The Quantum Survivor

The snow had stopped. Through triple-paned windows, the morning sun cast long shadows across pristine drifts that buried my neighborhood under six feet of powder. I pulled on my winter gear, grabbed my phone, and stepped outside to start documenting structural damage for the insurance company.

No footprints marked the snow. Not even from my next-door neighbor Kathy, who walked her German Shepherd at exactly 6 AM every morning, blizzard or not.

"Hello?" I spoke flatly into the dense air. The silence pressed against me.

I trudged through the snow toward Kathy's house, leaving a deep trench behind me. Her front door stood slightly ajar, snow drifting onto her welcome mat. Inside, a half-empty coffee mug sat on her kitchen counter, still warm.

My phone showed no signal. The power was out, but that was expected after a storm this severe. What wasn't expected was the complete absence of emergency vehicles, snow plows, or other people.

Back outside, I noticed something else wrong. No birds. No distant traffic noise. No aircraft. The air itself felt wrong—thinner somehow, despite the sea-level atmospheric pressure reading on my watch's barometer.

I needed more data. The physics lab where I worked was only two miles away. The walk would be brutal through the deep snow, but I had to understand what was happening.

The trek took nearly two hours. Every house I passed showed similar signs—doors left open, cars abandoned in driveways, no signs of struggle but clear evidence of sudden departure. The university campus was equally deserted.

In the lab, I powered up our backup generator and began running atmospheric composition tests. The results made no sense. Nitrogen levels were normal at 78%, but oxygen had dropped to 19.5%—still breathable but notably lower than Earth's standard 20.95%. Most concerning was the presence of trace gases that shouldn't exist in our atmosphere: xenon, krypton, and complex organic compounds I couldn't identify.

"Shit." I ran the tests three more times. Same results.

The radio in the corner suddenly burst to life with a surge of static. I moved to it, desperate for any human contact.

"This is Dr. Wade Albrecht broadcasting on emergency frequency 121.5 MHz from Northeastern University Physics Department. Is anyone receiving?"

Static answered.

A new theory formed—one that explained the strange atmospheric composition, the sudden disappearances, and the overwhelming wrongness of everything. I needed to test it.

Using the lab's spectrometer, I analyzed the sunlight streaming through the window. The spectrum was off by 0.03 nanometers across all wavelengths. A tiny difference, but profound in its implications.

"Fuck me sideways," I muttered as I sank into my chair. "We're not on Earth anymore."

The entire region—possibly the entire planet—had been transported somewhere else. The slightly different atomic weights in this universe had shifted our solar spectrum just enough to be measurable. The strange atmospheric composition suddenly made sense—this was Earth's atmosphere, but evolved under slightly different physical constants.

I grabbed the radio again. "This is Dr. Wade Albrecht. If anyone can hear this, the blizzard wasn't natural. It was cover for a quantum tunneling event that transported us to a parallel universe. The different physical constants here made the transition survivable for matter but lethal to the strong nuclear force holding human consciousness to our bodies. I theorize everyone else's consciousness was scattered during the transition. I only survived because—"

I stopped, remembering the experimental quantum consciousness stabilizer I'd been testing on myself. The prototype was meant to prevent quantum decoherence in quantum computing experiments. Instead, it had accidentally saved my life by anchoring my consciousness during the transition.

The radio remained silent. I was alone in a parallel universe with no way to reverse the transition. The sun was setting, and the temperature was dropping fast. I had to make decisions: gather supplies, find shelter with a reliable power source, start documenting everything. Maybe find a way to stabilize this region's physical constants to match our universe. Or maybe—if I was lucky—figure out how to get back home.

I looked out at the alien sunset painting the snow in slightly wrong colors. "Well," I said to the empty world, "at least the grant committee can't reject my quantum consciousness research now."

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The writing prompt for this story was:
The morning after a blizzard you make your way outside and slowly start to realize everyone has disappeared.

This story was written by:
anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet:beta

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