Life was pretty good for Sam Speakman.

  He was about to turn in his final paper. Sixty-three pages on quantum information theory, stored in a three ring binder and carefully placed in his bag.

  But Sam was worried. Not about the paper, or any of his other schoolwork, of course. That much he was confident about. After he passed this class, he was guaranteed to graduate with at least a 3.63 cumulative GPA, collect his bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics and do... something.

  He didn’t really know what one exactly did with a degree in theoretical physics. Sam wasn’t much of a planner. He let computers and other people do all the long term thinking for him. Sometimes it didn’t work out, but so far, he had enough of a support system to focus on his studies in the present.

  College planning didn’t really help him with the rest of his life. Maybe he could hire a life coach, but that requires money first and he definitely doesn’t have a job yet. Which he doesn’t know anything about. That was definitely step one. Figure out what theoretical physics is useful for.

  However, none of this information, or lack of it, was helping him navigate the physics department. His professor’s office was upstairs, and of course, the elevator was out of order. The elevator was always out of order, and the college couldn’t afford to fix it. It was possibly a bad idea to have gone to the local university, but they strangely had the program he was looking for, and he wasn’t really paying attention to the details when he accepted.

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  Sam wasn’t very good with directions. Sure, he could use Google Maps, but he couldn’t really remember anything spatially. So, every time he visited his professor’s office, he had to study the map, and follow every sign, but he still got lost. Every time. At least he remembered what floor it was on.

  He found the stairs after walking in a circle at least three times, and started carefully walking up the stairs. These stairs were cursed. Every time Sam climbed them, no matter how carefully he did, he always tripped. No one else did. He watched people climb them up and down for hours, once, just to prove his theory. It was always the second to last step, too. He had even tried skipping that step, but his foot always caught on it, as if it grew taller just to trip him.

  He always held his hands out while climbing the stairs. When he reached the death stair, he braced himself, and stepped. It always hurt, but he’s gotten better at catching himself over time. As he was falling, he thought more about what he was going to do after graduation. It might be possible to find work in a lab, or he could go back to school for electrical engineering, as many large businesses will pay money for engineers with expertise in quantum mechanics.

  Shouldn’t he have hit the ground by now? It felt like he had been falling for a lot longer than normal. Sam focused back on his surroundings, shelving his internal monologue about job prospects for after he landed.

  Strange. He couldn’t remember the landing being green before. Or it being so far away. He was only 1.7 meters tall, after all.

  Is that... grass?

  Since when did the physics department have–