Relativity (33 page)

Alison bit a fingernail. “It really was an accident, I swear. When we turned it on there were all these sparks. Then all the power went out and Ethan was thrown across the room and was shaking on the floor. I thought he'd stopped breathing. I was so scared.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“We were only trying to open the wormhole. Ethan made a time machine. He's been planning it for weeks. He said that if we generated enough energy he could create a wormhole in a doughnut and then he'd be able to travel backward into the past.”

“Time machine?”

Alison nodded. “We plugged every electrical appliance in the house into different power boards and then we plugged those into a single power board. Ethan said that if he collected all that energy, the wormhole would take him back in time.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was going back to prove that he wasn't shaken when he was a baby. And I honestly thought he'd be able to do it. Because of his special gift. Because he's a savant. Claire, I'm really sorry. I never thought he'd—” The little girl's voice choked, unable to finish her sentence.

Claire rocked the girl in her arms. “Shh, everything's okay. It's not your fault.”

“And the bunny. Oh no, I'm so sorry about the rabbit. I think he's dead.”

“Quark?”

Alison gave a hesitant nod. “He was in Ethan's arms. He said that quarks don't experience time because of quantum flux. But then we turned the power on and . . . poor Quark.” Alison paused and wiped her nose. “Are you going to tell my mum?”

“She doesn't know you're here?”

“No, I'm going to be in so much trouble.”

“Don't worry, I'll talk to your mother and explain. You really did the right thing. You saved my son's life.” Claire looked into her wide eyes; she could see glimpses of the woman Alison would one day become in the girl's face. Like Ethan, she was quickly growing up. But they were both still so young and had already been through so much—seizures, hospital, surgery—it saddened Claire. “Are you okay to stay here for a bit longer? I really need to get back to Ethan.”

“Are you kidding? I feel more at home here than in my own house. I know everyone.” She pointed at the triage nurses, who waved back. “I'll be fine.”

“I promise I won't be long.” Claire stood up.

Loud footsteps followed her down the linoleum corridor. Mark tapped her shoulder, sending a shiver down her spine. There was warmth in his wrinkled brow that Claire found comforting but she quickly disregarded the thought. His concern was too clear on his face; it made her feel uneasy.

Mark immediately took her in his arms. “Is Ethan okay? Are you okay?”

Claire took a moment to untangle herself from the pull of his embrace. “He was nearly electrocuted. I'm not sure what happened. He was trying to build a—”

Mark spoke over her. “Time machine.”

“Did you have something to do with this? Was this one of your stupid plans? He's only twelve years old; he's very impressionable. You can't go and tell Ethan that time travel is possible. This is the real world. It's not science fiction.”

“It is actually possible,” Mark said. “In theory. But no, of course this wasn't my idea. Ethan asked questions about time travel, black holes and negative energy, but I had no idea he was building a time machine. Now it all makes sense.”

“Apparently he wanted to go back in time to prove that you didn't shake him.” They were now standing in front of Ethan's cubicle. She lowered her voice. “He thinks he has some special gift. He thinks he can see physics.”

“He can?” Mark looked into the distance.

Claire pulled back the curtain. “I don't know.”

Ethan was still asleep.

B
OTH HIS PARENTS
stood over him, speaking a garbled language that Ethan didn't understand. Their words sounded broken and strange, their voices muffled like they were underwater. It was weird to watch them talk: he'd never seen them together before. Now they were in the same room. His mum whispered odd sounds; his father gave a jumbled reply.

Ethan squinted. His eyelids felt too heavy to lift; his muscles were tender and sore. But it had worked. The time machine had worked. He was really in the past; he'd really gone backward in time. Of course he couldn't understand them—he was a baby. Ethan didn't know how to talk.

But looking around the room, this version of the past didn't seem right. Bars on the bed frame, scratchy sheets, an oxygen tank—they were in the hospital. The room smelled like saliva and bleach. This was the wrong destination; this wasn't where Ethan wanted to be. His calculations must've been wrong. Unless he'd gone back too far and was in the hospital because he'd just been born.

But if he was a newborn baby, then how did he know already about quantum mechanics inside his head? Maybe traveling through the wormhole had caused baby Ethan to be mind-melded with older Ethan. Although that sounded like a temporal paradox, turning causality on its head, and that would close the time loop. His head hurt just thinking about it.

Ethan groaned.

“Pumpkin.” Mum leaned over him, her hair falling into his face. “I'm so glad you're awake. How are you feeling?”

He blinked. Babies weren't supposed to answer questions so he'd need to keep his mouth shut. It must have been rhetorical; Ethan only understood what she'd said from listening to her voice in the womb.

“Hey, sport,” his father said. He didn't seem that much younger even though they were twelve years in the past.

An ache pulsed down Ethan's spine, stabbing him vertebrae by vertebrae. He tried to roll onto his side, but his arms didn't feel like his arms, and his legs were really far away. They didn't bend like baby legs but he couldn't lift them.

“Ouch,” he said. Hopefully, it was a word that babies knew.

“Could you get the doctor?” Mum asked Mark. “I think he's in pain.”

His father disappeared. Mum sat on the bed. She held Ethan's hand and kissed it. “I'm so sorry, pumpkin. I'm sorry I got so upset with you. This is all my fault. I should've told you the truth from day one.”

Her words confused him. This was wrong. Ethan tried to say something but only a weird croak came out. His mouth was dusty, his tongue prickled. Pins and needles made his whole body tingle. He felt pinned down by some invisible force.

Dr. Saunders pushed open the curtain. “Ethan, you're awake. We urgently need to get you to Radiology. They're expecting us in the Medical Imaging Department in five minutes.”

Mark stood behind him. “What's going on?”

“The human body conducts electricity,” Dr. Saunders said. “With high-voltage injuries, depending on the length and severity of his electric shock, Ethan is at risk of seizures, aphasia, visual disturbances. Given his previous neurological history, he had a CT scan on arrival but it was inconclusive. I'm sending him to the neuroimaging center on the other side of the hospital complex for an fMRI to look at blood flow in his brain. We need to rule out intracranial hemorrhage.”

“Oh my god,” Mum said.

They wheeled his bed out of the bay and into the blazing light of the ward, down corridors, and through automatic doors. Ethan stared at the ceiling, counting the grid of flecked fiberglass panels. It looked like sheets of graph paper—curved lines sweeping through coordinates, graphing the inverse of exponential functions. Exactly like the curvature of space-time. His head spun.

Ethan cleared his throat. “It didn't work, did it? The time machine didn't work.”

The wheels of his bed were grinding. Nobody replied.

Ω

IN THE NEUROIMAGING CENTER,
Ethan was rolled into a dimly lit room. Blue light glowed on the ceiling; on one wall the yellow faces of the
Bananas in Pyjamas
grinned. Ethan was lifted from the hospital bed onto a strange plank connected to a large white doughnut—just like a closed time-like curve.

Was this a time machine? They strapped Ethan onto the table and secured his body under a plastic frame. Suddenly the plank slid backward into the hole of the giant doughnut. His legs wobbled as the machine swallowed him. Lights came on inside the cylinder. The giant machine made him feel small, like he was a particle inside the Large Hadron Collider.

Static came out of the speakers. “Ethan, how you doing in there?” a radiographer said through the intercom. His voice boomed through the tube.

Ethan pulled his hospital robe down, trying to cover his knees; it was freezing in the doughnut. “Where am I?”

“In the fMRI machine. Last time you had a scan, you were sleeping, so you probably don't remember. Stay very still. If you move, it'll ruin the images. Are you ready?”

Ethan gulped and stared at the curved walls. He closed his eyes and tried to stay still.

The machine powered on, loud noises whirling around him.
Boom boom boom boom boom
.

Its sound pulled Ethan down.
Boom boom boom boom boom
. Like a hammer knocking on the side of the round walls, there was something soothing about the rhythmic blows. Loud clicks that were almost musical, that took on a melody of their own. Ethan focused on the noise.
Boom boom boom boom boom
.

He opened his eyes again. Radio waves burst out of the machine. The magnet hummed. The doughnut was a magnet; the hollow of the tube filled with a bright torrent of waves. Flickering waves soared above him, like he'd opened his eyes underwater while light billowed on the surface. He saw spiraling patterns of ripples everywhere. Crashing electromagnetic and radio waves gathered in his field of vision.

“Keep still,” the radiographer said over the intercom.

Ethan's eyes fluttered, hypnotized by the quivering waves. He calmed down and went rigid. Waves crossed paths—danced with one another to the thunderous song of the machine—as the particles inside his body aligned.

Ω

“CLAIRE,
can I speak to you over here?” Dr. Saunders was back, but Ethan wasn't with him.

She stood up and accompanied him into a consultation room, glancing over at Mark. He followed.

Ethan sat on a wide, metal table. He fidgeted with the fabric of the hospital gown. Claire noticed how hairy his legs looked; they were no longer the legs of her little boy.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“Good news is, it looks like the electric shock hasn't done any further damage to Ethan's brain.”

“Does that mean there's bad news?”

The doctor frowned. “Remember how we spoke about Ethan seeing unusual things? Electromagnetic and sound waves? Particles?”

She put her arm around her son. “So you think Ethan can really see them?”

“Honestly, I was nearly convinced he could; I got excited about it.” Dr. Saunders looked at Ethan. “Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that's the case. While Ethan was in the fMRI scanner, the radiologists and I observed him have several small seizures. Partial seizures, in one area of his brain. Because the fMRI measures blood flow, we were able to identify seizure activity as it happened and exactly where in the brain it was focused. When he has these focal partial seizures, Ethan is fully awake and alert. He wouldn't know he was having them.”

“So the waves and particles—?”

“Are hallucinations, caused by temporal lobe seizures,” the doctor said.

Ethan shook his head. “No, that's wrong. I can see them. They don't feel like a seizure. And the time machine. What about—”

“In cases of symptomatic epilepsy, it's often determined by MRI that there's some degree of damage to a large number of neurons. Lesions caused by the loss of these neurons can result in groups of them episodically firing abnormally, causing a seizure.” The doctor turned to the boy. “Did you see anything in the scanner, Ethan?”

“Waves. When the scanner made the clicking noises, the radio waves met the electromagnetic waves, and then particles bounced off one another. The doughnut was a magnet.”

“But isn't that right?” Mark asked. “That's how the MRI machine works. Ethan must be able to see the physics. How else would he know?”

“They're definitely visual hallucinations caused by focal partial seizures,” the doctor said.

Claire interrupted. “What's causing this?”

Dr. Saunders pushed his glasses up his nose. “The part of Ethan's brain that was originally damaged is where we've pinpointed the recent abnormal electrical activity. If you look at this section just here,” he said, holding up a picture of Ethan's brain, “you'll notice it's a different color to the rest of the gray matter of his brain. This lesion is where the seizure activity is occurring. It's where the original brain hemorrhage was.”

Claire let her eyes linger on the discolored area of Ethan's brain. A lesion. It was like looking at a painting—a picture that was once a masterpiece—ruined by a thoughtless brushstroke. There was a stain inside her son's head.