Observer Bias

A tiny sweet treat of a story. A smile keeps you young.

Shen Wei’s social media feed is an encrypted channel, and Lin Xinghe is its only recipient.

He posts a cluster of crystals under a microscope, captioned, “Its symmetrical structure is just like someone’s stubbornness.” He records the white noise of the lab and notes, “The frequency matches the signal from the observatory.” Each post survives for less than five minutes. When no reply comes, he deletes it at once, like a particle trail that never existed.

He thinks this is quantum entanglement known only to him, until years later, Lin Xinghe grips the back of his neck and says offhandedly, “Why delete them so fast? I saw them ages ago.”

It turns out there was no such thing as faster-than-light communication. It was simply one person’s love that couldn’t stay hidden, and another person’s heart that couldn’t contain its excitement. In the observer’s margin of error, they had quietly collapsed into the one and only answer long ago.

Theme: Some loves lie buried deep beneath the stars.