“Don’t worry, Steve,” Janine said. “We’ll be supportive. I know that I haven’t been, of late, but I’ve forgiven you now—and Milly too, of course. Ali’s been forgiven too. All’s well that ends well.”
It hasn’t ended yet, Steve thought, but he didn’t dare say anything about fat ladies singing, so he started the lesson instead.
“I have to teach the sixth-formers about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,” he said, “although I’m not sure I understand it completely myself. I do it the conventional way, by telling them about Schrodinger’s cat. The cat in question is sealed in box with a deadly weapon, whose trigger is operated by a device sensitive to an event that’s subject to quantum uncertainty—an event we can only express mathematically as a set of probabilities, because we can’t recover enough information to give a more definite answer. The thought-experiment asks us to consider the existential status of the cat when we don’t know whether the trigger has been activated or not. The common sense view is that the cat is either alive or dead, but we don’t know which. The so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, asks us to accept that the cat is neither dead nor alive, but caught in a state of uncertainty— until someone opens the box and looks, at which point the uncertainty disappears under the pressure of observation.”
“It’s the cat I feel sorry for,” Alison murmured. Milly and Janine put their fingers to their lips.
It was at that moment that Steve realized how pointless it would be to continue with the lecture, instead of just cutting to the chase and telling them what they actually wanted to know—but he was the host, and it was his wine they were drinking.
“When I first heard the story,” Steve said, “it was the cat I felt sorry for, too. How would it feel, I wondered, to be caught in a state of uncertainty, not being able to know whether it was alive or dead? If I’d asked my teacher, of course—which I never did—he’d only have said that, within the parameters of the thought-experiment, the cat can’t be capable of feeling or knowing anything, because if it could, it would be an observer, and the uncertainty would collapse— but that’s a cop-out. I just kept on wondering: How would it feel, to live in a state of irresolvable uncertainty? What would it be like to live in an unfixed reality, to be conscious and inquisitive, even though the world is fundamentally unstable, unmade, unknowable?”
“I feel like that all the time,” Alison whispered.
“Then I realized,” Steve went on, “that that’s pretty much how I feel all the time. Which seemed odd, because I’d already taken aboard the scientific point of view, from which the world works by cause and effect, and in which everything happens because it has to, and everything is predictable, if only you can know enough about the logic of its situation. After all, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle isn’t supposed to apply to the sorts of things we can see, and the sort of thing we are. We aren’t supposed to have experiences that don’t make sense, which are both real and not real. We aren’t supposed to be trapped in a situation where we don’t know what anything means, or whether it means anything at all.”
“He must be quite good at his job,” Janine whispered to Milly. “I hadn’t realized that, never having seen him in action.”
“When I started going to AlAbAn, though,” Steve said, “it seemed to me that there might be a way to make sense of it, or at least a way for me to think about it. If there is such a thing as time travel, you see—even if the only things that can travel in time are ideas and images, and even if they travel subconsciously, only reflected in the conscious mind indirectly—then the world is fundamentally uncertain. Now isn’t just the passive product of the past, cursed with inevitability by the tyrannical work of cause and effect. Now is something forever on the brink of metamorphosis, always subject to arbitrary shifts occasioned by the detritus of time travel, no matter how hard time-travelers try, no matter how many agencies of time police there are to keep them in line, and no matter what kinds of forces are at work in the unimaginable darkness outside the time-stream. Even if there were no rogue elements working to the opposite end—which there inevitably are—it would still be the case that every now there ever was, is, or will be is vulnerable, unstable and unsafe. Even if everything else could be brought under the umbrella of true causation, there’d still be other possibilities lurking in dark matter, or somewhere beyond.”
“I take it back,” Janine murmured. “No wonder they hate him at school, if he’s always that pretentious.”
“I can’t speak for anyone else,” Steve continued, “but that’s what I’ve got out of AlAbAn: an explanation of sorts for my sensation of uncertainty, my consciousness of not quite knowing what or where or when or who or why I am, or how to find out. I agree with Janine’s robotic Steve that the most sensible way to understand the kinds of entities that might be responsible for that uncertainty is not to credit them with too much purpose—or, at least, not to credit them with purposes that involve me. From the conscious point of view, whatever feeds into or emerges from the unconscious mind is essentially alien. At the end of the day, it isn’t controlling us, or instructing us, or begging us to go in a particular direction; it’s just shit that’s happening.”
Janine raised her glass, as if in salute.
“Maybe the hyperbaryonic entities, whatever they may be,” Steve plugged on, “really can change the universe, changing its past along with its future, pitching the universe into a perpetual state of uncertainty, setting it to hover between alternative possibilities of conformation. Maybe, in order for that to be the state of universal affairs—for that always to have been the state of universal affairs, the hyperbaryonic intelligences do need our help, or our capitulation. Maybe, from their point of view—though not from ours— that’s what self-conscious intelligence is for. Maybe, collectively if not individually, and unconsciously if not consciously, all the intelligent entities that ever lived, or ever will live, or ever might live, have a part to play in deciding what the ultimate outcome of the hyperbaryonic mass-exchange will be.”
Milly reached out to clink her glass with Janine’s, sharing a silent toast.
“Maybe plant intelligence has a better sense of its own part than animal intelligence,” Steve continued, “because it’s sedentary and contemplative, and patient in its sexuality. Maybe what the limited empathic capacity of the human mind can only construe as a dream of turning into stone could be better expressed as a desire for ecstatic hypostasis, or a vegetal Omega Point, or some other ineffectually-clutching verbal formula. Maybe we poor primitive humans can never be more than the merest of catalysts to the ongoing and eternal metamorphosis—but even if that were the case, it might be something of which to be proud. Even if there merely happened to be something accidentally contained in our blood and being that’s vital; even if it were only in some crude protovitalistic sense that it’s significant, still we’d be making our contribution to the evolution of the eternal Phoenix. If what the robot said is true, it’s not just future evolution that’s important, because time and change aren’t simply linear processes. There’s another dimension in which change can occur, a sort of sideways time, in which it’s not merely the shape of things to come that’s eternally uncertain but now and then. Everything in the great universal symphony of matter in motion is subject to the eternal if.”
“If only,” Alison said, not clinking her glass with anyone’s.
“At any rate,” Steve said, “that’s pretty much the way I do feel, even though mathematics and physics aren’t much help to me in describing or measuring it—and I think, on due reflection, that that’s probably the best of all the possible states that a person or a universe might be in. In fact, I suspect that’s the only kind of universe in which it would be possible to be a person. It’s not necessary to feel sorry for Schrodinger’s cat, because it’s the state of uncertainty—the awareness of the fact that the entire time-stream is in a state of flux—that makes choice possible. A world without choice would be mecha
nical—not intolerable, because there’d be no conscious entities in it to find it intolerable, because there wouldn’t be any selective pressure favoring the evolution of consciousness—but still mechanical, subject to true causation. Uncertainty isn’t what makes the world go round, but it’s what allows us to be aware of its movement.”
“It’s getting boring, Steve,” Milly told him.
Steve ignored her. “I think that’s why all the time-travelers we dream about are so interested in us, so keen to study and measure us. They’re not just interested in us because we were the first, but because we might not be here forever. They’re anxious to explore and explain our now because they suspect, or know, that next time they come back in time to look at us, we might have been profoundly changed. That’s why the time police were so insistent on returning Milly to her point of origin, while being so careless of the fate of her abductors. It makes no difference, by the way, if all I’m talking about is dreams, because dreams are the most important thing there are, precisely because their meaning isn’t already built into them, awaiting excavation and realization. The meaning of dreams is potential and provocative, awaiting interpretation and transfiguration by the imagination. That’s what imagination is for, and why it’s the way it is.”
“It’s all bullshit, though, isn’t it?” Janine said. “You can’t change the past, or the present. You can learn to live with it, and accept it for what it is, and move on—but you can’t change it.”
“You can’t be conscious of past change,” Steve told her, “but that doesn’t mean that the past can’t change or be changed. It’s conceivable perhaps inevitable—that we wake up every morning to a new world, which only seems always to have been the way it seems now. If so, we’re always playing our parts, albeit unconsciously, in the remaking of that past, and hence in the remaking of ourselves, both in the present and in terms of our future potential.”
“It’s just bullshit,” Janine insisted. “Even if it were true, it wouldn’t change anything in regard to the way we live our lives.”
“It might,” Steve said, “if we were better able to make use of the potential inherent in our unconscious minds—in our dreams and in our faculty of imagination. If it’s true, we probably are becoming better able to live our lives the way we’d like to live them, as the pattern of the time-stream shifts. If it’s true, we probably do wake up every morning to a slightly better history that the one we had before—because the best of all possible worlds is a world in which that kind of progress would be possible. We all woke up this morning in a world in which the unfolding ecocatastrophe will put our entire species out of its misery in a matter of a hundred years—but the possibility might be open to us, if we can only forge the will, to extend that hundred years, bit by bit, into a thousand, or the thousand into...well, who can tell what the final span of the time-stream might be, when all the intelligences that will ever live, or might ever have lived before, have exerted their collective will to its maximum effect? Always assuming, that is, that they ever permit finality to creep in. If the animal intelligences have their way, maybe the vegetal Omega Point will just be a pipe-dream.”
“I think you mean pie in the sky,” Milly said, and giggled.
“If time travel ever will exist,” Steve said, frowning, “whatever form it might take, then there’s a sense in which we’re not doomed, individually or collectively. From the viewpoint of future time-travelers, we’ll always be here, and now...but we’ll always be different, every time-trip, as the margin of uncertainty unwinds in hyper-time. We’ll always be actively remaking ourselves and our world, always uniquely interesting. Every one of us will die, sooner or later, but, simply by virtue of having lived at all, we’ll all have had the chance to explore an infinite range of personal possibilities and potential lives—not in the sense that we can live them one by one in linear series, but in the sense that we’re always in a state of uncertainty, always hovering between them, always in transition. Who, in their right minds, would want to live any other way? And who, even if it’s all bullshit, wouldn’t want to be able to imagine it? It’s the ultimate good news, after all: we do have a choice; our choices matter; we’re only as limited as our imagination.
“I already knew that,” Milly said.
“So did I,” Janine added, “and I always knew that it was bullshit.”
“What do you think, Alison?” Steve asked.
“As a virtual AlAbAn virgin,” Alison replied, “I don’t have any basis on which to judge.” Her glass was empty.
“I think we ought to revert to AlAbAn rules now,” Milly said, draining her own glass. “Let’s be supportive, and thank Steve for all his mental effort. Okay, Jan?”
“Fair enough,” Janine said. “It’s all food for thought, after all. Who am I to condemn it as bullshit? I’m on your side, Steve. Good for you. Way to go, etcetera.”
“We ought to be thinking of calling that cab now,” Alison put in, “if we’re all going home. Are we all going home?”
“It’s Steve’s flat.” Milly said. “It’s his prerogative to decide whether or not to invite one of us to stay the night—and, if so, which of us to invite.”
“I’m tired,” Steve said, “And I’ve got a heavy day at work tomorrow with it being a Friday. If any of you had expectations, I’m sorry.”
“You’re procrastinating, Steve,” Janine pointed out. “You’ll still have to decide which of us to call next time you pick up the phone. You might like to give us a clue as to who it might be. We can’t live with the present state of uncertainty forever, and I’m sure Milly doesn’t want to continue being your girl-friend by default.”
While Janine was speaking, Alison took out her phone and started thumbing in a number.
“But that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Steve said. “We should welcome states of uncertainty. If we didn’t have uncertainty, we really would be existentially trapped by the inexorable grind of true causation.”
“We want you to make up your mind, Steve,” Janine said. “Do you want Milly, or do you want to try to patch things up with me, and maybe get back to where we were before? We want to know which of us you’re going to call—given that you’re lucky enough to have the choice again.”
Janine had to speak a little more loudly than usual to make herself heard, because Alison—who was still pretending to be the relentless voice of sanity in a mad world—was placing the order for the cab.
“I don’t know,” Steve said, not entirely truthfully. “Things might look different in the morning, when a whole new world will seem new-born. As I said, I’m tired. I’m sure I’ll be able to make a more sensible choice when I’ve slept on it.”
“He already admitted that he doesn’t deserve either one of you,” Alison said, putting her phone away again. “If you want my advice, I think you should both refuse to take any more of his calls, and move on. Chalk it up to experience, plenty more fish in the sea, etcetera. The taxi will only be five minutes, by the way—no queue tonight. We ought to go outside and wait on the pavement. We shouldn’t wait for the driver to honk his horn and disturb the whole street.”
“Well, thanks for listening to me,” Steve said. “It’s good to be able to put these things in shape and get them out into the open. It’s been very helpful.”
He watched Janine and Milly lock gazes for a few seconds, before they turned to look at Alison. They gave every impression of having turned to her merely to respond to her suggestion, but Steve thought that there was something slightly quizzical in the way they looked at her.
“You’re right,” Janine said, setting down her empty glass at last, “It’s getting late.”
“There’ll be plenty of time to work things out,” Milly agreed. “In the end, it will all be settled, one way or the other.”
“Or not,” Alison said, as she opened the door of the flat and held it open for her friends. She glanced back at Steve, and said: “Jan’s right, you know. Any connection, literal or metaphorica
l, between all that bullshit you just came out with and the mundane business of everyday life is entirely imaginary.”
“So is everything else that constitutes mental life,” Steve said, “and sometimes makes it worthwhile.”
Janine and Milly said “Goodnight, Steve” in chorus, neither one of them apparently being prepared, in the circumstances, to add a supplementary expression of affection.
“Any time you need to hear the voice of sanity,” Alison said, “you know where you can find someone willing to fake it. Thanks for the lift—and the rest.”
“You’re welcome,” Steve said. “All of you.”
<
* * * *
EPILOGUE
What Happened Next
In February 2009 Steve married his long-time girl-friend, Alison, at Salisbury’s central Registry Office. It was a small-scale affair, and they had no need of bridesmaids. They honeymooned in Wales; they didn’t need to take the long way round in driving there, even though the direct route required them to pay a toll.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 41