Probability Sickness

Olaf Lindqvist had been a maintenance engineer for thirty-seven years. For the last fifteen, he’d worked exclusively on compression field generators. The exposure was killing him in ways medical science was only beginning to understand.

His apartment thrummed with background resonance - 13.7 gigahertz bleeding from every compressed device. The fridge, the bandwidth router, the storage units, even his fucking mattress. Each one singing at the frequency of controlled reality distortion.

“Compression Field Syndrome,” his doctor had called it. “Prolonged exposure causes quantum decoherence in neural tissue. Your brain is forgetting how to maintain singular probability states.”

Olaf understood the mathematics. Each compression field created a localized reality bubble where physics bent just enough to allow impossibility. Spend enough time near them, and your consciousness began to bend too.

He watched his hand flicker - solid, translucent, solid again. His body couldn’t decide which probability to maintain. Some mornings, he woke up partially compressed, his thoughts squeezed into painful density. Other days, he expanded across multiple states, experiencing breakfast in seven different quantum outcomes.

The water from his tap tasted like metal and regret. Compressed for efficiency, it carried trace harmonics from the treatment plant’s industrial-grade generators. Every glass reminded his cells of their slow dissolution.

His neighbor’s music bled through the walls - not the sound, but the compression artifacts. Melody squeezed through probability gaps, arriving as sensation rather than audio. He felt bass lines in his bone marrow, lyrics manifesting as brief hallucinations.

“Shielding helps,” other sufferers told him in the support group. “Lead-lined clothing. Faraday cage bedrooms.”

But the truth was starker. Society ran on compression now. Every building, every vehicle, every device pushed reality just a little out of true. And human consciousness - that delicate quantum phenomenon - was never designed to exist in constantly warped spacetime.

Olaf opened his window, hoping for uncompressed air. But even the atmosphere carried interference - delivery drones, transport fields, the great industrial compressors that kept civilization running. The sky itself hummed at 13.7 gigahertz.

He’d helped build this world. Installed thousands of generators, optimized millions of fields. Each one perfectly safe in isolation. Nobody had modeled what happened when every human lived surrounded by dozens of overlapping compression fields.

Now he knew. Reality became negotiable. Consciousness became fluid. And maintenance engineers like him became probability ghosts, flickering between states like broken equations.

His coffee mug existed in three places simultaneously. He drank from all of them, tasting past and future and never-was.

Tomorrow, he’d flicker a little more. Next year, he might not maintain coherence at all.

But the efficiency gains were undeniable. The board of directors had made that very clear.