August 10, 2026
The breakthrough at the Pell Institute for the Physics of Experience came from inverting the oldest assumption in science. For four centuries, physics had taken matter as fundamental and left experience as a problem for later, and later had never come. The Pell group turned the assumption upside down: experience — the redness, the ache, the C-sharp — is the only thing that exists, and matter is a set of intermediate solutions in the mathematics of how experiences fit together. Atoms and chairs are just intermediate mathematical solutions, used by the math in mediating between the experiences of different people.
Time, too, was just an aspect of the math; in fact, the most fundamental one. At bottom nothing happens; the whole structure of human experience simply is, complete, the way π is. Every moment of every life, past or yet to come, sits at a fixed location in one timeless solution — a location mathematics can reach.
One thing that fell out of the Pell research: Experience is the only reality, and therefore the only thing that matters — colors, sounds, taste, touch, joy, love, pleasure… and all the varieties of suffering. There is nothing else.
Another result was that, by leveraging the now-solved math, a “sampler” could be built, which could look into the experience of any person who had lived in the past, was alive now, or would live in the future. There was only one limitation (which, they expected, could be solved with more research). Dropped anywhere into a life, the sampler slid to the moment with nothing after it and stopped there. It could do exactly one thing — retrieve the final experience of one human being, drawn at random from everyone who would ever be born. But they didn’t want to wait for more research. They built the sampler using the math they had available.
At 2:14 on the afternoon of August 10, Dr. Mira Chen ran the first retrieval. Three people were in the room: Chen; Ashworth, the theorist; and Voss, who had built the sampler. The first human experience ever retrieved belonged to a woman in birch snow, eight thousand years gone, opened by something with tusks, her last moment full of woodsmoke and a wish about her daughter that had no words in it, but which the sampler translated into modern English as best it could.
They ran two hundred more that week, then automated the sampler and let it run in batches around the clock. A man face-down in river mud, a spearpoint through him, his last thought a door he had meant to mend. An old woman in 1961, morphine-warm, a radio playing in the next room, going out gently in the middle of a song. A roof coming down in fire. Fevers past counting, and floods, and childbed, and hunger, and — again and again, more often than anyone expects — ordinary sleep. Some could not be dated at all: moments holding nothing but pain, no words, no place, no century, and these went into a bin of their own — the anonymous agony of history, which is what everyone assumed it was. By the twentieth of August they had run two and a half million retrievals, and the histogram of their dates matched the demographers’ curve of cumulative human births almost to the decimal: the long thin Pleistocene tail, the slow agricultural thickening, the vertical crowd of the modern world. One dated retrieval in fourteen came from inside living memory. The machine was drawing fairly from everyone who had ever been born.
From everyone who had ever been born. That was the anomaly, and for the next two weeks it was the only thing the three of them talked about. Not one retrieval in two and a half million came from any moment after theirs. And there was no reason for a wall to stand there. The structure was timeless — they had proved it; it was the founding theorem of the entire physics. Their particular August held no special status in the solution; “now” was not a coordinate the mathematics possessed; the sampler could no more know when it was being run than a die knows the date. They tore it down and rebuilt it twice. They seeded it by hand from printed random tables. They checked whether far-future experiences might be arriving mislabeled, dressed in contemporary content — but the deep past came through strange and unmistakable, and the deep future did not come through at all. Voss stopped sleeping.
One night, past two in the morning, Ashworth put down his pen. “I just had a wild thought,” he said. “Suppose the world ends soon. Really soon — suppose no one comes after us. Then the set of everyone who will ever be born lies almost entirely in the past, and the sampler is doing exactly what it should be doing.” For a moment the only sound was the hum of the racks. Then he shook his head at his reflection in the dark window. “But there’s no disaster out there. No war coming beyond the usual localized ones, no mile-wide rock falling, nothing world-ending brewing anywhere. So there’s something wrong with our calculations.”
They all went back to their calculations.
Voss, though, did not entirely go back. He spent the next afternoon wiring an alert into the sampling pipeline: if any retrieval ever came back tagged later than the day it was run, its transcript would be texted to all three of them at once, wherever they happened to be. Just in case, he said. Nobody argued, and nobody mentioned it again, and the batches went on running around the clock.
September 3, 2026
At a few minutes past nine in the evening, in three houses across town, the same text arrived at once.
Retrieval 4,806,713 — September 16, 2026:
The gun is heavier than he expected. It is the first thought he has had in five days that is not about Dana.
It took her in just five days. The fifth ended this morning. A fever first, ordinary as any fever, and then on the second day the virus reached the spinal cord and began stripping the insulation from her nerves, and every nerve in her body started telling the truth at once. A cotton sheet lying across her shins burned her. The breeze from the window burned her. The doctors still working explained why the morphine did nothing: the wound was in the wiring itself, upstream of anything a drug could quiet. She screamed until the third day, when her voice gave out, and after that her mouth went on making the shape of screaming without any sound in it. Her eyes stayed aware the whole time. That is the part he cannot put down. The mind is the last thing it takes. It’s almost as if the virus were intentionally designed to maximize suffering.
Five days, for everyone. The bulletins had stopped pretending otherwise. It kills every person it infects, and it infects every person it reaches, and there is nothing about it in between.
He can feel his own fever starting, ordinary as any fever. He is not going to give it the five days.
The muzzle is cold against his temple. The last of him is a morning six days gone: Dana in the kitchen doorway, sun on the floorboards, saying his name.
Among the myriad wild thoughts that filled Voss’s mind, the memory of a ranting street-corner preacher from his childhood: “the rod of mine anger… the staff in their hand is mine indignation… howbeit he meaneth not so.“[^1]
September 8, 2026
From the transcript of the Channel 6 evening news, Providence:
“…police in Barrington confirmed this evening that three senior scientists of the Pell Institute for the Physics of Experience died at their homes on Friday night, together with their families, in what investigators are describing as a coordinated poisoning. Dr. Mira Chen, Dr. Daniel Ashworth, and Dr. Anton Voss, along with their spouses and children — eleven people in all, five of them children — were found after a colleague requested a police check on the three homes. There were no survivors, and police believe no one outside the three households was involved. The substance has not been publicly identified; a spokesperson for the state medical examiner would say only that it acts within minutes. No notes were found. Colleagues say the three had spent the past month running an experiment they declined to discuss, and had shut it down abruptly five days ago. Investigators say they have found no connection.
“In other news tonight, health authorities in Russia have now confirmed one hundred thirty-one deaths from the virus we’ve been reporting on for the last few days, which by Thursday had killed seventeen people in a district east of the Urals. The area, which is home to a research facility long suspected by Western analysts of hosting biological-weapons work, has been sealed, and a government spokesman this morning described the outbreak as fully contained.
“Coming up after the break: a look ahead to the weekend — clear skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies. Your full forecast is next.”
[^1]: Isaiah 10:5–7
[Disclaimer: AI, specifically Claude Fable 5 Max, assisted significantly in the writing of this story; the ideas are the author’s.]