Prologue

Prologue

In the labyrinth of the old motel where the corridors narrowed like the tight throat of some forgotten stellar vortex, the air hung like a heavy pall, damp and steeped in days gone by. It felt as if time had simply stopped here.

On one scuffed, sorry-looking door, a brass number “24” trembled. From inside, a mobile kept ringing, again and again with stubborn insistence.

Behind that door, it was cramped, airless, filthy. The burgundy carpet had worn down to bald scars, exposing the slow, merciless rot beneath. Wallpaper in a tiny, pointless pattern had peeled away in places to show mould and decay. An old, bulging CRT set stood by the door; beside it, a cheap electric kettle and a black ashtray spilling over with cigarette butts. On the bedside unit, next to the landline, the handset lay off the cradle while a mobile shivered — a small thing with a grey-blue display, the kind that keeps going after its tenth fall. A dim ceiling lamp flickered on and off. Even the light here seemed ready to surrender.

On the bed, under a threadbare coverlet, sat a white rabbit called Cyrus. A pretentious name for a rabbit, admittedly, but it suited him oddly well. Clean, sturdy, with fur so dazzlingly white it looked like a projection from a parallel dimension, a cruel contrast to the squalor of this refuge. His eyes were large and round, catching the lamplight in a way that gave them an amber glint — warmer than anything else in the room. On his left haunch, where the fur thinned, was a birthmark shaped like a crescent moon.

Opposite the bed, a young woman named Anna sat in an old armchair that remembered other lives and far drearier lodgers. One leg was hooked over the arm, back half-slouched, a pose so loose it verged on defiant.

Her long dark hair, tied back, fell almost to her knees. She wore a black fabric corset cinched tight at the waist, blue jeans, black stilettos, and light-brown suede fingerless gloves. She sat the way blokes do before a match: legs apart, sure of herself, and frankly not giving a toss how it looked. Her black eyes stared somewhere past it all, blurred and unfocused. She was just a shell that remembered only how to breathe.

The mobile fell silent. Silence hit, sudden and hard. The girl gave the smallest flinch, as if slapped, blinked, and for the first time in ages, she moved. The rabbit on the bed turned his head towards his owner. She leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. Looked at him. Between them there was an understanding of the sort that forms between two people. To her, Cyrus wasn’t just a pet, but the truest, most faithful friend she’d had in all her life.

The mobile came alive again, ringing with nagging insistence. The ringtone pressed into her temples like a blunt knife. Anna let out a heavy breath, rose from the chair and went to the bedside table. Tiny shards of glass crunched underfoot in the carpet —an overturned table lamp lay by the wall, and nearby a smashed bottle of wine. On the bedside table sat a crumpled pack of cigarettes with a black-and-red logo and a name a moody teenager might have thought up: “D.Evil”. Beside it — the newspaper “The Sleeping City”, a round brown stain on the front page.

The girl drew out a cigarette, flicked a heavy metal lighter with a practised snap, and brought the flame to her lips. The flame briefly lit her face: soft, rounded lines, a snub nose, freckles, a mole under her right eye, plump lips with the corners faintly upturned — a smile that hadn’t truly lit in a long time.

She closed her eyes, savouring that first drag, the smoke trying to fill the emptiness inside. She leaned over the small black-and-yellow cassette player at the edge of the bedside table. Pressed the button. The tape clicked, the cogs began to whirr, and Joy Division seeped through the cramped room like a warming poison. A muffled bass came in, simple drums, and a man’s voice.

Music washed over the room in a wave. The girl lifted her head, half-closed her eyes, and breathed out smoke in a slow stream, allowing herself a brief, elegant gesture. Her body found the rhythm on its own. Her shoulders gave a slight sway. The fingers holding the cigarette traced a crooked arc in the air. With her free hand she began, by feel, to undo the hooks of her corset. She did it carelessly, slowly. The corset gave. Black fabric fell open, revealing a lace bra.

On the mobile’s screen a contact name flashed for a second: “Noah”, then flipped back to some number. Anna went to the bedside table and took the mobile in her hand, squeezing until her knuckles turned white. She turned to the window.

Cold evening air surged into the stuffy room, at once thinning the smell of tobacco and cheap alcohol. Outside, evening was sliding into night; the sky still held the last of its blue, but the first stars were already pricking through the dark grey. Her long hair had slipped loose from its tie, a little mussed. The wind stirred it; a light strand stuck to her lips, damp with cigarette smoke. She paused for a second, giving the moment a chance. Then, almost lazily, she tossed the mobile out of the window.

The phone plunged, its screen glowing all the way down until it hit the ground.

She turned. Walked past her pet without so much as a glance and slipped into the bathroom.

The bathroom was white, cold, and very bright. The tiled walls shone with a sterile light, throwing back the pallor of her skin. Anna was already standing by the sink in just her underwear and stockings. The light fell from above, emphasising her wavy dark-blonde hair and the frailty of her collarbones. And pointed ears peeped from the curling strands — like those of a fairy-tale creature torn out of folklore into reality, where myth mingles with horror — and such details whispered of hidden mutations, of genetic secrets that might, perhaps, destroy the world with a single whisper.

Her gaze fell on a small plastic bottle at the edge of the sink. On the label: “Risperidone”. Her fingers, delicate and tremulous, quivered slightly as she picked it up. She turned it over, listening to the dull rattle of tablets against cheap plastic, and screwed her eyes shut. Something between nausea and fatigue was rising inside, but it had dragged on so long there wasn’t even the strength left for despair.

She tipped the tablets into her palm. A small handful of tiny white discs, meant to mend a mind, now turned into a ticket to the other side. She rested her shoulder blades against the cold wall, stared at the tablets in her palm, thinking of something. Then she tipped back her head, tossed the tablets into her mouth and, wincing at the acrid bitterness, swallowed them, feeling them scrape her throat.

Anna turned the mixer tap on the bath; the pressure roared, the noise grew heavy and oppressive. The hot stream battered the enamel, a thin veil of steam rising. The empty bottle fell to the floor and rolled, knocking against the wall. She didn’t dare take off her underwear. Because she was ashamed for the people who would later haul her swollen, bluish body out of this puddle, waterlogged to a sickening swell, with skin mottled in purple patches of decay, foam dried at her mouth in a yellowish crust, eyes bulged from their sockets and glassy like a fish on a tip, hair matted into clumps with slime and filth, giving off a heavy, cloying stench of rot that would soak into their clothes and haunt their nightmares as they tried to scrub away the vile slime stuck to their fingers.

She lurched into the bath and flopped into the water, letting it close around her like a filthy bog. Scalding hot, but somehow calming.

Anna lay listening to the water still roaring, filling the voids, drowning out any other sound. When she opened her eyes again, she noticed the skin on her wrist prickling, itching. An unfamiliar sensation—not like a cut, not like a burn. As if along the inside of her left arm someone had drawn a fine, ice-cold point. She raised her wrist from the water; it ran down her fingers. Where the skin had been smooth moments before, thin red weals were swelling up.

They were appearing on their own. Some invisible hand, very careful, almost gentle, was carving a pattern. The lines crossed and writhed, forming an ugly motif — something like a stylised, mangled flower. The girl watched as her own skin was etched by that invisible knife, and felt only a mute horror buried under a thick layer of apathy.

Anyone else in her place would have scrambled out of the bath, run for help, shouted, screamed, anything. She just kept sitting there. Her hand trembled, but she didn’t pull it back, letting the pattern finish itself.

The music playing in the cassette player suddenly stuttered. A rustle bled through the speakers. The track rasped, dissolved into a hiss. Over the white noise another sound slowly crystallised: a quiet woman’s voice singing a children’s lullaby.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are.

Up above the world so high

Like a diamond in the sky.

When the blazing sun is gone,

When he nothing shines upon,

Then you show your little light,

Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

The words about the little star came through the interference as if from underwater. Something in the room had shifted. The rabbit on the bed lifted itself, ears bolt upright. He stared at the closed bathroom door, his muzzle tense. The soft, unnatural hissing, laced with the lullaby, spread through the room like the smell of burning. The walls began to crack. Quietly, almost imperceptibly—the way the first fractures look in the shell of an egg just before something nightmarish hatches. After a while, the cracks thickened, lengthened, branching out.

Paint bubbled and flaked off in scales; the plaster swelled, broke and crumbled. Furniture blurred into misshapen shadows. The carpet turned sodden, its edges pulling like candle wax; the bed’s legs went down with a wet squelch into the softening floor. The bedside table skewed, the wood bulging under an unseen heat. But there was no flame—only invisible entropy, reducing everything to atoms. In the fissures in the walls, tiny pale points appeared. You might have thought they were just bits of plaster fallen away to reveal the white undercoat. Then it became clear: those points were stars. Very distant, beyond the cracked shell of the motel wall.

In the reflection of the melting television screen, a silhouette flickered at the window for a moment: a figure with an elongated, unnaturally long nose and horns jutting from its head.

Cyrus hopped off the bed and dashed to the bathroom door. He pressed his fluffy chest to it and began to scrabble, furious. Tiny claws bit into the wood. He felt death coming with every fibre of his animal self. From out here, in the room, you could hear only the rush of water and a woman’s voice humming a lullaby.

The bathwater turned pink. A thin thread of blood seeped from the fresh pattern on her wrist and bloomed into soft clouds. Anna watched it and thought how beautiful it was. A careless watercolour wash at her own end.

Her eyelids suddenly grew heavy. Her head went light, like a balloon ready to pull free of her body. She let her lids fall. From her left nostril a fine thread of blood began to run, slipped to her upper lip, and was smeared away by the hot water.

The girl’s body slid under the water, her hair fanning around her head like black seaweed. The water brimmed and spilled over the edges, gushed onto the floor, ran for the threshold. It reached Cyrus’s paws, scorched his pads like acid; he jerked, but didn’t leave the door, only scrabbled harder with his claws, trying to get inside, raking the wood down to bloody splinters. His fur was soaked and clumped into matted lumps, steeped in that vile liquid that carried the reek of death. Objects around them slowly lifted off the floor and floated upwards, as if gravity had gone on temporary strike. From the open window, fog crawled into the molten room. It filled the space, mingling with the steam and the smell of damp fabric.

***

The next morning met the same room with a gentle light. Dawn filtered through the open window, picking out the dust settling on the furniture. The motel room looked as if nothing had happened. Only damp traces on the floor and the smell of hot water hinted that something had.

The door stood open. Inside, people moved about in disposable overshoes and gloves. SOCOs, detectives, the duty pathologist. The scene photographer kept crouching to shoot the yellow evidence markers. Between the room’s door and the bathroom stood a man with caramel-coloured hair and brown eyes. Shoulder to the frame, he looked into the bath. His gaze was heavy, sombre. His name was Tate.

Another man stepped inside. Detective Inspector Vincent Lord. Tall, in a white shirt with a neatly knotted tie. Black hair with a noticeable streak of grey on the right, dark blue eyes, a scar cutting through his right eyelid, and a smaller one on his upper lip. Not a flicker on his face, only contained concentration. He entered the bathroom and saw the dead girl; the pathologist was crouched beside her.

Her skin had taken on a greyish cast, like the sky before a storm. Her eyes were closed. A thin strip of dried blood marked the skin beneath her nose.

‘Body temperature—about thirty-three degrees Celsius; the water’s a touch higher. The air in the room is still warm, roughly thirty-five. Judging by the condition of the skin, she’s been in the water quite a while.’

He gently took her left hand and lifted it clear of the water. On the inside of the wrist a fresh, sharply defined mark stood out—the same flower an invisible hand had carved into her skin only hours ago.

‘The Faceless’s mark. Left wrist.’

Vincent studied the pattern without blinking. Something tightened, painfully, inside him, but his face stayed the same: even, stern. The pathologist eased her hand back into the water.

‘Rigor mortis has reached the upper limbs. Provisional: Anna died six to eight hours ago. But it’s too early to draw conclusions.’

Her name didn’t come from him at once. To the pathologist, she was just a case. To Vincent, his niece. He felt his back go even more rigid. He raised his head to the ceiling, as if there were anything up there besides yellowed stains, and closed his eyes.

The pathologist nodded towards the floor.

There by the wall, beside the spilt water and a yellow evidence marker, lay an empty plastic bottle of Risperidone.

‘The bottle was found there. Antipsychotic used for psychoses and schizophrenia. An overdose can trigger cardiac arrest. Add a hot bath… the heart could have failed.’

‘And what about the mark?’ Vincent forced himself back to the job.

‘There are shards from the broken bottle,’ the man said, scratching the back of his head.

‘In theory, you could have used one of them. But look at this: the lines are very clean. It’s hard to cut this neatly with glass. There’s something… else.’

Vincent stepped back from the bath and went out into the room. Water squelched underfoot. He stopped in the middle of the place, giving his eyes a moment to take in the whole scene. Yellow evidence markers stood by every significant item. The empty bottle, the smashed lamp, the glass shards, the player, the pack of cigarettes, the spilt wine, and the charred filter of a cigarette end in the ashtray. The pool of water had run out into the corridor and reached the next door.

‘Tate. Who turned off the tap? Judging by the amount of water, it was on all night.’

‘No idea. When we arrived, the tap was already off.’

The pathologist leaned out.

‘That’s right. For a flood like this, the tap would have had to be open for hours. With decent pressure. In six to eight hour,s both the water and the body should have cooled to room temperature. If they’re still warm, hot water was running almost until morning.’

Tate folded his arms.

‘So someone came into the room after she died, shut off the water and left everything as is? The call came in from the motel owner complaining that the water had flooded the corridor, and no one was opening the door. Given there’ve been suicides here before, he was afraid to go in himself and waited for the police. All the neighbouring rooms were empty yesterday, so there are no witnesses either.’

‘Did he explain why he rented a room to a minor?’

‘Yeah. Said some bloke actually rented the room a week ago—didn’t bother checking his ID; he looked about thirty. And instead of his own name, he just put “N” in the guest register.’

Vincent went over to the bedside table where she’d been standing not long ago. On top, beside the yellow markers, lay the cassette player and the crumpled pack of D.Evil. In the player’s plastic bay sat a cassette with a hand-scratched label: ‘Joy Division’.

‘Found the mobile?’

Tate gave the slightest shake of his head.

Who was this “N”, and could he have taken her mobile? Vincent wondered.

Together, they looked towards the window. The outlines of the city street seemed distant, cut off from this room.

‘What an idiot. I left her on my own.’

‘Don’t start. You did everything you could. There are things we can’t control. You’ve said that yourself a hundred times.’

Tate searched his face and felt, quite literally, everything Vincent was feeling.

***

Their friendship was never warm in the usual sense. No hugs, no beer-fuelled confessions, no lines like, ‘mate, I’m here’. They’d both sooner choke than say it out loud. And yet it turned out to be the most reliable thing either of them had.

They’d met back in the days when ‘friend’ wasn’t just a word you tossed around. Tate was an anchor for Vincent. The one person who didn’t try to fix him. Didn’t pry and didn’t ask unnecessary questions. He simply took Vincent as he was: sharp, withdrawn, obsessive, at times unbearable, with a lousy sense of humour. And, more importantly, he never expected him to become someone else.

Vincent, for his part, trusted Tate the way you trust very few people. Not with words, but with deeds. He knew that if something went wrong, Tate would have his back. Not out of duty or because ‘that’s what you do’, but because he believed it was right. For Vincent, that was the purest form of loyalty.

Vincent didn’t explain his decisions. Tate didn’t demand explanations. He either walked alongside him or stepped quietly aside, knowing there was no point arguing just then. They’d seen each other at their worst. Seen the job burn away what was left of an ordinary life. Seen how the past wouldn’t let go. How the personal slowly rotted under the weight of the case. And neither of them ever used that knowledge as a weapon.

Tate once told someone that Vincent was the sort of man he wouldn’t want to be friends with under other circumstances. There wasn’t a hint of insult in it. Just the truth.

***

Something gave Vincent’s trousers a gentle tug. He looked down. By his leg, up on his hind legs, stood the rabbit. Wet-pawed, ears pinned. He reached up to him, tiny claws snagging the fabric, and looked up with wide eyes. A memory slid into place: old, warm, painfully alive. A little girl with black eyes and this same rabbit in her arms, laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. Vincent smiled in spite of himself. An unexpected, almost out-of-place expression for his face. He crouched and held out a hand. The latex gloves bit into his skin as he gently stroked the rabbit’s head.

‘Cyrus… hello, mate. What are you doing here?’

Tate said nothing, watching them. There was more honesty in this strange little scene than at most official funerals. As Vincent stroked Cyrus, his eye caught something under the bed. A dark rectangle. He peered, leaning forward on his palms. It was a book. He dropped to his knees and reached under, pulling out a thick hardback. The book was a little grubby and scuffed, but the cover image still showed: a starry sky, a stylised galaxy, the title — ‘Mechanisms of Quantum Immortality’. The author was one Richard Cord. A crumpled scrap of paper stuck out, with a doodled smiley face and an arrow pointing in.

Cigarettes, booze. But inside, still the same curious child, Vincent thought, opening the book where the marker stuck out. On the scrap it simply said: ‘Feed Cyrus.’ Vincent clenched the paper between his fingers; the feeling he’d been holding off all through the morning shift rose up — something between a laugh and a sob. He drew a deep breath and lowered his eyes to the text.

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The quantum world is inextricably woven into the reality we experience every day. But what if I told you that consciousness is not merely a product of the brain’s neural networks, but rather an interacting ensemble of quantum processes? That carries startling implications for our understanding of the very nature of life and death.

Consider, for a moment, quantum entanglement: two particles, separated in space, yet still able to influence one another instantaneously. This ‘spooky action at a distance’, as Einstein once put it, suggests that our own thoughts may, perhaps, exert an immediate effect on the physical world around us.

Next, if we look at the idea of quantum immortality, we meet the notion that consciousness might maintain its coherence after the death of the body. How? Through the endless variations of the many universes, where every decision, every act, creates a new branch of reality. In one of those branches, you may live forever.

We stand on the threshold of discoveries that may upend our sense of being. What if quantum effects allow consciousness to pass between different states of existence? We may come to see death not as an ending, but as a passage into another form of being, one hidden from our limited perception.

Chapter 7: The Possibilities of Quantum Immortality

Immortality, like the Holy Grail of physics, promises infinity in a world constrained by the laws of entropy. Yet quantum theory offers an alternative view of eternity. We already know the observer plays a key role in determining a system’s state; what if consciousness itself is an act of observation, compelling the universe to materialise out of a sea of probabilities?

Consider our own death. In classical terms, it is final. But through the lens of quantum mechanics, death is merely one of the countless possible events in our quantum state. In another universe, parallel to this one, ‘you’ continue: interacting, choosing, observing.

Here we arrive at the idea of quantum immortality: consciousness as an entity not bound to a single reality, continuing its journey through the multiverse. Each time it meets death in one universe, our consciousness may ‘leap’ to another, where we go on living. The process is unbroken and unending — an eternal loop of existence.

Thus, in the quantum world, death is not disappearance but transformation, a transition from one state to another. It is a perspective that lends new meaning to our actions, thoughts, and aims. If quantum immortality is real, then every moment of life becomes a precious contribution to an infinite canvas of existence, where each of us is an artist of eternity.

Chapter 11: The Echo of Eternity

Our journey through the quantum multiverse opens prospects that the ordinary mind may deem fantastical. Through the veil of the everyday, the contours of other worlds begin to show — worlds peopled by versions of ourselves, living other lives shaped by other choices.

Imagine that with each decision, each movement, you not only act in this universe, but also send a ripple through countless realities. In one, you turned left and happiness waited; in another, right, where tragedy lay in store. In every universe where you made a choice, you left an echo of yourself — and it lives, loves, suffers, and reaches for the light of understanding.

What is the price of such immortality? Perhaps it lies in this: that we may never wholly ‘die’, but we may never wholly ‘live’ either — for in each reality our existence is only the after-echo of all possible paths. We are not linear beings, but part of a grand, multidimensional quantum tapestry.

Can our consciousness ever grasp these infinite branches of its own self? Or is our mind meant to perceive only a single thread of this endless weave? Perhaps the truth of quantum immortality lies hidden in the deepest recesses of our being — the very place we fear to look.

And so we stand on the threshold not only of a new physics, but of a new philosophy, a new ethics. How should we live, knowing that each choice gives birth to an infinity? What should we do, conscious that the echoes of our decisions carry across the universes? These questions demand from us no less courage than the idea of immortality itself — the courage to face the unknown, the immeasurable, and ourselves.

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vincent closed the book without a word, though his head was a churn of thoughts. It seemed to him that this room, this day, this case were only one branch — and somewhere else Anna never came to this motel, and he hadn’t been so late to her life.

***

Night had fallen. Outside, the mortuary’s brick building looked like a weary veteran in retirement. Inside, it smelled of disinfectant and steel. The place was quiet: only the faint hum of the refrigerators and distant footsteps somewhere along the corridor. On the stainless post-mortem table lay Anna. A turquoise sheet covered her body to the chest. Her hair was fanned out, her skin paler than it had been in the morning, her lips faintly blue. The body seemed finally, utterly still. And then her eyes opened.

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