Schrodinger’s Cat
Schrodinger’s Cat
Finally, the day was here! Alex rode in the back of her parents' Jeep as they sped toward the shelter that held what was soon to be their cat captive. Her parents said something; she didn’t hear it but responded “Yeah!” enthusiastically and that seemed to satiate them. The car door slammed as she stepped out onto the hot pavement, warmed by the midday sun.
As Alex stepped into the shelter she was bombarded by the strangest noise she had ever experienced. It was like all of the cats in the world were making all of the noises in the world all at once, while simultaneously remaining silent. Entranced by the noise, Alex looked around, her eyes landing on the strangest creature she had ever witnessed. It was shaped like a cat, with all the right limbs in all the right places. But each individual adjective that could be used to describe it was at once an accurate description and totally off the mark. It seemed to be every color, every breed, every personality, everything Alex could hope for, and also incredibly disappointing, all at once. She reached out to pet the strange creature and everything she had noticed before about the feline was accentuated.
Entering the shelter again, the day following the night of her dream, Alex wondered at the strangeness of the cat that inhabited it. She blessed the air conditioner of the shelter, simultaneously cursing the 2050s rapidly warming climate, and was slightly shocked and a little disappointed as she noticed the shelter’s acute lack of a feline aberration. She absentmindedly picked the sole cat that would live to see the ‘morrow, a young, rusty brown tabby with a playful attitude. At home, the cat acted… perfectly normal.
Her professors accused her of pursuing too much all at once, but Alex knew that it was fine. I mean, who doesn’t want to pursue all careers government related? And so what if it took her a couple extra years? She’d be damned if she couldn’t pursue politics and her dream of being an astronaut. Though this whole thing was taking a toll on her sleep; it was her second night in a row staying up until much too late in the morning, Schrodinger perched next to her laptop on the desk. As she wrote she suddenly felt as if the entirety of her thesis had been written already, and yet she had also written none of it.
Her campaign was going well, it appeared that it was a good move to use her dead cat as its figurehead. If everything went the way the polls said they would, Alex would be the youngest female president by tomorrow morning. Alex went to bed hopeful. Sure enough the next morning her presidency began with a cleaning of the oval office.
During said cleaning something strange occured. She was dusting various things in the office and decided that it would be a good idea to get behind the furniture as well, after all, the cleaning people had to be somewhat intimidated by the space they were cleaning and would not risk disturbing a carefully composed room, just for the sake of cleaning it. Sure enough dust was plentiful behind the various filing cabinets and desks. Alex felt vaguely proud of her dust deduction, which was strange, given the amount of other stuff she had to be proud of. Then the strangeness occurred. She was moving a filing cabinet when she was beset with the same feeling of possibility that she had experienced twice before. She did not know what was behind that cabinet but it could be anything, because it was everything. And nothing. All at once. When she did finally peer behind it she was strangely unsurprised at what she found.
It had been two weeks since the start of the new president’s apparent insanity. She had ruthlessly cut spending from all departments, to the point of collapse for some of them. All of the excess money created by this was being dumped into the space program, for which she claimed she had “big plans.” A few weeks after that these big plans manifested into a rocket, the likes of which humanity had never seen, at least most of humanity. The rocket was supposed to be able to travel fast enough “to reach the realm of possibility at the edge of the universe”. The president would be its sole occupant. She had gotten the design for such a monstrosity of post modern technology from a vision that allowed her to see the truths of the universe. At least that’s what all the newscasters were saying.
And when it was built she flew. And she flew where she would. And waiting for her, there, past the edge of the universe, was Schrodinger.
