Madeline smiles and reaches out to squeeze my hand. “I’m sorry. I know I’m sounding awfully harsh with you. But it’s only because we love him and want to protect him, my family and I. But I’m well aware that my grandfather has A WILL OF HIS OWN AND IT IS VERY STRONG.” She gives her grandfather a mock sneer which he returns before they both soften back to smiles. “You’re obviously not to blame,” she tells me. “He’s always been defiant. It’s why he is who he is.”
She gives me a few more instructions for where the controls are for the heat in the room and in the chair. Then she kisses Dr. Venn on the cheek and tells him she’ll see him this afternoon.
As soon as we’re alone, Dr. Venn says, “My headphones, please.”
I slip them over his head, then take the chair across from him and pick up the microphone.
“The yorker isn’t with you today,” Dr. Venn says.
“No. He wanted …” I’m not sure if I should tell him Daniel will be talking to Professor Lacksmith today. Just in case Daniel finds out anything bad. “He had to go to school.”
“But you’re here, and I’m here,” Dr. Venn says. I nod. “It’s because we both understand, don’t we? That this right now is the most important thing in our lives.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Good,” he says. “Then we won’t waste time. Yesterday you asked me about your past—how it could change before you came here. Let me tell you about one of my experiments.”
29
“Imagine I set up an experiment where I show you a series of holographic images,” Dr. Venn says. “One after another, just a few seconds apart. A picture of a bicycle, a dog, a hat—that sort of thing.”
“Okay.”
“I program my machine to show you one hundred images in a row. Then once it’s done, I ask you to quickly list as many of the images as you can remember. That’s the test. That’s the only test you take.”
“Okay.” I don’t see what this has to do with my question about the past, but I’ll let him tell it his way.
“Then after the test, I have you sit and watch twenty-five of those same images again, chosen at random by the machine. And do you know what happens?”
“I have no idea.”
“You remember those images you saw twice better. Significantly better.”
He pauses, smiling, as if what he just told me is impressive.
“Right,” I say. “That makes sense. If you see the same image twice, you’ll remember it better.”
“But there’s only one test,” Dr. Venn reminds me. “Do you understand? I only test people after the first viewing. But they score higher on all the images they’ll see for a second time after that.”
He pauses again to give my mind a chance to catch up.
“Wait a minute,” I say. I close my eyes to try to picture it. “So you’re saying people remember better the things that they won’t even see until after the test is over?”
“Exactly,” Dr. Venn says. “It’s why I always told my students they should pay attention in my classes when we go over the correct answers to an exam. They didn’t know it, but they were part of my experiment, too. The ones who paid attention to what the right answers were after the test made fewer mistakes to begin with than the other students.
“Now, I know what your objection will be,” he says before I even have time to form it. “You’ll say, ‘Well, obviously the students who come to test reviews are the better students anyway, since they care more about their grades.’ But I eliminated that element by making it mandatory at least once every term to attend a post-test review and take notes next to every question they missed. And across the board, every student did better on whichever test I chose for the experiment that term. I picked different tests every time. And the same thing happened again and again.”
“That’s amazing.”
Dr. Venn grins. “Isn’t it? But you’re wondering why I’ve told you this story.”
Actually, I’ve been so absorbed by it, I forgot what we were originally talking about.
“It’s called retro-causation,” Dr. Venn tells me. “And you’ve done it both times you’ve appeared here as Halli.”
He removes one of his arms from the cuff on his chair. “Just for a moment,” he tells me before I feel the need to say anything, although I’m not sure I would. I don’t exactly feel comfortable ordering around an elderly scholar who is obviously more brilliant than I’ll ever be.
Dr. Venn picks up a pen and draws three dots on a sheet of paper. “I’ll let you label them,” he says. “Past, present, future.”
I write one word under each dot.
“Why did you put them in that order?” he asks me.
“Because … I don’t know. That’s how you said it. And it’s normal.”
“It’s normal because we think of them that way. But you could just have easily written Future, Past, and Present under the dots in that order. Or written all three words on top of each other under just one dot. It doesn’t matter. They’re all three here all the time, occupying the same space. But that’s very hard for us to understand, isn’t it? Even if someone could prove it to us mathematically.”
“I have trouble with math anyway,” I confess.
“You won’t need it,” Dr. Venn says. “I need you to picture something instead. You told me you’ve studied quantum physics. How would you describe a possibility wave?”
“It’s a feature of the uncertainty principle,” I say. “It has to do with not being able to predict what a subatomic particle will do. We can measure either its spin or its velocity, but we can’t measure both at the same time. So there will always be one aspect of its future that’s unpredictable. Until it settles down and we can measure it, everything it does is just a possibility.”
“What happens when you do observe the outcome?”
“Then all of the possibility waves collapse,” I say, “and only one of them becomes a certainty.”
“And that applies to more than just subatomic particles, correct?” Dr. Venn asks. “Other, larger things can have unpredictable behavior, too.”
“Right. Because larger things are made up of subatomic particles.”
“Good,” Dr. Venn says. “There’s a coin in my desk drawer. Get it.”
I find a few silver icies in the tray of his drawer and hold one up.
“Toss it into the air,” Dr. Venn tells me.
I flick it upward off my thumb.
“Now—quickly,” he says, “what are its possibilities?”
“Heads or tails,” I say.
“More than that,” Dr. Venn reminds me. “The coin might disappear into another dimension, or it might defy gravity and float upward and never land. Those outcomes aren’t likely, but they are possibilities, aren’t they? Isn’t that what we do with quantum physics? We try to account for all the possibilities, no matter how strange they might be?”
“Yes,” I say, “but there are some things that are more probable than not. And the probable outcome is either heads or tails.”
“So now it’s landed,” Dr. Venn says. “Which is it?”
“Heads.”
“What is the probability now that it will still land tail side up?”
“None.”
“And the probability that it will land head up?”
“One hundred percent. It already has. I can see it.”
“Good. You can keep Mr. Gandhi as your reward.”
“So that’s who it is!” I say. “I saw one of these when Halli and I were in the Alps, and I thought I recognized the face, but I just couldn’t remember.”
“Those were issued in honor of Mr. Gandhi’s one hundredth birthday.”
I’m about to just accept that information and move on, but I can see Dr. Venn staring at me with particular interest. As if he’s waiting for me to get it.
“One hundred?” The memory of one of my history lessons tickles my brain. “But I thought …”
“That he was assassinated when h
e was in his seventies? You would be correct. In your world.”
“But here?”
“He lived to a hundred and two. Youngster.” Dr. Venn smiles. “He played a key role in the world as you see it now. We wanted peace, and he was the man to design it. We owe a great deal to his vision.”
“So did someone still try to kill him, but they failed?”
“No,” Dr. Venn says, “it never got that far. We were already different just a year after the war. And it’s fair to assume the would-be assassin was different, too. For the same reason we’re talking about: retro-causality.”
“Okay, you’re going to have to explain this all to me,” I say. “I feel like I have little pieces of it here and there, but I don’t see how they go together.”
“Let me add another piece,” Dr. Venn says. “Do you know what the Zeno effect is?”
“I think so. It’s when there are two identical particles, both under observation, but with one of them, the scientist only observes it twice: at the beginning of its life cycle and at its end. With the second particle, the scientist checks on it all the time from start to finish.”
“And what happens when you compare the two particles at the end of their cycle?”
“They’re both very different,” I say. “Because every time you observe something or measure it, you change it. It’s called the observer effect.”
“Very good,” Dr. Venn says. “I want you to hold all of those principles in your head for a moment. Now hand me that pen and paper again.” He takes his arms out of the cuffs, then flattens the paper on his lap with the pen poised above one of the dots. “So. The last time you saw Halli alive, in the flesh—not when you looked ahead and saw the avalanche, but when you were with her in the Alps—that was on Sunday, you said. Correct?”
“Correct.”
He pokes a hole through the Past dot.
“Next, you woke up in her body on Thursday, safe in her bed in her Colorado house. Also correct?”
“Yes.”
He pokes a hole through the Present dot. “So. Tell me, Audie, if those were your only two observation points—this known past and this known present—what are the possibilities of what could have happened in between?”
“But … I know what happened in between. I saw it. I saw the avalanche.”
“No, you saw one possibility that led to a different present—the one where Halli was dead. You woke up in the present where she lived—or more specifically, where you lived inside her body. Forget what you think you know. I want you to tell me what one of the possibilities was for how her story went from this point in the past to that point in the new present.”
“Well … I guess the one that her tracking information showed. That she hiked out with Daniel and Sarah on Sunday.”
“And Daniel confirms that, yes?”
I nod.
“So those are at least two facts that make that history the more probable one,” Dr. Venn says. “And make the history where Halli dies less probable. Like you observing the coin lying face up, and so it’s unlikely it landed tails up instead.”
“Wait a minute—hold on. Those are not the same thing.”
“Why not?” Dr. Venn asks.
“Because … I mean … one is just a coin. The other is a whole life. It’s a lot more complicated.”
“Is it?” Dr. Venn asks. “Then let’s take another example: your second time through as Miss Halli. You said there are things that have been changed. How could that have happened?”
I stare at the paper on his lap. Past, Present … and all that blank space in between.
“Just suppose something for a moment,” Dr. Venn says to me. “Humor me. Let’s say the conscious you arrives at some point in her timeline, and thinks, ‘Hm, that didn’t go so well. What could I do better next time?’ And let’s say the conscious you thinks, ‘Where in the previous timeline did things start to go wrong? What if I went back to that and started doing things differently?’”
I’m listening very intently. Because what he’s saying sounds like it could possibly be true.
“And so,” Dr. Venn continues, “you decide to make some changes. Circumstance and choice. And so here you are, a new Present, but what Past would best support it? ‘Oh, I know—I won’t have done this. I’ll skip doing that.’ And now you’ve claimed a different possibility for what might have happened between Past and Present. And the moment you start living forward again, you’ve set those changes in place. They have now become your probable history.”
“But … wait a minute.” I set the microphone on my lap so I can lean forward and give my head some support. It wants to be cradled a little right now. Anchored between my palms. It’s feeling a little airy and unweighted at the moment. It needs to know we are real.
I sit back up and try again. “I don’t control the dog. He hates Jake this time. Why?”
“Because maybe in this past you reacted to Jake in a way that made the dog feel protective. Is that possible?”
The word possible has taken on a new meaning for me. “Yes, I suppose it’s possible. And I guess it’s possible that I knew Halli’s parents would make Mrs. Scott leave the island before we could make plans for me to stay with her, so this time I made sure I talked to her in time.”
“It’s my students studying the test after they take it,” Dr. Venn reminds me. “You saw the better answers, and so you fixed it.”
“Wow.” What seemed bizarre just a few minutes ago is starting to make more sense.
“It’s because time flows in loops,” Dr. Venn says, “not in a straight line. Possibility waves flow from the past to the present and back to the past, carrying information in both directions. It does the same from the present to the future, with waves coming back showing all your possibilities.
“But there will always be one that resonates with the wave you’re sending forward,” Dr. Venn continues. “Future you says, ‘These are the answers to the test you’re about to take. You’ll see them at the test review you’ll go to two days from now.’ ‘Oh, okay, thank you.’ Or present you says, ‘I want to be a doctor.’ Future you answers, ‘All right, here’s the life where you’re a doctor. Do you want to know how you got here? You did this and this and this.’ ‘Oh, okay, so I’ll make those choices right now and going forward, and become that version of me in the future. Thank you for the information.’”
“Are you serious?” I ask. “That’s really what happens?” It’s a beautiful story, but it sounds too unreal to be true.
“That’s what my research shows. And my own personal experience. The possibilities coalesce into one probable course. I send a wave into the future and it searches for the resonant wave coming back. Then I start getting hunches, nudges—all from the future me. ‘Go talk to that person. Stay away from this one. Read this book. Go for a walk now because you’re going to see something that will change your life.’ I can choose to follow those suggestions or not—the choice is always mine—but the track has been laid for me if I want to make it easier on myself.”
“So … hold on.” He’s giving me so much information right now, I feel like my brain is on overdrive. “So when I came back as Halli this time, I sent out a possibility wave about how I wanted things to change. And one of the waves coming back from this present connected with that and we made a new history together. Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s close,” Dr. Venn says. “We could spend all day on it—and maybe we will later—but first I want to know something else: have you noticed any other changes?”
“You mean … besides the things about Red and Jake and Mrs. Scott? No, I think those were the only big ones.”
“Any changes … in yourself?” Dr. Venn asks.
“Like what?”
“I don’t want to plant any suggestions in your head,” he says. “Just examine it yourself.”
Do I feel any different? Maybe …
“Okay, I don’t know if this means anything,” I tell him, “but there h
ave been a few times … no, forget it. It’s probably nothing.”
“It’s probably not,” Dr. Venn says. “So tell me.”
“I’ve noticed … okay, there are a few times, especially when I’ve been dealing with Halli’s parents, when I feel like I really am her. Not just pretending. I feel angry and … offended, I guess, in ways I don’t think I should, you know? They’re not my parents. Why do I get so upset?”
Dr. Venn nods. “Anything else?”
“Maybe a little … bolder this time?” Despite what I just said, I feel shy saying it. It’s weird to have to describe yourself to someone else.
“Bolder how?” he asks.
“Stronger than I used to feel. More confident. More sure of what I have to do and how I should go about doing it. And also … I guess I’d have to say more defiant.”
“Defiant,” Dr. Venn says, smiling. “Yes. That’s a wonderful word for it. And do you want to know why you feel that way?”
“You mean it’s not just my imagination?”
“Oh no, not at all,” he says. “It’s very real. I’ve experienced it, too.”
“You have? Then what is it?”
“It’s the strands of Halli in you. You aren’t strictly Audie anymore. You carry Halli with you now, too. Along with strands of the girl you were right before this. And strands of the life Halli is making now, living as you. And of course strands of the original you. They’re all woven into you, like threads twisted into rope. So of course you feel bold. Of course you feel strong. And yes, defiant.” He raises a gnarled, arthritic fist. “You’re not the same seventeen-year-old girl you were a month ago—you’ve traveled universes. Lived multiple lives. Of course you’re a different person. And why? Circumstance and choices. Possibility waves flowing backward and forward and sideways. You’ve chosen the best parts of all of you to construct the girl sitting before me right now. How do I know? Because I did it, too.” He barks out a laugh. “So! What do you think of that?”
What do I think? What can I say? I just sit here staring at this old man who is grinning like a kid, his body encased in purple casts, his eyes bright behind thick glasses. He must be exhausted from all this talking, from all this teaching, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. The man is exuberant. The man is alive.
Parallelogram Omnibus Edition Page 81
