‘Thinking of not killing myself,’ he corrected.
‘And when I get here - having nearly crashed the car at least twice - all you can do is rabbit on about sodding immortality. Sorry, Ian, but this is pub stuff. It’s not getting Moira out of the house late at night stuff.’
‘Actually, I think it is.’ Ian reached across the table and pushed aside the pile of science magazines.
They had been hiding a gun.
‘Fuck,’ Moira said. It was a handgun, a small revolver. It was horribly familiar, yet Moira did not remember ever seeing a real handgun in her life. ‘Please tell me that’s a replica,’ she said.
‘It is,’ Ian said. ‘But it’s been converted into a real one. There’s a website that shows you how to do it. You don’t need any fancy tools, not if you already like to tinker around a bit.’ He nodded at the balsawood dinosaur. Yes, Moira thought ruefully: Ian liked to tinker. If anyone could convert a replica gun into a real one, it was Ian Caldicot.
‘I’m really not happy with this, Ian.’ She wanted to ask him where he had got it, whether it was in some way legal, but what she mainly wanted was the gun out of Ian’s reach before he did something with it. ‘It’s not loaded, is it?’
Ian picked up the gun and made the little revolving chamber swivel out, the way she had seen people do it in films. He held the chamber up to the light, lengthwise, so that Moira could see along the cylindrical holes where the bullets would have gone. Ian rotated the chamber slowly, until one blocked hole came into view.
‘Can you show me to the phone, please?’ Moira asked. ‘I think I need to ring someone.’
‘The phone’s disconnected. You don’t need it. You just need to sit here and listen to me, that’s all.’
Moira nodded: anything to keep Ian talking. ‘And then what?’
‘Then I’m going to put the gun against my head and fire it. And I’m going to keep doing it. Ten times, twenty times, thirty times. And you’re going to sit there and watch me, and then you’ll believe me.’
Moira thought about grabbing the gun. Could she wrestle it out of Ian’s hand without it going off? If she could get hold of it and run outside, she could throw it into one of the snowdrifts. It was dark out there, and the snow was still falling: if she gave it a good lob, she didn’t think there’d be much chance of Ian finding it before morning.
But even as she was thinking of that, Ian slipped the gun down into the baggy pocket of his tracksuit bottoms.
No chance of reaching it now.
‘I thought you said this was about immortality,’ Moira said, her voice faltering. ‘Playing Russian roulette doesn’t sound very much like immortality to me.’
‘You’re right. But the point is I’m not going to kill myself. I just have to demonstrate the impossibility of that act in the most convincing way possible.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re a friend. Because you’ve always listened and you’ve always had an open mind. Because I knew you’d come over.’
‘Because my name came early in your address book?’
Ian smiled. ‘You’re under Moira, not Curbishley.’
Moira sighed. ‘OK. Here’s the deal. I’ll listen. You can tell me whatever it is you want to tell me. But I don’t want to see that gun again.’
‘You promise me you’ll listen? That you won’t laugh, or start arguing? Not until I’m done?’
‘A deal is a deal.’
But she was not certain Ian had agreed to his side of it.
‘Do you know about the Many Worlds theory, Moira?’
‘You’ve mentioned it before.’ Play along, she thought. Keep talking. ‘One of the quantum things, isn’t it? Parallel worlds and all that?’
‘Sort of. The idea that every time there’s some kind of interaction in the universe - every time some particles or whatever crash into each other - then the universe splits into so many different copies, each of which corresponds to one of the possible outcomes.’
Moira thought back to long pub conversations over last orders. ‘I think I get the gist.’
‘Of course, we only see one of those possible outcomes take place. So if we make some experiment in a lab that could produce result “A” or result “B”, with an equal probability of each, we’ll only see A or B, not both. But in reality the universe branches at that point, and there are counterparts of us who see the other result come out of the experiment.’
‘A bit like that cat thing you’re always going on about,’ Moira said.
Ian brightened, obviously pleased that she remembered. ‘Yeah. You put a cat in a box with a radioactive source and a Geiger counter rigged to a vial of poison gas. If the radioactive source releases a particle - and it’s got a fifty/fifty chance of doing so in a given period - then the gas gets released and the moggy becomes an ex-moggy.’
‘And then you open the box . . .’
Ian sipped his coffee, oblivious to the horrid lumps of spoiled milk. ‘And in one universe you get the dead cat. But in the other, the radioactive source didn’t go off. Remember there was only a fifty/fifty chance of it happening? This is the branch of the multiverse in which it didn’t. The cat’s still alive.’
Moira sensed that Ian was nearing the crux of his revelation. ‘All right,’ she allowed.
‘Now this is the clever bit. What happens next is that we take the same cat - give it a nice saucer of milk and a bit of Whiskas, of course - and put it back in the box. And run the experiment again. Same thing happens: the cat isn’t dead. What do you conclude?’
‘You conclude that you could be in deep shit with the RSPCA, if they ever find out what you’ve been doing.’
‘And apart from that?’
‘I don’t know. That you’re in the branch in which the decay didn’t happen, again?’
‘Yes,’ Ian said. ‘But think about what that means: you’ve now switched onto the no-decay branch twice. Carry out the experiment again: same thing. Another time, and another time after that. You keep doing it, and every time you can’t kill the bloody cat.’
Moira raised a finger. ‘Only because you keep specifying that the cat must be alive. But if I did that experiment - say I tossed a coin, instead of going to all that trouble with Geiger counters and stuff - it wouldn’t work like that, would it? I might not kill the cat straight away, but after two or three goes I’m pretty sure I would.’
‘But the point is, whenever you did kill the cat, there’d always be a counterpart of you - another Moira - that didn’t.’
‘After one or two goes, maybe. But if I kept on not killing the cat, I’d begin to think it was a bit unusual: that something was wrong with the experiment. That’s not how it works, Ian. You can’t keep coming up heads. Sooner or later you always hit tails. Look, I’ve got a pound coin in my pocket here, I can prove—’
‘No,’ Ian said, correcting her gently. ‘Sooner or later one of you hits tails. But the other one comes up heads. And that’s how it keeps happening. No matter how improbable it seems, there’ll always be one counterpart of you that finds it impossible to kill the cat, no matter how many times they try.’
‘But that’s absurd.’
‘No, just very unlikely. Which doesn’t mean that that particular counterpart doesn’t exist: just that your chances of being it are very small. It’s like being the queen. Someone has to be the queen, even if any one person’s chances are tiny. Have you ever wondered how Her Maj feels, when she wakes up? Fuck me, she must think. I’m the queen. I’m the sodding queen!’
‘I’m sure she’s got used to it by now.’
‘But the point still applies: logically, there’ll always be one counterpart who keeps ending up in the universe in which the cat doesn’t die. They might feel odd about it - they might look back at all the experiments they’ve run and feel a bit strange that they’ve been chosen as the one who never gets to kill the cat. But if they take the Many Worlds theory seriously, they’ll have to conclude that someone had to end up never killing th
e cat. And when they finally do kill the cat, they’ll know that someone else - another counterpart of them - has just failed to kill it again. And that’s how it goes on.’
‘For ever?’
‘For ever and ever.’
They sat in silence for several moments, Moira once again wondering about the phone and the gun. If Ian had disconnected the phone, how difficult would it be to make it work again? If it was just a question of popping the connection back into the wall socket . . . she imagined herself fumbling it in, somehow managing to dial the police before Ian ripped the phone out of her hands . . . but no. That wouldn’t work: Ian was an inveterate tinkerer. He’d have opened the phone and removed something. And even if he hadn’t, even if she did magically get through to a warm human being, how long would it take them to get here?
And the gun: still no joy. She thought about shoving the table towards Ian, levering it up from her side so that it came crashing down on his knees, but unless she did it very quickly Ian would have time to move aside. The one thing she didn’t want to do was make him any angrier without getting the gun off him.
‘So that’s it, is it?’ she asked. ‘Your big revelation? In some remote twig of the infinitely branching universe, there’ll always be a cat you can’t kill?’
For the first time Ian showed a flash of irritation. ‘There’s more to it than that. Much more. Frankly, Moira, I was hoping you’d have seen it for yourself by now.’
‘Seen what?’
‘The bigger picture. The cat in the box represents the outcome of just one quantum process: the tick of a Geiger counter. Now imagine if there were a million Geiger counters in the box, each pointed at their own piece of radioactive material. It only takes one tick to kill the cat. The overwhelming likelihood is that at least one Geiger counter will register an event.’
Moira chose her words carefully. ‘Then I suppose the cat dies.’
‘Nearly all the time, yes,’ Ian said. ‘But there’ll still be a branch in which it doesn’t. There’ll still be one experiment in which none of those million counters register an event. Just because it’s weird doesn’t mean it won’t happen, in some extreme branch of the multiverse.’
‘All right,’ Moira said. ‘If I follow you, then you’ve collapsed one chain of events into a single massively unlikely outcome. How does that change things?’
‘It changes things because there’s no limit to how far I can take that process. Everything that ever happens is a series of quantum events. Every process in every cell in your body - every chemical reaction - it all boils down to quantum probabilities in the end. And no matter how complex the macroscopic event, there’ll always be a finite probability of it not happening.’
‘Give me an example.’
‘Life itself,’ Ian said. He seemed to have calmed down a little now. ‘Think about it, Moira. Think about your body: every cell in it working to sustain the ongoing momentum of living. Molecules being shuffled around, crossing membranes, interacting with other molecules . . . all of it riding on quantum processes. The avalanche is unstoppable. But there’s still a tiny probability - cosmically rare, I admit - that every single one of those processes will suddenly swerve in the wrong direction for the continuation of life. It’d be like a room full of clocks suddenly stopping ticking. Unlikely, but - given a multiverse of possibilities - it could and must happen, somewhere.’
‘What if . . .’ Moira said, groping for an objection. As long as she could keep Ian engaged, he seemed unlikely to do anything regrettable. ‘What if the multiverse isn’t big enough to contain all those possibilities? What if some events are just too rare for consideration?’
‘It doesn’t have to be that extreme, of course. Not every quantum process has to go wrong. Just some of them. Enough to kill you.’
‘Still pretty unlikely.’
‘But vastly more likely, if you take that view.’
‘Now you’re frightening me.’
‘Then consider the more benign alternative. You’re very old, lying in your deathbed after a long and happy life. You’re about to die of natural causes.’
‘All right,’ Moira allowed.
‘But what does that mean, exactly? What is death if it isn’t just a series of chemical processes coming to an end?’
‘Pretty bleak way of looking at it.’
‘On the contrary,’ Ian told her. ‘Think of those chemical processes grinding to a halt. Underlying them, of course, are yet more quantum interactions. That’s all anything is. And if it’s possible to think of those processes coming to a halt, then it’s also possible to consider them being minutely prolonged.’
‘So one of me gets another minute of life?’
‘More than that, Moira. One of you gets immortality. One of you never ever dies. Death is a chemical threshold. There’ll always be one of you that can’t quite cross it. Some flicker of life keeps sustaining you. You’ll be slipping into ever remoter branches of the multiverse with each breath, but from your point of view - what does it matter? You don’t perceive all those earlier versions of yourself dying away. You just feel yourself persisting.’
‘That doesn’t sound like any kind of immortality I’d choose for myself,’ Moira said. ‘To me it sounds more like a kind of hell. Always drawing the last breath, but never, ever quite getting there. I think I’d rather throw myself under a bus than face the prospect of that.’
Ian smiled again. ‘You’re forgetting that no outcome is disallowed, no matter how improbable. An engine drops off a passing plane and smashes the bus to pieces. A hole opens in the road and swallows it. The bus just spontaneously disintegrates: every single weld failing catastrophically at the same moment. A freak whirlwind lifts you out of harm’s way.’
‘That sounds more like a miracle.’
‘That’s exactly what it would look like. You’d know, though: you’d realise that all that had happened is that you found the nearest non-fatal branch.’
Moira could see where this was heading. ‘A gun, then,’ she said, speaking the words with a kind of dull inevitability. ‘I’ll put a gun to my head and pull the trigger.’
‘Won’t work either. It will misfire. Consistently so, until you point it away from your head, or at an angle that won’t prove fatal.’
‘But what about the people watching me do it? Most of them will see me blow my head off. Not much immortality as far as they’re concerned. They’re not going to believe, are they?’
‘Not until they try it for themselves.’
‘We all have to put a gun against our heads, is that it? Squeeze the trigger, and if we survive - if the gun misfires - then we conclude that we’re immortal?’
Ian leaned forwards. She could see the alloy gleam of the gun, the tip of the handle jutting from his pocket. So near - so tempting to try and grab it. But the very thought of trying made her feel sick with fear.
‘Look back on your own life,’ he said. ‘Was there never a time when you came through something - an accident, or a frightening moment - and thought you were lucky not to have been killed?’
Moira shook her head, but not with complete conviction. ‘I can’t think of anything specific.’
‘Why did you give up parachuting, Moira?’
‘I didn’t give it up,’ she said. ‘I just lost interest. I was never mad on it to begin with. There was just this bloke I happened to fancy at the time - you remember Mick, don’t you?’
‘I remember Mick. But I also remember why you stopped jumping. It was the day you snagged your ripcord on the door handle, walking through the canteen doorway. Unfortunately the chute didn’t open. It hadn’t been packed properly. And if you hadn’t snagged it on the doorway, you’d never have found out until you were already falling.’
‘I’d have had the reserve chute.’
‘But when they examined your reserve chute, they also found that it hadn’t been packed properly. Mick’s ex-girlfriend still showed up at the club now and then, didn’t she? No one was going to swear that
it wouldn’t have opened, and no one was going to swear that Mick’s ex might have had something to do with it. But that was the last time anyone saw you at the club. I know, Moira. I was sorry to see you go.’
‘We kept in touch.’
‘There was a bit of a gap before we hooked up again. Face it: it spooked you. You kept thinking back to that door handle, and wondering what would have happened if you hadn’t nipped back into the canteen for those cigarettes.’
‘We’ll never know,’ Moira said.
‘We can guess, though. The vast majority of you died, or were maimed. Some small minority of you survived. Some of you just decided not to jump that day. Some of you went back into the canteen and had the good fortune to snag that handle. Some of you did jump anyway, and even though the equipment was sabotaged you still came safely down to Earth. Some of you don’t even know how lucky you are.’
Zima Blue and Other Stories Page 54