Schrödinger's Gun Read Online Free PDF Page A

the cat is inside the box, okay, and there’s a flask of poison in there, too, which can break open at any time. The cat might die and it might not. Now, we don’t know if it’s alive or dead in there until we open the box to check. Okay?”
    I remember thinking that it was a dumb thing to do, trying to explain quantum physics to a six-year-old, but Sarah was a smart kid. She just looked up at me with her big, doleful eyes and listened.
    â€œBut it’s not just that we ‘don’t know’, it’s that there are really millions of potential cats, alive and dead, and opening the box collapses them all down into just one, which is alive or dead. That’s what mommy’s head-chip does.”
    She considered this, eyes on her lap, for almost a minute, then looked up and said, “The cat must know.”
    The Chicago evening closed around me. I looked up at the curtained window and then down at the letter in my hand. I plunged my thumb into the envelope.
    *   *   *
    I dozed standing up on West 23 rd Street. As was usual by now, I was both there and in my bed in Trumbull Avenue at the same time, my implant straining to keep both possibilities open. It had gotten too cold even to snow: the sidewalks were locked in frost and my breath was as opaque as cigarette smoke. I huddled into the wall/pillow and closed my eyes.
    â€”Kitty Rivers—
    â€”Vincent Quine—
    â€”a blunt-nosed pocket pistol underneath a staircase—
    My thoughts ran through the same tired grooves. Who shot Johnny Rivers? Was his death simply a part of the grim business of Chicago—a hit put out by a rival gang and executed by a thug who’d killed before and gotten away with it—or was it a crime of the heart, an act of revenge by the woman he had pushed too far?
    I think I started dreaming. Vincent Quine oozed past me, stretching and distorting like he was in a house of mirrors. Kitty Rivers showed me her bruised cheek and started crying, turning into Sarah when I tried to comfort her. For a moment I saw all of Chicago as a mist of endless possibilities. Bullets flew from guns, hit, missed, ricocheted; bodies fell, crumpled, folded, flew, sank, rolled, were discovered or kept secret; revenge was or wasn’t or was almost taken. A million stories hovered in the smoke.
    I woke to the sound of a door slamming shut.
    It took me a moment to work out which reality I was in. West 23 rd Street was chill and bleak and someone had just got out of a car. It was too dark to see them clearly. They opened the trapdoor to the basement and disappeared inside.
    I followed, reaching into my pocket. My gun was freezing to the touch. I trod stealthily over to the trapdoor and crouched beside it. The light had been switched on inside, but at this angle I could see almost nothing of the room below. I stood up and stepped over to the stairs.
    Apart from Johnny’s body having been cleared away, the crime scene was exactly as I had left it. Distillery equipment glinted dully in the half-light. When I reached the bottom of the steps I drew my gun from my coat and stepped forwards, squinting furiously as my eyes adjusted. I heard a scuff behind me and spun around.
    â€œChicago Police,” I said to the shadow underneath the stairs. “Step out slowly, hands on your head.”
    The figure moved into the light.
    My heisen roared. It was impossible. What I was looking at was impossible. I felt my gun drift downwards as my arms lost strength.
    They stood there, overlapping, like two different movies projected onto the same screen; a fault line between two universes. A perfect quantum tightrope. I was looking at the cat inside the box, alive and dead at the same time, and I had seconds left to choose which possibility remained when the lid came off. I couldn’t speak. For a moment, two versions of myself stood inside of each other, our hearts beating different rhythms.
    The figure that had