by Dennis M. Powers
A man walks into a bar.
As the door swings closed, the sirens of a passing emergency vehicle reach a crescendo and Doppler shift down the street. The bright red neon sign in the window absorbs the red and yellow flashing lights, protecting the dark interior from their flickering glare. Flanigan’s Pub, Food and Cocktails, the sign reads. The people at the tables take no notice of his entrance and ignore the receding exterior noise. He blinks his eyes to adjust, runs a hand over his dark hair, wipes at a smudge on the sleeve of his coat, and inspects his torn breast pocket. He sighs, walks toward the bar in the back, and then stops midway as if waiting for something. A patron drops their fork. As it clatters to a halt at the man’s feet, he bends to retrieve the utensil and places it next to the confused diner, still searching beneath the table.
He approaches the mahogany bar in the rear and, instead of taking one of the empty stools along its length, selects the lone seat between the waitress station and the ornate polished corner.
He removes his white lab coat, looks at the telltale smudge, and hangs it over the back of the barstool before taking a seat.
“What can I get for you?” the bartender asks, flipping a coaster and cocktail napkin before him.
“Two fingers. Neat. And not the bar brand. Something from the reserve.”
The bartender places a glass before him, turns to the back shelves, and reaches for a bottle. The man raps his knuckles on the bar twice and, when the bartender looks at him, says, “Over two.”
As the bartender pours the selected libation, he grins and says, “A man of excellent taste.”
The man nods and gazes at the glass for a moment, takes a breath, and then pours the alcohol down his throat in one fluid motion. His eyes water, and he squints his face before shaking his head and exhaling a wheeze. He taps the pads of two fingers next to the glass, and the bemused bartender pours him another.
“Tough day?”
“You wouldn’t believe,” the man gasps, hoarse from the alcohol burn. This one he sips and nods to the bartender.
“Keep it close.”
As the bartender moves to serve another patron, the man turns and fumbles in his coat pocket, retrieves a felt-tip pen, snatches a cocktail napkin from the pile, unfolds it, and scribbles lines of formulas. He fills a second napkin before halting to glance around the room.
He counts the customers, notes their tables, inspects each wall trinket, and scans the television screens hung on the walls, taking particular note of the sports events and the silent, closed-captioned sportscasters narrating the games in text across the bottom.
His eyes fix on the businessman flirting with the young businesswoman sitting caddy-corner from him at the bar, and he looks away when the man notices him watching.
The waitress, in black slacks, a white button blouse, and an apron, passes behind him, slides her tray into the pickup zone, and enters an order on the touchscreen.
“Excuse me, Shazz?”
“No one has called me that since high school.” The waitress says, turning to face him. He notices the name plaque pinned to her blouse.
“I’m sorry. Sharon. You forgot the seltzer with lime.”
She stares at him with a ‘who the hell are you?’ expression for a long moment, until her eyes widen, and after pulling her pad from her apron, she turns back to the touchscreen to amend the order. Before she can turn back, the bartender fumbles under the serving counter, searching for something.
“What are you looking for?” Sharon asks.
“Oh, that lady in the green dress just ordered a Grasshopper, and for the life of me, except for crème de menthe, I can’t remember what’s in it. Have you seen my bartender’s manual?”
Sharon shakes her head.
“It’s in the top drawer at the other end of the bar,” the man says. They both glare at him with skeptical looks, but after a moment, the bartender tilts his head and walks to the other end. He waves the dog-eared manual he retrieves from the top drawer and studies it before making the drink.
Sharon looks at the man, sees the scribble of formulas on the napkin, and eyes his lab coat hanging on the back of his chair.
“You have a name?”
“It’s hard to pronounce. Doesn’t have many vowels. People call me Ted.”
“Well, Ted, that’s quite a trick you’ve got going on there. I don’t remember seeing you in here before.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
The bartender returns with Sharon’s order, loads it onto her tray, then reaches for a glass, fills it with seltzer, and garnishes it with a slice of lime.
The man flirting with the businesswoman leans in and lowers his voice. “You haven’t touched your drink. What say you finish it up, and we can go for a walk? There’s a park just down the street.”
Ted turns to Sharon. “Would you call Ronald? We’re going to need him in a second.”
“Ronald?”
“Yes, the bouncer.”
“You mean Reginald. Why?”
“Please, just call him.”
As the businesswoman reaches for her drink, Ted covers it with his hand and slides it away.
“You don’t want to drink that.”
The woman jerks her hand away, surprised, but the man shouts. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m preventing her from being incapacitated by whatever you put in her drink,” Ted says in an even tone.
The man glowers at him, loosens his tie, clenches his fists, then growls. “What the fuck did you say?”
“This young lady doesn’t want to be drugged by whatever you put in her drink.”
The man slides off his stool.
“You’re gonna be sorry you said that.” But before he can take a step, Reginald, stealthier than his size would suggest, corners him against the bar and, in an impressive baritone made more menacing by a hoarse gravel rumble, says, “We’ll have none of that.”
The businessman turns to where he thinks Reginald’s face is, cranes his neck upward at the giant, and his anger flows out of him like water circling a drain.
The bartender withdraws a tablet from beneath the bar and stands scanning the screen. He shakes his head when he finds the section and flips it around for all to see.
Taken from a camera hidden in the lights above the bar, the video shows the man emptying a vial into the woman’s drink when no one was looking.
“What do you have to say?” Reginald says, gripping the man’s arm.
“It’s not what it looks like.” The man’s whimper is closer to a pathetic whine. The businesswoman backs away from the bar and distances herself from Reginald’s captive, her hand to her mouth as Reginald turns to her.
“Would you like me to call the police?”
The woman looks from Reginald to the bartender, then to Ted, before composing herself and shaking her head. “My flight home leaves in the morning.”
“So, no police?”
“It is just as well,” Ted says. “They won’t get here in time. They’re busy at the moment.” Red and yellow flashing lights play across the front windows and whizz down the street. The fear on the man’s face turns to a smirk, but the bartender whips the tablet up and takes his picture.
“Every pub, bar, and restaurant within a ten-block radius now has your photo. You are persona non grata at all of them. If you ever try something like this again, I will make it my mission to see you locked up.” He flicks his chin toward the door. “Get him out of here.”
Reginald drags him from the bar and pushes him toward the exit. As he opens the door and shoves him outside, passing sirens intrude on the nattering conversational rumble of the dining room.
The bartender turns to the woman standing next to Sharon.
“I am very sorry about this.”
“I should return to my hotel.”
“I’ll call you a car. It’s the least we can do. You can wait in that booth over there, and Sharon will bring you some tea. Reginald will escort you to the car when it arrives and see you off.”
The bartender orders a car, then picks up the reserve bottle and pours Ted a double. “On me.” Then serves several patrons, fulfills a waitress’s order, and returns to Ted.
“How did you know he put something in her drink? The camera showed you weren’t even in the bar when he spiked it.”
Ted sips the last of his drink and taps the bar. The bartender refills his glass.
“I’ve seen it before.”
The bartender opens his mouth to reply, but the woman and Reginald walk past and halt beside Ted.
“Thank you.”
Ted nods and watches Reginald escort her to her car.
Sharon enters another order and drops her tray on the service counter beside Ted.
“So, what are you, a fortune teller? A psychic or something?”
“I’m a physicist. I work at the high-energy lab near the river.”
“You build yourself a time machine or something? Is that how you know what’s going to happen?”
A chuckle escapes Ted as his dour expression lightens.
“Traveling backward in time is impossible. The arrow of time points forward, and the future is unknowable.”
The bartender, filling a glass at the tap, looks over at Ted. “I thought Einstein’s theories showed backward time travel is a mathematical possibility?”
Sharon flashes the bartender a perplexed look and holds out one hand, palm up.
“What?” he says. “I watch a lot of Science Channel.”
Ted twirls his drink on the bar before answering.
“It’s true that some formulas don’t differentiate between forward in time or backward in time, but Special Relativity postulates that the passage of time is relative to the speed you are traveling compared to an observer’s frame of reference. The closer to the speed of light you move, the slower time moves for you compared to someone stationary, like on Earth. We have proved that.”
Sharon shakes her head. “In that big blockbuster movie, they flew a spaceship close to a black hole, and the guy didn’t grow old and came home just in time to see his daughter die of old age.”
“That’s the part of the movie where they got the science correct. Black holes warp spacetime, stretching and bending both space and time.”
“Didn’t he also send messages to himself and his daughter into the past?”
“That’s the fiction part of that science fiction movie. Think about it. If you receive a message from yourself in the future, it means your future has already happened, no matter where you are in time. That means the universe is static, predetermined, existing all at once, and there is no free will, only the now we perceive as we move through it.”
“I’m not sure I like that idea very much,” Sharon says with a huff as she hoists the tray that the bartender finished loading and carries it toward the tables.
“I think you confused her,” the bartender says, wiping the service station with a damp towel and checking the status of Ted’s glass. “You know, I have to say, I never thought about it like that before, so I can see why she’s upset.”
Ted raises his glass in a mock salute. “You shouldn’t feel bad. The best minds have been mulling it over for the better part of a century without success.”
“She’s going to keep asking,” the bartender says, lifting his chin in Sharon’s direction. “How you do it? She’s persistent like that.”
“Yes… I know.”
“Of course you do. Another?”
Ted nods, and the bartender refills the glass before moving down the bar.
Ted sips his drink and scans the television screens hung around the establishment, making note of the various sports events. He watches one for a few moments before grabbing another napkin and scribbling more formulas. A loud thump from the dining area startles him, and he looks up to see a group of fans at a nearby table pointing and waving at the game on the television screen. Some are smiling, and others seem forlorn. The score is close, but the game isn’t over yet.
“So, are you going to tell me how you do it?” Sharon asks, leaning on the service area to get his attention. “If you didn’t build a time machine, and the future is unknowable, how is it you know what’s going to happen?” She points to the scribbles on the napkins before him. “Are you working it all out with some special math?”
“You’re close. It’s all about probabilities, but before I try to explain, you should get the mop bucket for table six. You are going to need it.”
Sharon squints past him to table six, blinks once, and scurries across the room toward the table. Cheers explode from the table as the game on the television screen ends with a surprise win, and half the members rise to their feet. She arrives in time to intercept the half-empty beer pitcher on its way to the floor, catching it without spilling a drop.
With a polite smile, she waves off the bewildered customer who knocked it off the table, refills each of their glasses, and returns with the empty pitcher.
“Huh!” Ted says. “That was different.” And scribbles more on the napkin.
“Nice save,” the bartender says to Sharon. “Refill?”
Sharon nods, then smacks Ted’s arm with a backward swipe. “Okay, mister physicist. What gives?”
“Like I said. It’s a matter of probabilities.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do you know about quantum mechanics?”
“Nothing.”
The bartender looks up from setting a full pitcher on Sharon’s tray.
“Only what they say on the Science Channel.”
Ted leans back in his chair. “Have you ever heard of Erwin Schrödinger?”
Sharon frowns. “Wasn’t he a mad scientist who liked to poison cats?”
“I know this,” the bartender perks up and says. “He proposed a thought experiment where you put a radioactive atom inside a box with a detector that will release a poison when the atom decays. If you put a cat in the box and close it, then, since you can never know when the atom will decay, until you look in the box, the cat is both dead and alive.” He frowns at Sharon. “He didn’t really put a cat in a box. It was a thought experiment.”
“I don’t get it,” Sharon says.
“What it means,” Ted says,” is that at the quantum level, all particles are in a superposition until you observe them.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Simply, it means that the quantum universe exists in multiple states until we observe or measure it. It is a bubbling soup of probabilities until we perceive it, when it collapses into our reality.”
Sharon squints at him, picks up the pitcher, and walks towards table six.
“She didn’t like that either,” the bartender says, leaning across the bar.
“Neither did Einstein. He is quoted as saying that God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”
“I am not sure I follow where this is going. Do you work in quantum mechanics?”
“Sort of. My research is on the possibility of energy capture from the evaporation of microscopic black holes.”
“Black holes!?” Sharon says, walking behind him. “Don’t they eat galaxies?”
“These are microscopic. They last less than a trillionth of a second, then decay. We create them in the collider at the high-energy research lab.”
“I still want to know how you can tell what is going to happen,” Sharon says.
“Schrödinger showed that through superposition, every state of a quantum particle exists simultaneously until the wave function collapses into a single state. This idea gave way to the Many-Worlds theory, which posits the universe splits into a new branch for each outcome of a quantum event, creating a new parallel universe.”
The bartender gets excited. “Wait… wait. That’s like those superhero movies where they jump into alternate universes and meet other versions of themselves.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sharon says
“Yes, sort of, because it’s not that easy. Scientists who study these things more than I do estimate that the energy required to breach the barrier between universes would likely destroy the one you are in.”
“Hold on a second,” Sharon says. “First, you say the universe exists all at once, and now you’re saying there are multiple universes? Will you make up my mind?”
“It’s confusing, isn’t it? Two theories of reality.”
Ted glances at the nearby TV screen, lets out a sigh, and mutters, “So soon.”
A special report banner flashes across the screen. Someone shouts, “Turn it up.” Ted mutters, “Please don’t,” as the bartender points the remote and unmutes the sound. An announcer behind a desk reads from a typed page in his hand.
“… police standoff on River Street. We now go to Isobel Torres on the scene. What can you tell us, Isobel?”
Ted lowers his head and takes a deep breath. “And here it comes.”
“Here what comes?” Sharon asks.
“The answer to your questions… or not.”
Isobel Torres, dressed in a gray business suit, quaffed and poised, stands on an adjacent rooftop overlooking the street below. Emergency vehicles crowd the area, their flashing lights and brilliant spots illuminating the building.
“For the past several hours, the police have cordoned off River Street in front of the National Energy Research facility.”
Sharon looks at Ted. “Isn’t that where you work?”
“Sources tell us environmental activists have taken control of the building and are threatening to detonate an explosive device. It is unknown how many people are inside, but the police appear to still be negotiating with the group.”
“What do they want?”
“They think our research is dangerous,” Ted says.
“Is it?”
Ted sips from his glass and looks at Sharon. “Not until you introduce explosives.”
“There appears to be something happening,” Isobel says. The camera zooms in on the three-story atrium. Seen through the glass, armed men holding automatic weapons push a dark-haired man in a white lab coat across the lobby toward the windows. The man stumbles and falls, landing on his left shoulder. They drag him to his feet and press him to the window with a gun at his head.
The bartender turns around and stares at Ted. “Do you have a twin brother?”
On the screen is Ted, or his doppelgänger, pressed against the window.
“Wait!” Sharon says, holding up the left sleeve of Ted’s lab coat. She points to the TV screen. “Look at his arm.”
The bartender looks at the TV, back at Ted, and then at the lab coat hanging off Ted’s stool with the same smudge.
“Holy mother, it is you! How can you be in two places at once?”
“I can’t.”
“What kind of trick is this?” Sharon says.
They watch the TV screen as a gunman pulls Ted from the window. He rips Ted’s badge from him, tearing his breast pocket, then pushes him out of sight toward the interior. The other gunman stands before the window, holding a small box with a switch on it. They can’t hear what he is saying as he shouts at the police, brandishing the box.
“Moment of truth,” Ted says, and grips his drink.
Nothing happens for a moment as the gunman stands there shouting. Everyone at the bar stares at the screen. The man collapses, the TV screen goes dark, and a Please Stand By message appears.
“Shit!” Ted growls and leans back on his stool.
The studio announcer, looking flustered, appears on the screen. “It appears we have lost our live feed. Please bear with us as we work to get Isobel back.”
The bartender and Sharon turn to Ted. “What the hell is going on?”
“It’s the answer to your question. How do I know what is going to happen? I don’t. I only know what has the highest probability of happening. The customer dropping their utensil, the bartender’s manual, you forgetting the seltzer with lime, and the jerk spiking that woman’s drink happen with high probability in each universe. However, I don’t know for sure. That’s why I got your and Reginald’s names wrong, why I was sure the pitcher you caught was going to hit the floor, and was wrong about how quickly the standoff would escalate. It’s all probabilities.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The two theories of how the universe works. I’m proof that Planck and Schrödinger, not Einstein, were correct. And that the multi-universe theory is true.”
“Wait,” says the bartender. “You said it would destroy this universe if you breached the barrier.”
“It already did.”
“What!?”
“My work is with microscopic black holes, remember? Explosives detonated on the containment vessel act just like they do in an atomic bomb. Only instead of smashing uranium atoms together, it smashes black holes together.”
“But we’re still here.”
The lights flicker, and the television screen turns to snow.
“Black holes. Space stretches and time moves more slowly closer to a black hole. Einstein wasn’t completely wrong.”
Ted slips off his stool and dons his lab coat. The breast pocket flops forward as he pulls it on.
Sharon’s face wilts. “This is some kind of elaborate joke. It has to be.”
“I’m afraid not,” Ted says, tucking the loose pocket into the remains.
“If you are jumping universes, and I don’t for one second believe you are, then why haven’t you tried to stop it from happening?”
“I have tried, but the sniper has a ninety-nine percent probability of shooting the gunman with the detonator.”
The lights go out, and a collective groan rises from the customers, followed by sporadic cheers once the emergency lights flicker on.
“Like with you catching the pitcher of beer, all I can do is wait for the ten to fifteen percent probability that the sniper hits the gunman’s brain stem before he can trigger the bomb.”
Ted lifts his drink and swallows the remaining liquid in his glass. He grimaces and squints as he slides the glass across the bar.
“In the meantime, I figure I can at least have a drink and enjoy the good stuff while I wait.”
The howling wind rushes past the front door, thumping debris against the window as it cascades up the street. The building rumbles, glasses rattle, and the floor shakes from an earthquake. Audible fear pervades the room as the patrons panic.
Sharon looks at his torn pocket, shakes her head, and shouts over the rising clamor. “Why just you?”
Ted shrugs his shoulders. “Probabilities!” he shouts as the walls stretch and everything around them undergoes spaghettification, then disintegrates into the void.
A man walks into a bar.
#
© Dennis M. Powers 2026
After 50 years of wrangling electrons through tubes, transistors, and chips, writing code and operating a web design and hosting business, Dennis retired to his home in Connecticut to write science fiction adventure stories. He dislikes the cold and dreams of living in a tropical setting. You can find him on Bluesky at @dennismpowers.bsky.social and his website, dennismpowers.com.