Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (62 page)

“Is someone there?” she asked. She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but her voice trembled.

No answer. She fumbled in her pocket and found the squeeze light that she had purchased in Bermuda when she was concerned that there might be another blackout. Just luck she had it in her pocket. The bulb glowed, creating a tiny pool of bright light.

She saw a flicker of movement outside the circle of light. She shone the light around, but saw nothing but dark walls, dark floors. “Who’s there?”

No answer. She faced the darkness, holding the light in front of her, but she reached behind herself to rattle the door knob again. It would not open. “Help!” Susan called. She pounded on the door with the hand that wasn’t holding the flashlight. “Open the door!” she shouted, hoping that someone might be on the stairs, someone might hear her. “Help!”

She tried the knob again and it turned suddenly in her hand. The door opened. She almost fell onto the landing, but clung to the doorknob for support. Regaining her footing, she turned and slammed the door behind her, leaning against it and waiting for the sound of someone on the other side of the door.

All was quiet. After a moment, she turned to face the person who had opened the door. “Thank you,” she began. “I got locked out …” Her words died. In the dim light that filtered down from the landing above them, she recognized the man who was studying her.

Weldon Merrimax. She stared at him in disbelief. “You sounded like you needed a hand,” he said.

“Yes,” Susan said, her voice weak. “Yes, I suppose I did.” She straightened up, standing with her back to the door.

“So what’s in there?” he asked, glancing at the door behind her. “What had you so scared?” He studied her, his eyes cold and appraising.

“The light went out,” she said. “That’s all.” She shook her head, not knowing what else to say. She didn’t want to talk to this man. She was afraid of him.

“Scared of the dark?” he asked, smiling as if he liked the idea. Susan shrugged.

“Nothing wrong with being scared of the dark,” he said. “It’s a sensible attitude, if you ask me. I think that’s the first big lie that parents tell their kids. ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark,’ they say. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ What bullshit. There are lots of things to fear.” He raised his eyebrows, still smiling at her. He looked like a rattlesnake, contemplating a mouse. “You step into the darkness and you don’t know what might happen,” he said, his voice still soft. “Anything could be out there.”

“My imagination got the best of me,” she said. “That’s all.”

“That’s all?” His smile broadened. It wasn’t a nice smile. “I wouldn’t discount your imagination. The imagination is a very powerful thing.”

“I’ve got to be going,” she said, starting up the stairs.

“Oh, don’t rush off,” he said, walking alongside her. “I’m glad I ran into you. I think we got off on the wrong foot the other day. I have a bone to pick with Max, and I took that out on you. I just don’t like Max taking credit for my work.”

She kept walking.

“All those books you think are so bleak. Those are mine, not Max’s. You understand that?”

She didn’t answer. She reached the landing and pushed open the door. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped out into a carpeted corridor. She was in a public area one deck below the Calypso Deck and her stateroom. She could hear the music from the Lotus Eaters’ Bar.

The man was still beside her. She stared at him, feeling more confident now that she was in a well-lit passenger area. She was trying to think of a way to contact Tom. “What do you want?” she asked him. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“How well do you know your Bible?” the man asked her.

She blinked, startled. She hadn’t read the Bible since she stopped going to Sunday school in sixth grade.

The man went on without waiting for an answer. “Do you remember where Satan came from. You know that story?”

She frowned. “He used to be an angel, then he was cast out,” she said slowly.

“He was called Lucifer, the light-bearer. He was cast out because he had the balls to challenge the Creator by setting up a throne for himself, for thinking he was as good as the Creator. That was something God couldn’t take. So God cast Lucifer into the pit.” The man studied Susan with a level stare. “It’s a question of who is going to be the Creator, that’s all.”

“I don’t understand …”

“You don’t want to understand,” the man said, his voice laced with contempt. “And I’m afraid I don’t have time to explain it all to you. I’m rearranging things a bit, so that they’re more to my liking—that’s all.” He turned away, heading back into the companionway. He glanced over his shoulder. “By the way, when you see Max, tell him I’d like to talk to him.” The door swung closed behind him.

Susan ran to the bar and asked the bartender to call security. “Hurry,” she said. “Tell them I just saw Weldon Merrimax.”

A security guard named Don came to the bar and rushed out to search the companionway, but Weldon was gone.

If you’ve been following me so far, you know that quantum physics describes a world of many simultaneously existing and sometimes contradictory possibilities. An electron orbiting an atom can be, simultaneously, in more than one place.

It really can. Trust me on this. Experiments have shown that the same electron is in two places at once. However—and here’s the tricky part—the minute you try to measure the electron’s whereabouts, all those potentialities collapse into a single actuality.

The easiest way to describe all this is to use Schrodinger’s cat, a beast I find annoying but impossible to avoid.

Schrodinger’s cat is a thought experiment. Let’s get that straight at the start so that I don’t get nasty letters from cat lovers. No one has actually performed this experiment with a cat. This is a theoretical cat—the brainchild of one Erwin Schrodinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics.

So here’s the imaginary experiment. Suppose you have a cat—let’s call her Fluffy. You put her in a sealed, soundproof box. You plan to keep Fluffy in this box for exactly one hour. There’s plenty of oxygen in the box; Fluffy won’t run out of air. But you have also placed in the box a Geiger counter and chunk of radium that emits gamma rays. Over the course of an hour, the radium has a probability of exactly 50% of tossing out a subatomic particle (a process known as radioactive decay).

Considered from the quantum mechanical point of view, the radium atom is in a superposition of decaying and not decaying with a 50% likelihood of doing either. Considered quantum mechanically, two realities exist: in one, the radium atom has decayed; in the other, it has not.

In the reality where the radium decays, the Geiger counter clicks. When this happens, a device breaks a flask that releases a poisonous gas that kills poor Fluffy.

In the reality where the radium does not decay, the Geiger counter doesn’t click, and everything is OK. In that reality, Fluffy is fine.

Here’s the part that tweaks the physicists. The radium atom is in a quantum mechanical state of superposition. It is simultaneously occupying two realities: decaying and not decaying. Since Fluffy’s survival is linked to the state of the radium atom, the cat is also simultaneously occupying two realities: alive and dead. It is not that the cat is definitely alive or definitely dead and you just don’t know which is true. It’s weirder than that. Until you open the box and observe the system, the atom and the cat are in both states at the same time the cat is oscillating between life and death.

Weird, huh? This is what makes my fellow physicists get twitchy. Strange behavior on the part of an electron or an atom is annoying enough. But Schrodinger’s cat allows the weirdness of an electron to manifest itself on the macroscopic scale. You’ve got a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead—until you sneak a peek.

When you take a look, all the potentialities collapse to a single actuality. Physicists call this “the collapse of the wave function.”

We know that the wave function collapses whenever we physicists try to measure or observe a system. The act of looking influences the system we are observing and causes all those lovely potentialities to become a single actuality. Open the box to look at the cat, and bingo—the cat is alive or the cat is dead.

Why should observation change a system? No one knows. Theoretical physicists call this the “measurement problem,” and the whole thing has made lots of physicists terribly uncomfortable.

People have come up with some lovely theories to explain the measurement problem. The most popular among physicists is the theory proposed by Niels Bohr, one of Schrodinger’s contemporaries. Bohr said that you can’t describe a system unless you measure it, so you can’t even talk about what it looks like between measurements.

As far as I’m concerned, Bohr’s interpretation avoids all the interesting questions. It’s sort of like he threw up his hands in disgust at the whole mess and just decided not to deal with it.

Then we have the Wigner Interpretation, proposed by physicist Eugene Wigner. Most physicists don’t like this one much, but I love it. Wigner suggests that when someone looks at a system, their consciousness influences the system. The mind of the observer attempting to measure or observe the system triggers the collapse of the wave function.

Another theory I rather like is the Many Worlds Interpretation, first suggested by H. Everett in his Ph.D. thesis at Princeton and later developed further by physicist B. de Witt. This one ducks the question of what triggers the collapse by saying that there really isn’t a collapse when someone makes a measurement. All the potentialities are realized as actualities, Everett said, but they exist in different universes, all branching out from the original point. There’s a separate universe for every possible outcome.

Most physicists don’t like this theory much—it smacks too much of science fiction. But Everett’s approach offers some real advantages. Mathematically, it’s solid—I can show you how Schrodinger’s wave equation (developed by the same Schrodinger who came up with the cat conundrum) correctly describes the quantum mechanical state of the universe as a whole, including all of its branches.

As I mentioned before, my Ph.D. thesis deals with a mathematical model that connects Wigner’s theory and the Many Worlds theory, showing that consciousness is what determines how and when the universe branches.

Maybe you’re wondering what all this has to do with the
Odyssey
and Max Merriwell and my friend Susan. Could it be that Max has generated a mess of branching potentialities? If so, are we headed for the collapse of the wave function, where all these potentialities col lapse into a single reality? If that’s the case, will the reality when they collapse be our own? Or will the world as we know it cease to exist?

Or is the Everett-De Witt Many Worlds theory right? Do all these branching realities coexist, parallel realities that occasionally overlap?

I confess: I’m very curious about the answers to these questions. I think it’s time to work out the math.

“You never know what’s going to be on the other side of the door,” Gitana said. “But you know you have to open it. Or you would wonder for the rest of your days.”

—from
The Twisted Band

by Max Merriwell

The next morning, Susan woke early. Leaving Pat sleeping soundly, she went to Circe’s Kitchen, on the chance she might find Max having breakfast. Luck was with her and he was there. His notebook was on the table in front of him, but it was closed. He waved when he saw her.

“Good morning, Max,” she said. “Do you mind if I join you?”

“I’d be delighted to have your company. Please—sit down.”

An overhead lamp cast a warm golden glow over the table; the air was scented with coffee. Though the restaurant was warm, Susan felt cold. Outside the window, the sky was overcast; the ocean waves were the color of lead—gray and impenetrable. Hard to believe that this dark water was connected to the sparkling, turquoise blue seas off Bermuda.

She ordered breakfast—bacon and eggs, coffee, toast—while trying to figure out how to broach the subject of Weldon Merrimax. But before she could, Max started talking.

“I found another note under my door this morning,” he said. He took a piece of ship’s stationery from his notebook and offered it to Susan.

She unfolded it. Another hexagram: five broken lines, topped by a solid line. Printed under the hexagram in the same angular handwriting as the first note was one sentence: “The dark lines are about to mount upward and overthrow the last light line.”

“That sounds ominous,” she said.

Max frowned. “Not necessarily. Considering darkness to be evil is a very Occidental perspective. Darkness isn’t necessarily evil. There is always fluctuation between the dark and the light. The moon waxes and wanes; the sun rises and sets. The bright and the dark; the firm and the yielding; the yang and the yin.”

Susan found herself remembering Mary Maxwell’s discussion of dragons. “I met Mary Maxwell night before last,” she said. “After drinking Rum Monkeys.”

“Really?” Max didn’t seem surprised. “I quite like Mary. She’s a wonderful person.”

Susan stared at him. “She’s a real person then?”

Max shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “It’s best not to examine these things too closely. It’s all part of the creative process. Tricky stuff, that.”

Susan shook her head. “I met Weldon Merrimax last night.”

Max frowned. “Oh, that’s too bad.”

“He’s real, isn’t he?” she asked.

Max sighed. “That’s a very difficult question, Susan.”

“Seems simple enough to me.”

“Might as well ask whether light is a particle or a wave,” he said. “It’s both, you know. Though not at the same time.”

“What is going on, Max?”

Max stared down at his coffee for a moment, then said, “You have to consider the power of names. To summon a demon, one needs to know its name. To activate a golem, one writes the name of God on its forehead. Names are very powerful.”