by Lori Avocato
“Hi Pug.”
She had her hair down today, falling in soft curls to her shoulders. Her smile was as inviting as a Greek Siren. And just as dangerous!
“What’s up?” he asked.
She sat in the chair next to his desk and crossed her legs. “I’ve got the medical information you asked for.”
He leaned back. “Let’s hear it.”
“I interviewed his physician—Dr. Gupta. He was reluctant at first, but relented when I told him the man was dead and this was a police investigation.”
“Tell me his specialty’s not psychiatry!”
“Family Practice. For about thirty years.”
“What about our case?”
“The Professor was in quite good health but had signs of early Alzheimers.”
“How did he take that?”
“Not well. But then, who would? He said his ability to think clearly had sustained him over the years; that he’d given up marriage, family and most social contacts to pursue his ideas.”
She looked up. “Dr. Gupta copied down what Jackson said next: ‘I’d rather be without my life, than without my mind.’”
“That’s worrisome.”
“Yes, the doctor thought so too. Said he asked about family, clergy, or other community support groups. The professor just shook his head.”
“Was he suicidal?”
“No. Nothing specific. And he didn’t appear clinically depressed. Just sad at the cruel blow fate had dealt him.”
“I can understand that.”
“Dr. Gupta gave him a prescription for Aricept and asked him to return in three months. Jackson just said he’d be fine.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Except for one unrelated matter. I found a life insurance policy at the Alpine house. Didn’t think much about it at the time, but after the interview with Dr. Gupta, I read it more carefully.”
“And?”
“Only one beneficiary.”
“His daughter?”
“Yes. And one thing more.”
“Yeah?”
“It doesn’t pay out for suicides.”
7
“Hi Pug...Skip...Pam.” Jack Youngblood waved them all into his office. “Have a seat.”
The three investigators trooped into the ME’s office and took the chairs forming a semi-circle in front of the desk. Staring back from the wall behind the desk were glass-framed diplomas, medical licenses, board certifications, residency certificates, and photos of Youngblood with important people in medicine—testimonials to his twenty-five years’ experience in forensic pathology.
Salazar studied Youngblood as he brought them coffee and snacks: tall and lean; a head full of brown hair (with enough gray to look distinguished but not so much to look old); hazel brown eyes that never rested; and more than a few facial wrinkles and creases, badges to the struggle with his personal demons.
Youngblood looked from one face to the other. “I need a final disposition on the Jackson case. The Sheriff’s after me to wrap it up, the daughter wants to bury her father, and a reporter from the Union Tribune has been snooping around. Seems he’s got wind of some...ahh...unusual aspects of this case.”
All heads turned to Salazar.
“So, what was it, Pug? Suicide, homicide or accident?”
Salazar opened a manila file folder in his lap, shuffled some papers, and took a deep breath.
“Skip ruled out homicide,” he began, “from the evidence collected at the scene itself: no fingerprints on the gun except the professor’s, no evidence of a struggle, and no known motive.”
“Okay. Then suicide or accident?”
“I don’t think the man planned to kill himself, though he knew the risks involved in what was essentially an experiment.”
“Experiment? You think it was an experiment?” Youngblood grabbed a pencil off the desk. “He may have used an elaborate gadget to do it, but the man aimed a loaded gun at his head. How could there be any doubt about his purpose? He set up the system himself—very deliberately made all the connections. That wasn’t accidental. And every chamber of the weapon was loaded. No accident there, either.”
“I know it sounds crazy, doc. But I think the professor was playing a game of roulette. Quantum roulette. He thought he had surrounded himself with a perfect quantum system—generated by an electron spin detector and completely isolated from all outside influences. The ‘accident’ part occurred when the lost hiker heard the gunshot and called 911. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Youngblood wasn’t buying it. “I don’t see how discovery by the hiker made any difference. Jackson couldn’t have known he’d be detected when he pushed the button to fire the revolver.”
“Exactly! “He didn’t know the hiker’s intrusion had caused his quantum system to collapse.”
Youngblood sniffed and peered over half-lenses. “Please explain, detective.”
Salazar sighed. “The quantum world is largely unfathomable to the human mind, though mathematics seems able to describe it well enough. At its core is the principle of superposition—”
“I know about that,” Youngblood interrupted. “You’re talking about the bizarre mixture of the many states of a quantum particle—its spin, angular momentum, or energy.”
Pug continued. “The corollary to Superposition is Entanglement. They’re not exactly the same...but yet they are...”
Youngblood stood and started pacing behind his desk. “What’s that?”
Pug hurried on. “Imagine if you could generate a single electron with only one spin state—say, spin-up. Then somewhere across the universe a corresponding electron with spin-down would instantly appear. Even if the two particles were separated by light years of space.”
Youngblood stopped pacing. “Wait a minute. Einstein showed that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. It’s the universe’s absolute speed limit. So, how can the second particle instantly appear light years away?”
“Nobody knows. But numerous experiments from particle accelerators seem to back it up.”
Youngblood rubbed his chin. “Yeah?”
“And an MIT scientist has recently shown if you could somehow sever this entanglement, each particle would revert to its unique, independent characteristics.”
“Like spin direction?”
“Yup. They call it a ‘quantum after-life.’”
Youngblood scratched his head. “But it’s a long way from a quantum particle to a human being.”
“Not as far as you might think, doc.”
“Merely a quantum leap,” Skip Mulcahy said dryly.
Pug groaned then soldiered on. “And there are those three pesky facts in this case that just won’t go away.”
Youngblood leaned back. “Okay, Pug. Put it all together for me. Make your case.”
Salazar took a deep breath and began. “I think our professor was seeking quantum immortality.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not totally sure. And while we may not believe it, I think Professor Jackson did—which is all that matters.”
He searched his colleagues’ faces.
“Go on, Pug,” Youngblood said, his tone softer.
“I have no evidence for this, beyond what we discovered during our investigation. But it appears the Professor subscribed to the ‘Many-Worlds’ theory of quantum physics.”
“‘Many-Worlds?’” Pam asked. “Is that like parallel universes?”
“I don’t think so. The theory, proposed in the 1950s, is a further extension of the principle of superposition. It postulates that every outcome of a quantum event exists in its own world. This results in an infinite number of parallel universes.”
“Again, I ask,” Youngblood said, “what has this got to do with real people?”
“Superposition and entanglement should apply to us as well. As long as we are part of a quantum system.”
“Do you believe that, Pug?”
“Doesn�
��t matter what I believe. Professor Jackson believed it. And he went to great effort to create such a quantum system—that little black box with its electron spin detector—and isolate it from the rest of our world. He believed he was in an intimate quantum relationship with that electron every time he pushed the button.”
Skip smiled. “I know some women I’d like to have that kind of relationship with.”
Youngblood ignored him. “But he must have known the risks of such an experiment.”
“He had Alzheimer’s disease, and he knew the risks of that,” Pam broke in. “He couldn’t bear the thought of losing his mental faculties and becoming a burden on others when he’d lived his entire life independently.”
Salazar nodded. “I also think he wanted to take one last swing at this idea, put it to a live test, not just leave it as a thought experiment.”
“To go where no man has gone before, huh?” Youngblood said. “My apologies to Captain Kirk.”
“Well, if he was right, the moment he pushed that button, he would be in both alive and dead worlds simultaneously—like Schroedinger’s cat. If the gun did fire, he’d be without awareness of himself...at least in that world. But if he remained aware of his existence, he had to be alive. When he pushed the button again, the same thing would happen. And again. Every time he pushed the button. Since only someone aware of his existence could continue to push the button, he would have achieved immortality. Quantum immortality.”
“Fascinating.” Youngblood picked up a pencil. “But what about the fully loaded gun?”
“I think he fully loaded the gun because he wanted to leave nothing to chance except the spin of the electron.”
The room was silent for a long time.
“The broken clock was perhaps a signal...”
“A signal? To whom?”
“To us. A clue to what he was trying to achieve. And maybe, in some way, a proof that the ‘Many-Worlds’ idea was valid. He broke the clock just before he pushed the button to document when he’d actually begun the experiment.”
A full week before his death?” Pam looked shocked.
“I think he’d been pushing that button continuously all week—and his body’s dehydration and malnutrition are further proof of that.”
“I’ve heard enough,” Youngblood said abruptly, sitting upright. “It’s time to wrap this up. The bottom line is that the man did kill himself.”
“Only in this world. And only because that lost hiker came along and severed the entanglement.”
“Maybe so, Pug, but it’s the only world we have. I’m willing to accept that it was a failed experiment, that the professor didn’t deliberately take his own life. I’m ruling it an accidental death.”
Salazar nodded. Youngblood was the ME. But he couldn’t shake a final thought: had the professor truly—irrevocably—died. Or was he still out there, in some other form, in some other universe?
8
The case was closed.
Pug kept repeating the words to himself, each time more forcefully.
The damned case was closed!
Two weeks had passed already. The daughter had buried her father, Dr. Youngblood had made his decision, and Pug had filed his own report. It was time to move on. Time to let it go.
But IT wouldn’t let HIM go. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, it nagged at him without mercy.
He glanced up from his desk. Busy squad bay. Everyone with new cases, new challenges. They weren’t obsessed. Not like he was.
The case was abso-frigging-lutely closed!
He clicked his pen in rat-a-tat succession, then flung it down. It might cost him his job, his career, his pension. But he would damn well do it anyway!
The case may be officially closed. But it wasn’t over yet. Not for him.
He lunged out of his chair and made for the parking lot.
~ * ~
It took him forty minutes to get to Alpine, another fifteen to reach the old crime scene. It was well past dark when he finally got there.
He crept up to the house and illuminated the inside with a flashlight through a window. Empty. No furniture; no objects d’art; no dishes in the sink. It was as empty and dark as a black hole.
He hauled his equipment from the SUV, easily defeated the front door lock, then lugged the gear inside: a folding card-table and director’s chair, and a battery-powered lamp—all items from his own patio. With exquisite care, he re-created exactly the scene he’d observed in the house almost three weeks earlier. (He’d ‘borrowed’ the garage door opener, black box, and winch from the Sheriff’s evidence room. “Additional forensic tests,” he explained to the deputy working there, who really didn’t give a damn as long as he had a signature on the log.)
He plugged the black box into the same wall outlet and connected it to the winch and metal triggering rod. He mounted his own .38 caliber revolver on the card table and aimed it forehead high at the empty folding chair. This time the gun was loaded with blank rounds instead of live cartridges. Finally, when the black box was warm to the touch, he was ready.
He switched off the lamp, listened and watched again.
No sound. No light. Nothing penetrated his little quantum world.
He knelt next to the chair and pushed the button.
Nothing happened.
No bang!
Even with blanks, the gun should have discharged if the electron was spin-down.
Not even a click.
Should have at least been a click if the electron was spin-up.
There was neither.
Salazar re-checked the components and all the connections. Everything looked the same as when he first saw them; the same as the set-up in the Ballistics Lab.
He pushed the button again.
Nothing.
He straightened up, hands on his hips. “What the hell!”
The cell phone’s chirp startled him: an incoming text message.
“Damn! Forgot to turn it off.” He thumbed the ‘Open’ button.
“Hello,” the message read.
“Who is this?” he sent back.
A grainy image slowly accumulated on the screen. Salazar drew a sharp breath as he recognized the blurry but unmistakable visage of Professor Jackson staring back at him.
“I was once Robert Walker Jackson,” the caption read.
Eyebrows crawling like caterpillars up his forehead, Pug texted back, “Is that you, Skip? Is this your idea of a joke?”
“I was Robert Walker Jackson,” the message repeated.
“C’mon! Who is this?”
Silence.
“Professor Jackson is dead. How can you be him?” Pug demanded.
“All that he once was, I am now.”
Best to humor the prankster. “WHERE, exactly, are you, Professor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you still alive?”
“I am aware of my thoughts.”
“Why are you here?”
“Why are you here? This was my house.”
Try another approach. “Why didn’t the gun fire? Or at least click?”
“Because there was no quantum event generated by the transistor?”
“Why not?”
“Because that action remains with me. Not with you. And not with the black box.”
With shaky hands, Pug typed back, “Is there anything else?”
“Yes, there is a message.”
“From whom?”
“I can’t answer that.”
Pug hesitated. Did he really want to read this? Gooseflesh crept down his arms. “What is the message?”
“The experiment was a success. Tell everyone that Professor Jackson was right.”
The cell phone went suddenly dark. The connection had been severed from the other end.
Pug stood motionless in the dark for many beats of his rapidly thumping heart, then finally walked to the wall and slid down it.
A wave of relief washed over him.
It was finally o
ver.
Now, the case—his case—was finally closed.
Praise for
Highland Press Books!
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~ Tami Cowden, Author
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The Man of Her Dreams by Leanne Burroughs is a delightful dip in the waters that bear ancient Viking ships from blood-soaked beaches to life-changing love. From modern day Florida to the days of the formidable Norse conquerors, Burroughs introduces us to Agnar and Miranda—two of the most unlikeliest lovers in any century. Miranda is tossed into a time and world far from her own, tethered to reality by a handsome Viking. Agnar catches a beautiful woman in the act of harming his ship—would she do any less to his life or his heart? Their love might have been kindled by the prayers of many, but it ignites through to-the-death battles, a desperate search for lost little ones, and the binding together of two broken people God chooses to bless despite their pasts. The Man of Her Dreams will have you looking for an ‘unnasta’ of your own.
~ Aysel Arwen, author
~ * ~
My Dream Came True – I have enjoyed all of Leanne Burroughs’ romance books. The newest, My Dream Came True, is certainly one of her best. Could not put it down. Anyone that is familiar with Viking lore will love it. There is also a Christian version (The Man of Her Dreams). I cannot wait for the next ones about Agnar’s brothers and sisters.
~ Jessie Lee Lindsey, Amazon
~ * ~
Highland Wishes by Leanne Burroughs. The storyline, set in a time when tension was high between England and Scotland, is a fast-paced tale. This reviewer was easily captivated by the story and was enthralled by it until the end. The reader will laugh and cry, feel all the pain, torment and disillusionment felt by both main characters, but also the joy and love they felt. Ms. Burroughs has crafted a well-researched story that gives a glimpse into Scotland during a time when there was upheaval and war for independence. This reviewer commends her for a wonderful job done.