The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

by Christopher Edge

  I climb inside the box, pulling my knees up to my chest to fit inside, and close the flaps behind me. In the corner, Mum’s laptop is still working away silently, a blur of zeroes and ones scrolling across the screen. A handful of feathers are scattered across the keyboard, and I quickly check that the Geiger counter and quantum entangler are still connected as I hear the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

  I grab hold of the banana, feeling it squish beneath my fingers. In the supermarket they give bananas a best-before date, but what I need to know now is its radioactive half-life. As soon as a single atom inside this banana decays, then the Geiger counter will click and get me out of this place.

  In every parallel universe I’ve found so far, Mum’s still been gone. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find her again. But then I remember what Dad said to me yesterday.

  “When your mum died, I felt lost. But you helped me face up to things, Albie. You made me see that life was still worth living.”

  Dad’s still lost in my own universe, but now I know he needs me too.

  I hold the banana next to the Geiger counter, praying that this time it’ll take me home.

  CLICK.

  Then the universe shivers and the box goes dark.

  I’m too scared at first to open the box, frightened at what I might find when I look outside. Stalling, I pick up Alba’s quantum entangler, unscrewing the lid of the thermos and tipping out the ammonite necklace into the palm of my hand. It was a great plan, I think to myself. Just a shame it didn’t work.

  I take a deep breath and then push open the flaps on top of the box. Everything is dark. The Quantum Banana Theory must have done its new trick of skipping from day to night in this switch to a brand-new universe. But as I climb out of the box and look around the room, I realize that it hasn’t taken me home.

  This isn’t my bedroom. The skylight’s in the same place, but there’s no telescope, no piles of books and comics on the floor. Then, as my eyes adjust to the gloom, I see something on the wall that makes me stop and stare.

  It’s Paddington Bear in his red hat and blue duffel coat. He’s sitting on a suitcase eating a marmalade sandwich. In fact, there are dozens of Paddington Bears all over the wall. This is the wallpaper I had in my nursery when I was a baby, and as I turn around, I see a white cot standing where my bed should be.

  I stand there frozen for a second—my brain flashing up error messages as I try to make sense of this. Then I hear the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, before the door is pushed open and somebody steps into the bedroom.

  “If it’s that cat again…”

  It’s my mum.

  I can see her framed in the light spilling in from the landing, her long, dark hair just the same as it was before she got ill. Mum peers toward the shadows where I’m standing.

  “Who’s there?”

  For a second I stay frozen, unable to believe that I’ve found her at last. Then I step forward out of the shadows.

  “It’s me—Albie.”

  Mum stares at me with a look of total confusion on her face. She puts her hand on her stomach, and when I look down at the bump there, I realize she’s pregnant. Then Mum’s knees start to buckle, and I rush forward to stop her from falling down.

  “You can’t be…,” she murmurs as I help her into the easy chair next to the door. Around her neck Mum’s wearing the ammonite necklace, the spiral fossil gleaming gold in the half-light. “It’s impossible.”

  I shake my head in reply.

  “You only find out what’s possible by trying to do the impossible. That’s what you told me, Mum.”

  I open my hand to show her what I’m holding. In my palm, the spiral ammonite on its chain gleams gold. A mirror image of the fossil on the chain around her neck.

  Mum stares at it in disbelief. Then she looks up at me with wonder in her eyes.

  “It is you,” she whispers, reaching out to touch my face. “I could never forget your eyes.”

  A tear rolls down Mum’s cheek, and I can’t quite work out why she’s sad. I’ve found her at last.

  “But how?” she says, the words coming out in a silent sigh.

  So I tell her everything. How she died and how Dad told me that quantum physics said there was another universe where she was still alive. How I invented the Quantum Banana Theory to find her again, kidnapping my next-door neighbor’s cat and traveling to parallel worlds. I tell her about my evil twin and how I had to steal a duck-billed platypus. I tell her about Alba and the accident and how Alba wanted me to let Mum know that she loves her. I tell her that my dad is lost without her—just like me.

  And she listens to me, holding my hand in hers, just like she always did.

  “So where’s all my stuff?” I ask her when I finally run out of breath, looking around the room. “Are you booting me out for the new baby?”

  Mum looks at me with tears in her eyes.

  “This is your room,” she says, her voice cracking a little. “You died when you were just a baby, Albie. The doctors did everything they could, but your heart just wasn’t strong enough.”

  I’m holding on to Mum’s hand, but I feel like I’m falling into a black hole. Dad’s book said that a parallel universe might have one tiny change, and in this universe it’s me.

  “It hit me and your dad very hard,” Mum says, wiping away a tear. “For years we kept your nursery just like it is now. We couldn’t even think of trying for another baby. I only got to hold you for a little while, but I didn’t think I’d ever feel the same way again. Then this year we found out that I’m pregnant. The scan says it’s going to be a little girl.”

  I’m biting my bottom lip so hard it almost bleeds, but I can’t stop myself from crying.

  I don’t know if I’m crying for the baby Albie, who never got the chance to grow up, or the baby sister I’ll never even know. For Alba, for Granddad Joe, even for my evil twin, but most of all for my mum.

  And Mum holds me as I cry, stroking my hair and telling me that she’s here.

  I look up at her kind face, just the same as I remember it. There’s still one question I need to ask.

  “Do you believe in heaven?”

  Mum cradles my head so I’m looking up at the skylight. I can see the stars shining there, tiny points of white against the blackness of the night.

  “Hundreds of years ago, they used to call the sky the heavens,” she tells me, the sound of her voice a warm, cozy blanket that I just want to snuggle down in. “The sun and the moon and all the thousands of stars they could see. Now we know that in our galaxy alone—the Milky Way—there are a hundred billion stars. And there are a hundred billion galaxies across the universe. Thousands of new stars are being born every second, and thousands are dying too. And when these stars explode in a supernova, they scatter the elements that make everything—hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and everything else—across the universe to make new stars and planets and, in the end, us.” Mum looks down at me with a gentle smile on her face. “There’s a piece of heaven inside you, and there’s a piece of heaven inside me. We’re all made of stardust.” Then she hugs me, whispering in my ear as she holds me tight. “I know there’s a heaven, Albie, because it’s given me the chance to see you again.”

  I hold on to my mum as tightly as I can. I never want this hug to end, but it has to.

  Everything I’ve done was because I couldn’t imagine the world without my mum, but now I know there’s someone else who needs me too.

  “I’ve got to go,” I say, wiping my eyes as I get to my feet. “I’ve got to get back for Dad.”

  Mum slowly nods, her eyes still shining with tears.

  “Goodbye, Albie,” she says. “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Mum. I always will.”

  Then I turn away and don’t look back as I crawl inside the cardboard box. If I turn around, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go. Closing the lid behind me, I hunch down in the bottom, my shoulders shaking as I try to stop myself fro
m crying my heart out. Then Dylan jumps onto my lap.

  At first I think he’s going to claw me, but instead he just purrs and I hold him tight as the laptop screen fills with a blur of numbers. I don’t even know if the Quantum Banana Theory can take us home. Dad said there could be an infinite number of parallel universes, but Dylan seems to think I know the way back.

  “We’ve just got to wait for a particle to decay,” I whisper in his ear, his fur warm and sticky against my face. “Then we’ll see where we end up this time.”

  And that’s when Dylan decides to eat the banana.

  As soon as he takes a bite, Dylan starts to make a really weird noise like he’s coughing up a hairball backward. His claws dig into my legs and his meow now sounds like a death rattle. I’m trapped inside a box with a psychopathic cat, and it looks like he’s turning zombie on me.

  Dad’s book said that when a radioactive particle decays, the universe splits in two. But the book also said that if anything interferes with the particle, this creates “quantum decoherence” and the universe collapses into a single state. And with the radioactive particle inside the banana now in Dylan’s stomach, I reckon this counts as pretty major interference. The only question is: will Dylan’s midnight feast zap us back to our own universe, or send us spiraling into a black hole?

  Then Dylan throws up the banana, peel and all, all over the Geiger counter.

  As he slowly unclenches his claws, I notice through a crack in the lid of the box that it’s light outside. It’s gone from night to day again. The universe must have changed without me even noticing.

  I don’t know what I’m going to find outside, but Dylan isn’t hanging around to worry about that. He pushes the cardboard flaps open with his nose and shoots out of the box like a cat out of hell.

  “What’s that?”

  I peek out of the box to see my dad standing in the doorway of my bedroom, looking down in surprise as Dylan races between his legs and straight down the stairs.

  I look around the room carefully, making sure that this time I’ve found the right universe. Everything seems to be there—my telescope, my books, my comics—and as I look at the poster of the solar system above my bed, all the planets are in the right place with the right number of moons. It looks like I’m home.

  When Dylan took a bite out of the banana, he must have short-circuited the experiment. The Quantum Banana Theory got a factory reset, restoring us to our original universe. I let out a sigh of relief. I owe that cat another LolCat treat.

  Dad looks at me quizzically as I climb out of the cardboard box.

  “Your granddad said you’d come home early from school.”

  I nod, waiting for the lecture to start about how we should all be getting back to normal.

  “Me too,” he says, and then I see his eyes fill with tears as he wraps his arms around me. I’m crying too now, but through my sobs I can hear Dad telling me that we’re going to be OK.

  Despite what the book the vicar gave me said about five stages of grief, I don’t think there’s a set of rules you follow when you lose someone you love. All you can do is hope you’ll find a way through.

  Dad pulls a tissue out of his pocket and pushes it into my hand.

  “Seeing as we’ve both finished early,” he says, his arm still holding me tight as I wipe my tears away, “how about we do something together instead?”

  Mum’s gone, but Dad’s still here and we’ve got to go on living. That’s what Mum wanted. And that’s what we’re going to do.

  The school hall is packed for the science fair. All the tables are set up in rows like it’s exam time, but instead of boring tests, each one is displaying a different science project. There’s Olivia Appleby’s potato-powered clock, Michael Bedford’s robot racers, and Meera Patel’s dry-ice bubble maker, Meera poking each giant bubble with a knitting needle and making them pop in a shower of smoke.

  All the mums and dads from Class 6 are wandering around the aisles, looking proud as they inspect the experiments. There’s a small crowd gathered at Victoria Barnes’s table as she shows off her working model of Mount Vesuvius. Pouring in a bottle of vinegar, Victoria steps back theatrically as an eruption of lava foams out of the crater at the top. The orange-red gloop spills down the sides of her papier-mâché volcano, wiping out the Lego town of Pompeii and covering the toy soldiers and plastic farm animals in a layer of pretend lava. Everyone claps and Victoria looks dead smug, like she’s got first prize in the bag.

  But Miss Benjamin is already starting to shepherd everyone outside, following Kiran, Dad, and me as we carry the huge balloon through the double doors and out into the playground. As I walk past Wesley MacNamara’s table, he gives me a friendly grin. Wesley’s standing in front of a poster that reads “DUCK-BILLED PLATYPUS—ALIEN OR NOT?” In a glass case on his table is the stuffed platypus that Dad convinced the Clackthorpe Museum of Natural History and Mechanical Wonders to lend to the school for the science fair. I don’t think I have to worry about getting a dead arm anymore.

  The rest of the school is waiting outside in the playground, every class lined up with their teacher to see the science fair’s grand finale. Everyone’s excited to see the celebrity from TV—otherwise known as my dad—although some of the little ones from Early Years look a bit disappointed that he’s not from the kids’ channel.

  Following Dad’s advice, Kiran dropped the idea of sending his My Little Pony balloons into space, and instead we’re using a high-altitude weather balloon that Dad borrowed from his TV show. Fixed to the bottom of this is Alba’s quantum entangler, and inside that I’ve put Mum’s ashes.

  “I’m sorry these aren’t going to be the first ashes sent into space,” I tell Kiran as we reach the middle of the playground. “That guy from Star Trek got there first.”

  Kiran shakes his head as we look up into the clear blue sky.

  “Your mum’s going to be the first Nobel Prize winner in space,” he says. “She was a scientific genius. That’s what they said on the TV.”

  Since I used Mum’s laptop in the quantum banana experiment, all its data got sent back to CERN via the Grid. When the scientists there looked at what Mum’s data said, they all got very excited. They say the data she found might actually prove that parallel universes exist. It’s never happened before, but some people are saying Mum might even be given the Nobel Prize in Physics, even though she’s passed away.

  Dad puts his hand on my shoulder as I hold on to the balloon. I can feel the helium inside tugging on my wrist, pulling my arm toward the sky.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  Most of the time you need to hold on tight to the things you love. It’s just like flying a kite. But sometimes you realize that you need to let them go.

  Looking up at my dad, I nod. Then I open my hand.

  Everyone cheers as the balloon shoots up into the sky. Shielding my eyes, I watch it rise. It’s the size of a beach ball now, getting smaller with every second. Beneath the balloon I can still just see the quantum entangler glinting in the sunlight. The altimeter fixed to it will automatically open the lid when it hits the edge of space, scattering Mum’s ashes.

  We’re all made of stardust. And when I look up at the sky at night—into the heavens—Mum will always be there.

  From radioactive bananas to cats that are both dead and alive at the same time, here’s more about the real-life science in The Many Worlds of Albie Bright.

  Wait a minute, are bananas really radioactive?

  Here’s the info: A single banana contains at least 0.1 microsievert of radiation. That’s about the same amount of radiation you’d be exposed to if you lived next door to a nuclear power plant for a year. But don’t worry, this level of radiation isn’t harmful to you. In fact, if your dentist gives you an X-ray, you’re actually exposed to 10 microsieverts of radiation. That’s one hundred times the dose you’d get from a single banana.

  But what about Schrödinger’s cat? Did that crazy scientist really try to poison poor Ti
ddles?

  Sadly, we don’t know if Erwin Schrödinger had a pet cat called Tiddles. His famous experiment is actually a thought experiment—a way of imagining the weird world of quantum physics.

  What exactly is quantum physics?

  Until the end of the nineteenth century, scientists thought that atoms—the tiny particles that make up all matter—were the smallest things that existed, but then they discovered that atoms were made of even smaller particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons. Quantum physics is the theory that scientists have developed to describe and explain how these subatomic particles behave.

  Like a single atom being in more than one place at the same time?

  Exactly! When Albie’s dad tells him about the double-slit experiment, he’s describing an actual experiment that scientists can perform in real life. If they repeatedly fire electrons at a detector plate with two slits set in front of it, scientists discover something very strange. Over time, a pattern builds up on the detector plate—a pattern that could be produced only if waves of electrons were interfering with each other. This should be impossible, because the scientists only fire a single electron at a time.

  And in 1926, Erwin Schrödinger came up with an equation to explain this “waveform.”

  An equation for what?

  Schrödinger’s equation describes how the electron exists as a wave of probability. This means the electron is spread throughout space, all at once, but there is a higher probability of finding it in some places than others. Some scientists say the “interference pattern” on the detector plate is produced by the electron taking every possible path to the detection plate—at the same time!

  But…but…but—that’s crazy!

  Wait a second, it gets even weirder! If a scientist tries to track the path of the electron, the interference pattern disappears and the electron acts like a particle—not a wave—going through either the left- or right-hand slit. To explain this, a Danish physicist named Niels Bohr came up with a theory that became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation.