by Wendy Devore
My forehead crinkled with incomprehension. “I can’t believe the reason you offered me this internship is to teach meditation to Andrew.”
Janine shook her head. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Research has shown that people with long experience practicing meditation experience a change in their EEG patterns. I believe this is why your practice has decreased the frequency of your abnormal night terrors and made it possible for you to awaken yourself.”
I nodded. “I’m aware of those studies. It’s why Dr. Daniels was so adamant that I learn to meditate.”
“But newer studies have revealed that long-term meditation also causes physical changes in the underlying structure of the brain. If we were to do an MRI on you right now, we’d find that your brain has a thicker than average insular cortex. The interesting thing about the insular cortex is that it’s a very small lobe, and while it’s not fully understood, it appears to have an astonishingly intricate connection to a wide number of functions. It’s also very close structurally to the base and the back of the brain stem, which controls stages of sleep.”
“So what you’re telling me,” I reasoned slowly, “is that Andrew needs my brain.”
Janine leaned forward, lips pressed tight. “Yes,” she sighed.
I turned to Andrew. “And if I help you understand this abnormal REM state, can you help me get rid of the nightmares?”
“At this point,” Andrew admitted, “we’re not completely certain. But we’ll collaborate with you and Christopher Daniels to advance our collective understanding of these abnormal REM states. Your involvement in this project will vastly accelerate the pace of his research as well.”
“But what about Lily? If I really can figure out how to get out of a slice, can’t I go get her?”
Janine and Andrew exchanged a dark look. “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she replied. “Lily has no measurable brain activity. The duration and the divergence of that slice put tremendous strain on her, both mentally and physically. The medically induced coma was supposed to give her a chance to recover, but rather then healing, her mind has simply shut down. We believe that if your brain stops functioning here, your manifestation in the other slice is no longer feasible. Sadly, in our best estimate, there is no ‘Lily’ left anywhere to retrieve.”
I stared from Janine to Andrew, trying to ignore the troublesome metallic taste that had erupted at the back of my tongue. They were asking me to sign on to an experiment using an unproven technology that had fried this woman’s brain. This was madness. No wonder they’d offered such an enormous paycheck. “What if I decide I don’t want to continue with this assignment?”
A moment passed, then two, the silence becoming increasingly awkward. Andrew turned his intense gaze on me, and I suddenly had the uncomfortable sensation of standing alone in a searing hot spotlight.
“We won’t force you to honor your commitment to this project,” he said. The monotone inflection of his voice somehow magnified the insinuation of disappointment perfectly. Why did I suddenly feel so mortified for falling short of his obvious expectations?
Janine’s apprehension couldn’t hide behind her practiced calm. “Breckinridge has a long reach, so if you do decide to leave us, I would caution you never to reveal what you’ve just seen and heard. There’s a real possibility that doing so would end your scientific career—permanently. And after all, who would believe it?”
I blinked hard. It didn’t take a genius to see that Janine had huge reservations. I wondered exactly how long Breckinridge’s reach could possibly be.
“And then there’s your personal interest in the matter,” Andrew continued, still studying me with uncomfortable scrutiny. “You’re not going to find a faster—or better funded—way to understand what’s happening to you.”
I drew a long breath. The risks were mind-boggling, and any sane person would immediately run the other way. Unless, of course, she was burdened by soul-crushing night terrors that were apparently really happening to someone, in some reality. It was difficult to accept, but this experience had actually made my condition seem even worse.
In the end, my answer was inevitable. The nightmares needed to stop. A final backward glance at Lily cemented my resolve. “I guess I have no choice.”
I stepped out of the room to call Michelle, eying the hulking security guard as I dialed. He stared directly ahead and ignored me completely. I couldn’t explain any of this to my sister, but she needed to know that I could potentially be out of contact for days at a time. With any luck the long absences would be because I was “working” and not because I was incapacitated like Lily. I shuddered as I imagined myself lying lifeless on a gurney, and I hoped Michelle never needed to stand in this room and hear this diagnosis.
My call rolled over to voice mail, so I left Michelle the most reassuring message I could muster. I wished with all my heart that I could disappear down that hallway, leave this place, and forget all about this ill-advised undertaking. But it was not an option. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and prepared myself to embark on my precarious assignment.
I eased the door to Lily’s room open a few inches and realized that Andrew and Janine were in the middle of a heated exchange. Despite the hovering presence of the guard, I paused for a moment to eavesdrop.
Janine’s tone was steady and maternal. “…everyone would understand.”
“I need to be here for her. I can’t let her go alone.” His voice faltered, and my gut clenched in response to his obvious heartbreaking sadness. “Her family will be here tomorrow to say goodbye. I’ll be here as well.”
His phone’s message alert chirped.
“What is it now?” Janine asked.
“He’s demanding that Kate slice—immediately.”
Janine sounded apprehensive. “Do you think she’s ready? She’s barely recovered from yesterday…”
I cleared my throat loudly and pushed the door fully open in time to catch a look of worry that passed between them.
Andrew focused his attention on me and frowned, every trace of the emotion I’d overheard wiped away completely. “We’re finished here. Let’s go.”
As Andrew drove us back toward the hills, my mind was reeling. He kept his eyes trained on the road, his shoulders rigid and his expression slack. Wedged between him and Janine, I stared forward uncomfortably and tried to make myself as small as possible.
“We could delay a day or two, until everything at the hospital is resolved,” Janine suggested.
His hands clenched the steering wheel even more tightly. “You know there can be no resolution.”
“I’m just suggesting a minor postponement.”
In my peripheral vision, I could see his pinched frown. I suspected that my presence was preventing a conversation that would have gone completely differently had I not been sitting between them. He took several breaths to compose himself before he replied.
“I need to see this through.”
Janine nodded, and the rest of the ride was spent in silence.
My stomach lurched as we left paved roads for the gravel track back into the hills. I thought about Lily, and my whole body felt ponderous, like I was carrying the weight of the world packed into a tight ball within my chest. I had committed to a project with a fail state of death. It was only my second day and I was already in mortal peril.
When we reached the building, I followed Andrew to the lab. Amir was toiling away at his workstation. I wondered if he ever let up and then remembered that he’d managed that game of poker with Michelle.
Amir rose from his chair and flashed his lighthearted smile. “Ready to get to work?”
I sighed and nodded.
“Time for a little primer on multiverse travel,” he said.
Andrew retrieved the two hand-stabbing devices, stroking their bulbous heads absentmindedly.
“We call these little guys Bugs. As you’re already aware, they attach to your nervous system and transmit signals that do two thi
ngs—trigger the brain stem to shift into the REM state, and induce the abnormal REM pattern that allows us to shift to another slice. They can be synced.”
He handed the Bugs to Amir, who returned to his computer and attached a thin, black cable to each. From his workstation, Amir unleashed a fury of keystrokes.
“When two Bugs are synced, the travelers will shift to the same slice.”
“Okay, I’m with you so far. But how do you set them up to tell them where you want to go?”
“That’s the first problem. We can’t actually tell them to go anywhere. When you shift to a different slice, you end up exactly where—and when—you started, only in another reality. So if I’m in this lab at ten thirty a.m. when I activate the Bug, in the slice I reach, it’s ten thirty a.m. And I’d physically be right here, at the same coordinates in space.”
“But you’re still here, in this reality too?”
Andrew nodded. “Yes, you’re still here, but in a unique state. You are not unconscious, but you can’t be awakened. We routinely monitor with EEG while we are slicing.”
Amir disconnected the Bugs and placed them carefully on the conference table.
“Let’s get started,” Andrew suggested, gesturing to the pair of the plush leather office chairs next to the rack of medical monitors. He pulled an EEG cap from a bucket of liquid and handed it to me.
“Think you could share some of those anti-nausea meds this time?”
Andrew tossed me a small pill bottle. I eyed the Bug sitting menacingly on the table.
“I don’t suppose there is anything you can do about the massive, horrifying pain that thing causes?”
“Afraid not. I’d like to say you get used to it,” he said as he sat down and slipped an identical sensor cap over his head and began wiggling leads. “But you never really do.”
Andrew reached for his Bug. He rested his right hand on the table, positioned the device, and motioned for me to do the same.
“Does it have to go on my right hand?” I asked, thinking about how painful everything had been following yesterday’s encounter with the device.
“Either hand will work,” Andrew replied. “I’m just a lefty.”
Ignoring the nervous sensation brewing in my stomach, I positioned the device on my left hand.
“Stoked for the trip?” Amir asked.
I grimaced. Andrew shrugged in a manner that was dismissive yet still telegraphed his irritation. Both Bugs began to hum. My chest tightened and I drew in a quick breath. I closed my eyes and waited for the scream.
When I opened my eyes, I was still sitting at the table, though during the trauma of the Bug’s activation, I had again grasped Andrew’s free hand. A sardonic half smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as I pulled quickly away. The Bug that had been affixed to my left hand had vanished, leaving the throbbing welt but no other evidence of its existence.
I looked around. The lab looked the same; we still sat at the table, and Amir was still typing away at the keyboard.
I took a deep breath, bracing for the nausea, but I felt fine.
“Did it work?” I asked.
Andrew ran his hand through his hair, which I noticed was now free of the EEG cap. I touched my chin. Mine was gone, too.
“No EEG, no Bugs,” he replied, shaking out his right hand. “I intentionally asked Amir to configure us for a very near slice. We won’t be here long.”
“Hey, Amir,” Andrew called.
Amir lowered a set of headphones that I didn’t remember him wearing just a moment ago. “Did you sneak in or slice in?”
“Sliced in.”
“Rad. Need anything?” Amir replied, still staring intently at his screen.
“We’re fine.”
I surveyed the room nervously. “If this reality is so similar to ours, why aren’t the local versions of ourselves sitting here right now?”
“It’s surprising how much variation there is, even in these similar slices. From time to time, I’ve encountered my local self, but it’s fairly rare, unless I go looking for him.”
The thought of a carbon copy of myself suddenly appearing before me out of thin air was mind-boggling. What would we even say to one another? I shook off the thought and tried to concentrate.
“How do you tell the Bug where to send you? I mean, how do you know which slice you’ll end up in?” I grimaced. Talking about the multiverse made me sound like an idiot.
“We don’t have fine control on how divergent the target slice is,” Andrew replied. “We can distinguish between a slice that’s likely to converge, and one that is so mathematically dissimilar it won’t naturally collapse.”
“And if the slice doesn’t converge?”
“Then we can’t get back. The procedure that Janine tried with Lily was risky. Really risky. We had no clear indication that it would work. And now we know it won’t, at least half the time.”
“My clothes haven’t changed. I look the same. You look the same.”
I took a closer glance at Amir. He was still wearing a faded T-shirt, but it was now blue rather than athletic gray. His hair seemed a little longer, and it was slicked back. No five o’clock shadow, but the same bemused eyes.
Andrew nodded. “You generally arrive with what you were wearing, and most of what was in your pockets comes, too. Except tech—watches, mobile phones, or cameras—for whatever reason, none of it makes the jump, there or back. Not even the Bug comes along.”
I probed the angry red welt on my left hand. A tiny droplet of blood oozed from the pinpoint incision. I wiped it away, vowing to avoid traumatizing the injury any further.
“It’s interesting that the slicing always lands you in the same physical location as where you started. That doesn’t happen in my dreams.”
“True, but your windows of travel, while not space-bound, do seem to be time-bound. Think back to the last one.”
I felt a chill pass through my body as I fought the suggestion but allowed my mind to drift back to that horrible scene.
“What time was it when you dreamed?”
“Early morning,” I replied. “Sunrise.”
“And where were you?”
“’Chicago. I remember the traffic on Lake Shore Drive.”
“What time did you wake up?”
“Four thirty.”
“Two hour time difference,” Andrew confirmed.
As I considered Andrew’s theory on my alternate-reality windows, I stood up, walked around the room, and picked up a coffee-encrusted cup from the counter. Another slice difference. I held up the cup and examined it closely.
“This is also different than my dreams. During the nightmares, I can see, hear, and sometimes even smell what’s around me. But I can’t interact with anything. And I can’t talk to anyone.”
I set the cup down, walked over to Amir, and gave him a poke on the shoulder, just to be sure. He turned and gave me a thumbs-up. I waved my hand in front of my face, then pinched myself just for good measure. “How is it possible that I am actually here?”
“About ninety years ago, physicists discovered that subatomic particles can exist in two locations at the same time. This, of course, is the heart of quantum mechanics.”
“I’m a bit bigger than an electron.”
“The physics behind it is complicated. The truth is, the equations of quantum mechanics explain the universe of the very small. Einstein’s equations explain the universe on a macro scale. But there is actually no theory that credibly connects the two. If you box a physicist into a corner, they will offer one of two theories. The earliest theory, the Copenhagen Interpretation, was proposed by Bohr and Heisenberg in the 1920s. They basically suggested that the act of observing a quantum effect fixes the possibility.”
“Oh, that’s Schrödinger’s cat!” I replied, recalling my Physics 101. It felt encouraging to understand some part of this absurd conversation, if only for a moment.
“Right. A fine theory, but with no basis in mathematics or measurable obs
ervation. A more recent explanation was proposed by a Princeton doctoral student in the late fifties and is called the many worlds theory. Hugh Everett proposed that every possible quantum outcome actually exists in worlds parallel to our own.”
“Thanks for the physics lesson, but none of these theories really explains how all this is possible.” My head was spinning. It wasn’t so hard to imagine the existence of parallel worlds, but to be in one?
“You’ve heard of Penrose, right?” Andrew asked.
“Ummm, nope.”
“Seriously? I suppose I can’t expect much from a school whose team mascot is a color.”
I glared at him. “You know I’m not a physics major, right? Neuroscience. I’m interested in brains, not bosons.”
Andrew breathed a long-suffering sigh. “Penrose postulated that our very consciousness is a product of quantum mechanical processes occurring in minute structures within our brain cells called microtubules.”
“Really.” I rubbed my temples. This was too much. “You’re trying to tell me that I think therefore I am because subatomic particles exist in two places at the same time? And how on earth does an abnormal REM state translate into appearing in a completely different reality? Seriously,” I said, “when are you going to tell me something I’ll actually believe?”
“Perhaps you’d prefer this: in the late nineties, a theoretical physicist by the name of Juan Maldacena produced work on string theory and gravity that led to an audacious theory that the universe that we experience is actually a hologram—that everything you see is a mere projection of the events that take place.”
I couldn’t contain the snicker. “So, I’m actually a hologram right now?”
Andrew shrugged. “That’s one interpretation. If we subscribe to Maldacena’s theory, however, you’d always be a hologram, no matter what reality you’re experiencing. It might help to use quantum teleportation as a model to explain it. Think of it this way; the Bug puts your brain into a state where it’s possible to reimagine the exact state of your atoms in an identical time and place in another reality due to an existing quantum entanglement between the sending and receiving reality.”
