A review by nataliya_x
Schrödinger's Gun by Ray Wood

4.0

When Erwin Schrödinger came up with his catchy mockery of the absurdist implications of some quantum mechanics interpretations he likely never even imagined that in the collective mind his memorable example of a cat simultaneously dead and alive¹ until the possibilities are collapsed into a single state by the power of observation would forever become the definite "that's it!" quantum theory postulate.

¹The principle was then realistically expanded in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies:

"Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious."

But the idea of the many possibilities just waiting to be collapsed into one remains catching and, unlike the poor cat, definitely alive, and that's what the short Tor.com story Schrödinger’s Gun capitalizes on - the instant recognition of the principle.



It's a determinedly noir story set in the 1930s-feel Chicago full of gangsters and cold crime and moonshine - and also somehow equipped with technology that allows the implantation of a heisen device (immediately leading to the thought of Heisenberg uncertainty principle) into a person's brain, allowing that person to see the endless possibilities spreading out from any event and to grab onto whichever of those possibilities you would like to see happen.

"Shadows of those possibilities stretched out on either side of us, rows of doppelgangers interviewing and being interviewed, as though Kitty and I were caught between two mirrors."

It seems like a great aid to a grim noir detective (who, in the defiance of the noir conventions, is a woman - but after all, it's sci-fi noir with a little less gender biases). It may even seem like a worthy enough personal sacrifice to solve crime - even if it is only in one of the endless possibilities.

“Why bother?” he had asked me once. “Even if you bring this guy down now there’s gonna be about a million other universes where he gets away scot free, right?”[...]
“Because if I don’t bother,” I said, “he gets away in a million and one.”

And personal sacrifice it is indeed. In parallel with the main storyline of the novella focusing on the murder of a Chicago mobster and an accidentally dropped titular gun in the middle of a grim unfriendly winter and the black-and-white film feel of the story there is another narrative line highlighting the isolation of living with a possibilities generation that has become a permanent part of you.

"My baby girl, my joy, my Sarah—for those first few weeks I couldn’t look at her. Not without seeing a spectrum of all that she could or might or would never be, every glorious and terrifying possibility fanning out around her. I brushed against universes in which I slipped and dropped her off the balcony, or accidentally smothered her beneath a blanket. They were outside chances, but they followed me like specters. Rick was no better. He was suddenly a million different people—Rick if I said this, Rick if I said that; Rick who could fall out or back in love with me a thousand different ways—and I withdrew, not knowing which of him I loved."

This story is definitely memorable with its stark contrast between the black-and-white smoke-filled noir tone and the existence of the possibilities-bending technology, wholly unexplained and therefore even more interesting. It's the mixture of vintage and futuristic, and this improbable mixture works improbably exactly like the mass-appealing idea of a cat both alive and dead, leading to the ending that us both frustrating and, of course, completely logically inevitable.

"That’s one thing they don’t tell you about Schrödinger’s cat: you leave the lid on the box too long and the damn thing starves regardless. No quantum possibilities required."