The Lucky Guess
The dame walked into my office at 11:47 PM. I know the exact time because I'd been staring at the clock for three hours, watching the seconds drip by like blood from a shallow cut.
She wore red. They always wear red.
"Detective Crane?" Her voice had that particular tremor that meant either genuine fear or exceptional acting. In my line of work, the difference hardly mattered.
"Private Detective," I corrected, though the word felt like ash in my mouth. I hadn't been a real detective for six years. Not since the department fired me for being too good at my job. "What can I do for you, Miss..."
"Reeves. Caroline Reeves." She sat without being invited. That was fine. The chair had bullet holes in it anyway. "My husband disappeared four days ago."
I reached for the bottle in my desk drawer, then stopped. Something whispered at the edge of my thoughts. A feeling. The kind I'd learned to trust even when I shouldn't.
"He's ain't dead, just missing." I said.
She blinked. "I didn't say—"
"You didn't have to." The words came out before I'd fully formed them. "He left willingly. Took the gray Volvo, not the Mercedes. He's holed up in the Riverside Motel, room 237. He's been meeting someone there. A man named David Conners."
Caroline Reeves went pale. Then red. Then she laughed, a sound like breaking glass.
"How the hell could you possibly know that?"
Honestly? I had no idea.
This wasn't the first time. Hell, it wasn't even the hundredth time. For the last three years, I'd been solving cases with information I shouldn't have. Details that appeared in my mind like memories of events I'd never witnessed. The cops called it intuition. My ex-wife called it disturbing. I called it a living.
"I'm good at what I do," I said, which was both completely true and completely inadequate.
She paid me anyway. Cash. Enough to cover two months' rent and a new liver, if I ever decided to invest in one.
After she left, I sat in the dark and tried not to think about where the information had come from. The knowing. That's what I'd started calling it privately. The Knowing, capital K, like it was a person instead of whatever broken thing was happening inside my skull.
I poured three fingers of bourbon and watched the city lights through my water-stained window. Somewhere out there, Caroline Reeves was driving to the Riverside Motel to confront her husband. I knew she'd take the highway. I knew she'd arrive at 1:23 AM. I knew she'd cry for exactly fourteen minutes before getting angry.
I knew because I always knew.
And I was starting to suspect I knew why.
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The Impossible Case
The call came at 4 AM, which meant either someone was dead or someone wanted someone dead. In this city, there wasn't much difference.
"Crane." I didn't bother with pleasantries. My voice sleepy and hoarse.
"Detective Crane? This is Lieutenant Morrison, SFPD."
I sat up. Morrison was homicide. We had history. None of it good.
"What'd you want?"
"A woman named Jennifer Park was murdered tonight in her apartment. Locked room. No signs of forced entry. No murder weapon. No suspects." He paused. "And according to three witnesses, she was seen walking her dog in Golden Gate Park at the exact time the coroner says she died."
My skin prickled. "What are you asking me?"
"I'm asking if you can do that thing you do. That lucky guess thing."
"I don't work for the department anymore."
"I know. I'm the one who fired you, remember?" His voice carried something I'd never heard from him before. Desperation. "But this case is wrong, Crane. It's impossible. And if anyone can solve impossible, it's you."
Twenty minutes later, I was standing in Jennifer Park's living room, staring at a corpse.
She lay on her back near the sofa. Single gunshot wound to the chest. Her eyes were open, staring at something I couldn't see. The apartment was pristine except for one detail: every mirror in the place had been shattered.
"Witnesses?" I asked.
Morrison flipped through his notebook. "Three people saw her in the park between 10 and 10:30 PM. Two knew her personally. They're certain. The coroner puts time of death at 10:15 PM."
I crouched beside the body and waited for The Knowing to kick in.
Nothing.
That was new. And terrifying.
I closed my eyes and focused, trying to summon whatever impossible sense had been guiding me for three years. Still nothing. Just the smell of blood and the hum of Morrison's breathing behind me.
Then I looked at the mirrors.
In the fragments of broken glass, I saw her. Not the corpse. The living Jennifer Park. She was running. Screaming. Trying to escape something that shouldn't exist.
I blinked and the vision was gone.
"The mirrors," I said slowly. "Why are all the mirrors broken?"
"We were hoping you'd tell us."
I stood and walked to the largest fragments, careful not to touch them. The glass was shattered from the inside out. Not by force. By something else.
The Knowing hit me then, but it was different. Fragmented. Like a radio signal cutting in and out. I saw Jennifer Park in the park, walking her dog. At the same time, I saw her here, dying. Two places. Same moment. Both real.
"She was in both places," I heard myself say.
"That's impossible."
"Yeah." I rubbed my eyes. Behind my eyelids, I saw more. A thousand Jennifer Parks, all slightly different. One where she wore blue instead of red. One where she turned left instead of right. One where she never existed at all. "I'm starting to think impossible is just a word we use for things we don't understand yet."
Morrison stared at me. "Are you okay?"
No. I wasn't. Because for the first time since The Knowing started, I was beginning to understand what it actually was.
And it was worse than I'd imagined.
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The Pattern
I spent the next seventy-two hours not sleeping. Instead, I filled my office walls with photos, newspaper clippings, and red string like a conspiracy theorist in a bad movie. But I wasn't looking for conspiracies. I was looking for myself.
Every case I'd ever solved using The Knowing. Every impossible deduction. Every lucky guess that shouldn't have been possible.
In the Caroline Reeves case, how had I known her husband was in room 237? I'd never been to the Riverside Motel. I'd never met her husband. But the information had been there in my mind, clear as crystal.
In the Park murder, I'd seen two realities simultaneously. The woman in the park and the woman dying in her apartment. Both real. Both happening.
I pulled out a legal pad and started writing.
Theory: I'm not guessing. I'm remembering.
But remembering what? Events I'd never witnessed? Conversations I'd never had?
My phone rang. Morrison again.
"We have another one," he said. "Same M.O. Locked room. Victim seen in two places at once. Mirrors shattered."
"Where?"
"Your building. Fourth floor."
I dropped the phone.
The fourth floor was directly above my office.
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The Woman in the Mirror
Her name was Dr. Laura Conners. Quantum physicist. According to Morrison's file, she'd been working on something classified at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. According to the shattered mirrors in her apartment, she'd been working on something that got her killed.
I stood in her living room and felt The Knowing crystallize into something sharper. Clearer. More terrifying.
She wasn't just killed. She was eliminated. Across multiple realities simultaneously.
The thought appeared in my mind fully formed, and I knew, with absolute certainty, that it was true.
"Find anything?" Morrison asked from the doorway.
I walked to the largest mirror fragment and stared at my reflection. Except it wasn't quite my reflection. The man looking back at me had a scar on his left cheek that I didn't have. He wore a wedding ring. I'd been divorced for four years.
He mouthed something: Pay attention.
I stumbled backward.
"Crane?"
"I need to see her research," I said. "Whatever she was working on at Berkeley. I need to see it now."
Morrison made a call. Two hours later, I was sitting in a secure lab, reading papers that made my head hurt.
Quantum decoherence. The Many-Worlds Interpretation. Superposition. Wave function collapse. Papers that made me think "What in the mother loving multiverse hell was I reading?"
And one phrase that kept appearing: Conscious observation creates branching realities.
Dr. Conners had been studying how human consciousness interacted with quantum mechanics. How every decision, every observation, every moment of awareness created a new reality. A new universe. A new version of reality.
She'd discovered something else too. Something she'd written in the margins of her last paper, in handwriting that grew increasingly erratic:
Some minds bridge the gap. Some observers can perceive multiple realities simultaneously. The brain, under certain conditions, becomes quantum-entangled with itself across the multiverse.
I read that sentence seventeen times.
Then I went back to my office and looked at all the cases I'd solved. All the impossible knowledge I'd possessed.
I hadn't been guessing.
I'd been accessing memories from other versions of myself. Other Thomas Cranes who had witnessed those events. Other realities where I'd actually been present when Caroline Reeves' husband checked into the Riverside Motel. Where I'd seen Jennifer Park's murder happen.
The Knowing wasn't magic.
It was quantum entanglement.
My consciousness was bridging parallel universes, pulling information from infinite versions of myself who had lived slightly different lives, made slightly different choices, witnessed slightly different events.
I was a man standing at the intersection of infinite realities.
And someone was killing the people who'd figured that out.
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The Convergence
I found the pattern in Dr. Conners' research notes. She'd identified seven other people with the same quantum consciousness bridging ability. Seven people whose brains had somehow become entangled with their alternate selves across the multiverse.
Six of them were dead. Locked room murders. Shattered mirrors. Killed simultaneously across multiple realities.
The seventh was me.
I poured myself a drink with shaking hands. Then I saw him in the glass of bourbon.
Another me. This one older, with gray at the temples. He was in my office, but not my office. The furniture was different. The walls were blue instead of gray.
He spoke, and somehow, I heard him.
"They're coming for you," he said. "Across all realities. Every version. They're trying to collapse you."
"Who?"
"We don't know. But Dr. Conners figured out why. We're contaminating the reality structure. Every time we access information from another reality, we create interference patterns. We're causing quantum decoherence at a macro scale. We're making the multiverse sick."
I set down my drink. "So they're killing us to protect all realities?"
"They're trying to. But you can't kill someone who exists in infinite realities. You can only collapse the wave function. Force all versions to converge into a single point."
"The mirrors," I said, understanding. "They're not breaking the mirrors. They're using them. Mirrors reflect. They create quantum feedback loops. If you force all versions of a person to observe each other simultaneously—"
"The wave function collapses. All realities converge. And the person ceases to exist across all realities at once."
Behind me, I heard my office door open. I turned.
Lieutenant Morrison stood there. But his eyes were wrong. Empty. Like he was looking at something very far away.
"I'm sorry, Crane," he said. "But you're breaking the universe."
He raised a gun.
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The Choice
I dove behind my desk as the shot rang out. The bullet punched through the wood inches from my head.
But I wasn't just in one office anymore.
I could see it now, truly see it, the way Dr. Conners must have. The branching realities. The infinite versions of this moment playing out simultaneously.
In one reality, I died. The bullet found me.
In another, Morrison missed and I escaped through the window.
In another, I talked him down.
In another, this never happened at all.
The multiverse was a tree with infinite branches, and I was standing at the trunk, watching all the branches grow at once.
"You can't stop this," Morrison said, but his voice was layered, multiple versions speaking in unison. "You're a probability infection. Every time you solve a case using information from other realities, you create paradoxes. You damage the structure of reality itself."
He fired again.
This time, I didn't dodge. I couldn't. Because I finally understood.
The quantum entanglement wasn't one-way. If I could access other versions of myself, they could access me. All of them. Every Thomas Crane who'd ever existed or would exist across the infinite multiverse.
I closed my eyes and reached out.
A million consciousnesses answered.
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The Solution
The bullet stopped.
Not metaphorically. It literally stopped in midair, three inches from my chest, suspended in a bubble of frozen probability.
Morrison's eyes widened. "That's not possible."
"You're right," I said. "In most realities, it's not."
I could feel them now. All the other versions of me. The cop who never got fired. The drunk who never sobered up. The one who became a professor. The one who died in childhood. Infinite variations, infinite possibilities.
Together, we were something more than any single consciousness could be.
We were a probability storm.
"Dr. Conners figured it out," I said, standing. The bullet rotated slowly in the air between us, all its kinetic energy temporarily redistributed across parallel realities. "That's why you killed her. She discovered that quantum entanglement of consciousness isn't a bug. It's a feature."
Morrison, or whoever was speaking through him, said nothing.
"Human consciousness is how the universe observes itself," I continued. "Every thought, every decision, every moment of awareness creates new realities. But most minds only experience one reality at a time. They collapse the wave function unconsciously."
I picked up one of Dr. Conners' papers from my desk.
"But some minds don't collapse the function. Some of us keep the wave function open. We bridge realities. We maintain quantum superposition at a macro scale." I looked at Morrison. "We're not contaminating reality. We're expanding it."
The thing in Morrison's eyes flickered.
"You've been trying to stop us because you don't understand what we are," I said. "But Dr. Conners figured it out in her last notes. She wrote that conscious superposition might be how the universe evolves. How it explores new possibilities. We're not a disease. We're the immune system."
I reached out and touched the suspended bullet. It was warm. Vibrating with contained energy across a trillion trillion realities.
"So here's what's going to happen," I said. "You're going to leave. All of you. Whatever you are, whatever system or force or entity is trying to prune the multiversal tree, you're going to back off. Because if you collapse me, you collapse all of me. Every version across every reality. And that much sudden quantum decoherence? That would create a cascade failure across the entire multiverse structure."
I released the bullet. It dropped to the floor, inert.
"I'm not a probability infection," I said. "I'm a probability anchor. And you need me."
Morrison's eyes cleared. He blinked, confused, lowered his gun.
"Crane? What... what am I doing here?"
"Going home," I told him. "Case closed."
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Epilogue: The Detective Agency
Six months later, I moved to a bigger office.
The sign on the door read: CRANE INVESTIGATIONS - SPECIALIZING IN IMPOSSIBLE CASES.
Business was good. Turns out, once you accept that you can access information from infinite parallel universes, solving mysteries becomes significantly easier.
I still drank too much. Still worked too late. Still had a complicated relationship with the word "detective."
But I'd figured something out that Dr. Conners had known: I wasn't alone.
None of us were.
Every decision we made created a new reality, a new version of ourselves exploring a different possibility. And if you were lucky, or unlucky, or quantumly entangled enough, you could talk to them. Learn from them. Share experiences across the infinite garden of forking paths.
I poured myself a drink and looked at my reflection in the window.
This time, I saw hundreds of them. All the Thomas Cranes. The detective. The drunk. The professor. The husband. The father. The corpse. The hero.
All of us, simultaneously real.
One of them raised his glass in a toast.
I raised mine back.
To impossible cases.
To quantum entanglement.
To the multiverse.
And to every version of myself I'd never met but always known.
The city lights blazed below, infinite and beautiful and strange. Somewhere out there, another Thomas Crane was just starting his story. Making different choices. Solving different cases.
Living a different life.
But the same life, too.
That's the thing about quantum mechanics. It's not either-or.
It's both.
Always both.
I smiled and took a drink, and across infinite realities, infinite versions of me smiled and drank with me.
We were all the same person.
And we were all completely unique.
That's the real mystery, I thought. Not how consciousness can bridge realities, but why we ever thought we were separate in the first place.
The phone rang. Another case. Another impossibility.
I picked it up, already knowing what they'd say, because somewhere in the multiverse, another version of me had already taken this call.
"Detective Crane," I said. "Tell me something impossible."
And they did.
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