A consequence of probabilities

A moment before the alarm started John Stock was awake. He lay on his side looking at the large red numbers on the front of his radio alarm clock, waiting for them to tick on to 06:00. When they did, he could have turned the radio off immediately. Instead, he lay there for a few seconds, listened to the noise and made sure he was awake.

"Good morning. This is the news on Monday the 23rd of August," said the newsreader. Their voice was disturbing in being both cheerful and profoundly serious at the same time.

Slowly Stock rose from his warm bed and slipped into the cooler world of his bedroom. It was a simple room, four plainly painted walls, his large double bed in the centre, a wardrobe in a corner. Thick curtains hung over the window that looked out across the estate from the third floor, curtains he pulled back to allow the morning sun in.

He went to the bathroom and showered. He made his morning coffee in the small kitchenette and on the large leather sofa that held him so warmly and made him feel everything would be all right.

Another day lay ahead at the office in the City of London, trying to place complex insurance risks in the Lloyds Market. He might get to go to Lloyds itself if he got the slip finished. If not, he would probably end up in a bar again, drink a little too much and get a taxi home.

[repeat]

A moment before the alarm started John Stock was awake. He lay on his side looking at the hands on his alarm clock, waiting for them to click onto six o'clock in the morning. When they did, he reached out slowly, listening to the bells as he made sure he was awake.

Slowly he rose from his warm bed and slipped into the cooler world of his bedroom. It was a simple room, four plainly painted walls, his large double bed in the centre, a wardrobe in the corner, a chest of drawers next to it. Thick curtains hung over the window that looked out across the estate from the third floor, curtains he pulled back to allow the morning sun in.

He went to the bathroom and showered. He made his morning coffee and then he sat down on the large leather sofa that held him so warmly and made him feel everything would be all right.

[repeat...]

A moment before the alarm started John Stock was awake. He lay on his side looking at the hands on his alarm clock, waiting for them to click onto six o'clock in the morning. When they did, he reached out slowly, listening to the bells as he made sure he was awake.

Slowly he rose from his warm bed, entering the cooler bedroom. It was a simple room, four plainly painted walls, his large double bed in the centre, a wardrobe in the corner. Thick curtains hung over the window that looked out across the estate from the third floor, curtains that he pulled back to allow the dull morning light and pounding rain to enter his world.

[repeat...?]

A moment before the alarm started John Stock was awake. He lay on his side looking at the large red numbers on the front of his radio alarm clock, waiting for them to change to 06:00. When they did, he could have turned the radio off immediately. Instead, he lay there for a few seconds and listened to the noise, making sure he was truly awake.

"Good morning. This is the news on Monday the 23rd of August," said the newsreader. The voice was disturbing in being both cheerful and profoundly serious at the same time.

Stock sat bolt upright in bed, gripped by an overwhelming sense of deja vu. He looked around his bedroom, unsettled by what he saw. It was as if the room couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be and then, as his eyes turned, the world became sharper.

He looked at the wardrobe in the corner. It sat there alone, a large creature in dark wood that held all of his clothes. Yet he was sure there had been something next to it. A chest of drawers perhaps?

Slowly he rose from his warm bed. He rubbed his face in his hands and tried to get his tired body to move. It didn't want to. It was as if he had been hit hard in the chest and it has sucked all his energy.

Somehow he got to the bathroom and by the time he had finished his shower and changed into his suit he felt a lot better. He sat with his morning coffee in front of the TV, watching the usual morning news feed from the BBC. It was barely interesting. Slow news day.

--

The morning commute was as easy as it had been for the past four weeks. Schools were out on holiday, which meant vast numbers of people taking time off to visit foreign lands. It shrunk the number of people on the tube in the rush hour to more manageable levels and occasionally - like today - he even found a seat. It didn't matter, he listened to his podcasts on his phone and watched the people around him struggle with their lives. The same thing he did every day.

At the office the day seemed to fly past. He finished preparing the presentation for the Lloyds market by mid-afternoon. It was a neat presentation, three buff folders full of technical specifications, reports, diagrams and drawings that had taken him a week to pull together. Everything was clear and logically set out so the underwriter would understand exactly what was being asked for and why.

Yet, as he looked at the presentation, he couldn't remember doing it. His memory told him this was his work, but when he tried to visualise himself asking a client for a report or placing papers into the file, there was a slight lag before a hazy half-memory came to mind.

He opened the topmost folder and looked at the slip he'd prepared. He knew he had done it, there was his signature on it, but it was like he was looking at it for the first time. He turned the page, looking over the words written on the paper. They were his words; he was sure of it. The sentences read like ones he would write, and the paragraphs were his usual length and style. As he read through them it was like he was exploring a book for the first time as he had no familiarity with the words.

The day ended. His friends were going to the bar for a drink and a sandwich before heading home. They invited him: he didn't feel like going.

Grilled salmon on a bed of rocket and pasta for dinner. Hot and freshly cooked and he couldn't remember doing it.

It was like he was waking up as the film ended. He was sure he had watched it, he could remember doing so, but it didn't feel right somehow as he lay in his bed and drifted off to sleep.

A moment before the alarm started he was awake, lying on his side and looking at the clock, waiting for it to ring.

"Good morning. This is the news on Monday the 23rd of August," said the newsreader.

Shower. Coffee. Daily commute. Sat in office. All so quick. Had he really done it?

And then lunch. Sat at a table outside, watching the world pass by. Suddenly slow. Detailed. As if he were there in his life now, not sitting on the outside watching it on fast-forward.

"John Stock?"

He looked up at the man who had spoken. A tall, slender man, wearing a dark pinstriped suit that appeared to be a couple of sizes too large for him and which made his pale grey skin seem more so. His face was long with thin lips and large dark eyes that had little brow above them. What hair he had was silver and thin, forming a whispering cover to the top of his head.

"Yes?"

The man sat down, which appeared to be an effort for him. Stock looked him over and noticed the longest, thinnest fingers he had ever seen on a man.

"I am so glad I found you," said the man. His voice was loud and clear, yet his lips seemed hardly to move as he spoke. "My name is Miser. I've been looking for you. Something's happened."

Stock tried to focus on the man and pick out some feature that would help him recognise him. Yet the harder he looked the more difficult it was to make out any detail at all. It was almost as if the man wasn't there.

"What?" asked Stock.

"Containment field failure," Miser, if that was his name, said.

"What?" exclaimed Stock in disbelief.

"The containment field has failed. It's causing all sorts of problems."

Great, Stock thought to himself, either I've got a lunatic crashing my lunch or I'm being set up for the latest candid camera.

"This is serious," Miser said, his voice now edged with near panic. "I need you to help me. If you don't then I don't know what will happen."

"Maybe I'll get to finish my lunch?" he joked. "How about you go annoy someone else?"

Miser shook his head.

"You need to help me."

The alarm went off. Stock's hand came down sharply on it, stopping the bells from ringing. He rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed, trying to bring himself round.

Something didn't feel right, but he wasn't sure what. He looked at the clock, then at the curtains, trying to put together his thoughts. Too much drink the night before, he decided, although he couldn't remember if he'd gone out last night after work.

The train ran smoothly to work, too smoothly. He was early and stopped to get a cup of coffee (latte, take away) before he went into the office. Not something he normally did.

"What day is it?"

He turned to the tall, gaunt man stood to one side who had asked the question. He knew him, seen him somewhere. For a moment he stared.

"What day is it?" the man repeated.

"Erm, Monday 23rd?"

"Sure?"

Stock turned his wrist over and looked at his watch. Monday 23rd August.

"Hey, I know you. You were hassling me at lunch yesterday!" he realised.

"Yesterday?"

"Yes, when I had my lunch break, I was sat outside and you rambled about containment fields or something. What are you doing? Stalking me?"

"While you were on your lunch break?"

"Yes, on Monday."

"Today's Monday," said Miser. Stock knew that was his name.

"But it was yesterday."

He remembered walking out of the office, walking over to the cafe out the back of the square and ordering pasta for lunch. He could see Miser clearly. See the dark pinstripe suit that was too big and the urgency on his face and in his voice. That was yesterday. Sunday. And he hadn't been in work on Sunday.

"It must have been Friday," he said weakly, trying to find a reason for his confusion.

"Come with me."

The thin man seemed to glide towards the table in the furthest corner of the large floor space. His feet didn't touch the ground properly, or if they did his long limbs worked in such a strange way that his movements seemed disjointed. Stock felled compelled to follow.

It may have been the rush hour, but the place was nearly empty, commuters preferring to collect their drinks in cardboard cups with plastic lids and continue on their way. The table was a small, round, dark wood affair, a little sticky and with a couple of stains from previous coffee cups that had yet to be cleaned. He sat opposite Miser, noting the man did not have a drink.

"So?"

"This may be a little difficult to explain," Miser said. His words were slow, deliberate and perhaps a little unsure in their meaning. It was is he were speaking a second language, one he was not entirely fluent in. "Do you know what quantum mechanics is?"

He cast his mind back to school and science and the lessons he had ignored. All he could remember was something about not being able to measure the position and speed of something at the same time. It was lost in the mists of a lifetime of work.

"Something like that," Miser said.

Stock thought nothing of it for a moment until he realised he hadn't said his thoughts out loud. He looked at the thin man, confusion on his face.

"Ah," said Miser, as if he had made some childish mistake. "I have done it again."

"What?"

Miser ignored him and instead pressed his fingertips together and leaned forward.

"In the mechanics each potential event can both occur and not occur," he explained slowly. His attitude was as a parent telling a small child something simple, which only added to Stock's annoyance. "This means there is an infinite number of universes appearing each moment, spreading out across existence, spawning yet more universes that then spawn more and more. Some of them last for eternity, some wither and die. Each universe, no matter how long it lasts, generates energy. Which my people have learnt to harvest."

Stock looked at the man, looking for some sign he was insane or joking. There was no expression on his face. No hint that anything emotional was going on beyond telling him straight facts.

"But there is a problem," the man continued.

[repeating problem]

A moment before the alarm started John Stock was awake. He lay on his side, looking at the large red numbers on the front of the alarm clock and wondered if he had slept at all that night. The dream, of a man in a coffee shop whose face he could not quite see and story he could not quite hear, had seemed so real.

"Good morning. This is the news on Monday the 23rd of August," said the newsreader.

He was sure Monday had passed, a thought that filled him with confusion. Memories of waking up, traveling on a train, speaking to the pinstripe man, they all jostled for his attention. They faded away, leaving an uneasy feeling in the back of his head.

"Now, about this problem."

He sat bolt upright, stunned by what he saw. In the corner of the room- his bedroom - was a man in a pinstriped suit. He was familiar, too familiar. Though Stock had not yet met him they had met before. Not in his dreams, but in a coffee shop he would visit later in the day.

"Ever thought maybe you were at the centre of the universe and everything revolves around you?"

What he should have done was shout, scream and demand the man left his bedroom. What he actually did was consider the question and nod quietly to himself. It was as if the unremembered conversation from his dreams was continuing.

"Yes," said Stock, though he wasn't sure why.

"Well, in your case it's true," said the man. Miser, wasn't that his name? "For some reason our containment fields have failed, and the leak is centred on you. We're doing what we can to plug it, which is why you keep waking up at the same time and place."

Stock nodded, sort of understanding. Information from a hundred conversations he could not remember came flooding into his head, scraps and snippets and monologues combining to create a single, consistent, clear picture of what was going on.

Miser's people, he was yet to discover, yet remembered clearly, had tapped into quantum physics to generate energy. Nature, it seemed, explored every possibility. Each decision in the universe, whether a tiny one like a particle going this way or that, or a massive one such as a nation deciding who would be president, resulted in the universe splitting and dividing so that every possible outcome existed somewhere. These unseen people harvested the energy the constant division created. A single thread of existence was maintained by destroying all the possible universes at their moment of creation. The universe that John Stock knew was little more than a battery.

And he was their problem.

Something about his presence was undoing their complex technologies and clever machinery. Miser's people couldn't collapse all the probabilities properly, resulting in a massive surge of new universes appearing that threatened to overwhelm them and destroy their reality. At the moment the problem was being kept in check by something to do with rocking perceived time back and forth, only it couldn't last forever. Eventually there would be too many potential universes and too much complexity and it would swamp Miser's world.

"Which will create a disaster," said Miser.

Stock looked at the wineglass in his hand. For a moment he wasn't sure if there was red wine or white wine. It was white, leaving that nagging feeling that somewhere else he was holding a glass of red.

"How come?"

"This universe," shouted Miser above the din in the bar, "exists inside our generator. If the generator is destroyed then logic would dictate that so too would this universe."

"Not necessarily," said Stock, remembering something he would read later on that afternoon. "This universe may continue in a different dimension to yours, continuing to expand infinitely. Yours may be lost, but ours may continue."

Miser nodded. "Or it might be destroyed. When ours collapses, there will be a puncture in this universe into which ours will flow. Two different universes occupying the same time and space will not be pretty."

It was a point well made. Stock considered it and in doing so became aware of the world around him shimmering and twisting until he found himself sat on a bench looking out over the Thames. The sun was setting, a pinkish hue appearing as night-time rushed towards him.

"You're experiencing the collapses," Miser told him with a hand on his shoulder. "It is getting easier and easier to find you now."

"Which means it's harder to contain them?"

Miser nodded.

Stock was tired. A hundred years had passed in which he'd read and researched and struggled to make sense of what was going on. Thousands of days spent making notes that would vanish with each collapse and yet somehow he kept the knowledge flowing. He kept remembering what he had discovered and worked out and realised. He was no longer living in a single universe, but across all possible existences, seeing everything at once. He had lived for centuries in a single day.

"What do we do?"

"We're working on it," said Miser.

He put the toothbrush under the running water and watched as the last of the foam vanished down the sink. The hesitation in Miser's voice betrayed more than any explanation could have.

"You can't fix it."

The man's grey face said all that was needed. The fear and desperation of an entire universe facing destruction was writ large in those huge dark eyes. Whatever had been tried had not worked. Stock was still here, moving through the ever expanding universes as the generator ran out of control.

"A conundrum," said Stock. He took a small amount of rocket and salmon onto his fork and slipped it into his mouth.

"We don't know what to do," said Miser. It was no longer about expressions and twitches, he had been open and honest in admitting failure. "It seems inevitable now that there will be a breach and our universes will collapse."

"I am the problem," said Stock, lifting up the glass of crisp white wine and turning it round in his fingers. He smelt it, enjoying the tickle to his senses, before taking a small sip that made his mouth come alive. "You can't kill me though, because that would create more universes. Nor can you go back in time and stop me from being born or you would've done that. Yet I need to be takenout of the universe."

Miser nodded.

"So it would seem. But we cannot find a way of doing it without destroying everything. Each time we model your death we generate uncontrolled growth in the universes we cannot collapse in time to prevent a breach. Our models on your non-birth suggest the universe will wither and die."

"It is beautiful at this time of year."

They stood on top of the hill, looking out over London. The city was stretched out beneath them, lights glowing as the sun set gently in the west. A whisper of cloud cover gave the sun something to reflect off of, turning the sky a subtle pink.

"I'll miss this," said Stock.

"Why?"

Stock looked at him and smiled.

"Isn't it obvious?"

Miser shook his head.

"I understand it now," Stock said, his voice slow and deliberate as he tried to find the words to explain the pictures in his head. "I am aware of my existence in every universe that is created. Each time you collapse one of them I remember it and in doing so it is recreated. No matter how fast you try to collapse the universes, I sense it and they are reborn. That's your problem, Miser. I remember."

"But you only knew about this after I was sent in here," said Miser. "I came in here because of the leak."

Stock laughed. His voice echoed off of the walls in his bedroom.

"You surprise me," he said. "You're thinking in such a linear way. When you came here and talked to me you created the conditions that allowed me to see across universes. In doing so, you created the leak. Time is relative, my friend. You've spent months trying to fix the problem, haven't you?"

Miser nodded.

"Not even a day has passed in here. We're out of step, Miser. The leak was created in your future and echoed back. You created the leak by responding to an event that hadn't happened."

Stock watched Miser closely. His expression shifted and moved, working through the explanation he had been given. And then the revelation and he nodded his agreement.

"We've been fools," he said. "We should have done nothing."

Stock shook his head.

"No, this was inevitable. Doing nothing would have been a disaster."

"So what do we do now?"

A pause. Several universes passed by, bedrooms, dinners, libraries, trains. They settled on the coffee shop outside Liverpool Street Station, both choosing to have Espressos and sensing the echo of their Latte drinking choices.

"I must cease to exist," said Stock. "Then you will be able to close the leak and restore order."

"I told you what happens if you die," said Miser. There's too much to unravel."

"Not die. Cease to exist."

"How?"

[5:59]

He awoke with a start a moment before the alarm sounded. Sweat ran down his forehead, collecting on the end of his nose before dripping onto the bedcovers. He rubbed his face, clearing the moisture away, before switching off the annoying beeping sound.

It was 6:00am.

Slowly he rose from the warmth of his bed, entering the cooler world of the bedroom. It was a simple room, four plainly painted walls, his large double bed in the centre, a wardrobe in a corner. Thick curtains hung over the window that looked out across the estate from the third floor, curtains that he pulled back to allow the morning sun into his world.

And it was his world. A bright world full of green trees and rolling hills. Birds danced in the sky, cows fed off the land. In the distance he saw a tractor heading across a field, the farmer oblivious to the marvel of modern science beneath him.

Which is what made Miser nervous.

There was something in him that gnawed at his subconscious. Something was out of place, a subtle error in the universe's fabric that perhaps only he could detect.

"Is everything all right?" he asked the operator on the other end of the link. He'd been compelled to call, even though he knew they would have notified him immediately if anything was out of place.

"A minor fluctuation," the operator answered. "We had a small spike in potentials, but that settled down within microns."

"Thank you," said Miser and disconnected the link.

A flash of memory caught him. In the event of a spike they would send him into the generator to collapse the probabilities and restore order. It had only happened once before, he could remember that, he was sure. But when he tried to be specific, he realised it was no more than a false memory, a recall of a drill or exercise.

Yet he was left with two words in his head he could not shift.

John Stock.

And the distinct memory of a man who chose not to exist.