by E. C. Myers
“What am I missing?” Ephraim asked.
“It's been almost a year here since you and Zoe brought me back, right?” Nathaniel asked.
“Yeah. It'll be a year in August,” Ephraim said.
“Same in this universe. Even though it's twenty-five years ahead of yours, time doesn't move any faster or slower in either. Twenty-four hours here is the same as twenty-four hours there. It's even the same time and day of the week.
“So we're just on separate tracks,” Nathaniel continued. “Imagine: If shifting from one universe to another is like moving up or down to parallel layers, overlapping with one universe, then going to another timeline is like taking a jump to the left.”
“Or a step to the right,” Jena said wryly.
“It's all the same to the Charon device,” Nathaniel said. “It's like a friend of mine used to say: ‘Other times are just special cases of other universes.’”
“Shelley said the same thing,” Ephraim said. “I get it. So?”
“If we use very similar coordinates to Everett's, like we planned, then we'll arrive in 1997,” Jena said.
“Crap,” Ephraim said.
“Damn!” Nathaniel said. “I'm really rusty at this. I know how the device works, I should have thought of it right away. Good catch, Jena.”
“Yeah,” Ephraim said.
She smiled.
“Hugh Everett might be alive in 1997,” Ephraim said.
“Survey says…no,” Jena said. “The Everetts I've read about died pretty young.”
“How many have you read about?” Nathaniel asked.
She wiggled her eReader. “All of them. All the ones Everett had information on, anyway. He collated all their biographical information, as if he were trying to work out his own future from the data points. How's that for morbid?”
“That sounds like Dr. Everett,” Nathaniel said.
“So what do we do?” Ephraim asked. “Abort the mission?”
“Not after we've driven all this way.” Nathaniel looked at Ephraim. “I say we improvise. You think you can ‘wish’ us to a reality with a living Everett, Ephraim?”
“Didn't Everett and his team try that before? They went through dozens of realities before they found one of him.”
“But no one's better at handling the coin than you. Not even your analog, and he was the first. You're like the coin whisperer,” Nathaniel said.
“I don't know. Trying to influence the outcome with my thoughts is kind of imprecise. Almost random,” Ephraim said.
“Almost,” Nathaniel said.
Jena reached behind his seat and squeezed his arm. “You can do it, Eph.”
“If you think so…why not? I'll give it a try.”
“Good man. Our exit's coming up,” Nathaniel said. He maneuvered the car toward the right lane. “Better start thinking about your wish, E.”
“Yeah.” Ephraim slouched back in his seat, the joy of the car ride lost. He had been ready for an adventure, assuming all he had to provide was their transportation between universes. But now he had to manage navigation too. The weight of their impossible scheme pressed down on him.
Nathaniel drove through the streets of Princeton, New Jersey, until he found parking in a garage on Hulfish Street. Jena excitedly directed them on foot to the main entrance to Princeton University, a large wrought-iron gate on Nassau Street. When they crossed through a side gate onto the campus, Ephraim felt like they'd already traveled back in time.
“This place hasn't changed much in twenty-five years,” Jena said, panning Nathan's camcorder over the college walk.
“Old universities like this have a way of holding onto the past,” Nathaniel said. He kicked a loose cobblestone on the walkway. “How do you know it so well?”
“Jena's going to Princeton next fall,” Ephraim said. He had tried not to think about the difficulty of maintaining a long-distance relationship with her, since he was planning on going to the community college. But Summerside to Princeton wasn't as insurmountable as his universe to Zoe's.
And where had that thought come from?
“Congratulations,” Nathaniel said.
“Whoa. I've never seen that before,” Jena said. She aimed the camera at a building that didn't quite fit with the classic, red-brick architecture of the university. It was a tower of glass and steel, like the Everett Institute, only smaller, with more windows.
“That's the science center Hugh Everett donated to the university. It has his name on it, naturally. He often talked about coming back to be president of the university one day and whip it into shape.”
Nathaniel looked around and pointed out a nearby building. “Let's shift from over there to attract less attention,” he said. “That building's been around for nearly a century.”
Nathaniel pulled out the controller. It looked brand-new. He had replaced the casing with a sturdier black alloy, carefully cleaned all the circuit boards inside, and replaced the missing screws.
Ephraim palmed the coin. It was warm against his clammy skin.
Jena capped the camera and slung it on its strap over her shoulder. She pulled out a smartphone and spoke to it: “Dial Crossroads. Speaker on.”
The line rang, and a moment later someone picked up. “Hello?” Zoe answered.
“It's us, Z,” Nathaniel said. “We're just about ready here. Start the shutdown procedure, just like I showed you.”
“Aye aye, captain. No problems on your end?” she asked.
“There's been a slight change in plans,” Nathaniel said. “Jena pointed out that the coordinates we have are twenty-five years off.”
Zoe cursed. “Because it's a parallel timeline that's been progressing respective to our universes. I should have thought of that.”
“Me too,” he said.
“Yes, you should have.” Dr. Kim's voice broke in over the speaker.
“I'm an engineer, not a quantum mechanic,” Nathaniel said.
“We'll discuss this later. How are you going to correct for the temporal drift?”
“Ephraim's going to guide us to the correct universe. The old-fashioned way.”
Dr. Kim drew in a sharp breath. “Are you sure you can do this, Ephraim?” she asked. “There's very little room for error.”
Nathaniel rolled his eyes.
“I guess,” Ephraim said.
She sighed. “I suppose that's the best we can hope for. We're nearly ready here.” Dr. Kim's voice muffled. “Zoe, watch the calibration. The gyro is listing. Correct it! No, the other lever. The other other lever. Better.”
“What if the coin lands on tails?” Jena asked.
“What?” Dr. Kim asked.
Ephraim leaned toward the phone and raised his voice. “When I used the coin before, heads would take me to a ‘good’ reality, and tails would take me to a ‘bad’ one.”
“Are you serious?” Dr. Kim asked.
“I know that isn't really what's happening, but she's right. It still might influence my thoughts,” he said.
“I suggest you don't let that happen,” Dr. Kim said.
Nathaniel clapped a hand on Ephraim's shoulder. “Eph, this is science. The coin functions based on its relative position in space and the parameters you set for it. That's it. Because you had a negative context for a coin that lands on tails, the coin adjusted according to your expectations. You have to not only understand that intellectually, but you have to believe it.
“Remember: There are countless realities where the year is 1977, where Dr. Hugh Everett III is studying multiple worlds at Princeton University,” Nathaniel said. “We only need to find one of them.”
Dr. Kim's voice blared from the speaker. “This is very important. You have to focus on filtering down to that specific subset of all the realities in the multiverse, and the coin will choose the best one at random based on its orientation when it makes contact with your skin.”
“You can do it!” Zoe shouted from the phone.
Ephraim swallowed and nodded.
“We're ready here,” Zoe said. “I'm reviewing footage from the surveillance cameras around the atrium now. I don't see any phantoms.”
“No offense, but I'll double-check your settings,” Dr. Kim said. “Nathaniel, as soon as your phone call drops, we're switching the LCD back on. We'll switch it off again for thirty seconds every hour, on the hour, local universal time. You each have watches synchronized with the home station.”
“The hourly time will probably be the same,” Nathaniel said. “It seems to be the default setting for the Charon device. But with you wishing, all bets are off, Ephraim, so we should be prepared for any variations in hour or day, aside from the year we want.”
Ephraim nodded. He tried to clear his mind to concentrate on the wish.
“Okay,” Nathaniel said. “Let's do it. Ephraim, whenever you're ready.”
No pressure.
He opened his eyes. Nathaniel and Jena smiled encouragingly.
Ephraim extended his left hand to Jena. She took it in her right. Nathaniel took her left hand in his right hand, completing the human chain, and flipped open the controller in his left hand. The screen glowed dimly in the bright afternoon sunlight.
Ephraim coughed to clear his throat. “I wish—”
“Remember to specify 1977,” Jena said.
“Okay,” Ephraim said. “I wish—”
“And Hugh has to be a working physicist,” Nathaniel said. “Studying parallel universes.”
“I—”
“At Princeton!” Jena said. “That's important too.”
“Okay.” Ephram waited for another interruption, but Nathaniel and Jena simply watched him expectantly.
“Get on with it,” Jena said.
Ephraim scowled. “I wish…” He paused, looking at them. “I wish we were in a universe where it's still 1977 and Dr. Hugh Everett III is a physicist at Princeton University working on parallel universes.” 1977. Dr. Hugh Everett III. Parallel universes. He repeated it all to himself like a mantra, letting it shape the reality he wanted.
Jena wrinkled her nose. “My nose itches,” she said.
“Nothing's happening,” Ephraim said. He jiggled the coin in his hand, like a cupped die, but it wasn't even warm. He let her hand go.
“That's okay. It happens to everyone,” Zoe said.
Jena scratched her nose, trying to hide a smile.
“You're still there?” Dr. Kim said.
“Unfortunately. Something's wrong,” Nathaniel said. “Confirm: The LCD is off?”
“Confirmed,” Zoe said. “It's frozen. And still no interference from adjacent universes on the monitors.”
“All our state-of-the-art scientific equipment, and we're relying on cheap closed-circuit cameras to detect other universes,” Nathaniel muttered.
He'd had to strip RF shielding from the Institute's video equipment to mimic the deficiencies of older technology like Nathan's camcorder, which was somehow more sensitive to the quantum wavelengths. They wouldn't be sure it was working until they saw a phantom from another reality, but they really didn't want to see a phantom.
“Try it again, Ephraim,” Jena said.
“It's just performance anxiety,” Nathaniel said. “You're out of practice.”
“It's supposed to be an instinct, isn't it?” Ephraim said.
He dutifully repeated his wish again, word for word, concentrating hard on keeping it all in his head, shaping the reality he wanted—willing the coin to take them where they needed to be.
“Still nothing,” Nathaniel reported after a moment.
“So what's the holdup?” Dr. Kim sounded impatient.
Ephraim examined the coin carefully: It was the right quarter and it was charged.
“It just won't respond. The coin's acted like this before, when I wished for something impossible, like a world where we have superpowers, or where the coin is programmed to respond to Nathan.”
“I'm calling this,” Dr. Kim said. “Head back to Crossroads.”
“No,” Ephraim said. “Nathaniel, hold out the controller for a second.”
Ephraim placed the coin in its groove and wrapped his hand around Nathaniel's over the controller. He closed his eyes and repeated the wish aloud slowly.
“The coin moved,” Jena said. She had the camera trained on it. She was getting as bad as Nathan with that thing.
“I didn't touch anything,” Nathaniel said.
“Good,” Ephraim said, trying to hold his concentration. He opened his eyes. The coin wasn't moving anymore.
“When did it stop?” he asked.
“After you wished for it to be 1977,” Nathaniel said.
“One out of three,” he said. Ephraim repeated the wish and saw that Nathaniel was right. The coin rotated a few times for the first part of his wish but didn't budge when he mentioned Dr. Everett or Princeton.
Jena narrated what they were trying to do for Dr. Kim and Zoe's benefit.
“I was afraid of this,” Dr. Kim said. “There may not be any universes left that match the criteria we need.”
“But the multiverse is infinite,” Ephraim said. “This should be a reasonable possibility.”
“Perhaps once it was. Hugh was dabbling in something he called the preferred basis, in which the multiverse is dependent on the probability of certain outcomes. For whatever reason, the likelihood of Hugh's success with parallel universe research is very low. He began to suspect this when he initially had difficulty recruiting his replacement. That's why he went back to ’77, after visiting dozens of contemporary universes,” Dr. Kim said.
“I read about that theory,” Jena said. “In universes where Everett went into computer science, he worked for the US government running nuclear war simulations during the Cold War. Some biographers speculated that if he hadn't designed the software that proved nuclear altercations result in mutual assured destruction, then we would have entered a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. No winners.”
Nathaniel whistled. “In other words, odds are that most of the worlds where Everett studied parallel universes were destroyed by nuclear war.”
“So we have to go a little farther back,” Ephraim said. “Like when, the sixties?”
“We don't have the luxury of being able to try multiple universes hoping that you'll find a surviving Everett,” Dr. Kim said.
“Do you want him or not?” Ephraim asked. “We're already here. We have to try. If we give up now then we've already failed.”
“Guys!” Zoe called. “Monitors are picking up quantum phantoms in the atrium.”
“Here too,” Jena said. She showed Ephraim and Nathaniel the screen of the camcorder, and they noticed the ghostly images of students walking down the avenue around them, faint in the bright sunlight.
“I'm shutting this operation down,” Dr. Kim said. “Sorry, team. Come home.”
Ephraim covered the cell phone so Dr. Kim couldn't hear them. “Jena, when did Everett study at Princeton?”
“Graduate school?” She stared at him for a moment. “1953.”
“Is that in most universes or just some of them?”
“All of them,” she said. “A rare certainty in the multiverse. He always went to Princeton for graduate work. But it was only in about a quarter of them that he ended up coming up with the many-worlds interpretation. And it only went anywhere in a small fraction of those.”
“Good enough for me,” he said. “We're going to the 1950s. It's our best chance to make contact with a living Everett.”
“He'll be too young. Practically a kid,” Nathaniel said.
Ephraim and Jena glared at him.
“Not that there's anything wrong with that,” Nathaniel said.
Ephraim related the plan to Dr. Kim and Zoe.
“Absolutely not,” Dr. Kim said. “That's not what we agreed. I'm initiating the lockdown sequence now. It's too late. Come back home.”
“Go, Ephraim!” Zoe said. “Make it quick.”
“Release that lever, young lady. No, th
e other lever,” Dr. Kim said.
“Jena! Remember Grumps!” Zoe said, just before the call cut off.
Nathaniel put his hand on Ephraim's shoulder. “Sorry, Eph. It was a ballsy idea.”
“What did she mean by ‘remember Grumps,’ Jena?” Ephraim asked.
Jena was scrolling through the menus of the phone, muttering under her breath.
“Jena?” Nathaniel asked.
“Please shut up. I almost have it,” she said. “How long do we have?”
“The LCD takes a few minutes to warm up,” Nathaniel said. “The initialization sequence for the barrier may take even longer if Zoe's stalling the doctor.”
“Got it!” Jena said. The coin started spinning.
She put her free arm around Ephraim's waist.
“Better grab on, Nathaniel,” she said as the coin slowed, then stopped.
Tails up.
“Take it away, Eph,” Jena said.
“But where are we—”
“No time. Let's go!” Jena said.
Ephraim grabbed the coin. Even though the tails orientation of the coin probably didn't mean anything, as the world shimmered around them, he tried extra hard to think positive thoughts.
Everything looked the same. The campus even smelled the same, like freshly mowed grass and sunbaked stones. Then Ephraim peeked around the corner and saw that the Everett Science Center had been downgraded to a humbler brick structure. He sighed with relief.
“We made it,” Ephraim said. “Somewhere.”
“I'm more interested in when.” Nathaniel examined their surroundings carefully.
“It's the mid-1950s,” Jena said. “And I'm wearing entirely the wrong thing for this decade.”
Expecting to be in the seventies, she'd worn a plain white blouse and black capri pants. Ephraim's white T-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes were a bit casual for a university, but they fit in just about any decade. And Nathaniel had nailed the stuffy professor look: a tweed jacket with patches on the sleeves and a red bowtie.
“Where did you get these coordinates, Jena?” Nathaniel asked.
“Yesterday, when we were DXing on the radio, Zoe and I recognized our grandfather's voice. The frequency of the transmission wavered between two coordinates, which we recorded. His analog had to be in his twenties, so this is circa 1955.” She smiled. “Which means Grumps is alive right now.” She looked around, sweeping the area with the camera. “This is so excellent.”