Schrödinger’s Gun by Ray Wood
My rating: 4/5 cats
In every crime scene every one of me was looking at, he lay face-down on the floor with two bullets in his back.
this is a neat little futuristic sci-fi noir story in which crimes can be solved by accessing any number of possible timelines by a detective with a heisen implant stuck in their brain. in this story, we have detective o’harren, a woman working in future-chicago, confronted with a corpse of a bootlegger and mobster called johnny rivers.
the story is full of the language of your typical noir:
It was one of those drab Chicago winters, the kind where every sunrise brings fresh bodies on the sidewalks.
but also full of those brain-boggles that occur when authors get a little frisky with the quantum physics:
Other universes closed around me. I clung to the possibility thread that I had plucked out from the throng, visualizing it as a literal rope clutched in my fist. I felt like I was falling—the walls lurched briefly into the ceiling—then all at once I stopped, and I was standing in the basement—just one of them—listening to the faint wash of traffic on the street outside.
it’s an interesting and thought-provoking little story that playfully subverts the noir genre and also inserts a little emotional drama about the consequences of being able to see not only the future, but a variety of different futures, and how that can really put a strain on a marriage. and it’s also got a nice pop of an ending.
the whole schrödinger’s cat thing is always a fun little mindgame, and can be a fun physical game if you have one of these things that i bought for greg.
and while most of the comments on the thread following the story on the tor site seem mind = blown by one of the cool lines in the story, i preferred this one:
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.
but you make up your own mind.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2015/02/sc…
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