Coin #2 - Quantum Coin

by E. C. Myers

  “Thank you,” she said softly, like a sigh. The coin disappeared into the right-hand pocket of her lab coat. “And the controller?” Dr. Kim said. She looked at Zoe and Jena expectantly.

  Zoe stepped up and sullenly passed the controller to her older self. Dr. Kim took it delicately, avoiding contact with Zoe.

  The doctor examined the device, her lips tight together and her face growing a shade redder.

  “What have you done to it?” Dr. Kim asked.

  “I took it apart,” Zoe said. “But I put it back together again.”

  “With…duct tape?” Dr. Kim seethed.

  Zoe waved a hand at the controller. “Those scratches and dents were there when I got it. Most of them.”

  “The Charon device is not a toy. It's a precision instrument.” She glared at Nathaniel. “This is what happens when you leave things in the hands of children.”

  “Don't you need the help of these ‘children’?” Zoe asked. “Nathaniel certainly did, to get back here last year.”

  “I'm not comfortable with the fate of the multiverse resting on a device held together with tape and glue. Nor should you be.” Dr. Kim shook the device. She closed her eyes in exasperation when she heard the rattling on the inside.

  “It got us here all right,” Zoe said.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Ephraim said. “What do you mean, ‘the fate of the multiverse’? That's just an exaggeration, right?”

  Dr. Kim thrust the controller at Nathaniel. “Check it thoroughly. Make sure there isn't any damage and see if you can recover additional coordinates. Feed them directly into the catalog and lock down the database.”

  “You got it, Doc,” Nathaniel said.

  “I can help you,” Zoe said. “I know how it's put together.”

  He smiled. “Thanks. But I know its parts better than my own anatomy.” He scratched his bristly chin. “Just a figure of speech.”

  “I know you're a hands-on kind of guy,” Zoe said.

  Everyone looked at her.

  Dr. Kim pulled a silver case from her lab coat. She opened it and selected a cigarette. She lit it with a Zippo lighter and squinted at them through a haze of smoke. Zoe coughed pointedly, waving her hand in front of her face.

  “I'm afraid I was not speaking with hyperbole, Ephraim,” Dr. Kim said. “We believe that there is an unprecedented interaction between the quantum wave states of individual universes in the multiverse.”

  “Which means what?” Ephraim asked.

  “Universes are merging,” Nathaniel said.

  “We already knew that,” Zoe said.

  Dr. Kim's eyebrows shot up. “How?”

  “We've seen it.” Zoe produced Nathan's video camera from one of the pockets of her hoodie. “We recorded it.”

  “You recorded it?” Dr. Kim shot a questioning look at Nathaniel.

  “This is the first I've heard of it,” he said. “What did you see, Zoe?”

  “We saw—” Zoe began.

  “We saw our friends…” Jena swallowed. “Our friends sort of combined into one person.”

  “Mary and Shelley Morales,” Ephraim said. “They're…they were twins. But just before we shifted, they merged into one person. M.S. She didn't even know anything had happened.”

  Nathaniel grimaced. “I'm sorry.”

  “This is marvelous,” Dr. Kim said. “I must examine that footage immediately.”

  Zoe clutched the camera against her chest. “This belongs to us,” she said.

  “Zoe,” Ephraim said. “Let her have it.”

  Zoe glanced at him. She handed the camera to Dr. Kim and folded her arms.

  “You still haven't told us why the universes are merging. Or how,” Jena said.

  “We're still figuring that out. We may know more once we've reviewed your recording,” Dr. Kim said. She dropped the camera into a pocket of her coat and kept her hand inside. She puffed on her cigarette thoughtfully.

  “You're welcome,” Zoe said.

  Dr. Kim continued speaking as if she hadn't heard Zoe. She looked directly at Ephraim.

  “What we do know is that readings from the LCD suggest the number of universes has just started to decrease at an alarming rate. And the process is accelerating.”

  “That's…bad?” Ephraim asked.

  “It isn't good, especially if you're in one of the universes that disappears or merges,” Nathaniel said. “The rate of branching and quantum decoherence are usually balanced.”

  “One thing's clear,” Dr. Kim said. “If this goes unchecked, we don't know if the process will ever stop. It could end up affecting every universe.”

  “You mean, what happened to Mary and Shelley. It could happen to any of us?” Jena asked.

  “We think so. But we aren't experts on this,” Nathaniel said.

  “Shouldn't you be? Isn't that your job?” Zoe said. “What are you a doctor of, anyway?” she asked Dr. Kim.

  “Psychology,” Dr. Kim said.

  Zoe threw up her hands. “That's useful.”

  “I need a new major,” Jena said in a small voice.

  Nathaniel glanced at Dr. Kim. “Look, I don't know about you, but I'm so tired I can't think straight,” he said.

  “You're right,” Dr. Kim said. “It's very late and you have all had an eventful night. Get some rest. Nathaniel will show you to the manor.”

  “You're sending us to our rooms?” Zoe said. “If the multiverse is screwed up, we can't afford to wait. We should do something about it now.”

  “What?” Ephraim asked quietly. “We don't even know what's causing this. Anything we do could just make it worse.”

  “There must be someone who can figure this out,” Zoe said.

  “There is, but we'll go over that tomorrow morning,” Dr. Kim said. “Don't worry, we have a plan.”

  “When people tell me not to worry, that's when I start worrying,” Zoe said.

  Nathaniel pressed the elevator call button, and the doors slid open. Jena hesitated, then walked inside.

  Ephraim put a hand on Zoe's arm. “I'm pretty tired, Zoe. We all are,” he said. “We'll figure this out in the morning.”

  She shrugged his hand off. “Fine.” She flounced into the elevator. Ephraim and Nathaniel joined her.

  “Good night,” Ephraim said to Dr. Kim before the doors closed, but she had already turned around and started walking to her office.

  Nathaniel pressed the 1 and the 3 buttons at the same time, and they heard a gentle tone. The elevator descended.

  “This is how you get to the basement entrance to Greystone Manor,” Nathaniel said. “We found an old network of tunnels that were used in the Civil War to move slaves to the Hudson River and then north to Albany.”

  Jena clapped. “A secret tunnel! I love it.”

  “1 and 3,” Zoe said. “Clever.”

  At Ephraim's questioning look, Jena explained. “One plus three equals B.”

  “Ohhh,” he said, a moment later.

  “I can't believe that woman,” Zoe muttered.

  “I know!” Jena said.

  “She was nice,” Ephraim said. “To me, anyway.”

  “The Doc's very focused on her work and worried about, frankly, the end of life as we know it, and possibly the entire fabric of space and time,” Nathaniel said. “That hasn't done wonders for her mood, I'll tell you.”

  “You'd think she'd treat us of all people better, though,” Jena said.

  “Doc has always been hardest on herself,” Nathaniel said. “She blames herself for…” He looked at Ephraim. “Well, everything. She's taking all of this very personally. All I'm saying is cut her a little slack. She's a good person when you get to know her, and she's the one who will get us through this. Whatever it is.”

  The elevator jolted to a stop.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Nathaniel said.

  The doors opened onto plush maroon carpeting. They followed Nathaniel through the air-conditioned corridor, and he led them up a short flight of wooden stairs to the fi
rst floor. All the polished brass and dark wood paneling reminded Ephraim of a hotel.

  “Only the west wing is open right now. The rest was under renovation when the money ran out. Ephraim, you're here.” Nathaniel stopped in front of a door and opened it.

  “Jena will be next door, and Zoe is just across the hall. I'm the last door on the left if you need me. Every room has its own bathroom and a stocked mini-fridge if you're hungry. I'll collect the three of you for breakfast around ten.”

  Jena stifled a yawn.

  “Thanks, Nathaniel. Good night, everyone,” Ephraim said.

  He walked into a comfy room with a wide four-poster bed, a writing desk in the corner, and some green velvet armchairs. The windows on the far wall looked out on the park, with the dark tower of the Everett Institute looming beyond the trees a hundred feet away. The outside of the Institute was just as utilitarian as the inside. With its gunmetal gray walls and solar paneling, it looked like a modern fortress.

  Ephraim closed the door and headed straight for the bed, shedding his jacket and tie on the way. He quickly stripped down to his boxers and collapsed face-first into the pillows. He was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

  Ephraim picked at his plate. The microwaved pizza was singed to a crisp on one edge, soft and soggy on the other, and slightly frozen in the center. And the soda was flat. This was far from the breakfast of champions he'd expected.

  He bit into it anyway, too hungry to quibble over quality. It wasn't the worst thing he'd had to eat. He had subsisted largely on a diet of Pop-Tarts and Chef Boyardee before his mother had discovered that not only could she cook—albeit with child supervision—but that she enjoyed it.

  They were seated around a long table in the conference room next to Dr. Kim's office. Her head was bent to read a translucent computer screen at one end of the conference table, hands typing on the bare table. Ash dropped from a cigarette dangling from her lips, but she didn't notice. A series of numbers scrolled in front of her face in green text, backward, from Ephraim's perspective. The controller was positioned next to the screen with the coin rotating slowly above it.

  Oddly, the other end of the conference table held a dusty contraption that Nathaniel told him was an overhead projector. It was designed to display information from clear plastic sheets onto a white screen suspended from the ceiling, but the lightbulb inside had burned out.

  Ephraim took another bite. The scorched crust of the pizza jarred a tooth and cut into the roof of his mouth. He dropped the hard pizza onto his plate with a solid thump and pushed it away.

  Dr. Kim looked at him through her computer screen, startled. She stared at him as though seeing him for the first time.

  “Ephraim,” she said.

  “Yes?” He ran his tongue inside his bloody mouth, surveying the damage.

  “Where did you get those clothes?” she asked.

  “I found them in the closet. They were a pretty close fit. A little baggy.” He met Nathaniel's eyes. “Was that okay?”

  Nathaniel swallowed. “I put him in his old room,” he said.

  “Oh.” Dr. Kim stared at Ephraim without actually seeing him. “Yes, that's fine. I always liked that shirt on you.”

  Ephraim had been so thrilled to change from formal wear into a gray button-down shirt and jeans, it hadn't occurred to him that he was wearing his analog's clothes. A dead man's clothes.

  “Well.” Dr. Kim cleared her throat. “If everyone's done eating, then I suppose we're ready to begin,” she said. She puffed on the cigarette once more before grinding it out on her uneaten, congealed slice of pizza.

  Jena and Zoe shoved their paper plates forward simultaneously, pizza slices only half-eaten.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Kim began. “Did I say that already?”

  “Good morning, Dr. Kim,” Ephraim, Jena, and Zoe chorused.

  Dr. Kim leveled a stern gaze at them over her screen. Jena had given him that annoyed look before, but this was the first time she'd been on the receiving end of it. Jena leaned back and pushed her glasses higher on the bridge of her nose with a finger, unnerved. Ephraim smiled.

  Dr. Kim tapped a couple of invisible keys, and a 3-D image of the coin and controller appeared on the monitor behind her. “The Charon device,” she said. “Also known as a portable coheron drive. How much do you know about the science behind it?”

  Ephraim leaned forward, feeling like he was taking a pop quiz he was in no way prepared for. He glanced at Nathaniel.

  “We know which buttons to press,” Ephraim said. Nathaniel smiled.

  Dr. Kim tsked.

  Zoe folded her hands in front of her. “I only have a vague idea of how microwave radiation works, but I don't need a physics degree to nuke a pizza. Though it might have helped in this case.” She flicked the edge of her plate.

  Dr. Kim stood and leaned on the back of her chair. She reminded Ephraim of his English teacher, Ms. Nolan. Had she had the same teacher in her senior year of high school in this timeline? How similar were their histories? He thought that might give him an idea of how closely their futures might track.

  “Let's start with the footage you recorded,” Dr. Kim said.

  “Nathan recorded it,” Ephraim corrected. “My universe's Nathan.”

  Dr. Kim swept a finger across her screen. The overhead lights dimmed, and the glass wall tinted black. Ephraim relaxed slightly. He'd felt like a goldfish in a bowl, exposed to the forty Institute staff members working in the R&D lab. When the fate of the multiverse was in the balance, you didn't get Sundays off.

  Nathan's video footage played across the screen at nearly life-size scale, with a clarity and depth that made Ephraim feel like he was back at the prom.

  “I enhanced the video quality as best I could,” Nathaniel said. He leaned toward Ephraim and lowered his voice. “I also edited out some of the personal drama to make you look better.”

  “Thanks for using your creative skills for good instead of evil,” Ephraim said. He wondered what Dr. Kim had thought of all that when she saw it.

  Ghostly images popped onto the dance floor.

  “We're very lucky Nathaniel's analog discovered this,” Dr. Kim said. “Perhaps we should sell all our expensive monitoring equipment in exchange for a twenty-five-year-old camcorder and a high school kid.”

  “Can't we just share in our combined accomplishments?” Nathaniel asked. “What's his is mine, and all that.”

  Dr. Kim smiled, the first sign that she'd retained any kind of sense of humor.

  “All parallel universes are superimposed over each other, occupying the same space but in different dimensions,” she said. “They're there all the time, but under ordinary circumstances, we can't see them—let alone jump from one to another. But as this video shows, something is weakening the forces that separate the universes. And it's now weak enough that people are beginning to shift involuntarily without a coheron drive. That's what happened to your friends.”

  Jena closed her eyes for a moment. When she'd come out of her room that morning, they'd been red. She'd claimed they were irritated from the contact lenses she'd worn the night before.

  “What's the bottom line, Doc?” Nathaniel asked. “What's the worst-case scenario?”

  Dr. Kim sat down and passed her hand over her screen. The computer and monitor went dark, and the lights brightened. The glass wall faded to transparency again. A man in a white lab coat pulled his ear from the window in surprise and hurried away. Nathaniel glared at him and tapped something on his tablet.

  “We lose…everything. It all disappears.” She fell silent and her shoulders slumped. “As if all those universes never existed.”

  “But we're going to stop it, right?” Ephraim asked. He looked at Nathaniel and Dr. Kim. “You said you had a plan?”

  “Before we can stop it, we have to understand it,” Dr. Kim said, “or we're just stumbling around in the dark. It's even possible that this process is natural, cyclical, and if we interrupt it there could be terr
ible consequences.”

  “Your arrival here caused a noticeable spike in instability,” Nathaniel said softly. “I don't need a camera to tell me it's all breaking down.”

  “But we're safe here?” Jena said. “The thing in the courtyard is protecting us?”

  Nathaniel glanced at Dr. Kim. “The cancellation wave generated by the LCD is stabilizing this universe,” he said. “But we don't know for how long. And it might be contributing to the damage, too.”

  Ephraim squeezed his hand. He could almost feel the coin in his fist. His mother, Nathan, Jim…everyone he cared about at home was in danger, along with their countless analogs in all the realities he'd visited and even more that he hadn't.

  “Can we extend the LCD's protection to other universes?” he asked.

  “You're just like him,” Dr. Kim murmured. “Always worrying about other people.”

  “Isn't that why we're here?”

  She frowned. “Of course. Perhaps we could protect other universes, at least the ones we have coordinates for,” Dr. Kim said. “Once we know more.”

  “Could we bring more people here?” Jena asked.

  Dr. Kim rubbed her upper lip with a knuckle thoughtfully. “That's also a possibility I've been considering.”

  “But only as a last resort,” Nathaniel said.

  “How would you choose?” Zoe asked. “How can you pick one analog to survive over another?”

  “You can't keep the LCD running forever. Eventually it'll break down,” Ephraim said. “Then what?”

  “You said there was someone who could help,” Zoe said.

  “The only person who could figure this out passed away a couple of years ago,” Dr. Kim said. “Hugh Everett.”

  “Everett?” Jena said. “That can't be. He'd have been over a hundred, easy.”

  “Who's Hugh Everett?” Ephraim asked.

  “I'm surprised you don't know,” Jena said. “This place is named after him. After you told me about the Institute, I looked him up. He existed in our world too. Dr. Hugh Everett III was the physicist who developed the many-worlds theory.”

  “He invented multiple universes?” Ephraim asked. “I wish he were still alive so I could punch him.”