Chapter 43 #2
He rests against his desk, eyeing Ilena carefully, as if he expects the baby to slide out onto the tile floor.
“You must be wondering why I’m here.” Ilena opens the AIM app, employing the ruse she devised on the way. “We—I mean, AIM—we’re
working on a new challenge.”
“So you can become trillionaires?”
“That depends on our focus groups.” She smiles to hide the shame that now comes with mention of AIM’s valuation. “This challenge
is a spin on the Sliding Doors concept. Remember that movie?”
He nods. “I’d hoped enrollment in physics would peak after.”
“And did it?”
“No, but it’s not Gwyneth’s fault.” He mouths, It is, and Ilena wants to wrap her arms around his cheesy self. “I have full confidence, however, that if AIM even whispers ‘parallel universe’ our department will be the belle of the ball.”
This time she smiles for real.
“So,” he says. “It seems you are in need of someone who can speak to what we call the ‘many-worlds interpretation’ of reality.”
“And can you?”
“I can, indeed. Not because I’m a leading expert, but because I have tenure and a thick skin.”
“Then it looks like the MIT directory steered me well. I searched the physics department, and there you were.”
“This version of me.”
Ilena laughs, wondering if she should feel guilty for being attracted to this Jonah.
He pushes himself off the edge of his desk. “What are you looking for, exactly?”
“We’re just in the exploratory stage right now,” she says, “which is why some grounding in the science will be immensely helpful.
The question we’re thinking of proposing is this, if there’s another version of you living a different life, living out a
choice you didn’t make, would you want to know? Would it change your life here?”
“A perfect AIM complement,” he says. “The intersection of philosophy and science has always fascinated me. We experience time
and space as fixed, but mathematically, the world we live in is anything but. Yet the notion of our world not being predictable
is philosophically uncomfortable for most.”
She leans forward like she would when he’d discuss a complicated spinal tap, seeing that same excitement in his eyes.
He circles the desk and settles himself in a wooden chair with arms and spindles and all the hallmarks of this profession he’s chosen here.
It seems to fit him. Maybe there’s something inherent, something that made this Jonah a professor and her Jonah a lover of sci-fi novels.
“For the question you’re posing,” he says, “we’d look at the theory of multiple realities. In simplest terms, the many-worlds
interpretation suggests that every time, say, two things could happen, they both actually do happen. This splits the one reality
into two new parallel realities. You, or the you of your conscious self, lives in one branch of what is actually a complex
multiverse. The theory goes that there are near infinite versions of you who have made every conceivable choice in your life.”
“So I have lived every possible version of my life?”
“Lived and are living. Possibly.”
“What about probably?”
“Above my pay grade. Literally. You might need a full professor to answer that. And speaking of, if you’re inclined to put
in a word . . .”
She laughs, and for a moment, they’re back in their original Cambridge apartment after too many glasses of wine, volleying
about whose turn it is to take out the trash. But it was never real. He never let her, in the beginning.
She refocuses. “What about this, if we want to ask our users if they’d want to try on this other life, what does the science
say? Can they—I don’t know the term—choose to move into a different reality? Or at least dip in?”
“Can you cross worlds?” He tents his fingers. “The short answer is no.”
Ilena’s need to be right begs to protest and offer herself as evidence, but she stays silent.
He fiddles with a button toward the hem of his sweater, barely hanging on by a single thread.
“We can think of it like radio frequencies. Even though there are hundreds of different radio stations, you only hear the one that your radio is tuned in to, the one frequency, the station that is what we’d call ‘coherent’ to your radio.
Even though there might be thousands of stations—or alternate realities—you can’t interact with them because you don’t vibrate coherently with them. ”
“Never? There’s no way to tune in, so to speak?”
“Got me.” He places his hand on his chest. “If scientists believed in ‘never,’ we wouldn’t be scientists. Plus, we really
do like trying to debunk one another. So is there a theory to support the opposite? Absolutely. And that’s ‘coherence link,’
which in some ways blows apart the reasoning that versions could never maintain consciousness of one another based on things
like frequency and wavelength and quantum entanglement . . .” He stops himself. “And you’re going to go into labor simply
to ease the boredom.”
She finds listening to him both fascinating and seductive, but those peppermint teas force her to nod to hurry him along.
He pushes his hair back, accentuating a cowlick and revealing a few strands of gray, which makes Ilena happier than it should.
“Theoretically, coherence link would offer a bridge between quantum states.”
“A bridge? To travel across? Like a two-way street?”
“Meaning . . .”
“A swap, I guess?”
“A brain swap?”
“Well, it sounds silly when you say it like that.”
“It all sounds silly. Ridiculous even. But in this particular case, a swap in the way you are suggesting is highly improbable.
More mystical or intentional than the physics allows for. The bridge would simply offer the conditions for one consciousness
to access its counterpart in another universe. While the coherence link lasted, consciousnesses could coexist.”
“And more silliness, but like two brains are better than one?”
Jonah smiles, and her stomach does a little flip. “While it’s conceivable that two sets of memories might exist in the same
space, personally, I find the notion of the human mind being able to tolerate such a thing hypothetically challenging.”
That must be why she, Mallory, and Aubrey don’t remember the lives they had in this world. If only she could tell Jonah she
is proof of his conclusion.
Jonah continues, “One set of memories likely suppresses another for a period of time. But it’s not a stable state. The more
time that passes since the collision, the more the coherence link will fade out, leaving just one consciousness. We have no
way of knowing which one.”
They could fade. And who knows which versions of themselves would remain.
Jonah seems to note the discomfort on her face. “It’s not as out there as it seems. Experiments with collapsing wave function
show how a particle that seems to inhabit just one position actually exists in every position simultaneously. We just don’t
have the means to observe it. With respect to coherence link, for those vibrations to line up, the worlds would have to be
very similar in that moment, and the closer they were in all elements, let’s say a fortieth birthday party on a beach in Bali—”
“Theoretically speaking or planned?”
“Planned, but only in my mind. So, a party in Bali in both worlds. If most of the same elements were in place, that would
substantively increase the odds of the universes bumping.”
“As in actually . . .” Ilena brings fist to fist.
“For these purposes, yes. Particles can become entangled, entering a shared quantum state, or, as you say, allow one to ‘dip in.’ The more alike things are, the more probability of a collision. It would ignite an active coherence link, and realities would cross. For how long, I can’t say.”
Puzzle pieces drop into place. The two outings happened on the same day in the same place with most of the same people, even
some in practically the same clothes like Mallory and her jumpsuit. They were both held one week before AIM was to go public.
And in each one, she, Mallory, and Aubrey agreed to return to the same spot to usher in good luck—in two days’ time. Which
means . . . maybe . . .
“I should go.” She hoists herself up, doing a Kegel to curb the urgency of her bladder.
“Of course.” He sounds disappointed. “And it’s a wonder he’s still single.” He gives a self-deprecating laugh.
She smiles politely, though it makes her heart sink a little.
“I hope I answered your question?” he says.
“Yes, you did. You’re an excellent professor.”
“I was going to be a doctor. But they don’t really wear cardigans.”
“Which you pull off quite well.” Heat rises in her cheeks. “But you would have pulled that off too, being a doctor.”
“You think?”
“If only you could see your other-world self.”
He smiles and winds around his desk. He holds out a hand to escort her from the office, but part of her doesn’t want to leave.
“Ilena, can I say something? Aside from it being strange and bizarre and delightful to see you again.”
“Same,” she says, all that double for her.
“You’re asking about choice for AIM, so I have to assume you’re looking for an angle related to your app’s focus on a fulfilling
life.”
“And happiness,” she says. “The pursuit of it, at least.”
“That brings me to my point.” He lifts an eyebrow. “Did I mention my lectures always run long?” She smiles gently, and he continues. “Because happiness is—”
“Don’t tell me, a journey.”
“Perhaps, for some. But I have to say I’m not that ‘woo-woo.’ Professional hazard.”
“Me neither, despite my profession.”
“Then speaking for me and not for the world of physics, I believe happiness stems directly from choice.”
Felix had said something similar, about happiness being something you can choose.
“And yet,” Jonah continues, “I’m not sure it’s about choice the way most people think.”
“And what way is that?” Ilena asks.
“That a single choice is the difference between being happy and not. That would mean in one reality you are happy and in the
other you aren’t. Physics isn’t that simple and neither are we.”
“Perhaps it’d be better if we were.” It was when Ilena’s actions strayed from her belief in a right choice and a wrong choice
that things began to unravel.
“I’m not convinced. I see it every day in my students who come here hoping the choice of MIT will cause everything else to fall into place.
They agonize over internships and job offers and grad schools as if their life literally depends on it.
Yet we all do it. We put an extraordinary amount of pressure on our choices.
This profession, this apartment, this lover, this Target throw pillow, if we choose the right one, it’s all smooth sailing.
That’s not logical. The lectures you love to give come with the papers you hate to grade.
Hypothetically.” He smirks. “The apartment with all that light means you pay a small fortune for blackout shades. Again, hypothetically. The partner you go to bed with is the same one who flosses their teeth in front of the open fridge door. Unfortunately, not hypothetically. That relationship didn’t last.”
Ilena’s hit with a little bit of satisfaction. “I’m not sure I’m following.”
“Not unusual. Again, just ask my students.” He grins, and she didn’t realize how much she missed it, the slow parting of his
lips, like he’s building anticipation for the full reveal.
“Trade-offs, then,” she says, “that’s what you’re saying?”
His finger goes to work on that dangling button. “Sort of. But perhaps being happy is all about choosing—and this is a technical
term—the crap you’re willing to deal with.”
Into her head comes a blur of mice-infested studios, overdrawn bank accounts, investor rejections, the computer glitch, doctors
and waiting rooms and shots and fights and . . . She presses her hand to her stomach.
This Ilena and this Felix chose this. They get a baby, a family, a friendship, more than what a lot of people have. But they’re
giving up something consequential and extraordinary. Though, to be fair, maybe there’s something easier about loving someone
but not being in love.
She looks at this Jonah with less gray hair in a beige cardigan in a life she can’t recognize, in a life she doesn’t share.
Any hint of desire is gone. She doesn’t want this Jonah.
She thanks him, puts her number in his phone and his in hers, and says yes to staying in touch. As she leaves, she says, “I
hope Bali happens.”
He crosses his fingers, and she turns, walks down the hall. Straight into the restroom where she lets in the pain of all she
is giving up.
This baby, this baby, this baby, this baby that is not hers, but my god, is hers.
Could be hers. She falls back against the bathroom stall, squeezing her vaginal muscles, clamping her hands around her balloon of a belly, pressing, pushing, begging, because if Ilena sees her, sees this child, holds this child, it will be hers.
But nothing comes.
Ilena strokes her belly. And straightens her spine. Knowing she will never fully forgive herself. But knowing exactly what
she has to do. And then she steps out into the MIT quad alone.