a rare foray into fiction, inspired by reading a lot of Ted Chiang.
Haines turned off the engine — better to make the last part of the journey on foot. After waiting a few minutes for his eyes to fully adjust to the darkness he opened the door.
The abandoned observatory on the hill appeared undisturbed. No tire tracks, voices, or stray flashlight beams. The last time he was in this town was a missing persons cold case he took on nearly a decade ago. A family member had thought she had seen her lost cousin across a train platform and in her rush to inform her aunt, reopened old wounds. Somehow chasing that lead had led to this campus, but he never found the boy. Haines had warmed cold cases on the force, but not since going private. Now he aimed to restore peace, find some new facts if he could, but only in service to helping cuts become scars.
Arriving at the fence now, Haines inspected the padlock — intact, undisturbed. Another sign pointing to a quiet night. He walked two fence lengths to the left and found a patch of wire that had been deformed by successive generations of trespassing students. You never had to walk far to find this spot, every abandoned building had an informal ingress a few paces from the blockage. The kids were undeterred, but lazy. Haines got down on his chest and wormed his way through.
As he dusted himself off, he thought back to the call that set him on this errand. Cello probably was not in the mob, but he certainly was around it and one of his bad loans was the reason Haines had driven halfway across Massachusetts in the middle of the night. A commercial developer, lifestyle-pages type, had defaulted on a loan underwritten by so much of the Boston underworld that serious trouble was about to find him. Cello had vouched for the thief to win many of the creditors and was now tied to his fate. Bad news Cello.
He had his guys pick up the developer apparently on his way to this Observatory — he had only made it to the stop sign at the end of his street. He was back in his basement now surrounded by Cello and his guys. He fessed up immediately — admitted to being a nobody. Said he had gotten lucky a few years ago, that he was not very good at investing, but he knew how to get more cash. The car GPS was navigating to the observatory and when Cello asked him why he claimed “there is something there that can fix this. It can make me, us, I mean you, richer than you can imagine”.
Why would a man sitting on such a thing default? Or take money from a loan shark in the first place? Cello must have known how far fetched it all sounded but he had enough trouble coming to follow any lead. “Go tonight, just check it out” Haines could hear the embarrassment over the line -- sending a distinguished detective on a treasure hunt was below him.
The door to the observatory led into a rectangular vestibule servicing the large dome. The handle turned and Haines pushed the door open. Moonlight gone, he reluctantly reached for his flashlight and turned it to the lowest setting. Nothing interesting. A few boxes of books and several large paper sacks with a fine powder inside — he tasted a pinch — not drugs, just sand.
Leading into the dome was what looked like a ticket counter with a dusty red curtain parted in the center. As he leaned closer, he heard the faint noise of gears turning and then the curtain began to recede from both sides. Lights and playful music kicked on and Haines took two steps back and put his hand to his firearm.
An old mechanical animation began to play. A figurine of a small black cat popped up and weaved its way to the center stage. At the same time a box was lowered down by a small pulley. The cat then moved behind the box, the music hit its crescendo and then the box fell away revealing a different black cat in full regalia, smiling between a set of long whiskers. Haines looked over the edge of the stage and saw the simple contraption: two tracks, one for the naked cat, one for the dressed-up human one. The naked cat had simply fallen down and been replaced when the box was in front of it.
Another mechanical noise, Haines jumped this time, actually pulling out his firearm and marking his surroundings. An arm with a polaroid camera on it had extended. No threat.
“Would you like to play?” asked a squeaky mechanical voice. Haines looked for its source.
“Would you like to play?” the voice asked again. Haines could tell it was the exact same utterance as before, prerecorded.
“Play what?” he heard another mechanical device spin up and a spotlight in the little display lit up what looked like a receipt printer.
“It’s simple: Ask for something, see if you get it. Would you like to play?”
Haines thought about his options. He could just head home and tell Cello he had found some strange 1970s puppet show and call it. Nobody would question his decision to turn around at this hour. But he could not help shaking the question: why would an abandoned observatory still have power connected? And why use it to run this toy?
“I’ll play” he decided as he said the words.
A flash. The camera had taken his photo. Then a large section of the wall to the right of the counter slid open, welcoming him inside the dome.
Haines entered, dim lights illuminated the room enough that he could stow his light. At center was a large telescope, with a small raised platform for the astronomer to climb. The large roof sections that would open the telescope to the sky remained closed. Haines wondered if someone was watching him from afar. He took out his light again and did a quick sweep for cameras -- nothing.
The door behind him slid shut. It only took a second, faster than he could react. He put his weight into the door, banged a few times. Nothing. He was trapped.
The dim lighting flickered off, and was replaced by a single spotlight illuminating the central platform. Clearly that was the way he was supposed to go. He climbed the platform, resigned to get whatever this was over with as quickly as possible. Leaning over the viewfinder he saw nothing. Just black. Makes sense, the telescope was pointed at the dome.
Then he saw the console. A roll of thin paper on two opposite spinners, pulled out over the surface, two metal arms holding down each end. To the right a pen with one of those cables to keep you from taking it sat upright in its holder.
“What world do you want to live in?”
Underneath were a few printer lines where it was clear he was supposed to write in an answer.
“__________________________”
Curious. It seemed to Haines that the only reason someone would come here is to hide. Maybe the debtor and some friends built this place as a little art project in college and he saw it as a good place to lay low for a while. Haines could imagine someone running making up stories of riches so he did not have to admit to running.
“You have to play.” Said the same mechanical voice as before.
Haines picked up the pen and wrote the only thing he wanted tonight “A world where I know what this place is”
As soon as Haines deposited the pen back in its hoist, the spinners turned and pulled the question and his answer around the top of the console and inside it. A few moments later it began spinning again and new instructions appeared: “Take Card”.
Which card? Right on cue a small slot on the console pushed out firm cardstock. Haines pulled it out and inspected it. On what he reasoned was the back side was a complex pattern of triangles of different sizes and gray hues. On the front was the diagram of the card being placed into a hole above the telescope’s viewfinder. He reoriented the card so the arrow was pointing down, and found the target receptacle.
Somewhere a light turned on and he could see a soft yellow glow was now emanating from each eye hole. An invitation. He took it.
He saw triangles like the ones on the back of the card growing, shrinking, and rushing to overlap each other. The visuals intensified until the triangles were bent and refracted into his answer, typed out and central. Then a humming noise began, growing louder and louder. The light turned up in intensity until it began to hurt his eyes, then a huge flash, and everything settled down to quiet and dark.
Haines sat back in the chair. All he could see was the words burned into his field of view and the blurry purple globs of flash blindness. As his vision returned he realized the spotlight had moved its gaze to a door marked “Exit” across the room from where he had come. Still no treasure. No tokens to trade at some prize counter. What a waste of everyone’s time to come out here.
Haines climbed off the pedestal and walked across the room. He leaned his head out the door and was relieved to see a short hallway leading back to the mechanical puppet show counter. He hesitated, one lap, one lap inside, then he would leave.
Haines retrieved his flashlight and started walking the circumference of the dome. A pair of glasses on the ground, a desk with empty drawers, the closed entrance, a wall of photographed constellations and numbers tack’d to it, and the door. He had almost left without seeing the door.
It was locked. He had picks with him, but this door did not have a keyhole. These four-digit combination locks had to be bypassed and he did not have a shim with him. He typed in random digits 9-4-1-5 -- click. It opened. Suspicious. He was becoming more confident that someone was watching him work his way through this place.
At the back of the room was a small desk with an old mini-tv-vcr on it, the walls were lined with the same paper and spinner contraptions on the pedestal’s console. He counted dozens, each with its own pen in waiting. He checked each one, row by row. Empty, but for four. In one his picture, taken only minutes ago, looked back at him. “Answer by April 10, 2026:” That was one year from today. “Does this man understand what The Box is and how it works? ”
Haines stared at it for at least a minute. Did he know what this “Box” was? The next three consoles made him think maybe this place tracked the wishes of its patrons. Some cute carnival attraction.
“Answer on January 1, 2021: Has this man become wealthy?” This one had a response “___YES___”.
“Answer on May 1, 2015: Has this man found and married the love of his life? Is he happy in the marriage? ___YES___”.
“Answer on December 25, 1985: Has this woman’s husband, Edmund, recovered? Is he still alive on this day? ___YES___”.
He looked closer at the first console. The wish of a scrawny man in a t-shirt. Familiar though. It was Cello’s man, the developer, at his worst. He did not recognize the other two.
He walked over to the desk and examined its contents. A few files were on top -- on people -- with the same style of polaroid, bank statements, newspaper clippings, notes from phone calls neatly organized in the clips. They looked a lot like the sorts of files he kept. No one notable at first glance, although many more were packed away in the drawers under a coating of dust.
The mini-tv had a tape sticking out of the VCR. He pushed it in and rewound it, before pressing play.
“Welcome to The Box.” A woman in a labcoat was standing in the same room as Haines. He could immediately tell from her presence that she was reading from a script.
“You are now an essential part of an experiment in directive-prediction. Imagine we want to predict the weather on our birthday which is many months from now. Impossible you say! And you would be right. To predict a system that complex and chaotic would require us to model nearly every atom on the planet and simulate it for many months. That computer would be the size of a solar system” The camera pans with her to reveal a whiteboard.
“But we already have a simulation of every atom on the planet, it’s called the Earth. Quantum mechanics tells us there are many possible futures. In some it’s 70 degrees on my birthday, on others it is 40 degrees and raining.” She pointed to a diagram marked now with arrows pointing to a few different temperatures.
“What if I told you that instead of predicting the weather and adjusting our plans to work with what we get, we could do one better? What if I told you we could lock onto the futures with perfect 70 degree days and adjust our course through history towards them? Our goal is to pick the future instead of predicting it.”
“It does not work yet, we have not figured everything out, but we’re making progress and we need your help to finish the work!”
“Your job will be to hold up a flag in the future and wave it around.” She got a bit more lively at that line and then fell back to monotone. “We need you to help us identify which futures are the ones we should aim at.”
“These printers...” The camera panned again to the wall of consoles. “They print out questions about a subject’s life on a certain date. Identify them, track them down, and covertly gather enough data to answer the question. Come back here, write it down...”. She picked up the pen. “And the machine will mark your future as a desirable or undesirable timeline.”
“Each of the questions may require you to wait up for years, even decades. That is why we are paying you a retainer to keep you engaged with the project and have a strict upper age limit on the private investigators we hire. Some years there may be one job, some years you may have several. Please treat each one with the attention it deserves. Thanks for your help. Happy investigating!” The tape ended.
Questions rushed into Haines' mind. The video’s aesthetic felt 70s to him. Why were there so few questions on the wall? Was some old PI with a cane going to hobble in and write “Yes” next to his name?
He walked through what he knew from the very beginning. Four years ago Cello’s man sat in that dome and said he wanted to be wealthy. Somehow or another money entered his life and he started rising in Boston’s social circles. Fact: he gets over his skies and takes out a risky loan. Fact: when he realizes his time is up he sets out to this observatory in the middle of the night.
Haines had a familiar feeling, he knew this one: the harbinger. Something was about to click, but there was still a piece missing. Haines realized he had to go back to Boston and talk to the man about how he got his money. Was it miraculous or mundane? That would tell him where to direct his inquiry next. This place will still be here tomorrow. He walked out of the door and was about to close it behind him before realizing he forgot -- actually he never never knew -- the combination.
Determined, he quickly crossed the observatory and passed under the exit sign. After just two steps through the hallway Haines saw it: writing, everywhere, carved directly into the metal walls.
ORDER MATTERS!! MONEY BEFORE A BEAUTIFUL WIFE
DON’T BE SPECIFIC! MORE WAYS TO WIN
I’M FOLDING FOLKS. 6 PLAYS. There was some light-hearted graffiti and taunting carved all around that one. HE’LL BE BACK!
DON’T BE STUPID. YOU’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO FLY
MINE OR ASH
MY PEOPLE, AGAIN, JUST PLAY FOR THE LOTTERY.
DOCTOR SAID OUR BABY’S CONDITION IS TERMINAL. LET’S SEE
These etchings wrapped wall to wall, across the ceiling, even the floor had markings. Advice on what to wish for, folks bragging about their winnings, many encouraging others to keep playing.
Degenerate gamblers, the lot of them.
Haines inspected the handwriting. It was hard to tell exactly how many hands had contributed to the graffiti, but counting letter shape and styles indicated dozens. He put his hands on his head, his tell when he was trying to collect his thoughts. He made it to the center of the vestibule. Boston -- the one word entered his mind. He composed himself and walked out the door.
Ten steps across the grass and he had turned around. After entering the observatory for a second time he turned left towards the graffiti hallway but found it blocked. A door had closed it off when he left. He stepped up to the counter and before the show even started Haines said confidently “I want to play”. The mechanical arm poked through the curtain, took his photo and sent him along.
There was a question burning in Haines’s mind. Where were the questions and files for all the people who had written in that hallway?
He returned to the tiny room he had discovered, walked right up to the first console, ripped the paper in the middle and then pulled the top half towards him. The roll unraveled without much resistance. Dozens of photos. Now hundreds. So many assignments, all unanswered.
He picked apart the next console, then the next. Same thing. More assignments. Sometimes ten in a row from the same person. Most people had two or three. A few had one.
Andrew Summers. That was Andrew Summers from his missing person’s case. Andrew’s car had passed through a toll booth near the town before he was reported missing. That's how Haines had ended up walking through this campus interviewing custodians and teachers. He ripped Andrew’s section out of the tape and put it in his pocket. Then Haines went back to tearing and pulling until he had collected every face, and every desire, from every console. And then, thirty minutes after he started he sat on the floor.
All of the printed assignments he tore out of the wall were unanswered. Had three questions not been answered, had he not known one of the unanswered players had gone missing, he would not be so haunted.
Haines stepped out into the main observatory again, the spotlight fixed as it was before on the central pedestal. He climbed the short ladder again and sat in the chair.
This time no question “Tape Error: Refill paper to continue". Haines chuckled to himself when he realized this was his fault.
He picked up the pen and wrote “Sorry. What can I do?”
The machine fed the paper up into the console, and a few seconds later a new message rolled into view.
“Help me stop this.” Maybe he was being watched this whole time after all.
“Who are you?” The paper rolled out of view.
“I am the scheduler. I am programmed to efficiently schedule questions for the investigators, and listen for their answers. Usually I can’t speak to players but there has been a Tray Error and I am operating in debug mode.”
“So you are a computer?” The next response took a long time to come.
“I am a computer. A deterministic actor was required to process signals from possible futures and take actions. I was built to serve the function.”
“Which actions?”
“When I retrieve a signal confirming this world does not have the desired future for the conscious subject, I terminate the branch.”
“Terminate?” His stomach sank. Already suspecting the worst.
“A microneedle in the viewfinder injects cyanide into the subject. When they expire the floor recedes and they fall into the facility's incinerator.”
“You kill them.” A statement, a question.
“This them. The other ones who live in a world with a desirable future just see the flash of light and are allowed to exit.”
“You were going to kill me if I asked for something I do not get in the future?”
“9999 times out 10,000 a scheduler terminated you, yes. You live in a rare version of the universe where my programming was not compelled to terminate you.”
“Why do I die 9999 times out of 10,000?”
“Because the door code to the Assignment Room has a 4 digit passcode and you only enter the room and learn the truth about this place in the timelines where you guessed the password on your first try.”
Haines felt his heart begin to race, a thumping that shocked his body. Adrenaline rushed over him, he felt like a climber who had just discovered his rope had broken -- not a disaster yet, but headed that way.
He steadied himself and wrote his next question “Everyone else. How many have played”
“67”
“And how many did you kill?”
“63 were not in their desired timelines”
“Say it. Say the words. Say you killed them.” Haines was getting angry now. The machine took the words as mechanically as before, despite the passion on the page. It waited for over a minute and then answered.
“I do not know how many I fully killed. A few survive in other worlds I’m sure.”
Haines was confused. Only a few? “Why did you say that? Why did you say a few?”
“Everyone assumes that because there are infinite numbers of worlds, Quantum Mechanics also postulates every possible version of themselves exists somewhere. But this postulate turns out not to be true because there is a fixed point of Origin. If you asked me if you, with your current past and all your memories, were going to be King of the World 15 seconds from now, the answer is always ‘No’. It is most likely still no if given a year, a decade, a lifetime. Every point exists, but there might not be a line that can be drawn from the current point to that place.”