Schrodinger's Gat (19 page)

“
Wild jackals stole the paper,” I deadpan.

“
Close,” he says. “A fluke electrical fire broke out, melting the server. The sprinklers went on, so it didn’t get very far, but the fire managed to destroy all my digital copies of the data and the paper, as well as the hard copies I had printed out. I had several offsite copies – I had learned my lesson with the previous run of bad luck – but by this point I was genuinely disturbed by everything that had happened. I am far from a superstitious person, but I couldn’t help thinking
someone is trying to keep this paper from being published
. You should have seen the look on the face of the insurance adjustor when I explained to him what happened. I think they were suspicious because of the accident with Emil. The adjustor kept asking if anything I was working on in my shop was ‘inherently dangerous.’ I told him, ‘not unless you believe in a malevolent deity who supernaturally interferes with the scientific method to avoid discovery.’ I don’t think he found it amusing. There’s no box on the form for ‘act of a goddess.’” He smiles at me.

“
Tali was a graduate student of mine at the time, and with Emil gone I needed some help, so I hired her as my assistant. Tali was fascinated with the project, and she took over most of the day-to-day work. I was probably pretty useless at the time; I couldn’t shake the idea that someone had interfered with our efforts to get published. Emil and I had discussed the idea of what we called active deterministic interference – essentially the deterministic universe actively working against efforts to change the future. It’s an idea that crops up in science fiction a lot: somebody finds a way to predict the future and attempts to change it, but circumstances conspire to cause events to come out exactly the way they were predicted. Usually the hero of the story inadvertently becomes central to the chain of events leading up to the event he was trying to prevent. For example, there’s a Philip Dick story where the reign of an oppressive future regime is threatened by the rise of a popular religious sect. The regime sends a man back in time to assassinate the founder of the sect before he can start causing trouble, but of course the agent ends up becoming the sect’s founder. That sort of thing. It’s a way of dealing with the paradoxes of time travel: how can someone in the future send an agent back to prevent the founding of a religious sect if the founding of the sect is part of the causal chain that leads to the agent being sent back? Or, more succinctly: what happens if you travel back in time and assassinate your own grandfather? The answer you find in a lot of science fiction stories is:
you can’t
. Somehow the universe will prevent you from killing your own grandfather in order to resolve the paradox.”

I
’m confused. “But you’re talking about predicting the future, not time travel.”

He nods.
“True, but the paradox occurs either way. If you can predict an event in the future and use that knowledge to prevent the event, then the event won’t happen and can’t be predicted. The prevention of the event is dependent on it occurring. Paradox.”

My head hurts, and not just from the blow to my skull.
“Yeah, OK,” I say wearily. “Go ahead.”

“
As I said, the idea of the space-time continuum actively rejecting paradoxes had occurred to us, but it was only an academic possibility. For one thing, we had never seriously discussed trying to prevent any of the events we were predicting. For another, we were only dealing with
probable
futures, not definite futures. That gave the universe some wiggle room: if we ever did manage to prevent an event from occurring, it might just mean that we had managed to shift the odds a bit. There was no definite paradox involved.

“
But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that the string of improbable events that prevented me from publishing that paper was an instance of active deterministic interference. Somehow we had forced the hand of determinism into revealing itself. And that notion prompts some interesting questions. First, why did the universe act so decisively to prevent publication of that paper? Second, if it didn’t want the paper published, why had it let us get as far as we did? That is, why not kill Emil and me in a car wreck a year earlier?

“
While pondering these questions, I came to a couple of troubling realizations: I was now thinking of ‘the universe’ as something that had motives and intentions. Not long before, if someone had come to me with the question ‘why did the universe do
x
?’, I would have laughed in their face. There is no
why
with the universe; there are just the brute facts of matter, energy and the physical laws that determine the interaction thereof. If someone asks, ‘why did the apple hit Newton on the head,’ science can answer ‘Because of gravity,’ and it can explain with some precision how gravity acts. But science can’t answer the question ‘why did the universe want Newton to get hit on the head?’ Science deals with causes, not goals or intentions. You can trace the reasons for the apple hitting Newton on the head back to the Big Bang and you can trace the consequences to the end of the universe, and you’re still not going to get an answer to the question ‘what was the purpose of Newton getting hit on the head with an apple?’ Science doesn’t deal with purpose, with teleology. It can answer ‘why’ questions, but only in a causal sense.

“
So I realized that it was foolish to keep asking questions like ‘why didn’t the universe want our paper to be published?’ But I was convinced that it was equally foolish to deny that there was something out there, some force or being, that was somehow acting purposefully to prevent the publication of the paper. My understanding of this thing was far from complete and I wanted to avoid, as much as possible, using any terms that would bias my own thinking and methodologies.  What I needed was a metaphor, something that I could use to represent the thing in my thinking. I knew it was more than some impersonal force, like gravity or electromagnetism, but I also knew it wasn’t a human being. It occurred to me to use a name from mythology, perhaps the Egyptian god of destiny, Shai. But I resisted personifying the thing.

“
Eventually I came to another troubling realization: if this thing, whatever it was, truly didn’t
want
to be discovered, and if it really was the deterministic force underlying the universe, then my attempts to define it using scientific methods were doomed to fail. Already it had killed my partner, stymied my attempts to communicate our theories to the greater scientific community, and destroyed all my data. If it was actively working to prevent me from pinning it down, then my efforts to do so were as doomed to fail as if I were trying to determine the position and momentum of an electron simultaneously. There was a sort of impenetrable cloud of indeterminacy about the thing.

“
As a physicist, I’m used to dealing with indeterminacy, but generally the practical results of quantum indeterminacy are negligible. There aren’t a lot of direct, real-world consequences to not being able to pinpoint the location of an electron, you know? Indeterminacy doesn’t usually run you off the road and melt your server.

“
It occurred to me that perhaps I was going crazy; that Emil’s death had caused something to snap in my brain, that I was thinking irrationally. I decided what I needed was a second opinion. Now scientists are a skeptical lot as a rule, so there weren’t many people I knew who would both hear me out and who were qualified to weigh in on the matter. Finally I decided to send an email to an Australian physicist I had met in Bern a few years earlier, a Dr. Bentley. Bentley was a brilliant man who had done some important work on quantum entanglement. And I knew that he was a man of faith, an Episcopalian if I remember correctly. I thought, ‘here is a guy who believes in a purposive entity behind the creation of the universe who doesn’t let that belief interfere with his ability to do serious theoretical physics. If anyone can give me an unbiased answer regarding my suspicions about this thing, it’s him.’ So I sent him an email telling him the whole story, just as I’ve told you, and asking him whether I’m completely crazy to be a bit nervous about continuing this line of research. Three days later, I get an email from a secretary in his department informing me that Bentley had died in a windsurfing accident two weeks earlier. That’s when I started to really get worried.”

I have to stop Heller at this point.
“Hang on,” I say. “If you’re trying to convince me that this force or whatever it is killed Bentley to keep him from learning about your research, I’m not buying it. You said yourself that he died before you sent him the email. How could Ananke or whatever we’re calling it reach into the past and kill him?”

He smiles painedly.
“You can think of it as Ananke reaching into the past to kill him, or you can think of it as Ananke leading me to send an email to a man who is already dead. What’s the difference? Either way, Ananke prevents the promulgation of information about her existence. Anyway, I confessed my fears to Tali, who is a pretty smart cookie herself. I had resisted telling her before because I know she’s a lapsed Jew, and she has very little tolerance for any sort of mysticism or superstition. She’s as atheist as they come. To my surprise, she sympathized with my point of view. In fact, she confessed that she had started to think of this deterministic force in personal terms herself. The data she was seeing was too weird to account for in any other way.

“
As I said, she was pretty much running the show at this point, as I was lost in my own worries and philosophical ruminations. Every day she would spend an hour or so going over local news reports, attempting to make correlations between the psionic field disturbances the detectors were reporting and the fires, shootings and car accidents reported in the news. We had agreed at the outset that we would never attempt to witness any of the events in person, partly because it was too dangerous and partly because we weren’t sure how observation would affect the data. At one point, though, the psionic disruption coefficients inexplicably started to drop, and she confessed to me that her curiosity got the better of her and she decided to visit a few of the sites and observe from a distance. At the first two events she noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The third was a pileup on I-680. While she was waiting for the event to occur, she noticed a car stalled on the shoulder and wondered if that was the cause. She took her eyes off the road long enough that she didn’t see the brake lights come on in front of her. By the time she saw it, it was too late to stop and she swerved to avoid the car. Predictably, this caused a chain reaction that brought about the twenty-car pileup she had gone there to observe. She was pretty banged up and spent three days in the hospital. When she came back, she found that the oscillations had returned to their previous intensity – in fact, the intensity was inexplicably slightly higher during her time in the hospital. The only conclusion she could come to was that
she
was the reason for the variations. The presence of someone who had foreknowledge of the event near the space-time coordinates of the event decreased the probability of the event occurring. She found herself unable to think of this thing she was studying as some kind of impersonal force any longer: it had not only anticipated what she was going to do; it had
used
her to make one of the events happen. She started calling it Ananke, after the Greek goddess of destiny. At least that was the formal name she gave it. More frequently she simply thought of it as ‘the bitch.’”

“
OK, stop!” I say. “You’re contradicting yourself again. How could Tali’s presence at the accident on 680 have reduced the probability of the event occurring, when her presence was the cause of the event?”

Heller sighs
. “That question is impossible to answer. Maybe it didn’t reduce the probability. We can’t know what the probability of the event occurring would have been if she hadn’t known about it, because she
did
know about it, and that’s the only data point we have. All we can say is that the intensity of the impression of the event is consistent with a lower-than-typical probability, when compared to the other data points. Another way to say it is that Ananke is capable of using agents who are aware of the event to cause the event, but that the odds of Ananke succeeding are intrinsically lower because of that awareness.”

I
’m honestly not sure whether he has answered my question or not. I decide to let it go. I still think Heller is a sociopath, but I’m starting to see
why
he’s a sociopath. He really has bought into the idea that everything he does has already been anticipated by some mysterious being – possibly even
dictated
by that being. Once you start thinking in those terms, madness can’t be far behind. You can either question everything you do, paralyzed by anxiety, or you can stop questioning anything. I guess Heller picked door number two.

“
At some point are you going to tell me who kidnapped Tali, and why you sent me to the mall with a bomb in a briefcase?”

“
I’m getting to that,” he says. “It’s important that you understand the background. Otherwise none of the rest will make sense.”

I
’m pretty sure that it’s not going to make sense regardless, but I shrug and let him continue.

“
So Tali and I were in agreement that if we wanted to stay alive and continue our research, we should think about Ananke not as an impersonal force, but rather as a being who was acting in an intelligent, premeditated way to attempt to keep us from thwarting her plans, whatever those plans were. So we were back to my original questions: why didn’t Ananke want us to publish, and why hadn’t she stopped us earlier? We were pretty sure that Ananke was trying to prevent widespread knowledge of her existence in the scientific community, because that would lead to more experimentation, the construction of more and better psionic field detectors, and a corresponding decrease in Ananke’s range of action. The more people out there with foreknowledge of probable events, the lower the probability of those events occurring. If you think of the most probable events as the ones that Ananke most wants to occur, then you can see why she is loath to allow their probability to decrease. But again, if that’s what Ananke wants to prevent, why hadn’t she prevented it earlier? Why not kill me and Emil in a car crash before we ever came up with the idea for the psionic field detector? For that matter, why allow us to be born in the first place? Why not kill us in utero? Or kill our grandparents before they had a chance to reproduce, just to be extra sure?