The Cat in the Box

By Wigner's Friend
wigners.friend@hotmail.com


Classification: Vignette; set during the cancer arc.
Spoilers: Passing reference to Never Again.
Rating: G
Archive: I'd be honoured. Just let me know so I can visit.


The digital clock in their rented Taurus glowed three forty a.m.
Or it might have been three forty-eight, Scully couldn't tell.
The middle bar of the last digit had mysteriously burnt out,
morphing all numbers except zero, one, and seven into bizarre
glyphs, an alien language in which zero equals eight.

Mulder launched a sunflower seed shell toward the half-open
window. Scully watched as the soggy projectile hit the glass and
clung there, hanging on for dear life. You and me both, she
thought wryly. She'd told Mulder that they were moving two steps
forward and three steps back in an endless line. But their path
was not the unswerving road to oblivion that she had envisioned:
it was a child's scribble of dizzy loops and sudden twists,
fraught with dead ends and hidden mines. Fate tossed them about
like a boat in choppy waters, and some days all she could do was
hold on and ride out the storm.

"So, Scully, what paranormal phenomena *do* you believe?" Mulder
was in remarkably good spirits, considering they'd been assigned
to routine surveillance of the supposed headquarters of a local
drug lord. They'd spent the first two hours of the stakeout
discussing mermaids, dragons, and other mythical creatures. Their
main disagreement, funnily enough, had been on the precise
meaning of "mythical".

Scully considered. "I believe in ghost particles."

"Ghost *particles*? You won't believe in full-blown ghosts, but
chop them up into tiny pieces and they're easier to swallow?"

"I meant ghostly manifestations of subatomic particles, Mulder.
Think quantum physics, not horror movie."

Mulder grinned. "So instead of going to heaven after they die,
electrons are destined to haunt their living counterparts for all
eternity?"

Scully rewarded him with the obligatory eyeroll. "Say we shoot
electrons, one at a time, at a barrier with two slits. Common
sense tells us that each electron must pass through one slit or
the other--"

"--but the electron 'ghosts' pass straight through the barrier
instead of going through the slits. Scully, even I know that
electrons can penetrate certain materials. Nothing paranormal
about that at all."

"Ah, but you haven't heard the whole story. The electrons do go
through the openings, only instead of going through one slit,
each electron goes through *both*."

"Both? So it splits into two copies of itself like multiplying
cells?"

"Not exactly. If we put a detector on the other side of the
barrier, it only detects one electron each time. So one electron
leaves the gun and one hits the detector. But somewhere in
between, it splits into two 'ghost' electrons, one for each
slit."

Plastic rustled as Mulder's fingers fished for another seed.
"How do you know the electron splits into two if only one hits
the detector?"

"If we shoot enough electrons through the barrier, we get an
interference pattern on the detector screen that can only be made
if each electron passed through both openings. But here's the
weirdest part of all: if we place the detector *at* the barrier
to see what happens as the electrons pass through, each electron
will only go through one slit, just like you'd expect from
everyday experience."

The seed crunching stopped. "So it only splits into ghosts when
we're not looking at it?"

Scully nodded. "When faced with a choice, an unobserved electron
hedges its bets by splitting into an array of phantom electrons
encompassing every possibility. But the very act of observation
forces it to choose, so we only ever see one 'real' electron and
never its ghosts."

"So electrons somehow know when they're being observed?"

"It would appear so, yes."

"You do realize you're attributing intelligence to a subatomic
particle." Mulder practically ground into his seat as he shifted
about, searching for a comfortable position in the cramped space.
Scully narrowly escaped an eyeful of elbow. Their knees touched.

"Intelligent or not, particles do act differently when we're not
looking at them. Quantum theory tells us that reality really is
perception. Nothing is real until it has been observed; what you
see is what you get, no more, no less."

"Now I know why you won't believe in aliens until they bite you
in the ass."

Scully disposed of his Cheshire grin with an elbow in the ribs.
"I'd spare myself the pain in the ass and settle for a
photograph."

"What if we were to perform that experiment with baseballs instead
of electrons? Are you saying that if I don't look at the baseball
as it goes through the barrier, it magically splits into two
phantom balls that pass through both slits?"

"That's not the way it works, Mulder. This phenomenon only occurs
at quantum scales."

A pause, as Mulder's tongue twisted around and ejected another
spent shell. This one hurtled over the glass hurdle into inky
darkness. "So how do you reconcile phantom particles on the one
hand, and the reality of everyday life on the other?"

"That's the million-dollar question. Take Schrodinger's example.
Say we design an experiment where there's a 50% chance a particle
would choose outcome A and a 50% chance it would choose outcome B.
We rig it so that if outcome A occurs, a glass vial containing a
lethal poison would be broken and the poison released. We put the
entire setup into a sealed box with a live cat. According to
quantum theory, both outcomes will occur if we don't look into the
box. But what happens to the vial and the cat? Is the vial both
broken and unbroken? Is the cat both dead and alive? Or is it
neither, until we open the box and look inside?"

"So we have a cat in Limbo. Literally."

Scully quirked a smile and continued. "We can take this idea
further: what if we locked ourselves in the room and then looked
inside the box? Since we'd be cut off from the world at large,
would we also be 'in limbo' until an outside observer opened the
door? What if the entire universe were like a giant box? Does our
very existence depend upon the observation of an external entity?
And if so, does this mean we finally have proof that God exists?"

"It's a little early in the morning to be discussing the
metaphysical implications of quantum theory, Scully."

"Maybe so. But Schrodinger's paradox does raise some interesting
ques--" Syrupy warmth trickled down her upper lip. Scully thrust
a fistful of tissue under her nose to stanch the flow.

Mulder's face bobbed above the blurred white partially obscuring
her vision. "Scully? Are you all right? Should I take you to the
hospital?"

"No, just give it a few minutes. I'll be fine."

Mulder's hand white-knuckled the steering wheel, but he said
nothing.

Rust tickled her throat. Silence dripped, slow and thick like
blood.

A tiny leaf, ablaze in vermilion, stepped onto the windshield. It
glanced at Scully before vaulting into the breeze.

Scully looked at Mulder, who sat immobile, frozen by anger or
frustration or both. She reached across and unwrapped his curled
fist. His fingers grasped hers for a moment before letting go.

Mulder started the engine. "I don't think our suspect is going to
show. Let's call it a night."

As the car lurched forward, the forgotten shell lost its tenuous
grip on the glass and bounced off the door onto Mulder's lap.

Scully stared at the crushed tissue in her hand, a ball of snow
smeared with crimson. She was like Schrodinger's cat, hovering
between life and death, reality and unreality, until someone
cared enough to look. No, she thought, as Mulder snuck a sideways
glance at her, he cares and he looks; but like Schrodinger's
observer, he has no control over the outcome. One day he will
open the box and see a dead cat.

The digital clock still read three forty a.m. Time stands still
if you travel at the speed of light. If they kept on driving,
maybe time would slow down, just a little.


*****

Long-winded Author's Note:

An ex-colleague took one look at my screen name and dared me to
write a story featuring Schrodinger's cat. This is the result.

Scully's explanation of the two-slit experiment is based on the
so-called "Copenhagen interpretation" championed by Niels Bohr,
and is the interpretation most commonly adopted by undergraduate
texts. Several other explanations have gained ground in recent
years, including the many-worlds interpretation, which posits
that the "ghost" particles are actually real: each possibility
does occur in reality, only in different universes. So instead of
having a half-alive/half-dead cat in the same universe, there's a
live cat in one universe and a dead one in another.

This is my first (beta-less, alas) attempt at fanfiction.
Constructive criticism most gratefully received at
wigners.friend[at]hotmail.com.