Synopsis: Schrödinger’s Bomb

Preface

The scientists who worked on the project theorized that the bomb’s impact would be great enough to effectively stop Earth’s time – for precisely 0.00235 seconds. The government who authorized its secret test launch and the historians who reordered the moment for classified files labeled it “The bomb that never hit”. Perhaps to an outside observer this seemed true enough, for the city they viewed through the distance lenses of their time saw no impact, saw no damage, so no destruction. Viewing from their time, now precisely 0.00235 seconds ahead of ours, they were correct in observing that nothing had happened. Confused and perplexed, they recorded and recorded, but the “bomb that never hit” was sealed forever in the past they could not see. A past that traps us –those of us who survived the bomb’s destruction- in the goulash fallout of what we prefer to call “Schrödinger’s Bomb”. Perhaps if none of us had survived the incinerating blast that devastated our city, the divergent reality would cease to be. Even if only one of us had survived, there is a chance that the unlucky victim would have opened the proverbial box to find either that the city destroyed, or that the city had survived. Either way, the dilemma would have been solved. Instead, several of us survived, and since we can’t live in two separate bodies in two separate times only 0.00235 apart, physics was forced to choose for us one outcome or the other. We each peered into the boxes of our fates and accepted the outcome we saw, but those two outcomes differ and collide every second of every day, locked in an eternal war for dominance. It’s no longer enough to have survived the blast. Now we have to survive each other and the "ghosts" of the unmarred city too, who refuse to face the truth of their destruction or trade their fragile reality in favor of our own private hell.