Short Fiction: Quantum Roulette

A multiversal morality play. Not to be taken as an endorsement of the underlying ethos or interpretation of quantum mechanics

Meta-content warning: Content warnings have little or no benefit in cushioning the blow of potentially disturbing content and, in some cases, may make things worse. 

Content warning: Suicide, rationalizations for quantum suicide.

I’ve won the lottery so often I no longer feel the faintest flicker of excitement; collecting my winnings is as predictable as cashing a paycheck. I have a very simple strategy. I pick my numbers based on a random measurement of quantum data. Then, if my numbers prove to be incorrect, I kill myself.

I’ve never had to actually go through with this tactic. What my method requires is an ironclad guarantee that I will not survive in any timeline where I don’t achieve my desired outcome. You may have heard that there are nigh-infinite worlds where everything happens; all I do is trim my personal branches of reality down to one where my preferred outcomes are met.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Schrodinger’s cat. A cat is placed in a box where a measurement of a random quantum event will trigger a device to kill the cat with 50% probability. Because all possible versions of that quantum event will take place in some parallel universe, there’s guaranteed to exist a universe where the cat lives and one where the cat dies, even though observers have no way of telling which reality they’re in until they open the box.

If you’re an observer, the outcome is random: when the event branches, one copy of you will see the cat live, the other copy will see the cat die. But if you’re the cat, the outcome is guaranteed: there will always be a surviving copy of the cat’s consciousness because the universe splits at the moment the random event is generated. From this we get the notion of quantum suicide: the cat can repeat the experiment a thousand times without risk. Each experiment splits off a universe where the cat lives and the cat dies, and the cat is guaranteed to have an uninterrupted stream of consciousness in the surviving universes.

Given a method of suicide with outcome coverage across the multiverse where there is guaranteed to be a version of yourself that survives, you can play the odds forever. Assign the placement of a bullet in Russian roulette from a quantum source and you literally can’t lose, even if from an observer’s perspective, you’re almost certain to end up dead. Neither point of view is wrong, per se. They’re simply looking at the same event from different and irreconcilable perspectives: my reality is not your reality.

My first few attempts at quantum suicide were done by sheer force of will. I was deep in debt with nothing to lose; I told myself I would either watch myself win the lottery, or end it all. My winnings brought me tens of thousands, but it wasn’t enough. I tried the same approach again, and pulled in a hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there.

And then it failed. I had picked my numbers wrong; I was left staring dumbfounded at the television, a gun to my head and the promise I had made to myself echoing in my mind. It was all over, I was already supposed to have pulled the trigger. By my own logic, my current timeline was no longer worth existing in. But at the same time… I was already sitting on a small nest egg. I had learned the powers that could be achieved by harnessing the multiverse. I was rapidly diverging from my past self who was willing to terminate my branch of reality for falling short of perfection. Was I really willing to throw my life away just because I wasn’t living in the best possible universe? Couldn’t my situation still be salvaged?

In that same instant, I was ashamed of my cowardice. I would have been sitting there with the winning numbers in front of me if my resolve had been absolute. If I had truly committed to pulling the trigger immediately unless I won, the only version of myself still around to ponder these questions would have had a winning ticket. It was my own weakness, my own hesitation, that condemned me to observe the losing ticket. But once the ticket had been observed, the cat was dead, and my life was over. Or so it would have been, if I had stuck to my word.

The problem was I could no longer trust myself. I was not as desperate and strung out as when I’d started: I couldn’t count on a version of myself who became aware of the consequences to opt out of living in my non-ideal universe. So I created a device to remove all choice from the equation: the Dead Man’s Switch. I would strap myself into the device with no contact with the outside world as the program loaded the winning lottery numbers from the internet. If my numbers were wrong, the Dead Man’s Switch would kill me instantly. If they were right, I’d go on living. From the perspective of a person walking into the Dead Man’s Switch, you are guaranteed to emerge a victor, with no conscious experience of any other result. If you had no knowledge of quantum mechanics, you would assume the device was magic, giving you whatever you wished for.

I made a critical mistake about a year ago. I had won enough contests to have caught the attention of the wrong people. It’s easy to say now I should have been smarter and laundered the money, but at the time I was fearless. The FBI asked for an explanation of my methods, and I told them a version of the truth: I picked my numbers as a result of quantum data, and I was simply lucky. I had to be a winner somewhere, right? I left the door open for them to think I had some supernatural ability; a few scientists interviewed me but eventually left me alone, concluding that my winning streak was no more than an unlikely accident, or more importantly, of no use to them. I remember one frizzy-haired man with glasses commenting that winning streak or no, he’d still bet against it continuing. From his perspective, he wasn’t wrong.

And then came the interview. I was waxing on about how every unlikely outcome has to happen somewhere and brought up Schrodinger's cat. I can’t remember what I said, but the podcast host got this gleam in his eye. One week later, he announced a special where he promised to unravel the secret of my success.

He broadcast a live video feed of himself playing Russian Roulette, announcing that he had a surefire method of guaranteeing the gun would never kill him. He randomized the contents of the chamber, then pulled the trigger five times to make his point. The first four shots were empty clicks. The last one blew his brains out.

In a way, it’s my fault that he’s dead. In some parallel universe divergent from mine, he succeeded in his mad game, and he’s having the same experience that I am: defying the odds, and only persisting in the branches of reality that favor him. He’s probably a celebrity. It’s just a stroke of bad luck that I didn’t end up in the same universe. I could have killed myself the moment I got the news to ensure I ended up in a universe where no one took my example to heart and I could live without guilt. But by the time I heard about the story, the moment had already passed. Unwilling to destroy my past with the same eagerness I directed to my future, I simply stewed in shame, the signs of my failure mocking me in every headline I read.

A person playing Russian Roulette where the outcomes are spread across different branches of the multiverse is taking no risks, even if from the perspective of an external observer, they are pointlessly destroying human life.

The podcast host’s actions kicked off a slow burn of suicides. Over the coming months, rumors of my success continued to spread; message boards would speculate about how my incredible feats of luck might be possible, then someone else would be found dead, a ticket with losing lottery numbers in their hand. Some kid made a video, explaining that he had already won the lottery twice using my method, and was about to do so again. He ended his own life in front of an audience of millions.

I live in a right to death state. The police came to interrogate me and inspected the Dead Man’s Switch, but I could afford enough lawyers to argue that nothing I was doing was illegal. I have the right to live or not live however I choose. They warned me against publicizing my methods, a point I had already decided on for myself. As they were leaving, I heard the detective on the case muttering that the whole situation was insane. Why should he have to live in my crap universe where I became rich for being psychotic enough to pull a trigger? Why couldn’t that have been him? One week later, I heard that he had shot himself. I don’t know what outcome he was hoping for, but I hope wherever he is now, he’s happy.

You might say that the decisions I made to get here have been selfish. I owe my current position in this universe to the trail of bodies I’ve left behind in other universes: untold billions of copies of myself left dead; a tragedy to the rest of the world, not even an inconvenience to myself.

To which I say this: why should I want to live in any universe but this one? Somewhere out there in the multiverse there’s a universe where all of us are happy, where no radioactive particle causes cancer in anyone, where no tornado rips through cities, killing thousands. I’ve chosen to reject the universes where I don’t get what I want. Why shouldn’t we all do the same?

The suicide rate continues to climb. Editorials have appeared blaming me, pinning the trend on my viral philosophy, my solipsistic rejection of all realities that don’t revolve around me. Some are saying suicide should be outlawed to stop the outbreak, or that lotteries should be eliminated to remove the incentive. 

I switched to playing the stock market a few months ago. It’s a considerably more dangerous game. Lotteries are guaranteed to have a winning set of numbers. If the stock market doesn’t produce any winners on a given day and you commit to killing yourself if you don’t come out ahead, you would end your existence across all branches of the multiverse. If you ask the Dead Man’s Switch to do something impossible, you’ll simply end up dead: there will be no version of you that survives.

I experimented with adding a failsafe to the Dead Man’s Switch; I would allow myself to survive without my desired outcome with one in a trillion odds. If I found myself alive and unsuccessful after committing to an attempt, I could conclude what I was asking for was almost certainly impossible, since it would have been more likely for me to emerge in a universe where I succeeded if not.

But quantum suicide warps all probability. I tried the experiment and came back with nothing: a string of financial losses, but no execution thanks to the failsafe. I could have concluded that this meant the gains I was hoping for were impossible, but the branch where I survived with one in a trillion odds was guaranteed to exist no matter what. All the failsafe did was guarantee that there would be a version of myself who achieved nothing from the attempt: I learned nothing about the relative likelihood of outcomes, I simply found myself poorer than I had started. The next day I removed the failsafe and repeated the experiment. I emerged successful, with my winnings only a hair above the threshold I had set for success.

I can’t keep playing this game for much longer, returns are getting worse and suicides are reaching epidemic status. But I won’t need to. I’m using my wealth to fund a Dead Man’s Switch for the human race. If it doesn’t observe the outcomes it wants, it’ll trigger a response that ends all life on the planet, so none of us are left alone without each other.

This is an act of mercy. The distribution of quantum states only gets you so far: under all possible quantum variations of radioactive particle decay, there’s no timeline where a caveman from hundreds of thousands of years ago is still alive. No matter what feats of luck could allow him to avoid early deaths, eventually the demands of age and the infirmity of cells and matter itself would end his life. He would have no possible future, across the entire multiverse.

But we do. We can harness information better than that caveman ever could have, asking the Dead Man’s Switch for randomly generated blueprints for software, proteins, 3D-printed organs, anything that can be verified by the Dead Man’s Switch as an output can be summoned into existence. We can demand miracles, and they will occur. We can reverse aging, build new bodies for ourselves, allow our limitless luck to take us to the stars. We can be gods; asserting dominion over all reality by choosing not to live anything but our best lives, controlling the world by sheer force of will. There will be no more reason for any individual to kill themselves, because we will all live or die together. We will be in the best of all possible worlds.

I won some of the lotteries that other people killed themselves over. My less fortunate competitors and I have been playing a massive game of reality chicken, swerving into each other, prepared to die if the alternative is living a less than our ideal life. In this universe, I’ve won all those competitions, at the cost of running a few of my fellow players off the tracks. If I keep playing for long enough, I could end up alone as the rest of the human race ejects itself from my reality. But soon we’ll all be in this together.

The risk of ruining everything by attempting the impossible remains my greatest fear. I thought about preconditioning my Dead Man’s Switch to find a universe with no more suicides, but I realize that may no longer be feasible, human nature may be a constant across the multiverse. Once everyone realizes how much our current state of reality is a result of my own manipulation, there may no longer be a sequence of random events that could leave everyone willing to continue in this world. But that’s fine. We’ve lost some along the way, so that world ahead will be even better.

One of the scientists I employed left the project, saying that for every ideal branch of the universe I created for myself, I was leaving behind countless other branches full of death and misery. That with one mistake I could kill us all, making the whole exercise pointless. She said I was crazy, that she was going to expose what I was doing for the sake of the world. For the sake of the multiverse. She called my methods the deepest sort of existential evil.

I briefly considered that she might be correct. I told the Dead Man’s Switch to kill me in my sleep unless she died of natural causes by the next morning. You can already guess the result.

I envision a world with no natural disasters, no more hunger, no more deaths. A world where whatever we imagine, whatever we want to create will be real. A world we will never reach without the courage to bend reality to our will. We simply have to all be prepared to die in order to reach it.

I put a gun to my own head, and blackmail the universe.