North Elevator
Months ago, Engineering student Susan Fong found the aged and dessicated remains of a human in the clothes of a modern day student. During the investigation Pinebox PD discovered that the clothing and backpack found with the body belonged to a student named Sean O’Malley. After a subsequent incident, O’Malley dropped out of school and became the night clerk at Speedy Pete’s Discount Gas and Convenience Store. Two nights ago, O’Malley contacted me via the Raven’s Report website saying that he had discovered something that either Pinebox PD had overlooked, or purposefully concealed regarding Fong’s disappearance.
I met O’Malley behind Speedy Pete’s last night to discuss what he believed he had uncovered. The student who I had often seen on campus appeared to have aged significantly. He had sores on his forearms where he’d scratched at invisible fleas until he bled. His cheeks were sunken and he’d lost a fair amount of his hair. He met my eyes, but didn’t hold them for long. O’Malley told me the following as he worked his way through six of seven cigarettes.
“Back in March when campus police took me into custody for running out of the Applied Sciences building naked, everyone figured it was just some prank. The only thing on my mind was getting the hell out of that elevator. It’s something different; Susie was the first to realize that something wasn’t right but she didn’t tell anyone.
“Listen, do you know anything about entanglement?” Sean took a quarter out of his pocket and flashed both sides of it to me then continued, “This quarter’s a solitary object, but let’s say I cut it in half along the circumference so that I have two half coins: one with the heads side, one with the tails. Now, no matter how far apart the two halves are, one will always be heads, and the other will always be tails. The interesting thing, according to entanglement, is that if somehow I can flip this tails side to a heads, it’s other half will instantaneously flip to the opposite side regardless of the distance between them.
“The hypothesis is, because the change is instantaneous you can transmit binary data over any distance without using an electromagnetic wave to carry the information. Imagine then that instead of the coin you used something more like a six-sided die. If you look straight onto the corner of the die, you’ll see three of the six faces, and be able to deduce the remaining sides as well as their position. Essentially, you’re sending more information with the die than you would with the coin. Now imagine larger matrices of data being sent instantaneously from one point to another. That’s exactly what you have in the North elevator chamber in the ETU Applied Sciences building. Below the elevator shaft is one half of an object, and resting on top of the elevator car is the second half.
“The power outage was the initial kick to break the object into two separate entangled pieces. After that the elevator handled varying the distance between the two. What the guys running the show didn’t get was what would happen in between the two entangled objects. The space between them lost integrity; time between them lost integrity. In the beginning all anyone noticed were their watches going screwy, but then Susie found that body…” Sean lit another cigarette and smoked through half of it before continuing. “A few weeks later, I stepped into the North elevator at about 7:30 in the morning. In the afternoon of that day I exited the South elevator ass naked, but honestly I don’t remember anything between when I ran out and when I woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by cops and my parents. Something happened…something in between.
“I do a lot to try and forget, but here’s what I can’t get rid of: a few seconds after the elevator doors closed the lights went out, the sound went out, the whole damn world went out. There was nothing but nothing, until somehow I sensed that there was somehow something even less substantial than the void around me. I don’t know what it was, I just felt a consciousness looking through me. Then it started doing something with my mind, like it was taking my memories and thoughts and sorting them. Then it started to put images of Susie in my head, intermingling her thoughts with mine. It didn’t stop with thoughts though, my bones snapped and healed as I lived through accidents Susie had endured. I heard her screaming as she went through my past pains. It forced us to experience everything the other had ever known. Whatever that thing was, it was separating our beings into components and shuffling them together like a metaphysical deck of cards; it was entangling us.”
He smashed out the rest of his final cigarette on the brick wall he was leaning against. “It brought us together, and then tore us apart. Each of us taking half of our existence with us, but knowing full well what pieces were missing and residing in the other half. The less-than-void ejected me from the South elevator, and kept Susie’s body in the North one, moving it months back in time and depositing her where her past self would discover it.”
“I know how this sounds: meth addict dropout must have finally lost his mind, made up some crazy story to excuse what he’s become. Let me tell you something else. I’ve tried to kill myself four times since I got out of that elevator, but I can’t die because Susie’s already dead. I can’t sleep, because she’s already sleeping. I can’t eat because…she’s the one who’s hungry. If you don’t believe me, go check out what’s on top of that elevator car. And if you want to stop this from happening again, you’ll destroy it.” O’Malley then got into his car and drove off.
Earlier this morning I went to the Applied Sciences building and found my way into the North elevator’s shaft via safety access panel. The car had been recalled to the basement level and was still out of service. I couldn’t find anything unusual on top of the car.
After leaving the building I made a phone call to Pinebox PD asking to speak with the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on the the body found by Susan Fong. When asked about the body, the ME said that the investigation was still ongoing and that he couldn’t answer my questions. The chair of the Applied Sciences department could not be reached for comment.
