Entangled

by Albert Sartison

  “I’ll try,” Aaron had replied, but deep down he knew he did not need anyone. He was often glad to speak with somebody, but that was enough for him. In his youth, he had been able to talk to strangers without drawing breath. Now, however, every topic seemed a vanity, unworthy of discussion.

  That evening, which was to be his last in hospital, he once again took a stroll around the hospital grounds to watch the sunset. This time around he was alone. The nurse he had become good friends with was on holiday, and he had not wanted to walk with the other one. She was too strict and boring so he had sneaked outside without her noticing.

  Sitting on a bench, he watched as the sun set unhurriedly behind the horizon, bathing everything around him in twilight and the cool evening air.

  At long last, the sun disappeared behind the distant mountain ridges and it was completely dark.

  Probably time to go back to the ward, Aaron thought to himself. He got up but feeling suddenly dizzy, he flopped back down onto the bench. Was it really happening again?

  He was not afraid. He did not want to die, but he did not want to cling to life at any cost either. He had had a good life. He had had Jessica. They had raised two wonderful children who had given them the gift of beautiful grandchildren. Life on earth would go on, but it was time for him to go.

  His soul grew calm and his thoughts were clear. Despite the discomfort, he even found it interesting. He was curious to know what would happen next. Aaron felt his consciousness fading away and he was sinking into darkness. He closed his eyes for the last time. What will be, will be. No matter what awaited him ahead, his journey on this earth had come to an end.

  6

  There was a strange noise, as if from an arc of electricity creeping between high-voltage power lines, getting increasingly louder. At first it seemed to be an illusion, but the sound had gotten stronger, acquired new shades. It was now possible to make a clear distinction between the low hum and the high-pitched squeal.

  The strange hum was joined by muffled noises. These were jerky and disconnected, and unlike anything else. It was quite some noise. Suddenly, the electrical noise began to subside and other sounds drew nearer. They were becoming increasingly louder and increasingly clearer. It was as if someone was gradually pulling cotton wool out of his ears.

  The first thing that Aaron felt was the blood throbbing in his temples. He started to become aware of his body. Something was wrong. He was unable to move at all. Opening his eyes also proved impossible. There was something new about this. It was not that he lacked the strength, it just felt like all his muscles were numb.

  He was able to breathe freely and easily though, without the familiar wheeze he had picked up in the factory. His sense of smell was able to distinguish between dozens of different aromas. He could smell a leather armchair, like in a car. And the smell of steel. But that was not all. There was also the smell of some kind of flowers. It was a whole bouquet of flowers. A huge variety of both the familiar and the exotic. They blended perfectly into one, complementing each other. No, it was a woman’s perfume. Yes, that was it. It was a woman’s perfume. Christ! It was the scent that Jessica had been wearing when they had first met. Sitting on that cramped settee at the student party, Aaron had stared at Jess’s alluring body and breathed in her smell. It was a perfume he would never forget and never confuse with anything else. Even in a thousand years. And right now, that was exactly what he could smell.

  Gradually, Aaron realised that his eyes were still closed. He tried to open them, but his eyelids seemed to have been glued shut. Managing to open them with some difficulty, he could once again see only blurred outlines. He was obviously not at home in his flat. Which meant it was the same as before. This time, however, he remembered what had happened. He had been in the park when the third attack had happened. He had not called for help, but even if he had, it was unlikely anyone would have heard him. It was already starting to get dark and the park was deserted. He had not had the strength to call out, or the desire. But it seemed that once again he had been lucky...

  “Here, let me wipe your eyes for you,” a voice said. “Aaron, don’t blink. I said don’t blink,” repeated the voice. “There, that’s better. You can try opening them now.”

  Instead of the usual hospital surroundings, his eyes were met with a stylishly furnished room containing several beautiful armchairs. His eyes were struck by the sense of harmony and the exquisite style of the décor. The chairs had graceful, sweeping curves and went with the chestnut parquet flooring perfectly. Whatever it looked like, it certainly looked nothing like the usual cheerless surroundings one found in a hospital.

  There were two people standing next to one of the chairs. They did not look like doctors, but rather scientists of some kind. Their faces looked both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

  “Where am I?” asked Aaron, finally.

  “Welcome back,” said one of them.

  “Back where?”

  “Back to reality.”

  “What kind of reality?”

  “Aaron, you are at work. You volunteered to take part in an experiment. The experiment went well and now it is over.”

  Aaron spent a few seconds thinking over what had just been said.

  “I don’t remember anything about an experiment,” he said after a short pause.

  “You will remember with time.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  Aaron looked around and saw that he was in one of the armchairs. He tried to sit up, but the wires attached to his head pulled him back. He instinctively reached up to remove them and slid his hand along his temple. His fingers sank into thick, soft hair.

  “What the hell?!” he muttered, touching his thick head of hair. His hair had fallen out many years ago, and there were so few hairs left that he always trimmed them down to the root.

  He transferred his gaze to the people standing in front of him with a silent question in his eyes. They were observing him closely, but did not hurry to explain. They studied his reaction with interest.

  “What is going on here?”

  “What do you mean?” asked one of them.

  “Why am I feeling so... strange?”

  “Do you feel ill?”

  “No, the opposite. I feel as if... Like before... It’s as if I’ve become younger...”

  Aaron knew that he was in a very strange situation. This kind of excitement always used to make his heart start to hurt, but not now. It was beating quickly, but there was no pain, no dizziness. His whole body felt... alien.

  “You are young, Aaron. What are you talking about?”

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Not at all. You have simply not yet fully recovered after the entanglement.”

  “After what?”

  One of those present moved closer to the chair.

  “Here’s the thing, Aaron. You are working on a quantum entanglement experiment with us. As a matter of fact you’re our team leader, if you still can’t remember that either. I’ll bring you up to speed, while you’re recovering.”

  The speaker pulled over a small chair on wheels and sat on it.

  “We had been conducting experiments on subatomic particle entanglement and had advanced from these to larger objects. At first we were able to entangle whole atoms, then several atoms, and then tens and even hundreds. We entangled everything we could get our hands on. Lithium, calcium, iron, gold, uranium. After a few years, we were able to demonstrate the effect on molecules. Simple ones at first, and then complex ones.

  “And then you had the idea of experimenting on live objects - you started with viruses and then moved on to small bacteria. We even managed to entangle whole bacterial colonies. Well, not as a whole, but each bacterium individually.

  “And that’s when it started to get really interesting. After the experiments with the bacterial colonies, we noticed that they had started to behave strangely.”

  “What do yo
u mean, strangely?”

  The second person joined in the conversation.

  “They started to predict future events, Aaron.”

  “Did the bacteria tell you this themselves?”

  The faces of the strangers broke into smiles. It was obvious they were feeling less tense, and their body movements had become more relaxed.

  “I see you’re starting to feel more like yourself,” said one of them, pleased.

  All the time they had been talking, he had been holding an ampoule containing some kind of transparent liquid. Now, however, he put it to one side and continued gesticulating vigorously.

  “One marvellous day it happened,” he said, and his hands drew intricate shapes in the air. “And as so often happens in science, it was a complete accident. One of our trainees noticed it. Her task had been to keep an eye on the colonies and feed them nutrients. Usually, she took a pipette and carefully put drops of agar in the places where the bacteria had formed the most densely-populated colonies. Well, you know that when a bacterial culture is growing in a petri dish, they do not usually distribute themselves evenly across the whole surface, but form clusters. Here and there, wherever they like most.

  “So, one day, she decided to feed the bacteria that had survived the experiment. At the most inopportune moment, her hand gave a jerk. Or she brushed against the dish... It’s not important. What is important is that the nutrient solution spattered the inside of the dish randomly.

  “Now if she had been the usual airhead like most of today’s students then she would probably have just thrown the dish away so nobody noticed. But she is an observant girl and noticed that the spatters had landed exactly where the colony clusters were. At which point she immediately went to you and told you everything.”

  “And then?”

  “You really can’t remember?”

  “When you’re recounting it, it sounds familiar, but I can’t actually remember it myself,” replied Aaron.

  “OK. Well after that, you wouldn’t rest. And you gave us hell, as well. We set up dozens of experiments in similar conditions. The bacterial colonies that had been subjected to the experiment really were able to predict almost faultlessly where the random drops of mixture would fall, and formed clusters in exactly these places. Before the experiment, they did not possess this ability. In truth, the more time that passed after the experiment, the weaker the effect became, but the important thing was that it existed at all. We measured it an infinite number of times. It is not a mistake, it is a scientifically proven fact.”

  Aaron had been listening carefully, looking at both of them in turn. Their faces stirred up in him a whole range of long-forgotten feelings.

  “And? Did we find out why?” he asked finally.

  “We developed a theory.”

  “Which is...?”

  “We have based it on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to this, at any moment in time, our Universe disintegrates into a multitude of worlds when one of the quantum objects comes out of superposition. When we entangle bacteria, we are opening up a window for them to one of the parallel universes. This universe is a copy of our world, except for the quantum state of a single elementary particle. We don’t know which exactly, but that’s not important.”

  “But how are the bacteria able to see into the future? If I understand you correctly, the bacteria are simply seeing a parallel world. An alternative present, in other words.”

  “Well, when I mentioned the window, I was talking very metaphorically. In truth, it is a lot more complex than that. The other universe, if you’re looking at it from our world, does not continue to exist in parallel, but collapses for an infinitely small period of time into a singularity. In the tunnel between the worlds, time is indeterminate, it ceases to exist. Therefore, for the observer from our Universe, time here stands still, but the alternative reality continues to exist for as long as the observer himself continues to exist there. After that, he would return to our world as if he had been living one of the alternative lives. Since another universe only differs from our own by one quantum state, it corresponds to ours almost exactly.”

  Aaron lay back in his chair and stared at the ceiling in thought.

  “So what you mean is that I’ve seen my own future?”

  “You have seen your life in a parallel universe, which differs from ours by one quantum state. But our world continues to parallelise in other universes, so you saw just one probably very similar alternative. The further into the future it is, the more our world will differ from the one you saw.”

  Aaron breathed deeply. Once again, he caught the aroma of Jessica’s perfume. Could he be dreaming? He was scared to even think it in case he inadvertently woke himself up.

  “Jessica... is she here?” he asked cautiously.

  “She’s not feeling well, she popped in half an hour ago and said she’d be in your office. She said she was going to lie down for a rest.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” asked Aaron anxiously.

  “Just normal pregnancy stuff. You’re expecting a child.”

  “Our third?”

  “Actually, it’s your second.”

  Aaron jumped up, ripping off the wires that had been velcroed to his head with a jerk.

  “Where’s my office?”

  “You’ve forgotten?”

  “In fifty years, you’ll forget too.”

  “As you come out of here, turn right immediately then go down to the end and it’s the second to last door.”

  Aaron ran towards the doors. Flinging them open, he came out into an enormous room and stopped in surprise, looking around. The sun was staring down through the glass ceiling, illuminating everything around him with a bright yellow light. In the middle of the room were some coffee shop tables, where a few visitors were sitting. Palm trees stood here and there between the tables and, a little further, there was the murmur of a small artificial waterfall. The world around had been painted in impossibly bright colours, and the aromas in the air seemed to be just as clear and bright. He could smell the coffee from the café, the smell of vanilla. There was also the very faint smell of water.

  He looked around again and then started to run as fast as he could. Aaron ran as though his legs had grown wings. It was only now, as he was running, that he could feel how much strength there was in his body. His heart was working like clockwork, no pain, no breathlessness, and his legs felt like they could run forever. He ran quicker and quicker. He wanted to reach his office before he woke up. Just a second would be enough for him to see Jessica. Alive. He could hear the wind in his ears from the running.

  The sacred door turned out to be glass, lightly coloured. He stopped by the door, took hold of the cold, steel door handle and held his breath. If it was a dream, then as soon as he walked through the door he would wake up. Since Jessica passed away, he had had a million dreams in which she had slipped away from him at the last moment. Aaron exhaled and stepped inside.

  The room was immersed in semi-darkness and was filled with the smell of a perfume like no other, a perfume he knew well.

  Jessica was lying on the couch with her hand covering her face. Hearing that someone had come in, she removed her hand from her face and looked at him.

  “Well? How did the experiment go?” she asked calmly.

  Without a word, Aaron walked towards her, lowered himself to his knees beside the couch and embraced her carefully. Burying his face in her hair, he took a deep breath and could sense her body, her smell. In his head it was as if a magical book had been opened providing memories which were raining down on him. Aaron spent a few seconds trying to hold himself together but then began weeping uncontrollably.

  Jessica pushed him away slightly and looked into his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, surprised and a little frightened.

  Aaron looked at her, but was unable to utter a single word. It was not a dream. It was the real Jessica sitting before him, exactly the same as she
had been in his memories. He dropped his gaze to her stomach and laid his hand on it.

  “My little watermelon,” he said softly and smiled. “Do you want me to tell you a secret? We’re going to have a girl,” he said, his voice trembling.

  Jessica smiled, shook her head, and began stroking his hair.

  “I wanted to surprise you this evening. We’re having a boy.”

  # # #

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  The ascendancy of mankind is being decided on Jupiter

  In the 22nd century, mankind assimilated the Solar System within the orbits of the inner planets, and was gradually moving further out, beyond the asteroid belt, onward towards the outer planets. The recently discovered technology of remote manipulation gave people the capability of altering the orbit of celestial bodies of planetary size, which laid the foundation of a new era for the human race: the terraforming age. The colonization of space beyond the limits of the Solar System became only a matter of time. Soon after the first successful test, changing the orbit of Mercury, a strange object moving from the depths of space towards the centre of the Solar System entered the field of vision of a telescope at an observatory in Chile…

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  The spacecraft reaches Mercury at the intended time and begins sending signals to determine the precise orbit of the planet. The experiment begins that evening. A command is sent to increase the speed of Mercury from the Experiment Control Centre at the moon base. Three hours later, the International Space Station, scientists at the moon station and also many other groups of scientists on Earth, register an increase in the diameter of Mercury’s orbit round the Sun by two percent. Once the experiment is over, Mercury’s orbit is slowed down to its previous level.