Valerio Malvezzi
FUTURA
PARALLEL UNIVERSES
BOOK 1
Futura: Parallel Universes: Book 1
Copyright © 2021Valerio Malvezzi
This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
A story is just a possibility between a prologue and an epilogue
Prologue
It will be spring.
The young man will look out the window.
Light, sun, the green of the fields. Farther on, behind the gravel road running through the low hills, a glimpse of sea, the ocean. A flock of birds in the distance, suddenly soaring from the uncultivated field, will attract his attention for a moment, and his gaze will linger. He will have peach fuzz on his face and shave every week. His hair will be slightly long, at least in his parents’ opinion, and he’ll let it grow on purpose, although it’s already thinning. He will notice that, looking in the bathroom mirror and examining his temples.
I’m only seventeen, what the fuck.
After undressing, he will enter the bathroom.
He’ll throw his pajamas and underwear in the laundry basket. The container will close itself and deliver the clothes to the laundry room downstairs. He will step into the spacious shower. “Water, twenty-eight degrees.”
What crap. Having to go to class on a day like this. Maybe that blonde will be there, though.
The water will come down, softly, sprayed through the nozzle. The shower will have been programmed with the twenty-four sprayers oriented and calibrated to the desired pressure and will not need any modification.
Prologue
It will be spring.
The young man will look out the window.
Light, sun, the green of the fields. The young man will wonder if those seagulls’ lives are better. Of course, they will move in freedom, twirling in the sky, to rise in the light.
And most importantly, no school.
Entering the bathroom, he will look in the mirror, gazing at his temples and shaking his head. He’ll throw the laundry in the basket, and, using the voice control, will order the required shower temperature. He will have to decide, he will think, letting the warm water flow over his body. When finished, he will enter the adjacent partition, ordering the blowers’ warm air jets.
“Ricardo, are you ready? I have to go, hurry!”
Damn it, go on, then!
“I’m not hungry, Mom,” he will say, annoyed, lowering the blower volume, “I have to start my lessons now. I’ll have breakfast mid-morning.”
“If you didn’t waste time playing around in the evenings, you’d get up at the right time in the morning,” she will say. “Your father and I have to go, so don’t get in trouble.”
The boy, exiting the bathroom, will roll his eyes. He will put on a T-shirt, fresh from the printer, his own design, and black stretch pants above his athletic shoes. He will approach the desk, get on the green carpet, enter the holographic helmet, and get ready for virtual reality.
The boy will let the source of life flow, and his mind will empty for a few minutes. “Stop.” The water will stop flowing.
“Open. Dry. Lukewarm.” The young man will enter the adjacent partition. A lukewarm jet of air from the blowers.
“Ricardo, are you ready? I have to go, hurry!”
“I’m coming, Mom!”
Damn it, go on, then!
After ten minutes he will enter the kitchen in a red T-shirt, fresh from the printer, black stretch pants, the same ones he wears with his band, and athletic shoes. He will endure his mother’s gaze.
“For God’s sake, Ricardo, how many times have I told you to at least put something decent on when you go to class?”
The boy will look listlessly at the news, about six feet away from his glass of milk. A journalist’s dubbed voice will be saying something extremely boring about the Pope’s planned visit to the island. Three-dimensional images, the Pope’s hands on the jam brioche.
“Your father and I are going. We’ll be back tonight; don’t get in trouble.” The woman will walk through the kitchen, hastily touching cleaning programs on virtual screens. “Your sister is staying with your grandparents. You’re on your own for lunch, so program what you want. I bought some things and they’re in the memory.” The woman will kiss the boy on the temple, then go upstairs.
“Program twenty-eight, volume fifty-two,” the young man will mumble. The video will move to a music program, the music filling the room.
“For Heaven’s sake, Ricardo, can’t you hurry?” The woman’s voice traveled down the stairs. “It’s almost 9:00! Don’t get to school late as you usually do. And turn that volume down!”
The boy will look at the holographic display timer, 8:39. “Mom, but I still have half an hour... volume thirty-two” the boy will say in a lifeless voice, a piece of brioche in his mouth.
The young man with peach fuzz on his face, his hair slightly long over his eyes, will listen to the Russian professor, in his own room and in seat twenty-three of the very white school room, set up in a semi-circle, where the virtual light enters softly from the many side windows.
“And so the result would be zero to zero. Which is not...” The teacher will look up, interrupting himself, take three theatrical steps, and declaim aloud, “The zero-to-zero soccer match result that your classmate in the last row at the top right is reading.”
The class will explode in resounding laughter. Ricardo won’t turn around like the others to look at the red-haired guy, but he will sneak a glance at his virtual deskmate, the blonde girl.
She’s even more beautiful when she laughs.
“Now, if your distinguished colleague will allow me, I’d like to go back to class today.”
I give up.
Ricardo will decide to follow the teacher’s lesson and forget the blonde.
“Now, I would like you to open your mind to some reasoning that may be new for you. It’s quite possible, according to the latest, most accredited theories, to continue the development of quantum physics of the last century, that at this exact moment there is another universe, separate and distinct from this, but co-existing. Let’s imagine a time space continuum...”
The physicist will draw two parallel sheets on the holographic whiteboard. “... and then another... and yet another. I mean, imagine reading a classic detective story, but getting out of your grandparents’ way of thinking. In one book, the culprit is the butler, but in the other, the gardener, or the murder has not even happened, or has yet to happen...”
I can’t. I can’t follow, I don’t understand a bit of this stuff.
“... But this means getting out of the narrow mental model of conceiving everything according to the three dimensions of the universe that we are used to seeing, that of Euclidean space.”
The singer’s guitar will drown in the glass of milk.
“What lessons are in your program today?”
“No matter what, I’m going to take an interschool course in quantum mechanics. It’s the second lesson of the quarter.”
The singer will fly over the crowd, drowning in the glass of mil
k.
“Bye, I’m going, love!” the mother will say.
The young man will hear the sound of the elevator heading upstairs as his mother rises to the top floor of the house. In the last ten years, roof parking will have been required, for space reasons, a city council decision. Even in this part of the world, space will be a problem now, and no new residence, including theirs, will have been built without parking for at least one flying car on the roof. Theirs, which will already contain two, will have a third, for when Ricardo is of age. A flying car enabled for transoceanic transit will be about twelve meters long, and obtaining authorizations will not be simple, but Ricardo’s father will have good connections in the city.
Ten minutes later, the boy will go to his room, approach the desk, and get on the two-by-two-meter green carpet, the recording space. (Unfortunately, his parents will not be able to afford the latest models, which will record movements in a space up to four times larger. Then he will turn on the gravity chair. Standing, he’ll turn on the holographic helmet. Infrared cameras will record his every movement, projecting his image into the virtual world in all light conditions. At the same time, the boy will receive the uploaded programs projected directly on his retina. Numbers and images will flow, all the boy’s own programs, the music band, the gym, and his friends’ houses. The boy will identify the school program memory.
“High school, course three, program thirteen, classroom two, lesson two.”
It will be a very white semi-circular classroom, with soft light from the many side windows, divided into four sections, the stairs slightly inclined, converging in the center towards the professor’s chair. At the bottom of all that white, a 10-meter virtual screen, divided into three sections, will contain the spaces where the educational programs will be loaded.
“This, young people, means that we have to hypothesize forms of measurement, but they still come from the natural sensory apparatus. Quantum physics helps us represent multidimensionality...”
What dimples, what teeth. I’d do anything to kiss a mouth with those teeth.
“Who remembers the grandfather’s paradox from the last lesson?”
A hand will pop up in the front row, belonging to a red-haired guy.
“Tell us, Mr. Flanaghan.”
“That thing that says I can’t go back in time to kill my grandfather, because otherwise it would be a paradox, and I couldn’t be here to follow his lesson?”
The teacher will look at him as the boy snickers with friends.
“Yes, and on second thought, it wouldn’t have been such a great loss...” the Russian will comment “... for you, I mean, not for your grandfather.”
The class will laugh.
“But where were we? Ah, yes. Well, quantum physicist David Deutsch found a solution to these kinds of paradoxes, hypothesizing the cosmos branching in parallel realities ...”
Blonde, light eyes, the accent is American, though. Maybe from the east coast.
“... So imagine these sheets, drawn here, like the pages enclosed in a book, made up of two-dimensional pages. Together, they are inserted into a book and thus into three dimensions. Here, let’s imagine that the sheets are the parallel universes...”
Yes, but if she’s from the west coast, or the Midwest, how can I see her? My parents will kill me if they find out.
“... True, it could also be a single and infinite spatial plane folded into itself in geometrically parallel layers. Moreover, if you remember, the dark mass, or black hole, has been scientifically detected empirically. It extends around galaxies...”
Well, ask her. If she’s from the west, there’s nothing to do, but what if she’s in Florida? She’s a stone’s throw from you, and you don’t even try?
The teacher will move his hand, capturing movies, recordings, and images on the screen, and then moving them into the space in front of him. Ricardo will know that all this is happening thousands of kilometers away. The school will nominally be from London, a prestigious course for which his parents will have paid a substantial fee, even though it is a public school.
“Seat twenty-three,” the boy will say into the helmet’s built-in microphone.
“The teacher is Russian. The languages you have used most frequently are Spanish and English. In what language do you want instant translation?” the program will ask.
“Spanish.”
Students, cheerful voices, laughter, colors in the white.
Let’s hope she’s there again. She was there yesterday at the first lesson.
He couldn’t get her out of his head all day.
“Please take your seat,” the teacher will say, in the center of the classroom, turning on the first of the three videos. A man in his forties, with blond hair, neatly trimmed whiskers, classy, printed shirt, and an aristocratic and affable demeanor.
Who knows where he’s talking from? I must have read it on the program. Well, who cares?
With seventy-two seats in the classroom, he will sit in his seat in the third row, a few seats empty, as will sometimes happen. The boys and girls will sit in their own gravity chairs, and their images will be displayed around Ricardo.
She’s there.
She will sit to the right, next to him, with just a nod, beautiful, blonde, attractive without wanting to appear so, a veil of makeup, very white teeth, the dimples that Ricardo will know by heart, despite having seen them only the day before.
The professor’s voice will have gone on for a few minutes. “The idea that there is one and only one universe, and that there is consequently only one history, which flows in a straight line from the beginning of time, must be revised...”
The students will follow and write on their own tablets, their real hands moving in midair hundreds and thousands of kilometers away, but Ricardo will listen, distracted, his mind on that earring barely three feet away from him.
“... So, in the end, we struggle to accept it, intuitively, thinking that there’s only one universe, because we’re anchored to the traditional concept of units of measurement. Galileo, Isaac Newton, and all classical physics is revolutionized this way by quantum physics, by thinking that it’s impossible to know the state of a particle without permanently changing it. As you can see, once the quantity is determined, it is not possible to determine what its value was before such a measurement...”
A little trip in an airbus, a minor thing. I hope she’s free tonight. Maybe we’ll go for ice cream.
“... I understand that it’s difficult for you to admit this hypothesis. A bit like reading our detective story and finding out only at the end that there are several possible solutions, or that maybe the characters actually never met, simply because they were parallel stories, however concurrent, or with points of contact. Maybe in one story something happens that hasn’t happened yet in the other, but could happen, or it never happens....”
Can I just say hi, I’ve seen you for two days, but I love you?
“... Moreover, listen to what Einstein himself wrote in How I See the World: “but thought could not support the idea that there are two structures of space independent of each other, one of metric gravitation, the other electromagnetic ...”
Maybe she already has a guy. Yes, damn it, but how do you know if you don’t even ask her?
“... and this is where the efforts of theoretical physics have focused on trying to combine the theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics...”
And then, maybe she’s a bitch who’ll stand you up tonight to hang out with friends.
“... According to them, matter, energy, space, and time are actually manifestations of primordial physical entities, which develop in different dimensions. If you look at this holographic sheet on the right, for example, assuming you’re in ten-dimension space-time, including one of these temporal spaces and the other nine spatial...”
Where could she be from?
“Now, we know that there are multiverses, and there now seems to be agreement on this among the most accredited s
cientific theories,” the professor will say, picking images and moving them to the center of the classroom.
Ricardo’s gaze will descend to her breasts, just peeking out of a floral printed T-shirt.
“In this lesson, we’ll reflect on the following questions: whether they are structurally identical, whether they can exist in different configurations, and whether, although there are different configurations, they have the same physical laws and fundamental constants.”
The professor’s voice will sound in Ricardo’s headphones, giving the exact impression of the distance of about nine meters that would separate them, but his mind will follow those slender hands, which will not really be moving the images a few meters from his own. Unfortunately, those will not be close either, but the boy will know that, if he touches them, the virtual program will simulate contact.
You have to talk to her, maybe she won’t take the whole course. You have to try before class is over and she disconnects.
“But there is another real question, beyond the hypothesis of this well-known scientist from the Academy of Chinese Sciences.” The professor will sit on the edge of the chair and sip a glass of water, which will descend into his body thousands of kilometers away from where the students will be watching him.
“The problem is the time and correlation of actions. Are they really non-communicating, as we have mostly believed in recent decades, or can there not only be a transit of information between them, but also, as we might one day achieve, mutual integration?”
She’s blonde. I heard her talk to the Japanese girl in English. It sounded like a European accent. Maybe she moved with her family. You have to invite her to dinner. Try it, at least ask her what her name is.
“Because if so, the problem is that of superimposition. How many universes overlap? In this logic, not only does space take on a different meaning from what we know, but so, and this is the point, does time.”
Futura: Parallel Universes. Book 1 Page 1