Schrodingers Maze

Part V - An Uncertain Truth

Finding himself in the comfort of a room, the light soft, the air cool and crisp and herbal scented, Schrodinger draws a breath deep down into his diaphragm. A clinical sense permeates the space around him, the few objects in the room placed with a deliberateness that implies meaning. A metal table lit white silver from above like an operating table. Two metal chairs placed either side. He swallows. His thirst is gone though he cannot remember drinking. He feels no hunger.

Startled by a quiet shuffle behind him, he turns to see a figure, a man. His hair, long and grey like wire, gives away an agedness that his skin conceals. His face is smooth and free of wrinkles, soft and golden like suede. A coarse loose hanging, cape or cassock of burlap conceals the man's body shape, and Schrodinger finds it difficult to discern how fat or thin he is.

"Where am I?", Schrodinger asks.

"We'll get to that perhaps. You lot are always worried about the where, but you should start with the what and the who," says the man walking towards the table and taking a seat, without meeting Schrodinger's eyes.

"I don't understand," Schrodinger says, meekly.

The man says nothing, extending his arm forward, motioning for him to sit. To Schrodinger he looks aloof, disinterested in him, but he sits, nevertheless.

"So, what are you Mr. Hamilton?", asks the man obtusely.

"I'm exhausted. You have no idea what I've been through," Schrodinger replies.

The man starts laughing, looking to the sky, eyes rolling. "Oh that. Let me see. No that was nothing. The guy before you, now we really went to work on him. Do you not think you deserved it?"

"Deserved it? For what I did you mean? For killing the Crown Prince and probably a dozen other people? If I could remember any of it, I'd be able to say what I deserve."

"And maybe what you are?"

"Maybe. But I can't believe what I saw. Can't believe that it was me."

"Why? Because you're so good?"

"Because I try to be good. I've always tried."

"But is anything singular? Good, bad. Black, white. Can not a table be used as a chair?" he says staring off at the wall to the left and tapping the metal desk in front of him. "And is it not more desirable to do so, once told not to?"

"I don't follow," Schrodinger says, still meek. His head is hurting again.

"And what of people? Are they one thing? Are you? Is it not that you search, yet you cannot pin yourself down? You know that something, a small seed of something anyway, exists within you that you cannot quite trust. That sometimes you do things to others or yourself that you know were not done in full consciousness. Have you never wondered why? A misspoken word. Submitting to that addictive impulse. Cheating because you won't get caught."

"But I didn't kill those people."

"You lack imagination," says the man in a voice so condescending that Schrodinger physically recoils in his seat. "Watch the video again," he says.

It takes a moment for Schrodinger to realise what he is talking about. His phone. He reaches into his trouser pocket, feeling its weight, and scrolls through his files. He watches the video again with absolute focus, trying to see what he must have missed. A reason behind all of this. Nothing. The video is the same. He plants the bomb, it explodes, the Crown Prince lies lifeless under his horse. Schrodinger is a killer. He shakes his head, still in disbelief.

The man flicks two fingers in front of him as if sweeping dust from an unseen shoulder. Schrodinger senses a change, a ripple through the room, a pressure in his chest bone like a bubble of gas catching in his gullet. "Watch again. Carefully," the man intones.

Schrodinger hits play again. This time he is standing there doing his job. Observing, guarding, keeping the peace. A man who is not him walks behind and places the rucksack on the ground. Schrodinger turns at just the right moment to spot him. He feels now what the Schrodinger in the video must be feeling. That something isn't quite right. That he must react. And he does, shouting at the gathered people who run panicked, far or for cover. The Crown Prince's cavalcade must have received warning because this time the street remains empty as the bomb explodes. The same dust and debris, minus the dead bodies.

Schrodinger physically belches as the feeling of another ripple rolls through him. "Again," say the man.

This time the video shows nothing. A completely normal street with cars moving along, pedestrians hurrying along the pavement going about their business. An ordinary day. No Crown prince. No Bomb.

Again, the ripple. "Again," says the man.

This time is almost identical to the scene in which Schrodinger saved the day, except this time his head is turned a few degrees anticlockwise, away from the man planting the rucksack. The Crown Prince arrives, the bomb explodes, and everyone, Schrodinger included, is consumed by the shock wave. As the dust settles, he sees himself lying in a pool of blood, chunks of strangers, macabre and unidentifiable, all around him.

"So, I ask again, what are you?" asks the man.

Schrodinger shakes his head again, hoping the answer will fall like ripe apples in the wind. "I don't understand," he says once more.

Now turning one-hundred-and-eighty degrees around on his chair, the metal legs screeching on the floor, the man tuts three times and looks again to the sky. "I can show you. I must show you. Just for a picosecond. Any longer and you would be lost forever."

"Show me what?"

Now the man jerks his arms to the sky, like Elvis hitting a beat. Schrodinger only catches the merest glimpse of his movement before he is seemingly plunged, full body, into a fryer. It is as if all of the pain and sorrow of the universe has been delivered onto him, but joy, envy, boredom, hatred and love too. His mind is flattened to the edges of the universe and there he sees everything in one instant. An infinity of possibilities all co-existing at this single point in time and space. And then it is gone.

"You were out for a while," Schrodinger hears the man's voice from above, as he becomes aware, eyes closed, that he is lying curled into a tight ball on ground. "So now do you understand? What are you?"

The words are not his own, yet they come, as if each syllable is being kicked from his body, "I am good. I am bad. I am ashes and dust."

"Excellent," says the man. "So, the who shouldn't be too difficult for you now. Who am I?"

Schrodinger thinks but all that comes is, "I am Schrodinger Hamilton."

The man laughs an exasperated laugh, "I am Schrodinger Hamilton," he repeats like a child mocking. "So self-centered," he jibes and taunts. "Not who are you. Who. Am. I?", he asks, stressing each word.

Schrodinger gathers himself and sits up, still on the floor, hugging his knees. Rocking back and forth he has a sudden clarity of thought. "God?" he ventures, his voice hopeful.

"Try to be a little more imaginative."

"The Devil?"

"Is there not a little bit of the Devil in all of us?", the man responds cryptically. "But fine. Can I not be God, Jehovah, Elohim, Allah, Bhagavan, or the 101 gods of Zoroastrianism? Can I not be the Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub or the Kigatilik? Can I not be all these things?"

Schrodinger nods his head. "The deity," he agrees.

"Then we can get to your question. The one you asked when you first entered this room," says the man looking over the top of Schrodinger's head at the wall behind.

"Where am I?" Schrodinger asks again, but this time more to himself than the man.

"Where are you?"

"Am I in heaven? Hell? Am I dead?", Schrodinger asks, an uncertain truth dawning on him.

The deity turns his head and looks directly at him for the first time. He raises his right eyebrow as if he is about to ask another question, but says nothing.