Although she may have initiated the process, the end of the zapper attacks wasn’t all her doing. Keith had made that much clear. No one person could provide the amount of psychic energy necessary to influence reality. What her grandfather—and now she—had done was to act as a catalyst for other people who had the same basic value system (what Zorne called a “reality matrix”).
It all had something to do with harmonic vibrations, Rayna recalled. Just as plucking one string on a guitar can cause other strings to vibrate, the oscillations associated with psychic activity set up harmonic vibrations. When the harmonics are strong enough, a new branch of reality splits off.
Rayna gave her head a slight shake. Keith had tried to explain Zorne’s theories several times, but her interest then had been cool and indirect, prompted by a desire to know about Al Frederick and his role (if any) in shaping history. It was different now. Now her interest was intensely personal. If Rayna Kingman was to survive in this new reality, she realized, she had to understand. And so, she probed deeply into her memory, struggling to remember everything Keith had ever said about reality-matrix physics.
“According to Zorne,” Keith had told her, “there is an infinite number of alternative realities.”
“You mean, like parallel universes, other dimensions, that sort of thing?”
“Not other dimensions, exactly. Parallel timelines. Other branches of reality. The theory goes all the way back to the 1950s, when some physicists were trying to explain quantum mechanics. They call the concept the Many Worlds Interpretation. I’m oversimplifying, but the idea is that every flip of a coin, for example, results not in either heads or tails but in both—heads in one branch of reality and tails in another. According to the theory, these branches of reality are completely inaccessible to each other, so that for all practical purposes, we know only our own reality. But that doesn’t make the other branches any less real. I guess you could say that reality matrix physics expands on the Many Worlds Interpretation.”
“How’s that?”
“Zorne says that a surge of psychic energy triggered by conflict with a strong reality matrix—what he called a “psycho-affective spike”—can split reality in the same way that the flip of a coin does. Of course, since we can only experience one branch of reality at a time, a psychically induced split looks like a change in the reality we’re living in. Like when John Martin Roberts was shot.”
Rayna massaged her temples and gently deflected a murmur of concern from the patient in the bed to her right. Think! What happens to the people who don’t have special psychic powers but who have compatible reality matrices? She frowned in concentration and probed her memory. Keith had said something about it. Something about a polarizing effect. Yes! That was it! The strength of the harmonic psychic vibrations in a mind net are directly related to the strength of a person’s emotional commitment to various aspects of his or her reality matrix. The stronger the emotional link, the larger the amplitude of what Zorne called “reality matrix waves.”
“Once a psycho-affective spike splits reality,” Keith had explained, “the associated reality matrix acts like a sort of polarizer, so that people with strong enough compatible matrices are carried along into the new branch of reality.”
That means people who don’t have psychic power themselves still have some control over what kind of reality they live in, Rayna thought.
“Only if they feel strongly about it,” she remembered Keith’s insisting. “People who don’t care—really care—about the kind of universe they live in, just have to take what they get. They have no influence at all. The polarizing effect apparently doesn’t screen out conflicting reality matrix waves if they’re of low amplitude.”
It was odd, Rayna reflected. Her grandfather’s psychic powers had helped give life to the ideals and dreams he shared with other people. The process sounded much simpler than it was. The world didn’t just continue to fit Al Frederick’s ideal. According to his journal, many things continued to interfere with his Utopian visions. So he kept releasing new spikes of psychic energy.
Keith’s explanation had been more technical. “The initial reality matrix effect gets weaker as new decisions continue to split that branch of reality into more branches. Any of the new branches might include things that conflict with the original reality matrix. In your grandfather’s case, when the conflict became great enough, it would trigger a new release of psychic energy. It was a kind of automatic course correction, with conflicting reality matrix waves again screened out.”
She mulled it over for a few seconds. Conflicting waves are screened out. Before she could block it, the image of Keith Daniels, eyes twinkling impishly as he teased Rayna about her tennis game, tore through her protective wall of analytical thought. Other images followed rapidly. Keith sleeping peacefully beside her the morning after they first made love. Keith eagerly volunteering to join her in an effort to stop what turned out to be Tauber’s conspiracy. And, finally, Keith spouting the Operation Strong Man line, as if what began as merely a role for him to play had somehow taken him over. Along with the images came the question she’d been trying to suppress since her first inkling of what had happened: Had Keith been screened out of this new reality?
She leaned her head back on her pillow and studied the pseudowall generator tracks on the ceiling. “We won, Mr. Attorney,” she whispered through teeth clenched firmly against the surging emotions inside her. Trouble is, I don’t feel much like a winner. All I feel is empty.
A sudden silence enveloped the room, and she looked up to notice that the HV broadcast had been turned off.
“Show’s over for now,” the woman in the next bed said in response to Rayna’s inquiring glance. “More HV later. Time for visitors now.”
Rayna half expected to see her parents materialize at the ward entrance, her father looking concerned but coolly confident, her mother wearing a reassuring smile. She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together.
“Hey, lady,” an unexpected voice announced, “I’ve been waiting to see you for three days!”
Rayna’s eyes snapped open and her heart leaped. She tried to reach for the man on the crutches, but her body was frozen, and she almost forgot to breathe. Never shifting his eyes from her face, he sat down on her bed and took her hand in his. When she finally regained her ability to move, all she could do was silently squeeze his fingers.
“Thank God you’re all right, Ray,” he said at last. “You had me plenty worried.”
A thousand thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant, but the words she wanted to say remained stubbornly out of reach. “Keith,” she asked incongruously, “are you really here?”
He laughed, leaned forward and kissed her gently on the lips. “I’m definitely here,” he said. His expression turned serious as he added, “I—all of us—have you to thank for that, don’t we?”
Rayna lowered her eyes and jerked her head forward in an abrupt nod. Keith stroked her hair for a few seconds, then pressed a finger against her jaw, turning her head until their eyes met once more. A moment later, they were clinging to each other as if to a life raft, tubes trailing, unheeded, from Rayna’s right arm.
“I thought I’d lost you,” she murmured, her head resting against his shoulder.
He pulled back, grinned and flexed his right bicep.
“Who? Me? My only problem was getting mugged by a rebellious tree.”
So it was Keith I saw at the park! Rayna thought.
“Keith,” she said, “this... this... thing I’ve got.... I mean, this psychic power. It ruined my grandfather’s relationship with my grandmother. How do you—”
His kiss answered her question before she could ask it.
“Ray, if it weren’t for you, that falling log might have done me in instead of just sticking me with these crutches for a while. Come to think of it, I guess I was killed in some other branch of reality. Just like Tauber survived in some other branch.”
Rayna felt the blood drain f
rom her face, and Keith quickly grabbed her hand. “It’s all right, Ray. This timeline is safe. You’ve seen to that. And as long as enough of us care about the kind of world we live in, it’ll stay that way. Don’t worry. We’re in this together.”
She studied his face for a long moment, then surveyed the beds around her. Park casualties, the nurse had told her. But not as many as there might have been. For the first time, her muscles relaxed, and she smiled—a big, glowing, soaring smile that came from deep inside.
“I’m not worried,” she said softly.
* * *
Dreamers and idealists have always had the power to change the world, but without the psychic booster that reality matrix physics explains, the road from dream to fruition was often indirect and hard to discern. Nevertheless, much of the “real world” that we so often take for granted began as someone’s dream. In the end, the best of “the real world” owes its existence to those who build castles in the air while the rest of us scramble to fashion our rough huts in the mud.
— Alec Zorne
Unpublished paper on reality matrix physics, 1972
AFTERWORD
This book began as a four-page short story titled “Castles in the Air,” which I wrote in 1971. At that time, I was working as a reporter/copy editor at the Valley News (predecessor of today’s Los Angeles Daily News). In fact, the newsroom scene in the Prologue is based on the city room of the old Valley News offices in Van Nuys, CA.
For some reason, the story idea stayed with me, but it seemed incomplete. So in 1985, I started filling in some gaps and expanding the story into a novel. I finished the first complete draft sometime in 1986, but I didn’t actively pursue publication at that time. Life took me in a different direction.
Then one day, I mentioned the novel to a friend. She asked to read it; so I started reviewing chapters before I sent them along. That’s when I re-named the book “The Reality Matrix Effect” and started working actively to get this book published.
Although this novel is fiction, some things in it are real.
—As noted in the Acknowledgments section, Nitinol exists. It is a “memory metal” that was developed at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory.
—Modern interpretations of quantum physics (including the Many Worlds theory) suggest the existence of multiple realities (at least on a quantum level).
The concept of reality matrix theory and shifting from one reality to another, however, is a fiction of my own invention. Or is it? What was once considered mysticism, religion and Eastern philosophy seems to be merging with hard science. So at this point, who among us truly knows the nature of reality?
January 15, 2013
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Remson Mitchell is a former newspaper reporter/copy editor, free-lance writer, public policy analyst and disability rights advocate. Her nonfiction work has appeared in the Valley News, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Times, California Journal, Capitol Weekly and other publications. A graduate of U.S. Grant High School in Van Nuys, California, and of California State University at Northridge, she has lived with multiple sclerosis for many years.
END NOTES
[1] wom, n. 1. a derisive slang term referring to something that is useless or pointless. 2. someone who is considered worthless or incapable of performing useful functions; a moron. Etymology: Believed derived from a late 20th-century acronym for “write-only memory” (WOM), a computer term referring to a hypothetical type of computer memory into which information could be entered but from which data could not be retrieved.
—from Dictionary of Modern American English, second edition, c. 2020
[2] bowl-squatter, n. an uncomplimentary slang term referring to space colonists who earn title to their property by living on it. Syn. rock farmer. Etymology: The “bowl” reference is derived from the shape of the life domes within which space colony environments are controlled for such factors as temperature, pressure and atmosphere. These domes resemble inverted bowls.
—from Dictionary of Modern American English, second edition, c. 2020.
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