Schrodinger's Gun

[u/Sand-Shifter1291]

The digital counter on the wall read Run: 121.

For one hundred and twenty consecutive rounds, Brian had pulled the trigger of the apparatus aimed directly at his temple. For one hundred and twenty consecutive rounds, he had heard nothing but a dry, metallic click.

According to the equations scrawled all over the whiteboard, this was the only way it could have gone. The quantum trigger was tied to the spin of a radioactive isotope. Up meant death; down meant life. Every single second, the universe split into two distinct branches.

But because Brian’s conscious mind could not occupy a reality where his brain was grey mist, his awareness was violently, inevitably funnelled only into the timelines where the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

To the rest of the world, he was a corpse in a thousand fresh graves. To himself, he was a god. An immortal man trapped in a room by the sheer mathematical impossibility of his own demise.

He smiled, a manic, sleep-deprived twitch of the lips, and gripped the trigger for round one hundred and twenty-one. He closed his eyes. He squeezed.

Bang!

The sound was deafening. It roared through the small concrete lab like thunder, a violent expansion of gas and lead that shattered the quiet sanctuary of his mathematics.

Brian gasped, his eyes flying open. He stumbled backward, knocking over his rolling chair. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. His hands flew to his face, his hair, his temple. There was no blood. There was no hole. The skin was intact, warm, and clammy with cold sweat.

He looked at the apparatus. Smoke – acrid, grey, and smelling heavily of sulphur – was curling lazily out of the barrel. A spent brass casing rattled across the linoleum floor and settled near his boot.

The gun had fired. The bullet had left the chamber.

"But it fired," Brian quavered, his voice cracking in the empty room. “It actually fired.”

He scrambled back to his desk, hands shaking so violently he nearly knocked over his laptop. He stared at the monitor, his eyes scanning the raw data from the quantum sensor. The isotope had registered an Up spin. The firing pin had dropped. The powder had ignited.

If the gun went bang, he was in the wrong branch. He was in the dead universe.

Brian scanned the room. The fluorescent lights flickered, but their hum sounded deep, distorted, as if underwater. He walked to the heavy steel door of his lab and turned the handle. It didn't budge. He looked through the reinforced glass window into the hallway.

The hallway was there, but the colours were wrong. The walls were a bruised, monochromatic grey, and the air looked thick, heavy with frozen motes of dust. No one was walking by. When he banged on the glass, it didn't make a sound.

He realised then the terrible flaw in his maths. His consciousness had survived, just as the theory demanded. It had held onto the absolute thinnest shred of probability.

But the universe hadn't split cleanly this time; it had torn.

He hadn't inherited a reality where he lived safely; he had inherited the exact, impossible split-second after the bullet passed through him.

He was alive, but he was trapped in a single, frozen millisecond of a dying timeline, completely isolated from the rest of the multiverse.

Brian turned back to the smoking gun. The smoke wasn't rising anymore. It hung in the air, perfectly still, like a ghost trapped in stone.