Quantum Void

by Douglas Phillips

  “Sounds like it came from my office,” he said, pulling his key out.

  They followed him only a few steps down the hall and around a corner. He slid the key into a door and opened it to reveal a darkened office. Jan flipped the light switch.

  A whiteboard had fallen from the wall and was lying on the floor. Jan picked it up and laid it flat on his desk. The whiteboard was partially covered with physics equations and diagrams, but scrawled diagonally in large letters were two words written with a black marking pen.

  Sorry, Jan.

  As they watched, additional words formed from nowhere, written by an invisible hand. The words ran across the width of the whiteboard, passing over its edge and onto the desk itself as if both were part of the same writing surface. A portion of one word even crossed the top of a white computer mouse in the middle of the desk. It was like a film projection of written words, covering multiple surfaces. They were difficult to piece together, but unmistakably from Nala.

  Radio doesn’t work … crackers and peanut … good.

  Jan grabbed an eraser and wiped the whiteboard clean. He quickly wrote. Hold the radio parallel to us.

  They waited. The radio in Jan’s hand remained silent, but more words were scrawled across the whiteboard, this time even drawing across Jan’s hand resting on the desk.

  Can’t see … you’re doing … again.

  Jan wiped the board clean again and wrote the same message once more. He looked up at the ceiling, but even Marie recognized that “up” was not the direction where Nala was hidden. Jan couldn’t look in her direction any more than he could point to her. No one could.

  More writing appeared.

  Nope. Too confusing.

  “She can’t see what you’re writing,” Park said. “It’s the view from four-dimensional space.” He leaned close to Marie. “You recall, Ms. Kendrick when you first visited Fermilab, the strange view from the camera? Walls, clothing, skin, bones, all mixed together. Confusing is an understatement. Nala’s situation may be even worse.”

  More words appeared.

  Cover it. Black for … white for no. Okay?

  Jan grabbed a dark blue blazer that hung on the back of his door and covered the whiteboard as best he could. If he was interpreting Nala’s broken words correctly, a dark surface would mean yes.

  “Now, uncover it so she can write,” Marie suggested.

  New words appeared as soon as the board was cleared.

  You guys learn quickly! … trained mice. Was radio working?

  Jan covered the whiteboard with the jacket for yes, and another sentence appeared.

  I’m calling. You’re … not hearing me. Write on cracker… easier to pick up.

  “She means the cracker box,” Marie said. “She had no problem picking that one up. There’s another box in the break room.” Marie dashed down the hall and returned with the box of crackers. Jan scribbled a note across its surface and handed it back to Marie. He still seemed concerned about holding anything out to Nala.

  Marie shook her head and held the box in the air as far from her body as possible. It probably wouldn’t be any safer, but it might make it easier for Nala to see it. Within seconds, the box began to wobble in Marie’s hand, then disappeared just as the first one had.

  Marie smiled. They waited to see what would happen. Writing appeared once more on the whiteboard.

  Not bad. Food with a message. … fortune cookie. As you thought, Jan. Instability … boson. I totally fucked up. Hang on to your lederhosen … in the void. Your move.

  As they watched, a few more words appeared.

  Hurry, would you?

  29

  Flickers

  Nala put the radio down and dipped another cracker into the peanut butter jar. A sweater wrapped around her body, she sat cross-legged on the floor, allowing her bare legs to soak up its relative warmth.

  She lifted the Viking oxygen mask for a moment, popped the cracker in her mouth and washed it down with pineapple juice. “Just as well that the vodka bottle broke,” she said between crunches. “Probably better if I stay sharp.”

  The bottle had been harder to grasp than the other items. Slippery, with no distinct edges to pinch between fingers. The peanut butter jar was much easier, particularly when someone held it up. Nala wasn’t sure who it was, but most likely a woman given the longer hair. Faces were difficult from this fourth-dimensional perspective, though hair was easier. The woman looked a bit like Daniel’s old partner. What was her name? But why would she be at Fermilab? More likely it was someone from security.

  The other two were easier. Jan and Jae-ho, almost certainly. Even if their faces were jumbled, she could tell just by their motions. People moved a certain way, and after years of working with the same colleague, you got to know them pretty well. Maybe not from another dimension, but the principle was the same.

  No sign of Daniel. She wouldn’t expect him to be there anyway. She could wish he was there. Daniel figured things out, and that kind of help could be pretty handy right now. But Jan was the physicist, and there would be no walking out of bizarroland without a scientific solution. Jan was her best hope, not Daniel.

  Finishing the cracker, she licked her lips and made another try with the radio, turning the volume up to maximum and speaking loudly through a gap in the mask. “Calling all scientists. Anyone out there?” She released the transmit button and listened. Nothing, of course. There wouldn’t be. Interdimensional conversations were one-way at best. A three-dimensional radio has no mechanism for sending electromagnetic waves into a fourth direction.

  She held the button down. “Just kidding. I know you can’t talk to me, and I think we’ve established you can’t hear me either… but if I’m not mistaken, I think it depends on the position of the radio, or maybe the antenna. Can’t remember. But I’ll keep talking and twisting the radio around and maybe you’ll pick up a few words here and there.”

  Nala stood up, whatever up was. “Thanks for the food. I’m going to grab a few more items if I can and then check out my surroundings. I’ll return here at noon, okay? In fact, let me just write that for you.” She drew once more on the whiteboard.

  She walked a few steps back to the break room, passing directly over—through?—the three-dimensional walls in between. She dropped to her knees for a better look at the table. It was still covered with objects, some recognizable, some not. There was something bulky and gray. She had already tried to pick it up, but it seemed soft—maybe a pillow. It was too difficult to pinch, and she had given up. Nourishment was more important anyway. There was still another bottle, maybe water. No longer a critical need, though with disappearing-reappearing water bottles, you never knew. Other shapes looked like food. Better.

  She reached to the floor and pinched a slender yellow shape between her left- and right-hand fingers. It wiggled and bent, but she finally managed to lift it from the page. A banana.

  “Yum,” she said, taking a bite. “Good choice, people of the page world.”

  She took another bite and picked up the radio again. “Who knows, maybe you can hear me. Probably better for my sanity if I think you might be out there. Hey, the writing sure got your attention, but I had no idea what you were doing in response. Maybe you were writing too, but it just looked like chicken scratches to me.”

  Nala’s ability to write in their world made perfect sense; it really wasn’t any different from an ordinary pen to paper. A three-dimensional pen intersects a two-dimensional sheet of paper exactly where the pen tip touches the paper. Any flat two-dimensional creatures living in the paper world would never see the pen but would easily detect the ink flowing into their page. From her 4-D perch she was simply intersecting the 3-D world with the tip of the pen, or the tip of her fingers. Same concept.

  “I’d love to give you a longer description of where I am. Maybe I’ll try to find a clear floor to write on. Anyway, if you can hear me, this might help you come up with a solution.”

  She looked around in t
he darkness. The area where she sat was free of debris, but there was no telling if she might encounter the edge again. It would be certain death if she did.

  “I’m in quantum space, probably propped up by HP bosons, though I couldn’t say what the baryon-to-boson ratio might be. My best guess is that the space Thomas and I created was unstable, and it folded back on itself when we forced it to collapse. Along with some 3-D space, we got sucked in.”

  She glanced to the bright light. “There are two sources of light. One is hanging above me. It’s almost like a star, bright and probably far away because walking toward it or away from it doesn’t really change its position. It might be the singularity I saw in the lab, but from another viewpoint. Whatever it is, the little shit turned itself off once. It just flickered and was gone. Almost wet my pants. Luckily it turned back on and has been steady ever since. But I’m wary.”

  She looked down, into the 3-D world. “The other source of light is the real world below me, though down may be a misnomer around here. The real world is dim, but it does glow. That tells me that photons are leaking across the boundary and, of course, any boson leaking into quantum space is normal physics, so that helps to confirm my hypothesis about where I am.

  “I can interact with the 3-D world. I can touch things, even pull them out. Well, you’ve already seen me do that. It probably means that at least a small sliver of me still inhabits the 3-D world. I’d love to find a way to improve upon a sliver, but I haven’t thought of anything yet.”

  She released the transmit key, dipped her head and then pressed the button again. “I fucked up bad… Thomas didn’t make it.”

  She missed her friend and colleague. He would have been highly valuable in getting them out of this mess, particularly with the communications. He was always so good at…

  She paused and slapped her forehead. “Dumb shit! What were you thinking? Cables. Fucking wires. That’s all you need.” The whole world had been wireless for years, but it was still no excuse. After all, they’d communicated with Core through a coaxial cable.

  Nala quickly scribbled a note on the whiteboard and then keyed the radio. “Boy, are we dense sometimes. Just hand me a phone. But before you do, make sure it’s connected to a computer via USB. Simple, right?”

  Once a wired connection was established, there were a number of ways to communicate. They could transfer files, for example. She even recalled a chat app that worked over USB.

  Satisfied that better communication was on the way, Nala turned off the radio and put it in the back pocket of her ripped shorts. It was time for some reconnaissance.

  She gathered a few items of food and one water bottle and put them in a plastic bag she had found in the debris, tying her supplies through a belt loop. She picked up a metal pole that was now the equivalent of her blind man’s cane, a last-chance warning for the edge and the void beyond it.

  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 theorist 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.