A black hole is a maze with no way out. But what happens to the information inside? To test this, physicists didn't fly to the nearest hole; instead, they built a tiny replica on a quantum processor. The maze was played by a chain of 32 superconducting qubits, where each step leads only forward, like a one-way corridor.

To understand the geometry of the maze, the scientists launched a single excitation and traced how its energy depends on momentum. Outside, they saw a familiar picture: two branches, like waves on water. At the horizon, one branch flattened — meaning the signal gets stuck. Inside, new points appeared where energy goes to zero, and all paths lead only deeper. For the first time, on a single device, they saw the light cone tilt: beyond the horizon, even light cannot turn around.

But the maze doesn't just bend paths: it also scrambles everything that falls in. To see this, they turned on interactions between spins. In the free model, information spread slowly, like ink in cold water. With strong interactions, it began to spread exponentially, as if each step in the maze randomly rearranged the walls. This is quantum chaos: a measure of how quickly a black hole forgets what fell in.

Previously, geometry and chaos were studied separately, in different systems. Here, they were combined in a single experiment, showing that a quantum processor can serve as a testbed for the most pressing questions about black holes. The next step is to test how information returns from the maze if the hole evaporates. Perhaps the answer is already close.