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, little friend. 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.

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

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.