Chapter Twelve
“You know what they say about a man with big blueberry pancakes.” Ollie glanced over his shoulder from where he stood over the stove, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. “Like, really big blueberry pancakes. Some women might see these pancakes and get a little worried about whether they can handle them.”
“That he goes through a lot of syrup?” I cupped both hands around my coffee mug, which proclaimed Grandmas Sleigh All Day with a weirdly sexy cartoon grandma in Mrs. Claus gear on the back. Ollie and I had laughed so hard when we’d spotted it on the shelf of the Goodwill near his parents’ place in Maine, inventing increasingly disturbing Christmas memories for the grandmother who felt this represented her, that we had to buy it. Purchases like this were why our kitchen cabinets could barely hold the dishes anymore.
“Lo, I hope you don’t have plans for today, because I’m going to have to introduce you to a new and slightly horrifying genre of porn,” Ollie said seriously, flipping the last cake onto the stack and joining me at the retro chrome-and-formica bistro set we’d tucked into the corner of our kitchen.
“I never know when you’re serious about porn genres,” I said as I stabbed a pancake off the top. Did Drew joke about porn? Did we watch porn together? It was strange to realize how many dynamics of your couple life time and exposure could erode into the shape of “normal.”
“Then I’ve got you exactly where I want you,” Ollie said, grinning goofily, his curly hair crumpled in some places and electrocution-wild in others. He always did get the best bedhead, especially after nights when we’d had a few too many. The same anaconda grip of tenderness I’d felt last night wrapped around my chest again, and my throat thickened with threatened tears.
I cleared it noisily and forced myself to focus on pouring syrup instead of allowing myself to give in to the urge to run my hands through Ollie’s unruly mop. Dizzy spells and random gaps in my memory were probably making him worry enough, I didn’t need to add acting like a college kid on Molly into the mix. Not that I’d ever taken Molly, but my friend Cara had always gotten very tactile when she did.
“What is the plan for today?” I asked as I popped a bite of berry-studded deliciousness into my mouth, practically moaning as the flavor burst across my tongue. The complete terror and dislocation of popping in and out of two versions of myself—or perhaps having really involved dissociative episodes, I was really gliding right past that possibility—wasn’t just making me appreciate the physical pleasures of Ollie. Everything in this life felt a little more…valuable than it had a week ago. “Oooh, what if we went apple picking? They had cider donuts at work last week and they were like…a postcard of Guernica, you know? Like, you knew what they were gesturing at, but it just made you kinda sad knowing how much more majestic the real thing would be?”
Ollie’s eyes dropped to his plate.
“Or we could go to the Sturbridge Flea? It’s definitely a hike, but we could get barbecue at that place down the road, make a day of it…”
“I mean…it’s not that I don’t want to, Lo, you know how much I love a hayride, but I kinda…have plans?”
“Oh.” I blinked. Tried not to let the hurt corkscrewing through my center show on my face. “With who?”
“Ryan.” Ollie shrugged, not meeting my eyes. “I would have mentioned it but I figured you’d be off to the café to work. I know how important the new VP role is. At least until you give it all up to live your writing dreams.” He gave me a wan smile.
“Right. Of course.” I tried to return it. “I definitely have plenty I ought to be doing.”
“If you want me to reschedule, I can,” he said, nibbling his bottom lip, entire body tight with discomfort. “You know I love a good farm store.”
“No, don’t do that. I’m drowning in work, having you out of the apartment will help me focus. And save me the price of a latte. On that note…” I rose to pour myself another coffee, watching Ollie in my peripheral vision. “What are you two even doing? Playing video games?”
Ryan was a friend of Ollie’s from college, dryly funny, and very interested in the tech world, which we’d connected over in the past, though more from the dev side. Mostly they got together on their own, often to check out whatever indie game Ryan had become obsessed with that week.
Ollie tensed again, gaze skidding away as he scooped up our plates. Which seemed…odd…
“Something like that.”
Was he lying to me about seeing Ryan? The thought wisped through me like smoke, casting a subtle haze over the conversation.
“Well, try not to get too day drunk. I wasn’t kidding about checking out that new bar Ben is working at.”
“Don’t worry, I think Annie has Ryan doing another health kick with her. The strongest thing he’s allowed to drink right now is kombucha.” He laughed too loudly, then turned to the sink, busying himself with composting the pancake remnants and loading the dishwasher, the clearest This conversation is over signal he was likely to give.
“On that note, I should hop in the shower,” I said, curiosity nipping at the edges of my brain. Were he and Ryan starting a band? Or was he doing it with someone else, someone he knew I wasn’t a fan of, and he didn’t want to tell me until things were firmer?
But that didn’t make sense, he was always excited to talk about a new band, the joy of it one of the few things that could fully pry open his heavy-lidded eyes. He’d watch me for the slightest reactions as he played each individual part he’d tracked on his computer, or sang through the chorus he couldn’t get out of his head, acoustic guitar in hand. I’d never had to fake it, though—he was good . Good in a way that made his commitment to his music, to each new band becoming the one that finally breaks through, feel like the only logical option. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t been relieved when he left the job at the liquor store to teach—the money was much better, which didn’t particularly matter to me but clearly mattered to him, and functionally ended one point of useless friction that kept scraping up our relationship. On one level, I thought it was ridiculous—if I wanted us to eat at some absurdly chichi restaurant, there was no reason Ollie should feel obligated to fund that whim—but on another, I respected it. Dad had always drilled the importance of self-reliance into me, too. So had Mom, though not quite so intentionally.
The giant, pristine condo I shared with Drew in that life flashed into my head, accompanied by an uncomfortable, crawling shame. Clearly not all versions of me had held on to the importance of that lesson. Had Mom felt the way I’d felt at dinner last night? Cared for, provided for, but disappointingly undervalued? The thought radiated ache through my chest, the discomfort of it immediately physical. I’d spent a lifetime avoiding sympathy for her, and for good reason. Who cared if she felt some kind of way, it didn’t excuse what she’d done . If you’re unfulfilled get a hobby, or a job , not a colleague of Dad’s that can fuck away your boredom. Don’t blow up your—and my—life.
I soaped up a second time, trying to scrub away the residue of ugliness that thoughts of my mom always brought on, and I was still lingering under the hot water when Ollie tugged open the bathroom door, the hinges whining in protest, to call out:
“Okay, I’m gonna head. See you this afternoon! Love you!”
“Love you too,” I’d only just managed before I heard his steps retreating, the distant slam of the front door.
Doing something with his friend does not mean he’s pulling away from you . He didn’t know I knew about the ring, after all. That I’d deliberately ensured we wouldn’t be celebrating our engagement this weekend. I was probably just projecting because of my entire consciousness literally pulling away from my body at random intervals.
Or maybe I’d been so worried about my what ifs that I’d finally broken this. Broken us.
The thought brought on a wave of nausea, and I quickly toweled off and grabbed my laptop out of my tote. Much as I wished Ollie would stay, wanted to wrap myself up in a day of pure us, him leaving me alone for a few hours was a gift. I needed time to dig into what was happening to me—I’d let myself hope that last night’s switch was final, but I still wasn’t sure, and even if it was, how could I go through life never really understanding it? As a woman who needed certainty so desperately that I’d literally split myself across worlds to find it, that didn’t exactly sit right. I needed to get a handle on my pinballing life. Lives? God, what did one even search in a case like this?
Opening my browser, I tentatively typed in quantum physics all possible worlds exist?
Articles purporting to explain the “Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics” streamed down the page, in publications ranging from Cosmo to The Journal of Quantum Mechanical Research .
Probably not gonna be my easiest entry point.
But as I clicked through article after article targeting the more…layperson quantum mechanics enthusiast, one name kept appearing over and over.
… Dana Howell, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…
…said professor Dana Howell, a leader in the field of theoretical quantum mechanics…
…but it’s still the most elegant solution, according to Dana Howell, an MIT physicist who served as an advisor to several mind-bending movies of the last decade…
If I was ever going to figure out what the hell was happening to me, I was going to need to get in touch with this Dana Howell as soon as possible. Luckily, MIT was just down the road…and it looked like my morning had recently cleared up.
I looked up at the gleaming structure that housed MIT’s physics department, grids of glass and metal pinned in place by vaguely brutalist Tetris shapes of some building material I couldn’t identify. The suspended walkways and conference rooms and offices that made up the viscera of the building were all visible through its transparent skin, and so many of the interior walls were also glass—all the desks and tables and chairs they held appearing to float atop one another, as though someone had cracked open the world’s largest dollhouse—that it made me want to pull my coat tighter around my body, protecting myself from whatever flaying effect occurred at the threshold.
But I had nothing to hide. Thrusting out my chest, I pulled open the door and walked in.
Inside, the panopticon effect—everything observable and yourself always observed—was almost overwhelming. A wave of vertigo swept through me as I stared at the glass-paneled walkways connecting opposite sides of the building several stories up, cringing slightly as I saw a man start tripping lightly down a staircase, the handrail that hit just above his hip the narrowest promise of protection between him and a multistory tumble through space. With a shiver I looked away.
“Can I help you?” It took me a minute to locate the speaker, an impossibly young-looking man tucked behind a swoop of desk near the entrance, eyes bright over the top of his laptop.
“Oh, umm…yes, I hope so. I was looking for Professor Howell. Dana Howell? I think her office is in this building.”
“I don’t think Professor Howell has office hours today…” The student frowned and turned to a desktop a few feet away from him, clicking at a mouse. “Did you have a meeting with her, or…”
“Not as such,” I said, sucking my lips between by teeth. He glanced up at me, apparently waiting for my explanation. “I was just hoping to…connect with her. About a possible…collaboration. I’m working on something that I think dovetails very neatly with her areas of study.”
“Okaaay.” He frowned, tilting his head to one side, clearly unsure what to do. “Did you want me to…call her office? She might be in. Or I can give you her email?”
“Oh, uh…both, if you don’t mind. I might get lucky, right?” I laughed awkwardly, which he ignored, clicking a few times on the screen, then flipping over a business card to scribble down an email, [email protected] . Probably could have guessed that one without making a total idiot of yourself, Laurel.
He passed it to me and dialed an extension on the phone, staring past me through the wall of windows as it rang…and rang…and…
“Oh…hello? Is this Professor Howell? Wow, okay, cool. There’s a lady here to meet you.” He stared at me expectantly. It took me a minute to realize he wanted my name.
“Laurel Everett.”
“Laurel Everett,” he repeated. “She said she wants to collaborate with you on research? No, I did. Sure. Right, okay, I’ll tell her. Thanks, Professor Howell.”
He hung up and turned to me.
“She said she can’t take a meeting today, but if you can wait a few minutes she could talk to you briefly.”
“Great! That’s great,” I chirped, smiling too wide. “I’ll just sit over here?” I tilted my head at some nearby benches. He nodded. “Great. Thanks so much.” But he was already back to his laptop.
Twenty minutes later, a petite woman in a chunky cabled sweater emerged from some unseen corridor, box braids pulled back loosely from her face, wire-rimmed glasses slipping slightly down her nose. Possibly because she was moving so quickly, each step so determined, her entire body seemed to vibrate slightly as she hurried beneath the tangle of suspended glass and metal, not bothering to look up at any of it. Her backpack hopped up and down like an eager toddler trying to see over her shoulder.
“Laurel, was it?” she said, voice as crisp and efficient as her gait. She didn’t seem to be slowing down as she approached. Tentatively, I rose. I recognized her from her faculty photo, though her lips hadn’t been so pinched there.
“Yes. Professor Howell? Thanks so much for taking the time to talk…”
“Call me Dana. And I won’t be taking time, I’ll be optimizing it. That’s the point.” She strode past me, pausing for a moment at the door to glance over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised in impatient annoyance. “Were you planning to join or did you just like the views? Henry made it sound like you were keen to chat?”
“Oh, umm, sure. Yup, coming now.” I hiked my tote up my shoulder and hurried after the smaller woman with the massive amounts of BDE.
She emerged into the fall sunshine and started down the sidewalk, weaving deftly between oncoming students.
“So you want a collaboration. On what, precisely? Are you an academic?”
“No. But I’m very interested in your work.”
“Why?” She turned to me, not even slowing down as her eyes raked my face, as though she were attempting to catalog me.
“Because I think I might be…experiencing multiple worlds?”
She came to a dead stop, glaring at me from under her lowered brow.
“You’re one of those ? Jesus, if I’ve told Henry once, I’ve told him a thousand—” She squeezed her eyes shut, inhaling and exhaling a long, loud breath through her nose. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m very busy, but thank you so much for coming in.” With an acid approximation of a smile, she continued on, somehow moving even faster.
“Please wait. I promise I’m not just…”
“Hallucinating? Forgive me for not believing you,” she snipped, not looking back.
“I’m not claiming I was born a time traveler or something,” I said, frustration creeping into my voice. “I think it’s related to a project my company’s been working on in the quantum computing space.”
She glanced over her shoulder at me, eyes narrowed.
“ Rea- lly. And where do you work?”
“Pixel? I have a card if you don’t believe that, either.” I fumbled in my bag for one and passed it to her. Her eyes flicked over it rapidly. She blinked a few times but didn’t say anything. “I’m in marketing, obviously, but my good friend works on Lightning projects and needed…not test subjects, exactly. But I guess test subjects? Apparently having more users helps the AI learn faster, and not that many people at our office are cleared to know about projects that haven’t been fully green-lit…” I rolled my eyes, feeling myself getting bogged down in the details. “The point is I think this might have a specific cause, but no one at work seems to think there’s even an issue, and if I really went into the details they’d probably have me committed—”
Dana stopped short so quickly I practically hip-checked her into a nearby planter. She seemed unfazed.
“What, precisely, do you believe is happening to you? No, scratch that.” She shook her head once, sharply. “What is this project, and how would it be able to make anything related to my work happen to you?”
“I mean…telling you any of that would definitely violate my NDA,” I said, anxiety creeping in. When I’d looked her up I’d been thinking about me, the person, but wasn’t all this just a side effect of me, the employee? Her gaze was so penetrating, it was hard not to wonder what was going on in her head, what she might do with this.
“Trust me, I’m not planning to share. Believe it or not, my reputation is important to me, too, and gossiping about what I think some corporate behemoth might be working on isn’t going to win me the respect of my peers,” she said tartly. Then, noticing something in my face, she softened slightly. “If it will make you more comfortable, it’s common knowledge in the theoretical physics community that Pixel has been pursuing more… dramatic user-facing applications for quantum computing than what we’re currently seeing in the space. Most of my colleagues have fielded at least one job offer from them. I’ve had four. It’s not hard to guess the general parameters of their work from that data.”
“That’s all well and good, but if you’re not even interested in helping me…”
“I won’t know if I’m interested in helping you until I know what you believe happened,” Dana said, widening her eyes as though this were painfully evident. “If you don’t want to continue this conversation, fine. I have to get to the lab anyway, and this little chat has already put me”—she glanced at her watch—“three minutes behind schedule. But if you’re worried enough about this… experience to track me down at my office, I’d say you very much do want to keep talking. And you’ve caught just enough of my interest that I’m willing to entertain that. But first, you’re going to have to trust me.”
It was a risk…but if I didn’t get answers, losing my job was going to be the least of my worries.
“Okay. But can we go somewhere a little more private?”
She considered for a moment, then nodded.
“The courtyard near my lab is almost always empty. And if it’s not, I’ll scare off whoever’s using it.”
“How will you do that?”
“I’m a chaired professor in one of the most competitive disciplines on campus. And even if I weren’t…Aren’t you intimidated?” Her lips curled up at the corner, eyes twinkling with humor for a split second, then she nodded again and started off. “This way.”
We wove through the campus until we arrived at a large, blocky building, its mirrored glass turning the sunlight blinding. Dana led us down a narrow walkway at the side, swiping her ID card to open a series of gates until we arrived at an open courtyard in the building’s interior, totally hidden from the street-facing side. As predicted, it was empty.
“Why don’t more people come here?” I said as we settled onto a bench beneath a perfectly tended Japanese maple, its leaves a vibrant burgundy. “It’s lovely.”
“If you’re here in the first place, it’s to use the lab facilities, not sit and contemplate the pastoral beauty of the season,” she said with a shrug, perching next to me, posture ramrod straight. “Now. Explain.”
Haltingly, I gave her a brief recap of what had been happening—the sketchiest of details on the AltR program, my abortive attempt to set up a profile, waking up in Drew’s bed, then slipping back and forth between the two worlds seemingly at random.
“And so far you’ve experienced only these two realities?” The sun was hitting her glasses in a way that made it impossible to read her expression.
“That’s right. And…I don’t know if it really matters, but Drew has always kind of been…”
“The one that got away?”
“More like the one I always wondered about. I think he probably feels the same way about me.” I was already breaching my NDA, I might as well own up to my work crush.
“Got it.” She pressed her fingertips together, tapping her lower lip with the joined pointers as she stared at me. “And there are gaps in your memory? By which I mean you’re not party to whatever happens to you in either world when you’re not… present ?”
I nodded.
“Well, my first instinct is that what you’re describing is impossible.”
“But?”
“No buts. Current consensus from those of us who adhere to the multiple worlds interpretation is that if infinite worlds do exist, it’s not possible to move between them.”
“But then…what do I—”
“I wasn’t finished,” she said, not quite annoyed, but commanding. Clearly she was used to people listening to her. “Consensus doesn’t mean something’s proven, or even the most elegant solution, only that it’s generally agreed to. And the question of how our individual human consciousnesses operate within a multiworld system is very fiercely contested.” She gave me a meaningful stare. Apparently this counted as hot quantum physics goss. She leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Some of us theorize that in the same way that there are infinite points where universes split, there could be infinite points where they come back into contact.” She pulled her fingertips apart and pressed them back together to demonstrate. “We’re not sure why that would happen, or how it would play out from a quantum perspective, only that it’s plausible. If the worlds you’re describing were…bumping up against one another, so to speak, something like this might be possible. Wildly unlikely, but possible.” She shrugged.
“Is that supposed to reassure me?”
“It’s better than wildly unlikely and impossible.”
“I guess.”
She glanced down at her smartwatch and exhaled decisively.
“I’m afraid I really don’t have more time to discuss this. While I do believe that you believe this is happening, it’s just…not enough to base a serious inquiry on.” She gave me a pitying smile. Desperation swelled in my chest.
“But you have to help! Who else would even understand?” I leaned closer, willing her to take this seriously. Her mouth twisted to one side, then she rolled her eyes, almost as if she were annoyed with herself.
“You said the split had to have happened a little under five years ago, give or take?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re sure it couldn’t have happened much earlier? A complete restart of your timeline, say?”
“Definitely not. I know Drew and I still met at Pixel in the other reality, and that’s when I started working there. And a total do-over…I feel like more things would have to change?”
She nodded once.
“In that case…the rock.”
“The…I’m sorry?”
“The Rock . Dwayne Johnson?” She raised an eyebrow. “You must have heard of him, he’s universally beloved.”
I laughed once. Even her opinions on pro-wrestlers-turned-Disney-voice-actors had the tone of absolute truth.
“Obviously I’ve heard of him. Are you suggesting I…find him?”
“That would be incredible for you, but no, I’m suggesting you mention him to me. The other me, if you do find yourself on that side of the coin again. Specifically, the fact that he was my first crush.”
“Seriously?”
“The man’s built like a god, Laurel.” Disdain creased her brow. “It’s not something I share widely, though, so if you, a stranger, were to know that about me, I’d be likely to take you seriously. And on that note, I have actual work to do.”
She rose and, without bothering to look back at me, disappeared through a door to the building.
I had someone on my side…maybe…and only if I kept ping-ponging between two worlds. I suppose that would have to count as a win.