Schrödinger’s Suburbia. A short story.
In a town where every house was a perfect copy of the next, Tim Jenkins prepared to live yet another day identical to the last.
The smooth, unblemished white walls of his home reflected the existential void that defined his life. Every morning, he woke up in the same queen-sized bed with sheets he didn’t remember buying, in a house he didn’t recall choosing, next to a wife who... well, might or might not exist. Just like Schrödinger’s cat, Lisa Jenkins was simultaneously present and absent in a marriage teetering between stability and total collapse.
Quantum physics would have a lot to say about Tim. According to theory, there was a probability, however infinitesimal, that a single subatomic particle could appear out of nowhere and blow up the entire neighborhood. Or it could just decide not to exist. Much like Tim’s will to live. But of course, no one really thought about that because people who lived in neighborhoods like this never really thought. If the observer alters the observed, then Tim was living proof that there wasn’t much to observe in the first place.
As the coffee slowly dripped into his cup—the one with "World’s Best Dad" written on it that he didn’t remember ever buying—Tim wondered if the universe was just screwing with him. The idea that particles could exist in superimposed states, that time was a jagged line rather than a straight one, and that his choices didn’t mean a damn thing in the grand scheme of things didn’t comfort him at all. In fact, it pissed him off. If the universe wanted him to believe he had any control over his life, it was doing a piss-poor job.
The philosopher in Tim’s mind—who, to be honest, was more of a narcissist than a deep thinker—began to ponder free will. If the universe was truly indeterminate, if every choice he made was just an illusion, then why the hell did he bother making those choices? You could say Tim was living in a quantum loop where every day was a repeat of the last, and every decision he made was just a fraction of a fraction of a probability.
Why not just screw it all? Why not flip a coin, let probability decide? But as always, Tim ended up choosing the path of least resistance. It was the conformist's paradox: aware of the trap he was caught in, yet too scared to shake it off. Schrödinger’s thought experiments and Zeno’s paradoxes were his daily bread, but in the end, they only served to reinforce his inertia. Like an electron unable to decide which orbit to choose, Tim oscillated between "doing something" and "letting things stay the same."
And so, with his perfectly orchestrated daily routine, Tim left the house, got into his black sedan (the same black sedan that every other Tim Jenkins in every other parallel universe was driving), and headed to work. His mind wandered over concepts of multiverses, of lives not lived, of possibilities never explored. But of course, he did nothing about it. After all, who observes a particle without changing themselves too? Tim Jenkins was evidently not that kind of particle.
And the neighborhood continued to exist, unless someone somewhere decided to look at it too closely. But who would ever bother to observe something so irrelevant so closely? And so, Tim Jenkins’s life, just like that subatomic particle, remained in a state of superposition—between existing and not existing, between making a choice and just letting life happen.
Until someone finally opened that damned box.
But who exactly would have the guts to do it? Certainly not Tim Jenkins, who lived trapped in his routine like a hamster on a wheel. The box stayed shut, the cat potentially dead, potentially alive, and Tim, well, potentially free, potentially a slave.
As he drove to work, a bizarre thought crossed his mind like a glitch in the matrix of his monotony. What if all this was an experiment, a twisted test orchestrated by some higher entity? Maybe God—or worse, a quantum physicist—having fun seeing how long Tim could endure the nothingness before imploding. If it really was an experiment, Tim thought, then there had to be an observer somewhere, someone recording his every move, every non-choice, and silently laughing at his inability to break out of his own box.
“Fuck it all,” Tim thought, not even really believing it himself. It was a rebellious thought, a mental act of insubordination that he would never have the courage to put into practice. Because even in his fake disdain, Tim knew he wasn’t going to do anything different. He would park the car in the usual spot, walk to his cubicle, and spend eight hours typing meaningless data into a system no one would ever really check. Then he would drive back home, have dinner with Lisa in awkward silence, and fall asleep thinking about the thousand possibilities he would never have the courage to explore.
And yet that persistent thought, that nagging doubt that maybe, just maybe, there was something else outside this box, kept buzzing in his head. Maybe if he just stopped playing the conformist, stopped acting like an electron unable to decide which orbit to choose, he’d finally find the guts to open the box. But not today. Today he’d do exactly what he did every day: absolutely nothing.
The morning traffic was, as always, an orderly flow of identical cars, each driven by another version of Tim Jenkins. The other drivers were just shadows, reflections of his own banality, indistinct figures gliding through the city like neutrinos through matter. Invisible. Insignificant.
His thoughts returned to quantum physics. Particles that exist only when observed, that behave predictably—until they don’t. But Tim wasn’t a particle, and no one was observing him—at least not in any way that mattered. Maybe that was his real problem: there was no one watching. Nothing giving weight or meaning to his existence. In a world where every atom was monitored, where every possibility was calculated, Tim Jenkins was the exception. An unobserved man. A quantum error in an ordered universe.
What if he just stopped doing what everyone expected? What if he ditched everything, drove toward the horizon, and kept driving until the gas or the earth ran out? But he knew he wouldn’t. He’d go back home to Lisa, to their box. The box he’d keep shut because opening it meant facing the reality that maybe there had never been anything inside.
He arrived at the office, parked the car, and turned off the engine. He sat there for a moment, hands still on the wheel, eyes fixed straight ahead. “Not today,” he thought again, but this time there was a hint of defiance, a small glimmer of rebellion.
Maybe tomorrow he’d open that box.
Or maybe not.
Because really, who would notice?
Like an old rusty mechanism that suddenly started working again, creaking and groaning.
“Fuck it all,” he said out loud this time. The words echoed in the empty parking lot, a sound that felt more real than anything he’d ever said before. For the first time in years, he felt the truth of those words. No one was watching him, no one was controlling him, and maybe—just maybe—that meant he could do anything.
Tim turned and started walking—but not toward the office. He kept walking, past the parking lot, across the street, with no clear direction. The world around him seemed to blur, and for a moment, Tim felt like he was the only real thing in a universe of shadows. Traffic whizzed by him, but he didn’t even notice. The city that had held him captive for so long was dissolving, revealing a horizon he had never dared to imagine.
With each step, Tim felt lighter, as if he was shedding weight, but not just physical. It was as if he was unloading his baggage of expectations, fears, and compromises. The box that had trapped his existence was finally opening, and inside, there was neither a live cat nor a dead one, but a void that seemed infinitely full of possibilities.
He didn’t know where he was going, but for the first time, he didn’t care. The world stretched out before him, a blank slate on which he could finally write something of his own. Every step took him further from the old life, from false choices, from compromises. It was as if he was daring the universe itself to stop him, to prove that there really was a destiny, a path already laid out.
But the universe remained silent. No invisible hand pulled him back, no force stopped him. And as he walked further and further away, Tim realized that maybe the only person who ever had the power to observe him, to change him, was himself.
He walked until the sun began to set, painting the sky with colors he had never noticed before. In that moment, with the sun dipping below the horizon and the cool air filling his lungs, Tim Jenkins finally felt free. Free from everything he had been, free to be anyone he wanted.
And so, without a plan, without a map, Tim Jenkins left his old life behind and disappeared into the twilight—a particle finally in motion, determined to create his own destiny, to draw his own orbit. Maybe the universe would take note of him, maybe not. But Tim no longer needed to be observed to exist. Finally, he was no longer a suspended possibility—he was real.