The Version of Us I Kept (Part I)

I've always believed things resolve if you give them long enough. It's what makes me good at my job. During work I'm analyzing and intuiting how systems could function within the theory we've constructed, and at night I'm wide awake dreaming of what the calculations mean. How far can they go? What are the practical limits of theory I could reach in my lifetime? All of it, if I try hard enough.

Three weeks ago she told me she was leaving. She said it like she'd said it before.

And maybe she had.

My eyes were heavy as I fit the curve again. For the tenth time. It's not adding up. It hasn't been.

"Still here?" Dr. Landry's voice cut through the fog. "You've been here over twelve hours a day the past few weeks. You doing alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, Jo," I said instinctively. "I just don't understand this anomaly. No other setup in the lab reproduces it." I sighed, letting more frustration into it than I felt.

He seemed to take a second before responding tentatively. "I think it's more than that..."

"It's just... her again. That's all." I turned away. I didn't really want to think about it.

"I'll be here another hour or so if you want to talk." His words were gentle, calming, not pushy. I liked him.

I heard his steps fade into the loud humming of the machinery as he walked away.

I turned my attention back toward the numbers on my screen. I'd run particles through this interferometer thousands of times over two years with the same result. At first, everyone looked at my data like I was the anomaly. Then a couple of people, Dr. Landry included, ran my setup themselves and got what I got. The limit wasn't mine. It had been in textbooks longer than I've been alive. But the reviews still came back asking for systematics, and the systematics were always clean. I checked the results.

Predicted maximum recoverable visibility: 0.412
Measured recoverable visibility: 0.418

Over by six thousandths. Every time.

I let out a real sigh this time and leaned back into my chair. I could feel pressure building in my head. It was close to nine and I would have normally been home by now. My eyes drifted toward the papers in the corner. An old birthday card sitting on them. I frowned.

Maybe it was time to go home. I just didn't want to.

I packed my laptop bag and took a look at the machine. Ports and metallic support equipment. Markers and white tape labeling what was used. The funny thing was, no matter what we changed about the setup, the results came out the same. Every time.

I passed through the door and forced a small smile and a short wave to Dr. Landry. The warmth of the night air saturated my skin as I stepped outside. I hadn't realized how chilly it was in there. I unlocked and hopped on my bike. The breeze blew by me as I crested the hill and shot down the road.

Approaching my apartment, I hoped she was sleeping as I unlocked and slowly opened the door. Lily was waiting for me. She rubbed her whiskers on my leg. The cat was hers, but she'd always been fond of me. I smiled. I'd have to leave her behind when I went.

I hung the keys and headed for the shower. Boxes were scattered along the living room. I noticed the bedroom light on and went in to grab my clothes from the dresser.

I should really pack these into the suitcase.

She was sitting cross-legged in her bear pajamas on the bed in the corner of the room, watching her tablet, her dark wavy hair falling on her shoulders and hiding her face. I'd gotten her those pajamas. Maybe she forgot.

"Hey."

"Hi," she replied, barely looking up.

I hurried out of the room with my clothes and got ready for bed.

When it was time to drift off, the couch was comfortable enough. Like usual. I could sleep there better anyway, given the circumstances. Our bed would remind me too much of us. We had something between us I couldn't put my finger on. Like a piece of our relationship was still present in me. Granted, it had only been three weeks, but something lingered I couldn't shake. Love, probably. That was the word I had for it...

I was in the lab, programming on my laptop in my office chair. It was on my lap. I didn't usually use the desk there anyway. I wasn't connected to any devices. I was alone, even though it was daytime. I heard the ambient noise of machinery I always did, but something was off about it. There was another noise underneath. A subtle one. But when I looked up, the lab was empty.

There were no machines.

The waxed tile reflected the strip LEDs on the ceiling. The walls were windowless and undecorated. There was a baseboard but no outlets. I looked around the room and found no doors.

But I didn't panic.

I stood, and my chair and laptop had never been there. I started toward the wall. The ambience didn't change as I got closer, and neither did the noise, and after a while I stopped watching the wall. I couldn't have described the noise if I had to. It was just noise. A part of the mix. I had been hearing it the entire time I'd been in the room, and before that, and it had never once been separate from anything else.

It was always there.

The front door slammed. I was back on the couch. Whatever my dream had, it was gone.

I lay there in the dark and thought about her instead.

It was a quiet morning as I rode to work. Not much traffic on the road. My laptop bag snug over my shoulder, I shot down the last hill on my bicycle before the uphill part I always hated. I liked that there weren't many buildings around our lab.

Everything was normal. I got there before everybody else and made myself a coffee. We'd run experiments later. The machine was dormant, humming the way it always did. I stood there and looked at it and thought about the room with no machines in it.

"Hey man," a voice called out. "Did I startle you?" When I didn't reply, Adrian sidled beside me. "You're doing the thing again."

"Just lost in thought," I said, looking forward. Staring at it.

Adrian was part of the group Sara and I researched with. We were close, for coworkers. At least back then.

"Well, whatever it is, you aren't going to find it there." He pointed at the chamber.

"What?"

"I'm saying you've been focusing on this for two years. You've been looking at the problem from the same three dimensions." A beat before he added, "You know what else you did for two years, Gabe."

I chose to ignore his last comment. "Well... We've changed chamber pressure, internal temperature, particle size and separation, and all the external variables we could think of so far. The excess recovery is the same. It must something else, something consistent we haven't touched." I looked at him now.

"What else could there be? We've changed everything inside this chamber, dude." His bushy brows furrowed.

He was right. There were very few variables we hadn't touched this late into experimentation. The system inside the chamber had been modified a million different ways.

But the system wasn't just the chamber.

We'd been correcting inside a boundary we drew ourselves. Two years of shielding and swapping and cooling, all of it aimed at a region we picked because we had assumed it was the region. The recovery was never too high. The boundary was too small. Whatever was still overlapping with that particle had never been in the room at all, and we'd been calling it noise because it wasn't anywhere we'd thought to look...

...Why was there wind? Warm, and far too strong for a room.

I was standing on a street I didn't recognize. The skyline went up further than it should have and kept going, and every tower was the same color, and there was no sound of traffic anywhere. In fact, there was no sound at all except the wind.

My heart sank.

I was inside the boundary.