No Stone Unturned by Nick Wolven (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) jettisons his (more usual, in my experience) breezy, lightweight approach in a more serious piece that starts with Martin coming back to his automated “HappyHome” to find his partner has left his son to run wild, with toys and dishes and mess everywhere. After he finds his son in bed asleep, Martin goes outside to find his wife Anna, who is having some sort of breakdown or dissociative episode in the communal reflecting pond.
Martin is later contacted by a man called Daniel, who says he can explain what has happened to his wife. When they meet he suggests that Anna has become “decohesive”—a result of her being a “Leaper” one of the first astronauts to use a quantum matter transmission device to explore the Galaxy.
The rest of the story sees a physicist called Lina from the LEAP program turn up, and Anna have further episodes where she forgets to pick up the child from nursery, or leaves him in the car, etc. Then Martin and Daniel meet again, and we get more of Daniel’s outsider hand-wavium about the LEAP process. He finally explains that that it doesn’t account for the “chaos” of the human mind when scanning a subject for quantum transmission, causing personality changes in those transported.
The final scene (spoiler) has Martin return home to find Lina the physicist there again, and to be told that Anna has decided to go back out again because she wants to be among the stars.
I found this dull, unengaging stuff, partly because of the makey-up science (shoving “quantum” and “chaos” in there does not make the hand-wavium believable), and partly because I just didn’t care about Anna, who seems to spend most of her time pretentiously staring at the stars or reflections of them in water (I exaggerate, but that’s what it felt like).
* (Mediocre). 9,600 words.