Answer Key: Episode 1

The first discovery was made at Aroa Research Center in the late 22nd Century. Amser Hughes led the experiment. The process involved two lab rats, an A and a B, a maze, and a timer. Rat B was the control. Amser’s team nicknamed the psychotropic drug cocktail injected into Rat A “quantum slurry”. They expected the cocktail to boost the rat’s ability to process information, resulting in a faster time in completing the maze, showing that some pieces of neural cognition happened at the quantum level. The difference was discernible immediately: Rat A barely paused at the turns, charging toward the finish, while Rat B plodded along, awkwardly backing out of every dead end. Amser beamed in triumph, her finger hovering over the stopwatch, ready to hit the button as Rat A reached the exit.

But then it disappeared.