The Unstuck Man

A quantum entanglement short story

Happy Friday, everyone! Today I’ve got a new short story for you that’s a bit different from my usual fare. Hope you enjoy it!

My wife was the President of the United States. Her foreign policy brought us to the brink of World War III.

My wife was a poet. Her command of the English language brought millions to tears.

My wife was a spy. She played the part of the bumbling diplomat so well that it was a decade into our marriage before I realized it was all a sham.

My wife was a stay-at-home mom. She was never more frazzled.

And finally, my wife was a quantum physicist. She was on the verge of a breakthrough that would have changed the course of history. 

Except that one night, a cascade of tiny cracks in her lab snowballed into an unthinkable and undetectable accident. Her work came home with her. Unfortunately for me, I never did.

It was late. 

Past 2 a.m. 

I think. 

I don’t remember why I was still up, but I do remember that as soon as she saw me, it was like a light switch had been flicked and we started making out on the kitchen counter, dirty dishes flying everywhere.

We were never the sexless married couple but we were also never the can’t-keep-our-hands-off-each-other still-think-we’re-twenty-somethings either. I can count on my fingers the number of times my wife walked in the door after a brutal 14 hours in her lab and did anything other than slink into bed. 

I couldn’t blame her. The pressure on her was immense. With her funding seemingly drying up every week, it was a constant struggle to make any scientific progress while putting on the same dog-and-pony show for the bureaucrats and foreign dignitaries.

“You did it,” I said, after she pulled away for a brief second before plunging her tongue back into my mouth. “You fucking did it!”

“Did what?” she asked. “Finally took charge and decided to fuck you when your wife went away on a business trip? Damn right! Now take off that shirt, I want to see what’s underneath.”

“So we’re role playing now?” I said with a wink. “Kind of weird, but I know how crazy you’ve been at work and if this is what gets you going then I’m all for-”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked, breaking off from me and slowly backing toward the front door. “I texted you an hour ago to wait for me in my apartment. And here you are, just like I asked. I honestly thought it wouldn’t be this easy, but I guess your wife is-”

“This is my apartment,” I said. “Our apartment. And my wife is you.”

“Oh that’s cute,” she said and that’s when I finally saw her. 

She was her, but wasn’t. 

The face was almost the same but the lines were all different. Her hair was the same color but with none of the stress grays. 

And her eyes...

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but what is your name?” 

“You’re right, it does sound crazy,” she said. “But I like crazy. So I’ll play along. My name is Elana...”

So far, so good 

“... Thyria.”

No. 

No, no, no. 

This was all wrong.

“And what’s your name?” she asked with a wink.

I ran toward her, then ran past her, and then ran out into the night.

That was my first mistake. But not my last.

I ran for days. It was easy at first, as that world was mostly similar to mine, save for a few minor changes. Like poutine was distinctly American for some reason. And Martha Jefferson was on the nickel instead of Thomas. There were other things too, but the most important thing I learned there was to never let Elana out of my sight.

After a month on Earth Two, I woke up one morning feeling like someone had shoved another version of me into the same amount of skin. I later learned from a slightly smarter version of my Elana, one that hadn’t made the minor but also catastrophic error in her calculations, that by running so far from Thyria, I had weakened the “entanglement,” as she had called it, to such an extent that it would have obliterated me and every version of me within the closest 12 realities.

Anyway, where was I? 

Oh, right. 

I called the homewrecker version of my wife and told her where I was. I don’t know why I thought that would do anything to help ease the pain, but as the hours passed, and she got closer, it was as if someone had loosened the invisible vise that was slowly squeezing my brain. 

When she opened the hotel room door, I was so happy that I would have kissed her, had it not been for the gun she immediately withdrew from inside her jacket and pointed at me.

“Easy now,” I said. “It’s just me. I just want to talk.”

“See that’s the rub,” said Thyria, “you aren’t just you, are you? Just like I’m not the me you thought I was.”

I later decided that referring to each Elana by their last name was an easier method of telling them apart than something unoriginal like Elana 2 or Elana 3. And a weird quirk of the multiverse I discovered along the way was that in no two universes did any Elana share the same last name. 

But I broke that rule with my Elana, Elana Prime, because she is the one who started this. And despite that, she is still the one I have tried to get back to for so long.

But Thyria will always hold a special place in my heart for being my first “other.” And for being the first Elana to shoot me there as well.

Quantum entanglement is a funny thing. By all rational expectation, I should have died and that would have been the end of it, perhaps. And maybe the me that Thyria loved did die that day. Maybe the poor bastard came back to himself for just long enough to stare at her with his own eyes, for her to appreciate the enormity of what she had done, before passing on. But whatever happened next, I was not privy to it. Because when I opened my eyes again, I was in my kitchen with a woman who looked like my wife. Along with four kids of various ages and states of undress.

Prime and I never had children, so this new status quo I had stumbled into was quite a shock.

“Don’t just stand there,” she said to me. “Help!”

“Yes, dear,” I said. That sounded like something this version of me would say. But the look on Parson’s face told me otherwise. I grabbed the nearest child, a probably-four year old who I quickly discovered was named Max, and brought him to another room. He stared at me for a second before deciding to scream his little head off, which caused a cascade, which nearly caused our neighbors to call child services. But eventually all four kids got tired as kids are wont to do, and so that is how I survived my first night as a parent.

And as the months went by, I found that Parson was so distracted by the responsibilities of the household that she barely had time to notice that her husband had been replaced. 

I later found out that the quickest way of being discovered that I was an imposter was to sleep with that particular Elana. Convincingly being another man in the bedroom was the hardest thing to fake and the hardest thing to learn on the job. So in each new world I found myself in, I tried to hold off on that first contact for as long as possible. 

Sometimes I was successful, like with Parson. Other times, the discovery was almost immediate. Thankfully, by the time those occasions started occurring with rapid frequency, I had discovered a less violent way of escaping a universe than by killing myself. 

In my all-too-little free time, I had been squirreling away the latest entanglement research in this universe as my nighttime reading, desperate to discover any clues on how to untangle myself from Parson and perhaps go home. 

But therein lay the problem. To untangle a quantum particle, you would have to literally move it back in time to its untangled original state. To untangle infinite sets of two individuals seemed orders of magnitude beyond what current science was capable of. But somehow, I had broken free of Thyria, my death triggering the same destabilization that caused me to jump there in the first place.

Or so I thought. 

As it turned out, the one thing I had been running from this whole time had been the very answer I was looking for. 

I boarded a plane one day and told Parson to meet me in Los Angeles the following afternoon. Hunkering down in a posh Beverly Hills hotel, I felt the onset of the quantum tautness overwhelm me as I waited for her to arrive. 

Which she did, although several hours later than I had expected.

“I’m here,” she said, as if she hadn’t just upended her Tuesday routine to fly across the country. “What now?”

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you have to say?”

“You should be excited I even came,” said Parson. “I have other things I could be doing right now, you know.”

“That’s true,” I said, the pain in my skull building to a crescendo. “You’re a busy woman.”

I walked toward her and before she could say anything, I pushed her against the hotel room door and met her lips with mine. 

That was all it took. 

I felt the quantum bond linking me to that world snap and in the last moments before my consciousness drifted to the next universe, I heard her say three words that still haunt me to this day.

“I knew it.”

The man in the black suit hits stop on the DVD player and the video of me in a similar sterile room to the one I am in now pauses. 

“Too bad,” I say. “I was just about to get to the good part.”

“Which ‘good part,’ Mr. Chambers?” the man asks me.

“I don’t understand,” I say. 

The man taps his ear and a frazzled woman with unkempt hair and too-big-for-her-face glasses comes into the room. She looks like she’s just out of central casting for a part as “Disheveled but still attractive female government scientist number 2.”

“Tell him,” the man says to her.

“Well, ummm, that’s not the interview you gave us last month,” she says. 

“Of course it is,” I say.

“No,” she says. “Your story has changed over time.”

She hits a button on the DVD player and the video shifts slightly on the screen. It’s still me, still in the same room, still wearing the same clothes. 

I begin to speak.

“And Martha Washington was on the quarter instead of George.”

Crap.

“Nice video editing,” I say. 

They don’t buy it.

“That second video is from the interview you did with us. And the first...” says the suit, prompting his mousy colleague to finish.

‘‘... is an interview we pulled from another universe.”

This body wants to react in a hundred different ways, but my mind has trained for these occasions for so many decades that I react as if someone merely told me it was raining.

“Huh,” I say. “That would be a neat trick, if it were possible.”

“That’s funny,” says the suit, “coming from the guy who said he hops universes for a living.”

“I am a mistake,” I say. “An anomaly. I can control when I leave, but that’s it. To do what you said you’ve done, it’s impossible.”

Ms. Mouse wants to say something but the suit stops her. 

“It’s fine,” he says. “You don’t have to believe us. But you do have to tell us the truth.”

“I’m done talking,” I say. “I want to see her.”

“Out of the question. You aren’t getting within 100 miles of the President, no matter how much your skull starts hurting.”

I smile.

“You’re right,” I say. “I should tell you the truth. Because earlier, when I said it was me who would bear the pain of being separated from my wife...”

A buzzer sounds somewhere outside the room. Then on Suit’s belt. Then he taps his ear and says, “no, she can’t. Don’t let her!”

It’s too late, though. Because even in my brief time with her, I could tell that she didn’t seem like the type who liked being told what she couldn’t do.

The door to the room swings open, and a woman in workout pants and a spandex shirt walks in, her long hair neatly tied into a high ponytail. She steps forward and then clasps her head, nearly falling, before righting herself.

“Hello again, Madam President,” I say. “Did I interrupt your morning jog?”

She looks at me with venom, still tight as a vise, and I wonder if I reach forward quickly I can escape this trap. But then it’s like a switch flips, and all the tension leaves her body. 

“Leave us,” she says to Suit and Mouse.

“Madam President, we can’t leave you alone with him. After what he’s told us.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to perfectly protect me from just outside the room, don’t you think?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says like the dutiful soldier that he is and my two interrogators leave, the door clicking shut to remind me not to try to run.

“Great,” I say. “If we’re alone now, I can actually-”

“Hello, Jacob.”

I pause. Her voice, it ...

“Prime? Is that you?”

She laughs. 

“Has it been that long for you that you have abstracted me away in such a manner, my darling husband?”

“What ... how...”

She leans in and kisses me and I brace for the escape vector, for the next jump that might bring me–bring us–home. But nothing happens. I stare at her and finally see the dozens of lifetimes behind her eyes. And I wonder if she recognizes the same in mine.

She takes my hand in hers and despite the time and the distance and the universes, I still recognize it. 

She smiles at me as she leans in close to my ear.

“We have a lot of catching up to do.”

Thanks for reading The Unstuck Man!

Sometimes I need a mental break from writing fantasy, especially writing in the same fantasy world for the past six years. So last year, I came up with the concept of a Quantum Leap-type story, except instead of jumping to a random place and time, the main character keeps jumping into worlds where he is married to a different version of his wife.

It was fun to write a bit of sci-fi, even if my understanding of quantum entanglement may not completely hold together upon heavier scrutiny. And it was fun to write a one-and-one done story, even if my brain kept imagining how I would continue this story (there’s an unfinished draft of a parallel story from Prime’s point of view somewhere in my Google Drive).

Special thanks to Mike Sadowitz for providing excellent feedback on an earlier draft of the story.