Wearing a Viking helmet air mask, pushing the pole in front and dragging an air hose behind, she would have been a strange sight if there had been anyone else to see her. With her free hand, she held the radio up to the mask and narrated to friends far away yet uncannily close.
“I’ll keep talking just in case you’re listening. I doubt it, but you never know. I’m beginning to formulate two theories, both ridiculous, but I’ll go out on a limb and describe them since no one’s probably listening anyway. The first comes from my encounters with the edge of this space. It’s a wall, a defined edge, though you can’t really see it until you’re close enough to touch it—which you definitely don’t want to do. But what’s beyond? Tricky stuff. You know how some of the multiverse theorists talk about the void? A place where nothing exists, not even space itself? Well, what if—”
She was interrupted by a flash of light. It came from the singularity overhead, first plunging her into darkness and then, a split second later, flickering back to life again.
Not again.
She kept her eyes glued to the light. Without it she wouldn’t get far. Worse was the nagging question—why was it flashing?
Nala continued speaking into the radio. “Okay, so that’s pretty fucked up. The light just flashed again. Don’t know why. That’s twice in the past… oh, twelve hours or so. Maybe it’s a clock? It strikes every twelve hours? Weird shit happens around here.”
She walked across a broad area, mostly black with white stripes. It could easily be a parking lot back in the real world. “Which brings me to my second theory, which is even crazier than the first. Jan will laugh or call me a physics pussy—which, by the way, Jan, is a form of sexual harassment. We’ll deal with that when I get back.”
She stood in place, thinking. “Inside this place—this bubble within the void—I think quantum rules apply. Superposition at a macro scale. Yeah, really! Mind-blowing, huh? But here’s my example. I’m 100 percent sure that I opened a bottle of water and then found the same bottle of water back in the fridge, unopened. One object, multiple states. Exactly what any self-respecting electron would do. Of course, mixing up the bottles could have been a really hilarious practical joke. I wouldn’t put it past Thomas, but he’s… he’s…”
Nala froze, staring into the blackness. Suddenly, things were not so funny. There was movement ahead, and not from the surface. A person, upright, and not flattened or distorted, walked directly toward her.
She dropped the radio and ran.
30 Apparition
Nala ran straight ahead into the darkness, dropping the rod that would warn her of the edge of the void, and without the slightest fear that such a fate could possibly occur.
She ran into the waiting arms of her friend, Thomas.
The big man, standing upright and apparently very much alive, enveloped the petite woman, his red beard scratching against her forehead. She hardly noticed as the Viking hat was pushed away and fell to the floor. She pressed her ear to his chest, listening to his breath and heartbeat, unable to reconcile what she saw before her with the impossibility that he was alive. She looked down. Both of his legs appeared to be firm and strong.
“I finally found you,” he said. “I was looking everywhere.”
She pulled away and looked up at his face. “But… you were…”
“Lost? Who, me? No, my pretty princess, it was you who were lost. I, Sir Thomas, did the finding.” His demeanor was that of a gallant soldier, or maybe a knight in shining armor. Typical Thomas. This was no illusion.
“Not lost. Thomas, you were dead.”
“Dead? You must be confused, m’lady. I’ve been wandering far afield, searching for you… or an exit.” He reached down and picked up the makeshift air mask. “I see you found my Viking helmet. You’re supposed to wear it on your head, like so.” He put it on his head with the hose dangling behind him like a ponytail.
Nala took a sniff of the air—it felt fresh again. Thomas certainly seemed unconcerned. Her confusion mounted. “There was no oxygen, except along the surface.”
“I fixed that problem. Ripped the end of a ventilation duct right out of the 3-D space below us. Plenty of fresh air coming in here now. You feel it?”
She did feel a draft coming from behind him, but maybe that was because her legs were bare. She looked down. Her full-length pants completely covered her legs with only a few small holes near the bottom. Another impossibility.
“What the fuck is going on?” She turned away from him, concerned she might be hallucinating. “I shredded my pants to make a bandage for you. Your leg was cut off, midshin. You bled to death.”
She swiveled around to the very solid man. If this was a hallucination, he wasn’t cooperating by disappearing when confronted by logic.
“You okay?” he asked. “It’s been a tough go, but we’re both alive. We’ll make it out of here, don’t worry.”
“This can’t be happening, Thomas. You can’t be dead and then alive.”
“Well, I’ve never done a zombie voice, but I’ll give it a try.” He cleared his throat several times. She held a hand over his mouth.
“Stop it. I’m serious. You were dead. Half your leg was gone.”
He shook his head. “I may have been unconscious for a while. I’m not sure I can account for all the time. Maybe you found me but left before I woke up?”
She pointed to her covered legs. “I ripped my pants down to shorts and now they’re miraculously repaired. This is the same fucking shit with the water bottles.” And she stopped talking and put both hands over her mouth.
“What?” he asked.
“Superposition,” she answered.
“The quantum wave effect? That kind of superposition?”
She nodded. “You’re literally Schrödinger’s cat. Both alive and dead while in quantum superposition, with the precise state unknown until there’s an outside observer.”
“You’re serious.”
“Yes, very. You’re the proof. It fits with my second theory.”
“Which is?”
“That we’re experiencing quantum effects at a large scale. Quantum weirdness that should be happening only to quarks and electrons is now happening to bottles of water. My pants. And you.”
“Unfathomable, m’lady.”
She took both of Thomas’s hands in hers. “But it can’t just be you. It’s me too. We’re both experiencing multiple, contradictory histories. We’re both alive and dead, severely injured and whole, opening water bottles that are then sealed.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“Thomas, we’re in superposition. Our fate is undefined.” She looked into his eyes and saw his concern, but there was no point in sugarcoating it. “None of this will settle on a specific outcome until there’s an outside observer.”
Thomas looked stunned. There were no snappy comebacks, no clever accents. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“Nala?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“You’re not making this up, are you?”
“No, superposition is as real as gravity. Electrons, photons, every quantum particle—when nobody’s looking, this is how they exist—as a probability wave. But as soon as anyone takes a peek with any kind of measurement, the probability collapses to a specific outcome.”
“Yeah, I knew that about subatomic particles. I just didn’t think it could apply to people.”
“It can’t. At least, it shouldn’t.”
31 Austin
Daniel walked into the small terminal building that provided support for business jets and private pilots. Standing in the middle of the lobby was the man he recognized from his previous trip, the EPA district manager, Jeffrey Finch.
The wiry-haired man stuck out a bony hand. “Thanks for coming down, Dr. Rice. We might need your expertise to figure this one out, and your influence to get it fixed.”
“I’ll do my best,” Daniel replied, hoping he had something to offer. His head was s
till foggy from limited sleep. The sun crept over the rooftops of the low-slung buildings dotting the edges of the taxiways at the Austin airport. It would soon be a blue-sky spring day in central Texas.
Finch led him to a car, and they were soon on the crowded freeways of the state capital. Most of the traffic was inbound to the city. “Normal commute? Or are these people trying to get away from the anomaly?” Daniel asked.
“Pretty normal actually,” Finch responded. “Three million people in the Austin metropolitan area. Fastest-growing city in the country. If anything, the anomaly is drawing people toward it, not away.”
Daniel wasn’t thinking clearly quite yet and gave Finch a puzzled look.
“You know, the storm chasers,” Finch said. “They’re coming from all over the state, now that the news broke.”
Daniel hadn’t thought of that bit of illogic. If it looked dangerous, there were always people who wanted to get as close as possible.
“The FEMA people are dealing with it,” Finch said. “They’re on-site at the Bastrop facility right now. State emergency management too, plus a whole mess of state police.”
“Has FEMA established a perimeter?”
Finch nodded. “But you and I will be going deep inside.” He looked over at Daniel. “Hope you’re okay with that.”
A few minutes later, they were past the last housing development and into the rolling ranchland east of Austin. Through the windshield, Daniel caught a glimpse of the strange phenomenon he’d been called to witness. Just above the trees, a gray swirl loomed. It looked like a dark rain cloud, but with considerably more geometric structure. Circular. Hurricane-like. It popped in and out of view as trees went by, but even at this distance, Daniel could tell the swirling cloud was enormous.
Finch turned off the highway onto a smaller road traveling north. When they got to a clearing, he pulled over on the shoulder. Daniel opened the door and stepped out for a better look.
The dark cloud now filled half the sky, blotting out the rising sun. The slowly rotating swirl was as ominous as any thunderstorm but at the same time oddly different—as if nature were throwing something new at the unsuspecting humans below. He half-expected lightning bolts to strike the ground at any moment, and perhaps they would. Atmospheric motion produced static electricity, and this unnatural swirl was definitely moving.
Rising in the foreground, the four smokestacks of the Bastrop electric generation facility seemed like toys beneath the enormous cloud.
“What do you think?” Finch asked from the other side of the car.
“I had no idea it would be this big,” Daniel said. A slight breeze blew in his face, and he detected the scent of flowers even though there were none around. Thunderstorms did that too, with downdrafts that spread out across the land and carried a variety of curious smells with them. “This cloud wasn’t here yesterday?”
“Well, it was just starting,” Finch answered. “The local police got a few calls yesterday morning. At first, people said it was a UFO, but it kept growing and the calls changed over time. I got down here just at sunset last night. It’s doubled in size this morning.”
“Any lightning? Hail? Other weather phenomena?” Daniel asked.
“None that I know of, but we have a state meteorologist out here somewhere. We could check with her. They’ve set up a forward command center at the Bastrop facility. That’s where I thought we’d go. You’ll have access to anyone you need from there.”
“What are we waiting for?” Daniel said with a shrug. “I guess I’m just one of those storm chasers.”
Finch nodded. “Just wanted you to see it before we got too close.” They climbed back in the car and headed east, toward the ominous apparition in the sky.
32 Interdimensional
Thomas still wore the Viking hat, complete with the trailing hose that Nala had assembled. He said he liked the improvements she’d made.
They’d come to the place where Thomas had rerouted a ventilation duct. Fresh air was still pouring out. How Thomas had managed to bend sheet metal into their space was a mystery, but the man probably had muscles in his fingers that were bigger than Nala’s biceps.
She’d wondered whether they could crawl out through the ventilation, but when they arrived she realized the opening was much too small even for her slim body. Still, it demonstrated that there were ways to break into the 3-D world. They’d have to make any alterations themselves, though. The people below had no visibility and no access to 4-D space. To them, the metal had simply disappeared into thin air.
It was good to have someone to talk to as they walked back to Nala’s campsite above Jan’s office. “I’m sticking by my theory. I poured water in your mouth. I listened for your pulse. Those aren’t false memories, even if you are healthy now.”
“Now that you mention it,” Thomas said, “I vaguely remember. I was lying on my back and my knee hurt and water dribbled into my mouth.” He stopped walking for a minute and lifted up his perfectly healthy leg. “So, tell me again how I could remember having my leg sheared off when it’s not?”
“I’m really not sure. Superposition of memories?”
“Which means?” He continued walking.
“If events are probable but not certain, maybe our memories reflect the probability. Maybe we remember every probability. That is, until there’s an outside observer.”
Thomas nodded, the hose bouncing against his back. “Then… poof, our brains will reset to match the final result? That’s going to be weird. Who do you think the outside observer will be? I hope it’s Jan. He has a good imagination.”
Nala laughed. “I’m really not sure how this works at our level. In ordinary quantum systems, the outside observer isn’t a person. It could be a camera or an alpha particle detector—any device capable of measuring a quantum property, like a particle’s position or spin.”
“A camera determines the fate of a particle? A camera’s not even alive.”
“Sorry, but it’s how things really work. The universe doesn’t care whether it makes sense to you.” She walked a few more steps, contemplating the weirdness of it all. She patted Thomas on the shoulder. “It’s great to have you back, my friend. I’m not sure I could have managed much more of this alone.”
The faraway light flashed again, freezing them in their tracks. Nala gave Thomas a glance, glad to see that he hadn’t vanished. In fact, nothing about either of them looked any different, and her memory still seemed the same as before. Maybe the flash had nothing to do with probabilities or quantum eigenstates. Maybe it was just a faulty lightbulb.
The universe doesn’t have to make sense. They walked on, with Thomas leading the way.
“How come you’re not concerned about walking off the edge?” Nala asked. “There is an edge, you know. Bad shit beyond it, too.”
“Why would it matter?” Thomas asked. “There’s no outside observer yet, so all probabilities are still in play.”
“Good point.”
“I figure I’m either invincible or dead. It will all sort itself out.”
A few minutes later, he stopped. “We’re back.”
They were. Assorted items of food lay on the floor just where she’d left them, along with several water bottles. For now, the disreputable bottles were behaving themselves.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“Famished.” Thomas sat down and opened the second box of crackers. “Peanut butter, too? You’ve done well, m’lady.”
“There’s more if you want it.” She motioned to the space over the break room. “You might be better at prying the bigger items out than me.” Nala sat next to him. Her legs were no longer bare, but the warm floor still felt good.
She had a million thoughts about their predicament, most of it crazy talk, but in the absence of data speculation was all they had. It was time for a brain dump to another physicist. Jan’s office looked empty, but there was plenty of blank space on the walls, and she had a marking pen. Until someone offered a phone on a wire
, it would have to do.
Nala wrote furiously across the floor, walls and ceiling of Jan Spiegel’s office. From this strange perspective, all surfaces tended to blend together. The right angles where walls met were hardly noticeable, as if someone had taken the complexity of a three-dimensional space and compressed it with a waffle iron. A sentence might start on the floor, jump to the desk and finish on the wall. In the 3-D world, it might be hard to read, but Jan would figure it out. At least it was communication.
Nala spoke to herself as she wrote. “Thomas is back. We’re in a superposition of paths, each with a nonzero probability of occurring. Eventually, our options will collapse to a single reality. It’s a roll of the dice.”
She looked up and thought about her next words. She wrote again on the remaining clean surfaces. “Any action you take will produce a random outcome. Do it anyway.”
Beneath her knees, there was motion. A figure entered the room. Longer hair and dark, clearly the same woman she’d seen before. The figure walked around the 3-D space, bending down to examine the floor and looking up at the ceiling. Had she seen the writing? A minute later, Jan came in and stood next to the mystery woman.
Nala picked a spot on the wall nearest to the woman and wrote, Who are you? The figure moved to the wall, apparently examining the writing. She might have even waved, though it was hard to tell exactly what she was doing. Nala reached down and placed a hand on the thin layer of three-dimensional space and the human shape within it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Jan, hurry! Come see this,” Marie yelled. “More writing.” She squatted closer to the floor. The words were stretched in places and unreadable, but clear in other places: nonzero probability… a roll of the dice and more. The floor and walls were covered in writing, and much of it read like a physics paper.
Jan came in and looked around. “Wow, she’s been busy.” He studied the words. “Instructions—at least, that’s what it looks like. Written to me; I see my name up here at the top of the wall.”
While Jan pieced together the messages, movement to one side attracted Marie’s attention. Black writing appeared on the wall, one letter after another. The phantom handwriting was genuinely eerie, like walking into an episode of Eyewitness to the Paranormal. “She’s not done yet.”
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 51