August 10, 2030
Snow between the birches, going blue with evening. Woodsmoke from somewhere behind her. The thing with tusks has opened her and moved on, and the cold coming up through her back is almost kind. The last of her is a wish about her daughter that has no words in it.
That moment was eight thousand years gone when Dr. Mira Chen retrieved it at 2:14 in the afternoon, in a back room in Barrington, Rhode Island. It was the first human experience ever retrieved. Three people were in the room: Chen; Ashworth, the theorist; and Voss, who had built the sampler. What the wish had actually been made of, none of them could say; the sampler translated it into modern English as best it could. Chen read the translation twice. She had a daughter of her own; she did not read it a third time.
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 — atoms and chairs included — is just a set of intermediate solutions used by the mathematics 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 the sampler could address the complete timeline of human experience at a resolution of three hours. Every three-hour position had equal weight, whether it fell in an age when only a few thousand people were alive or one in which there were billions. But the sampler could not retrieve the experience at the chosen time. Ordinary moments continued into other moments and gave the equations no stable edge on which to take hold. It could lock on only to the nearest instant at which a life ended — the one place where experience stopped and a closed boundary appeared in the solution. It therefore returned the final experience of the person whose death lay nearest to the randomly selected position. In crowded eras many deaths might be almost equally near; the mathematics made the choice. No one yet understood why the terminal boundary was necessary.
The sampler could measure the positions of its retrievals relative to one another, but when any one of them belonged on the calendar still had to come through what the experience contained. They expected further research to reach ordinary moments. They did not want to wait. They built the sampler using the boundary condition they had.
They ran two hundred more that first 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.
At first Chen had seen only the suffering. As the retrievals accumulated, she began to see the choosing. Some deaths no one had chosen; others one human being had chosen for another. Again and again, the second kind came in uniform, by timetable, under law, from a list, and sometimes in the name of God. Chen had begun to think that this was what taking the name in vain really meant. If experience was the only reality, then this was what humanity had made of reality. The mathematics had no category for blame. Chen did. Against her will, she wondered whether a species could become guilty.
By the twentieth of August they had run two and a half million retrievals. When they plotted the dates they could identify, the distribution was almost flat across the human past. A century in the crowded modern world appeared no more often than a century in the Pleistocene; the population explosion left no bulge at all. That was exactly what a sampler that weighted three-hour positions rather than people should produce.
Except that the distribution ended at the present.
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 back dated later than the day it was drawn. A blank a month wide proved nothing — a month was almost no width at all on a timeline hundreds of thousands of years long. But a blank stretching through the future was another matter. Another hundred thousand years would contribute as many sample points as any hundred thousand years of the past, no matter how many people lived in either. If humanity had a long future, the sampler should have returned future deaths in abundance; if the species endured for geological ages, the whole of the past would be a thin first chapter. Instead every dated retrieval lay behind the day it was drawn. 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 privileged; 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 human time has almost run out. Then almost the entire span the sampler can choose from lies behind us, and it 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, 2030
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, 2030:
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. No disease needs the mind awake. This one keeps it awake to the end.
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.
One thing would not leave Voss that night: words from Isaiah, heard long ago from a street preacher — “the rod of mine anger… against the people of my wrath… howbeit he meaneth not so.“[^1]
September 8, 2030
Excerpts from the transcript of the Channel 6 evening news, Providence:
6:03 p.m.
“…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 were among eleven dead, five of them children. Police believe no one outside the three households was involved. The substance has not been identified; the state medical examiner’s office 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.”
6:04 p.m.
“Russian health authorities say every known victim of the virus outbreak east of the Urals has died within five days of the first symptoms. The death toll has risen to one hundred thirty-one, from seventeen on Thursday. 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. In other news…”
6:25 p.m.
“Coming up after the break: a look at the week ahead — 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.]