it earlier. She felt for the light switch and the room jumped into life.

  She turned to survey her mess. The monitor she’d caught with her head sat on the workbench at a precarious angle. In the center of the floor was a growing puddle. Hovering six inches above that was the face of a tabby cat.

  Only the face. The legs, tail and body were missing. The ears were nowhere to be seen.

  Alex dropped to the floor and reached out to the cat. She put her hand in front of its face, waiting for it to nuzzle her. It purred and pushed its nose into her palm. Then she moved her hand downwards. She could feel the cat’s chest beneath her hand, sense the vibrations as it purred under her touch.

  But the cat she was stroking was invisible.

  “Are you another one like Schrödinger,” she said, “or are you something new?”

  “Meow.”

  The cat licked its lips, yawned in that flip-top-head way that only cats have, and vanished. Alex’s hand fell through empty space and landed in the puddle.

  She stared at the spot where it had been.

  “Puss?” she whispered. “Come back.”

  But it was gone. She stood up and wiped her wet hands on her grubby jeans.

  She had to clean up. There was a box of tissues on the workbench; she righted a water bottle that had rolled under the workbench and mopped up the spillage. The smell had gone. She put it next to the monitor she’d disturbed and pushed that back into its original spot on the bench.

  As she moved it, its screen flickered into life. Numbers and symbols danced on the screen, the work that Dr Katz had been doing before he’d left. It was as meaningless as the rest of the data she’d spent the last four months crunching for him at her own workstation.

  She grabbed the mouse and scrolled down, heart dipping at the prospect of working through all this tomorrow. Then she stopped.

  At the bottom of the screen was a sequence of numbers and letters which hadn’t been completed. She started typing, working through the equations and calculating their logical conclusion.

  She turned to the spot where the cat had disappeared. Behind it was the interferometer. She’d kicked it when the door had closed on her.

  She looked back at the screen. Then at the spot where the cat had been. Then back at the screen.

  This was big. This was huge. This might change the way humanity viewed the universe.

  Or it could be the late-night imaginings of a freckled Scottish postdoc who’d just stroked a cat with no body.

  She’d check it tomorrow, when she had the data on her own machine and could work through it properly.

  She grabbed the mouse and deleted her work. No one could see this.

  3

  Cat

  San Francisco

  24 March, 11:20pm

  Alex glanced both ways along the street then opened the door to her apartment block. It was a battered wooden door in a narrow doorway that clearly wasn’t part of the building’s original design. She took the steps two at a time, desperate to talk to someone. Schrödinger wouldn’t understand a word she was about to tell him, but at least he made a good listener. That is, if he’d chosen to be alive today.

  The first time Schrödinger had died was the second-worst night of Alex's life.

  She'd had a tough day at work, just two months into her new job and learning how to find her way through the maze of Berkeley’s faculty politics. She hadn’t made any friends yet, and was sure when people looked at her they imagined not a small, geeky physicist but the girl from Brave. She’d heard mutters of ach, wee lassie follow her around the building.

  She arrived home looking forward to a long, hot bath and a beer or three. The streets were dark and chilly; it was early November and Hallowe’en still hovered in the air.

  “Shrew?” she'd called as she fell through the front door. “Puss, puss?”

  Schrödinger—or Shrew as she had taken to calling him after realizing that his name made her look like a bit of a dork—was an o
ld-fashioned kind of cat who would respond to all the silly, clichéd noises and mewings she could direct at him. Even in French, which she found impressive.

  But that night, there was no response.

  “Minou, minou,” she intoned, knowing he liked the French. Then, in a more hesitant tone of voice, ”Schrödinger?”

  Nothing. The apartment was quiet, windows shut tight against the hum of distant traffic. There was no sound, not even a belching pipe, scratching pigeon on the windowsill (one of these days she would open the window suddenly and they'd regret it) or the refrigerator humming its disapproval of the hot dog sausages, cheap beer and Twinkies she liked to fill it with.

  She hurried through the apartment, calling his name in increasingly strident tones. But he was nowhere. She tested all the window latches, peered out dreading what she might see, checked behind the couch and under her duvet.

  No cat.

  Finally she arrived back in the kitchen. On the table, left there from the previous night, was a gargantuan cardboard box, one Amazon had used to deliver a pencil sharpener. Schrödinger—like all cats—liked to sit in cardboard boxes, even the tiny ones that didn't even keep his generous backside warm. Maybe he'd climbed inside.

  The top was closed, but not sealed. If he'd climbed in and gone to sleep, there was a chance it had fallen shut over him.

  She stilled her breathing, listening for signs of movement inside; scrabbling or sniffing, maybe the patter of him chasing his tail. But there was nothing.

  Slowly, her heart thumping in her ears, she lifted the lid.

  And there he was, curled up in the bottom of the box. Lifeless, motionless. Dead.

  She reached a trembling hand inside to touch his fur. He was cold. She let out a high-pitched gasp and plugged her mouth with her fist. She reached out again and laid her hand gently on the top of his head. It was still.

  Nausea rose up from her stomach. Overcome by tears, she rushed to the bathroom and dry-retched into the toilet.

  She sat on the bathroom floor for a few minutes, recovering her breath and checking that her stomach had calmed down, then ventured back into the kitchen.

  The box was still there. It was still open. And, head poking up from it, looking confused, was Schrödinger.

  “Meow”, he said.

  She rushed to him, pulling him out of the box and spinning him around at arm's length above her head.

  “Shrew, ya wee bampot,” she crowed. ”You had me going there.”

  He said nothing (he may be a quantum cat, but he was still a cat) but threw out a paw to hit her in the eye. She laughed and put him on the floor. He rubbed against her legs and trotted over to his bowl, munching noisily.

  In the months after that first time, he'd only pulled the dying trick a few times, maybe once every ten times she arrived home. But over the last year it had grown more frequent, until it had reached the point where on any given day there was a fifty percent chance that he'd be dead.

  Alex was tempted to tell her fellow physics postdocs—but couldn't quite bring herself to. A cat that lived in a state of quantum flux, that was both alive and dead until she actually, well, looked at him—would be a marvel, fit either for the circus or the lab.

  So his strange habit of dying had become their little secret.

  Tonight she was worried about him. He didn’t like it when she worked late. She crossed her fingers as she climbed the stairs, muttering a physicist’s prayer under her breath.

  She reached the first floor. As ever, the sickly smell of marijuana from the apartment above battled the fug of frying meat from below. She heard movement behind the door to her apartment. She blew out a long, relieved breath and fell through it, ready to pick her cat up and give him a tight hug.

  “Shrew?”

  “Meow?” He poked his head out of his box on the kitchen table. Had he been dead until she’d called him?

  She decided not to think about it and gave him a riffle behind the ears.

  “Good boy.” She kissed the top of his head. “Eww. Have a wash, boy.”

  He smelled odd. Sharp, like he’d spent the afternoon gluing his whiskers together.

  “Shrew?”

  She shook her head. There’d been no glue in the lab, and there was none here.

  She gathered him up and switched on the TV. The news was a murder. Nothing new; this was San Francisco. Sometimes she missed her sleepy hometown.

  Alex grabbed a beer and slumped onto the sofa. Schrödinger jumped out of her arms and onto the coffee table, staring at the screen. Someone called Claire Pope had been stabbed. A billionaire who’d made her fortune manufacturing pet food.

  “That’s your favorite, Shrew.”

  He continued staring at the screen. The newsreel was showing footage of the victim’s apartment—something luxurious in Pacific Heights. Then it flipped to images of Claire Pope on her wedding day.

  Schrödinger hissed. Alex put a palm on his back.

  “Hey, boy. Shush, it’s ok.”

  His back arched against her hand. His fur was damp, the way it got when he’d been fighting.

  “You don’t like that guy’s specs, boy? Nor me.”

  She flicked to the next channel and Schrödinger calmed. He sidled into her lap and she leaned back to stare at the ceiling, musing over what she’d seen on Dr Katz’s monitor last night.

  4

  Skirt

  San Francisco

  25 March, 9:15am

  Alex wasn’t very good at wearing black.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t do it. Any old idiot could open their wardrobe, pull out a black sweater and yank it over their head.

  But once she’d done it, and looked at herself in the mirror, she changed.

  The horror of seeing her curly red hair and pale freckled skin above a black outfit turned her into a shadow of herself. Someone who knew just how awful she looked and would rather other people didn’t notice.

  It’s not that Alex was vain. She just didn’t like wearing clothes that made people ask if she was feeling OK and tell her to go home and get some rest.

  But today she had no choice.

  She stood at the back of the chapel in her one and only black outfit. A fake silk shirt with two missing buttons, fastened today with a safety pin. And a skirt.

  Alex hated skirts even more than she hated wearing black. This one was long, and swishy, and made her feel like the wind might blow up toward her nether regions and freeze them off at any moment.

  Even in California, it could get chilly. Especially here, at the temple-like San Francisco Columbarium.

  She nudged Rik Patel, her lab partner and fellow postdoc. He appeared equally out of place in a black suit that looked like he’d bought it ten years and five sizes ago.

  “What’s up?” he hissed.

  “Nothing. Just puzzled.”

  “Shush.” He glanced toward the front. They were in the twelfth row, just three tactful rows from the rear wall and behind all the other mourners. In fact, there were six empty rows in front of them.

  “Don’t you want to know why I’m puzzled?”

  He frowned. “I never want to know why you’re puzzled.”

  “OK.”

  She smiled sideways at him. He’d ask her as soon as this was over, she knew.

  She looked around the chapel. It was minimalist, tasteful. Nothing like the imposing Scottish Presbyterian church where they’d buried her mother two years ago.

  She gritted her teeth and put up a brick wall in her mind, a technique she’d learned through bitter experience. For good measure, she put a shrub in front of it. A cotoneaster, with small white flowers. Pretty. When that didn’t work, she plonked a nest in the middle of it, with thirteen chirruping babies yelling at their absent mother for food.

  Her stomach dipped.

  The baby birds and absent mother were a bad move. She must remember not to use that one again.

  She shook her head to scrub out the nest and replaced it with a balled-up scrap of
paper. Then another one. She added a crisp packet, then a sweet wrapper. She felt her heart rate return to normal.

  She opened her eyes and made a mental note. Litter worked.

  At the front, a short, balding man who looked as if he hated wearing black even more than she did, was speaking. Simon Yang, Dean of the physics Faculty. It was a dull eulogy, peppered with clichés. Sorely missed—celebrate her life—thoughts go out.

  She looked at Rik. If he turned, she was going to make a puking gesture with her finger. Just a quick one. No one would see.

  The chapel doors swooshed open and closed behind her. She felt her body pull itself to attention, knowing she might be observed. She smoothed her skirt and concentrated on making her hair as un-ginger as possible. It never worked.

  There was shuffling behind her and then the thud of butt landing on seat. She heard breathing.

  She frowned and forced herself to focus. She hadn’t met the woman in the coffin—had barely heard of her before yesterday—so it was difficult to summon the required grief for this occasion. Everyone in the physics department was required to attend. Some of them, those in post longer than Alex, were up at the front, dabbing their eyes. She wondered exactly who Doctor Pierce was, and when she’d last worked at Berkeley. Not for a while, that was clear.

  She heard another movement behind her, and a cough. She craned her neck. A man was in the seat closest to the aisle, right at the back. He gazed at the coffin.

  The man was slim, mid-thirties. He had a dark beard with an odd hole in it, as if he’d started to shave before remembering that he had a beard. Maybe it was a skin condition. She could sympathize with that. Being a Scotswoman in California meant Alex had a permanent skin condition.

  His eyes slid to meet hers and she looked down, aware that she was blushing. At least it meant she was no longer pale as a polar bear on a very cold day.

  She turned back to the front. The Dean had stopped talking and was heading back to his seat. The priest patted him on the back and muttered something. Alex scanned the sparse rows of mourners in front, wondering how well they knew the deceased. Doctor Pierce had been nothing more than a photograph on the physics faculty website since Alex had joined. She’d had blonde hair pulled up in a tangled bun and wore a red and pink kaftan. She looked more like a member of the English faculty than a quantum physicist.