The Heisenberg Corollary

by C H Duryea

  From their vantage, they could see the Tozzk torpedo bores. The red glow flickered and went dark for a moment. Then it flared.

  And the Squarenose’s square nose exploded in a fiery mini-nova. As the Friendly Card swooped over the doomed warship, a chain reaction of detonations consumed it, literally, from stem to stern.

  They careened past it, away from the station, through the nebula, and back into the blackness of interstellar space.

  Vibeke released control of the stick back to the pilot’s station.

  “Punch it!” she shouted.

  Zeke punched it.

  “Faster!” she cried. He cranked the engines up to full burn. “Frogger online! Engaging—now!”

  They jumped, and everything went black—and stretchy.

  Ten

  Zeke’s vision cleared, and they were still in the blackness of interstellar space.

  He just didn’t know which space it was.

  He looked over and Vibeke was pulling off the NeuralNav, moving languidly. She tilted her head back as she disconnected the leads from her forehead, temples and neck. The fiber optics caught a flare of light from a nearby star and made her look like she was trailing an intricate and delicate web of light-strands, like something beautiful and mysterious and utterly other-worldly. Then the flare faded, and she was Vibeke again, looking strangely withdrawn.

  At least she was conscious this time.

  He released his harness and pulled himself out of the seat as Vibeke stowed the headgear and stood as well. For a moment they crowded the tight real estate between the two chairs.

  “What?” Zeke said, attempting affability. “No kiss this time?”

  He couldn’t tell if the joke had fallen flat or not. But when she looked down and slinked around him towards the cockpit door, he figured it had.

  By the time he followed, Augie and Harbinger were rushing up out of the engine bay, barely able to contain their elation. Across the cabin, Vibeke passed the autoslop and stopped and braced herself in the narrow accessway by the sack tubes. She kept her head down.

  “That was in-sane,” Harbinger said. “You would have had to roll a double-negative to make that one!”

  “Some flying, ace,” Augie said, clapping Zeke on the shoulder.

  “Not me,” Zeke said. He nodded towards Vibeke’s uncommunicative back. “It was almost all her.”

  Augie and Harbinger turned.

  “Huh,” Harbinger said.

  “That was fast,” Augie said.

  Zeke spun back around. “What did you two do?”

  “Well,” Harbinger said, stretching out the word into a drawl, “when we upgraded the Card’s cortical matrix, I was able to code some additional plasticity into the NeuralNav. I wrote that code to the onboard mainframe—and incorporated the Nav into the ship’s computer. I figured it would streamline the interface.”

  “Nice work,” Zeke said, “She can drive the whole bucket now.”

  “I didn’t think it would happen so quickly.”

  “Just as well. I was getting tired of being the bus driver anyway.”

  “There’s gratitude for you,” Augie said.

  A thought came to Zeke. “While you guys were busy merging our disparate technologies,” he said, “did you also hook her up to the Frogger?”

  Augie and Harbinger exchanged glances.

  “No,” Augie said. “We didn’t.”

  Narissa and Qaant Yke emerged from the hold, lugging a module with some of the hardware she had obtained back at the station. She put the module down and pulled out a handful of the square metal currency that had made them so temporarily rich.

  She sidled up next to Augie, jiggling some of the pieces in her hand.

  “These are probably valueless now,” she said. “Should have spent them all before we left.”

  “Maybe we can use them for raw material?” Augie said.

  “I’ll run a metallurgical,” Harbinger said.

  Narissa looked pensive.

  “Do you guys feel weird?” she asked.

  “What’s wrong?” Augie replied.

  “I don’t know. Just feel weird. It’s probably nothing.”

  “There has been a valence shift,” Qaant Yke said.

  They turned to him.

  “A shift in what properties?” Harbinger asked.

  “I do not have the appropriate translation,” the alien said. “A valence shift.”

  “How do you know?” Augie asked.

  “I can taste it.”

  “Well, when you can tell us what you’re valence tastes like,” Harbinger said, “let us know.”

  “We should probably try and figure out where we are this time,” Narissa said.

  As they had been speaking, Zeke kept on eye on Vibeke’s silhouette, still leaning against the aft accessway wall.

  The others carried on with their discussion, which Zeke should have been very interested in, but instead, he walked across the cabin, past the autoslop and into the accessway.

  “Buy you a cup of mud?” he asked when he came to her.

  She turned and looked up at him and her eyes were on fire, filled with exhilaration and awe—and a dash of terror.

  “There are no words,” she whispered.

  “For what?”

  “No words to describe it. The jump. What it feels like. What it’s like from the inside.”

  “I’m willing to listen,” he said. “Want to give it a try?”

  It was as if a switch was turned inside her. Vibeke drew herself up straight, turned to face Zeke directly, grabbed twin handfuls of his shirt, and kissed him hard.

  “You know I was just kidding before, right?” he asked after she pulled back for breath.

  She said nothing, but she slapped a button on the wall and a sack tube hatch hissed open directly behind him. She pushed him inside and followed, closing the hatch behind her.

  The Friendly Card cruised on her own inertia—without bearing. This was not an indication of a problem, it was merely a function of the fact that her crew, at present, had nowhere to go. And interstellar space was big enough that choosing one direction over the other didn’t seem to make any immediate difference.

  Especially when said space was twice removed from their native continuum.

  The crew migrated to different corners of the ship. Harbinger sat at his station in the engine compartment, running a metallurgical analysis on the currency they had brought from the last continuum, as well as the titanium lichen-poop. Qaant Yke retreated to an isolated corner in the hold and engaged in what looked like some form of meditation involving little figures made of shell, which he thoughtfully manipulated like pieces of a chess board on the deck surrounding him. Narissa practiced her martial arts in a makeshift gym in the main cabin, and Augie was on the flight deck—primarily because the Card’s first shift flight crew was decidedly not.

  In the cramped semi-privacy of the sack tube, Zeke and Vibeke reclined against each other under a tangle of bunched blankets. Zeke watched unfamiliar constellations through the viewport and the bright point of the nearby star system.

  Vibeke stared into an altogether different kind of space. He couldn’t tell what she was looking at.

  “So are we going to do this every time we jump?” he asked.

  She sighed. “Did you have to ruin the moment by talking?”

  “I just want to know if we need to include it in our post-jump protocols.”

  “Don’t get any fancy ideas,” she said. “That was emergency sex. Nothing more.”

  “All in a day’s work,” he answered. “So, tell me. How were you able to access the Frogger?”

  “Are you really going to make me talk about this?”

  “It’s important,” Zeke said. “Augie and Chuck told me they didn’t code any channels between NeuralNav and the Frogger. But you went there anyway. The NeuralNav is written to your epineurology. I just want to know how much of your wiring is—”

  She sat up and turned to him.
/>   “Is what?”

  “How much of your wiring is tied into the ship now—and into the Frogger.”

  Zeke immediately realized he had said the wrong thing, just exactly at the point when it was too late to stop himself.

  Vibeke turned and threw the blanket aside. She grabbed her jumpsuit from the foot of the bunk and yanked it up with a snap.

  “Gosh, Vibeke,” she said as she thrust her legs into the suit. “I just wanna make sure you’re all right. I’m worried about what that machine might be doing to you.”

  Zeke opened his mouth—then closed it. Saying that of course he was worried about her would make no difference now.

  “Well, save your energy, Doctor Travers.” She shoved her arms into the sleeves and closed the suit with a forceful jerk of the zipper. “You don’t have to worry—I promise I won’t contaminate your precious little machine!”

  She smacked the door button and climbed out of the tube, the hatch hissing shut behind her.

  “Because that precious little machine is all that can get us home,” he grumbled to the empty air. And because there wasn’t anything else to do, he rooted through the bedding in search of his pants.

  He was still looking when the comm beeped. He toggled the pickup.

  “What?”

  “I—hope I’m not interrupting,” Augie said.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “I thought you might be interested to know that the local star system sports a planet in the Goldilocks belt that appears to have liquid water on it.”

  He found his shirt and pulled it on. “Atmosphere?”

  “So it seems.”

  Zeke punched a second button. “Chuck, can you run spectroscopy?”

  “Already on it, boss.”

  “If it’s got air, can we breathe it?”

  “We’ll live. Just don’t hyperventilate, unless you want a nitrous oxide high.”

  “I don’t know about you guys,” Zeke said, “but I could really use some time on terra firma.”

  “Terra it most definitely is not,” Augie said. “And firma remains to be seen.”

  “Just the same,” he said as he found his pants. “I also want to run a thorough diagnostic on this tub, and it would be easier if we didn’t have to do it in a vacuum.”

  “Concurring,” Harbinger said.

  “What’s our ETA?”

  “About two hours at our current speed,” Augie said. “But we can make it in four minutes if we book it.”

  “I don’t want to book it anywhere at the moment. Plot a course for the planet and put the Card on auto-pilot. Everyone in the main cabin in five. It’s past time for a meeting of the minds.”

  “Such as they are,” Augie said and toggled off.

  Zeke found his boots and pulled them on, then he pulled himself out of the tube. Narissa was coming aft towards the engine room, shiny with post-workout sweat, tapping at the screen of a datatab.

  “Exercising or number crunching?” Zeke asked.

  “Both,” she said. She lowered the tablet and looked up at him. “You could have handled that better.”

  “Ever heard of privacy? You sound like my mother.”

  “How dare you, you punk,” she retorted with a smirk. “I’m less like your mother than I am your kick-ass older sister who’s not averse to throwing you to the floor and sitting on you until you give in. Besides, privacy is something we won’t get much of as long as we’re on this boat, so for all of our sakes, polish up on your lady skills.”

  “Easier said than done. She makes me want to go EVA without a suit.”

  “Go easy on her, kid.”

  “Easy?” he said. “Me? Go easy on her? You do remember who we’re talking about, right? I’m just trying to keep us alive.”

  “You’re the reason she’s out here, dumb-bell,” Narissa said. “It would be prudent to cut her a little slack, given her endocrine numbers.”

  “You don’t mean she’s—“

  “No, she’s not. But remember when we had her in the MediMech?”

  “Yeah—I asked you what you found out, and you told me to table it, so I did.”

  “She was a hormonal and neurological firestorm, and I can only assume the NeuralNav has something to do with it.”

  “You’re sure it’s not me?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. No mere male could trigger these kinds of numbers—not entirely, at least. But there’s more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She toggled the holo mode on the datatab, pulling up two diagnostic displays and sliding them side by side. Each data set revolved slowly above the screen.

  “The left side is the operational specs of the Nav unit, which is wired exclusively to Vee’s neurology. The right side is my last mapping of the Frogger’s cognitive matrix.”

  “They look the same,” Zeke said.

  “The Frogger seems to be mirroring the NeuralNav’s affinity for your copilot.”

  “Maybe she should stay off the Nav until we know more.”

  Narissa shook her head. “Probably a bad idea.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Several. One: That device is lighting up her pleasure centers like it’s the Fourth of July. We don’t know what kind of neurological or emotional toll taking her off of it would exert. Two: Looking at this, I can’t say for sure whether or not the Frogger will even work without her anymore. And three,” she poked him hard in the chest with three fingers, “because of the time you two spend together up on the flight deck, all those happy chemicals running through her system are strongly associated with you. Don’t mess with that.”

  Zeke shook his head. “I’m not sure if she even likes me, Narissa. I’m certainly not making her happy at the moment.”

  “Well maybe if you didn’t spend so much time in the lab,” she said, patting him maternally on the cheek, “you’d understand women a little better.”

  “We’re all scientists here. I’m not the only nerd on this ship.”

  Eleven

  The Friendly Card’s main cabin was a multi-purpose space. It could be used for cargo, it could be set up as a lab or a comm station, or it could be set up for passengers. On this trip, the main cabin was all of the above. When Zeke came in, a table had been telescoped out of a recess in the wall by the autoslop. A few chairs were mounted around the table’s perimeter, and the two instrument consoles each had a couple of swivel seats. Vibeke sat at the table with a cup of coffee, trying hard to look like she wasn’t intentionally not looking at Zeke. Which was awkward with just the two of them there. Luckily, Augie soon came down from the flight deck and soon after, Narissa, Harbinger and Qaant Yke arrived from aft.

  Everyone found a seat except for Qaant Yke, who stood stock still in a corner like some kind of sentinel.

  “So what’s new, folks?” Harbinger quipped, rolling a pair of D20s in his fingers.

  “Those?” Narissa asked, toweling cleansing gel from her hair. “Not your usual dice.”

  “Oh, yes.” He held them up. They were dark metallic, unlike the plastic ones Harbinger usually had clattering on him. “I bought them on the station. The icons on each face are strange, but both objects have twenty sides—I’m betting the icons are corresponding numbers.”

  “Right,” Narissa said. “As long they weren’t made by some seven-fingered race with a base-14 numerical system.”

  “Not our most pressing issue at the moment,” Augie remarked.

  “There are a few issues,” Zeke said, “we should get on the whiteboard, so to speak.”

  “Just a few?” Harbinger asked.

  “I think we’re looking at a two-prong flow chart with our primary problems at the top. All the other pressing issues we face are offshoots of the top two.”

  “Which are?” Narissa prompted.

  “The first relates to the two jumps we’ve made.”

  “We’re finally part of our own research. We’ve been talking about this day for years.”

  “Not al
l of us,” Vibeke said. “Qaant Yke? Have you been talking about this day for years?”

  The alien said nothing.

  “Nope,” Vibeke said. “Definitely not all of us.”

  Augie put a gentle hand on hers.

  “We’re all sensitive to the fact that you did not ask for this.”

  “Thanks, Agosto,” Vibeke said. “Okay then. Our first two jumps. What about them?”

  “When we built the Frogger, we only had a theoretical model of the multiverse.”

  “It’s still theoretical,” Narissa said.

  “Exactly,” Zeke said. “We were fairly certain from a mathematical standpoint that other universes were out here, but from inside of our bubble of space-time, it was impossible to know what the properties of those other continua would be. Universes of green cheese. Or universes in a big bang state. If the Tozzk hadn’t attacked, I would never have been so quick to make a blind jump into an environment that we couldn’t predict.”

  “So, we got lucky?” Vibeke asked.

  “In physics,” Narissa said, “there’s no such thing as luck. It’s steadfastly and reliably deterministic. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Zeke?”

  “Entanglement,” Zeke answered.

  “Meaning?” Vibeke asked.

  Zeke deferred to Narissa. “Your theory, Doctor Brand.”

  “Mathematically speaking,” Narissa said, “in an infinite multiverse, there should be an infinitude of universes very much like our own. But even that infinitude would be an infinitesimal sliver of the total number of universes out there. The odds of our blind jumping to another universe where the laws of physics behave more or less the way we expect is astronomical. But jumping from that universe to yet another with even close to the same properties? There aren’t enough atoms in our home universe to calculate those odds.”

  “Which suggests two possibilities,” Vibeke said. “One is that there are a lot more universes like ours than you had hypothesized, and the other is that something that should be completely random—is, in fact, not random at all.”

  “And old man Occam,” Harbinger said, “is rolling in his grave.”

  “Which is where Narissa’s entanglement theory comes in,” Augie said.