Schrodinger's Gat (27 page)

I finish eating and use the bathroom. When I come back the trunk of the Lexus is open.
Tali is walking toward me, holding something in her hand.

“
It’s that time, huh?” I say, motioning to the open trunk.

“
You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” Tali asks.

“
Just don’t leave me in there longer than you have to.”

“
I’ll let you out as soon as we’re across the border. Promise.”

“
Thanks. Good luck.”

I
glance around. Satisfied that no one is watching me, I climb into the trunk.

“
Here,” she says, holding out her hand. She’s holding the gun. “We might as well have all our contraband in one place. And if they search the car, I can say you held me at gunpoint.”

I
’m not sure how I could threaten her at gunpoint from the trunk, but it’s better than anything I can come up with. And let me tell you, when your best option is hiding in the trunk to sneak across the border into Mexico, somewhere along the line you’ve made a horrible fucking mistake.

She closes the trunk and everything goes black. After a moment,
the car begins to move. There’s a short stretch of highway and then we gradually come to a halt. It’s stop and go for the next half hour. I try to stay still, but the trunk is hot, cramped and uncomfortable, and I find myself constantly shifting to avoid losing sensation in my limbs. I stop moving and hold my breath as I hear Tali talking to someone. The whole exchange probably only lasts thirty seconds, but it seems like an hour. My heart is beating so loud I’m convinced somebody putting his ear to the trunk could hear it. My hands are sweating so bad I can barely hold onto the gun, so I set it down as gently as I can on the trunk floor. Probably just as well if I’m not holding onto it; a border guard who pops the trunk and sees me holding a gun will shoot first and ask questions later. This is what happens when you start fucking around with Schrödinger’s Cat: if you’re not careful, you end up the one in the box.

Finally
the car starts moving again, gradually speeding up to what feels like a decent highway cruising speed. Ten minutes later the car slows to a halt. The trunk pops open. Against the blinding sunlight a figure is silhouetted: Tali.

“
Rise and shine,” she says.

“
Did we make it?”

“
We made it.”

“
Thank God,” I say. I climb out of the trunk, still holding the gun. We’re in the parking lot of a gas station in what looks to be a pretty sketchy area of Tijuana – which could be pretty much anywhere in Tijuana. There are a couple of customers getting gas, but nobody seems to be paying much attention to us. People getting in and out of trunks is probably a pretty common sight around here. It’s a relief to be out of the trunk, but the sunshine that had seemed pleasant in San Diego now feels oppressive. I’m not sure if it’s actually gotten hotter or if the effect is purely in my mind. I’ve crossed a lot of lines over the past few days, but somehow crossing into Mexico has hammered the point home: there’s no going home again.

“
We should get going,” Tali says.

I shake my head.
One thing about being locked in a trunk for half an hour: it gives you some time to think about where you went wrong. “We were lucky to make it this far. You need to get out of here, Tali. I’ll take my chances on my own.”

“
No way,” she says. “I told you. We’re in this together.”

“
But we’re not,” I insist. “You aren’t wanted for murder. Carlyle is dead. Peregrine is out of the prediction business. You could go back to work, get a fresh start.”

“
My home is gone,” she says. “Heller is dead. Beth is probably dead, and even if she isn’t, she’s never going to wake up again. My parents are probably dead, and if they’re not, well … fuck ’em. You’re all I’ve got, Paul.”

“
And you’re all I’ve got,” I say. “But you deserve better than me. You deserve better than this.”

“
Goddammit, Paul. Stop that. Stop playing the martyr.”

I laugh humorlessly.
“Playing the martyr? Jesus Christ, Tali. I’m not
playing
the martyr. I am literally facing a death sentence. You think the mall bombing didn’t make the news down here? Crossing the border may have bought me a couple days, that’s all.”

“
Not if I’m here to help you. You can stay out of sight, and I can—”

“
You can’t save me, Tali! Get that through your head. You tell me I spend too much time reflecting on my faults, but you know what? You should fucking try it sometime. You might notice a pattern affecting the people you try to save. Most of them aren’t doing so well right about now.”

She seems taken aback.
“That’s not fair,” she stammers. “I had no way of knowing …”

“
Maybe not at first,” I say. “But the earthquake you caused should have given you a pretty big hint.”

“
You’re blaming
me
for the earthquake?”

“
You and Heller, sure. Who else would I blame? Carlyle? Carlyle might be more directly to blame, but you and Heller are the ones who went into business with him.”

She shakes her head.
“I know what you’re doing, Paul,” she says, jabbing her finger at me. “You think I’ve got some kind of messiah complex, that I can’t help myself from trying to save you. But I already told you, that’s not it. I know what I’m doing, and I’m choosing to do it. I got you into this, and I’m going to do whatever I have to do to help you.”

“
I don’t believe you,” I say. “I don’t think you’re thinking clearly. You’ve lost your sister and your purpose in life, and you’re latching onto me as your next project. And you know what? I’d let you do it if you weren’t going to end up in a federal penitentiary as a result. I’m a lost cause, Tali. You need to let me go. Find something else to live for. Get on with your life.”

“
You’re a condescending asshole,” she says.

“
Now you’re getting it.”

“
And you’re wrong. I can save you.”

“
I’ll settle for whatever cash you have on you.”

She eyes the gun.
“You going to shoot me?”

“
If I have to.”

“
Bullshit,” she says. But she gets her purse from the car and hands me a thick wad of hundred dollar bills. “Five thousand dollars,” she says, handing it to me.

“
Thanks,” I say, stuffing the money into my pocket. I stuff the gun back in my waistband.

“So this is it, then,” she says. “You’re just going to ride off into the sunset without me.”

“You make it sound pretty fucking romantic. I’ll be lucky to live through the week.”

“Jesus, Paul. Don’t say that. If you’re going to do this, you have to believe you’re going to make it. Don’t give up.”

“I’ll try,” I say.

“You’ve got to do better than try. I’m going to expect a postcard from the Cayman Islands in a few weeks.”

“I’ll send you a letter,” I say. “It won’t say where I am, but it will tell you how fast I’m going.”

“Ha-ha,” she says. “Quantum physics humor.
I’ve heard them all.”

“Did you hear the one about the guy in a trunk of a Lexus who’s dead and alive at the same time?”

This time she actually laughs. “No. How does it end?”

“I’ll let you know,” I say.

“I’m sorry things turned out this way, Paul,” she says.

“
Me too,” I reply. “Goodbye, Tali.” I turn and walk away. After a moment, I hear the Lexus squeal out of the parking lot behind me. I watch as Tali gets on the highway, headed back toward California. I cross the street toward a little dive bar with a flickering neon margarita glass on its roof. I figure I’ll have a drink and try to find a way to get to the bus station. From there I can try to work out a route to Mexico City, a thousand or so miles to the southeast.

The bar is dank and smoky
. A couple of old guys who look like regulars are slouched over the bar. A dour-looking bartender nods at me as I walk in.

“
Baño?
” I say. It’s stupid; every bartender in Tijuana knows the English word for bathroom. But I guess I might as well start using Spanish as much as possible.

He points to his left.

“
Gracias
.”

I walk to the bathroom and open the door. Inside
is a toilet that looks like it hasn’t ever been thoroughly cleaned and a sink that’s chipped and streaked with rust. Above the sink is a cracked and corroded mirror. In the mirror is a man who looks he made a wrong turn in San Leandro and just kept going.

Jesus Christ,
I think to myself. What am I doing? There isn’t a chance in hell I’ll make it to the Cayman Islands. If I’m lucky, I’ll be shot to death by Mexican police. And if that’s the best case scenario, why wait? I pull the gun from my waistband and hold it in front of me. I feel a little bad about making the bartender clean my brains off the ceiling of his bathroom, but then I remember I’ve got $5,000 in my pocket. I put it on the back of the toilet. If I had a pen and paper, I’d leave a suicide note that read:

Now you can renovate your fucking bathroom

But I suppose the message is implied. Unlike my father, I know to shut the fuck up when I have nothing to say.

Something falls from beneath the wad of bills, striking the tile floor with a loud
ping!
I crouch down to see my 50p coin. I must have slipped it in my pocket before I snuck out of my apartment yesterday morning.

Fate – or Ananke – seems to be telling me something, and I
’ve decided I’m done fighting it. I pick up the coin, take a deep breath, and flip it into the air. Heads, I live; tails, I die. It comes up tails. Without ceremony, I pick up the gun, push the barrel against my temple and squeeze the trigger.

Click
.

I squeeze it again.

Click
.

I look at the gun, puzzled. Removing the magazine, I notice that it feels light. It
’s completely empty. Tali, I think. She didn’t trust me with a loaded gun. And with good reason, it turns out. I can’t help but smile.

I put the gun back in my waistband and the money back in my pocket. I open the door and walk to the bar.
“
Una cerveza, por favor
,” I say. The bartender nods. To myself I whisper, “
Hoy vivo
.”

Today, I live.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious: this book is a work of fiction. Although I share some characteristics with Paul Bayes, I am not he. So if you want to correct Paul
’s understanding of physics (or anything else, for that matter), you’ll have to email him. The email address I have for him is
[email protected]
, but of course I can
’t guarantee he’ll respond. The same principle applies if you’d like to take him to task for his excessive use of profanity or any of his other foibles: there’s no sense in complaining to
me
about it.

For the record, I
’m well aware that Paul’s understanding of physics (both classical and quantum) is a little fuzzy. For example, he uses the old Bohr model of electrons “whizzing around the nucleus” of an atom, which has been pretty well discredited, and he doesn’t really understand the relationship between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. He himself admits that he’s no expert and that he’s gotten a lot of his information from Wikipedia. What do you expect?

That said, obviously I believe Paul to be a generally reliable witness or I wouldn
’t have chosen him to tell this story. Tali, who has a background in physics, is more reliable on technical matters than Paul, but of course her statements are being filtered through Paul and it’s possible that he’s gotten some of the details wrong. The same goes for Dr. Heller – except for the excerpts from
Fate and Consciousness
, which are verbatim. Although Heller was clearly mad and
Fate and Consciousness
shows signs of that madness, I’m hard-pressed to find any factual errors in his book. While Heller arrives at some outlandish conclusions, his grasp of physics is first-rate, as one would expect, given his background. You should, however, take his philosophical and theological ramblings with a grain of salt.

I
’ve done my best in this book to obey Samuel Delaney’s dictum that science fiction must not contradict “what is known to be known.” It could well be that a year from now, some real-world Tali toiling away in a university lab will make a discovery that shows the events in this book to be impossible, but that’s the risk one runs when writing about unknowns that are in the process of becoming known. All I can say is that as of
right now
, I don’t know of anything in this book that’s impossible, either physically or logically. Extremely unlikely, yes, but not impossible.

That said, when you write a novel based largely on hard science, certain readers will pore over the text in an effort to find errors. I know because I
’m one of those readers. So as a preemptive strike, allow me to point out a few “cheats” in
Schrödinger’s Gat
that I included as a concession to storytelling. If you’d rather find the cheats yourself (or if you’d like your opinion of this book to remain unsullied), feel free not to read the next few paragraphs.

First, although the idea of the human brain taking advantage of quantum phenomena has gotten some serious attention recently (see, for example, Jeffrey Satinover
’s fascinating book
The Quantum Brain
), the notion of the “quantum brain” as a sort of separate computing module is pure fantasy. That isn’t to say it’s necessarily wrong, but if the brain does take advantage of quantum phenomena (as I suspect it does), it probably does so in a much more subtle and interesting way. Similarly, it’s doubtful that there’s any such thing as a “psionic energy field.” Physicists have spent no small amount of time looking for some peculiar sort of energy associated with human consciousness and have come up with nothing. Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that no such energy exists, but if it does, it’s exceedingly difficult to detect.

The biggest cheat in
Schrödinger’s Gat
, though, is the manipulation of coin tosses to alter the course of the future. Surprisingly, the problem isn’t that a coin toss can create alternate universes, but the fact that so many other events can. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory holds that anything that can happen
does
happen. The quantum wave function never collapses to one possibility or another; both occur, even though I experience only one of them. As Heller puts it:

We only experience one timeline, but that doesn’t mean that only one of them is real. To put it more precisely, when you say that something ‘happened,’ you’re saying that an event occurred that you experienced in some way. That is to say, it occurred on your timeline, in your history. But if there are alternate futures, then who’s to say that for people on those alternate timelines, completely different events haven’t happened?

This idea is perfect fodder for science fiction, of course, but it presents a couple of practical problems. First, the number of universes created every nanosecond is so large that it may as well be infinite. A coin toss is just one type of event among hundreds of trillions of other types of events that cause universe-splitting. So to say that Universe A
1
and A
2
were created as a result of a coin toss in Universe A is to arbitrarily pick out two universes from many trillions of other universes. In other words, there’s nothing special about a coin toss, and therefore no reason to think that a coin toss would leave a greater “psionic impression” than any other event. So how is it possible for Heller to pick out coin toss events in the data?

One possible explanation is that the
coin toss bifurcation results in two very large sets of universes that are dissimilar to each other. That is, a coin toss results in a stark break in the continuity of possible universes, and it is this break in continuity that can be detected. This seems to be what Heller is hinting at when he talks about coin tosses having “a very distinct probability signature that shows up in our data.”

This leads us to another problem, though: the whole point of the many worlds interpretation is that the alternate universes split off from each other, each becoming a completely independent and self-contained universe. In other words, after these universes are created, they go their separate ways and never again meet. If that
’s true, however, then there’s no way a person in one universe could ever detect evidence of something occurring in another universe. So how can Tyche possibly detect a break in the continuity of other universes?

The answer is that until the universes split, all possible futures obtain for the universe in question. It isn
’t necessary for Tyche to gather data from
parallel
universes; it only has to gather data for universes that will split off from the current universe. Some future paths are much more probable than others, where “probability” is simply a measurement of the number of futures that meet specified criteria. For example, there may have been
x
number of possible futures where the Allies won World War II,
y
number of possible futures where the Axis won, and
z
number of futures where Martian invaders defeated both the Allies and the Axis. There are presumably far fewer futures where
z
happens than where
x
or
y
happens, making it far less probable than an individual in 1939 will find himself on the
z
path. To predict the likely outcome of the war, the individual in 1939 doesn’t need to know anything about universes that have already split from his own; he simply needs to know the rough distribution of
x
and
y
(assuming
z
is negligible). Of course, the ability to know this distribution implies that the possible futures somehow communicate backwards in time with the present, which is dubious but not, as far as I know, at odds with many-worlds. In any case, there are so many different interpretations of quantum theory (as well as sub-interpretations of many-worlds) that it isn’t difficult to find a reputable physicist who will back up whatever nutty ideas you have, within certain parameters.

These
“cheats,” however, are somewhat tangential to the main themes of
Schrödinger’s Gat
, and in fact I employed them primarily to highlight the underlying weirdness about quantum theory and what it implies about the universe we inhabit. The remarkable thing about writing this book was how
few
liberties I actually had to take. With the exception of the cheats I just pointed out, Heller’s statements are entirely consistent with quantum theory. In fact, his observations about the double slit experiment and box pair experiment are
quantum theory-independent
, meaning that you don’t have to accept quantum theory to appreciate the utter weirdness of the results. Light really does act differently depending on whether you observe it or not, and the causal relationship between observation and phenomenon does appear to be able to occur backwards through time. In case you don’t believe me, here’s an excerpt from
Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness
, written by two scientists with PhDs in physics: 

This “which-box?” experiment, or “look-in-the-box” experiment, establishes that each atom was concentrated in a
single box of its pair, that it was not spread out over both boxes
.

But before you looked, you could have done an interference experiment establishing that something of each atom had been in
both
boxes. You therefore could choose to prove either that each atom had been wholly in single box, or you could choose to prove that each atom had not been
wholly
in a single box. You can choose to prove either of two contradictory situations ….

A theory leading to a logical contradiction is necessarily an incorrect theory. Does the ability to demonstrate either of two contradictory things about atoms (and other objects) invalidate quantum theory? No. You did not demonstrate the contradiction with
exactly
the same things. You did two experiments with different atoms …. Did your free choice determine the external physical situation? Or did the external physical situation predetermine your choice? Either way, it doesn’t make sense. It’s the unresolved quantum enigma.

Important point: We experience an enigma because we believe that we
could have
done other than what we actually did. A denial of this freedom of choice requires our behavior to be programmed to correlate with the world external to our bodies. The quantum enigma arises from our
conscious perception
of free will [italics in original].

 Further: 

The creation of past history is even more counterintuitive than the creation of a present situation. Nevertheless, that’s what the box-pairs experiment, or any other version of the two-slit experiment, implies.

 The authors later point out: 

One can evade the quantum enigma by denying it meaningful to even consider experiments that were not in fact done, and claim that the conscious perception that we could have done them is meaningless. Such denial of free will goes beyond the notion that what we choose to do is determined by the electrochemistry of our brain. The required denial implies a completely deterministic and conspiratorial world, one in which our supposedly free choices are programmed to coincide with an external physical situation.

It is, of course, this “completely deterministic and conspiratorial world” that becomes Heller’s obsession, and it’s not difficult to see why. If he doesn’t deny the reality of free will, he is forced to admit that there are basic truths about the universe that are ultimately unknowable, that to an extent the universe hides its fundamental nature from scientists. Rather than accept the limitations of science, he accepts that the universe is deterministic – and then tries desperately to find loopholes in that determinism.

I should note that one way to
preserve free will is to define it to mean something like “the ability to make choices in accordance with one’s desires.” By this definition, a person can have free will even if all of her actions are determined. In other words, one can be said to have acted freely in a given situation even if one could not possibly have acted differently. By this definition a person in a locked room is free as long as she doesn’t try to open the door. This is a position that many philosophers take, but it’s not, in my opinion, a very satisfying one. We can assume that such a definition of free will offered little consolation to Heller, and that it is his attempts to reconcile a more robust sort of freedom with determinism that leads to his plight.

We can certainly sympathize with Heller. Although
Schrödinger’s Gat
is a work of fiction, the world in which it takes place is real, and it is a very, very strange place.