The Price of Bliss Eternal
by Thomas Dylan Daniel
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 2
Weeks later, Jean confessed to a university-sponsored therapist through a veil of tears that this was the last photo of her husband ever taken.
“He was so... tired! And it doesn’t make sense!” she wept, still lamenting the fact that she had not even acknowledged the possibility of risk in the experiment even as she had aided in its success.
“Jean, can you tell me what happened?” the therapist wanted to know.
“I’m not sure I even know! The experiment began according to plan, and then just simply never ended! I sat by the computer, checking each result against the others, and I was so... happy! They were all different! In the first twenty minutes, we tracked more possible combinations of decay than we could have computed in polynomial time! The results would have been impossibly rich for even a basic download if I hadn’t connected the machine to a supercomputer!” Jean choked. She had been yelling, but the conflicting emotions she felt about the remarkable discovery still overpowered her before she could explain the significance of the findings.
“Look,” said the therapist, “I understand how emotional you are, and I am here for you. But if you can’t explain what’s happening, no one will be able to help your husband! I need you to be strong, Jean. He needs you to be strong.”
Jean had been staring at the ceiling. She blew her nose, nodding, and made eye contact with the woman she was paying to help her through this once again.
* * *
Nils pulled the door shut, then spun the dial to lock it. Jean waved, from her computer terminal, and Eddie waved back. He turned to Nils.
“Are you ready to make history, sir?” he asked.
“But of course,” Nils replied with a grin.
Eddie gestured to the box. “Just spin the dial to maximum and press the red button. The supercooled time crystals in the temporal battery will pull the energy from the rest of the time crystals lining the box, and we will find ourselves inside our own pocket universe.”
Nils did as instructed. The outside world vanished, going entirely dark.
“Interesting! I’m glad I decided to put a light in here. I suppose the wires connecting us to the printer were the problem before,” Eddie chuckled. “Okay. Let’s start the experiment.”
Soon enough, an image was produced by the printer.
“Interesting decay pattern, precisely fifty percent,” Nils observed. “The atoms that decayed exhibited a shockingly nonlinear pattern on the graph.” He picked up the document, which contained a staccato pattern of lines, and pressed it into the rectangle to be scanned. Then, he put the paper back down. What a strange thought, that it would be not only blank but also back in the printer’s paper tray in a few seconds when the machine cycled. Capacitors were marvelous machines, really. He was a part of one, now.
Eddie smiled. “Nils, my friend, we have no way of knowing what number that experiment was. Congratulations upon making history!”
Nils felt his heart beat rapidly, and he embraced Eddie. “There has been no finer moment than this in all of history,” he said.
Near the top of the box, a lighted display blinked on. 3, it read. 2.... 1....
* * *
Six months later, Jean had recovered to some extent. Pierre had become an extremely close friend. Taller than she was, and more muscular than Eddie had been, what he lacked in scientific brilliance was made up for by physique. And, she reflected, she had been in no state to be choosy. Her only social circle had been that of the people she worked with. Tim hadn’t ever been bright enough to deserve his place there, and Paula had been picked up by another professor immediately after the accident.
“Voulez-vous manger avec moi?” Pierre asked her, the laughter hidden behind the lines of his face and the mischievous glint in his eye.
“Oui,” Jean replied, taking his outstretched hand and allowing herself to be pulled to her feet.
“I heard today; the book will be published,” Pierre said. “You will be receiving an advance of $200,000 for our work and a 10% royalty,” he finished.
“Fantastic,” Jean replied. “The ghostwriter will take half, and you and I can split the remainder.”
“Oh, no, Jean! The actual sum was $800,000. Your portion is $200,000. You’ll keep the entire sum of the royalty.”
“My goodness. I suppose Eddie and Nils are looking out for us from beyond the grave, then!” Jean exclaimed.
“They’ve created their own pocket universe. Come to think of it, it might not be so bad. We were all... so happy, before the experiment didn’t end. They’re probably going to be high-fiving each other and hugging all eternity.”
Jean’s eyes teared up, but she couldn’t think of a happier three-minute loop for her husband to spend eternity in. She imagined him, seeing the room go dark and knowing the experiment had worked, over and over forever. There were certainly worse fates, she reflected.
“Thanks, Pierre,” she said, hugging the strong man again.
A new thought occurred to Jean: just as chaotic activity at the quantum level collapsed the experiment to a different format each time, the experience Eddie and Nils had during each loop would likewise be a little bit different. How many permutations have they lived? It was a number so large the only thing she could think of to compare it to was infinity, and they had been trapped in the loop for only a couple of days, from the standpoint of Earth time.
Dinner was excellent.
Pierre was dressed in his best tuxedo, and had brought Jean to the nicest restaurant in town. He did not seem annoyed with her when she dominated the conversation, and instead, sat and listened and even chimed in now and again to be polite.
“So, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics has to be true.” Jean shrugged. “We will never recover Eddie and Nils because they have been living the same three-minute experiment, hundreds of thousands of times per second, the entire time they have been missing.”
“Yes, darling. I know. We broke the glass about half an hour after it began, and there was no one there,” he said.
With this, a tear appeared in the corner of Jean’s left eye.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t have broken it. Perhaps they would have come back, if only we hadn’t!” she said, choking at the end as emotion got the better of her.
Pierre stood and leaned in, hugging her.
Jean choked again, miserably breaking down; her body could not contain its excitement at the scientific discovery or subsequent publication any more than it could deal with the misery of losing her life partner. Somehow Eddie’s ghost had wrapped its arms around everything in Jean’s life and squeezed until she thought she would never escape.
Jean knew the experiment had been a success, but she would never understand what had gone wrong on an emotional level. She wanted to enjoy a nice evening with Pierre, and instead she found herself forced to mourn Eddie. The torrent of negative emotion persisted even as Pierre reminded her that she was celebrating her own greatest personal success to date.
* * *
The outside world vanished, going entirely dark.
“Interesting! I’m glad I decided to put a light in here. I suppose the wires connecting us to the printer were the problem before,” Eddie chuckled. “Okay. Let’s start the experiment.”
Soon enough, an image was produced by the printer.
“Interesting decay pattern, precisely fifty percent,” Nils observed. “The atoms which decayed exhibited a shockingly nonlinear pattern on the graph.” He picked up the document, which contained a staccato pattern of lines, and pressed it into the rectangle to be scanned.
Then, he put the paper back down. What a strange thought, that it would be not only blank but also back in the printer’s paper tray in a few seconds when the machine cycled.
Capacitors were marvelous machines, really. He was a part of one, now. Something felt off, somehow. Nils intuitively made a connection between the capacitor’s ability to recycle its electrical charge over and over again. He and Eddie, and the battery, would also reset before the next cycle.
Eddie smiled. “Nils, my friend, we have no way of knowing what number that experiment was. Congratulations upon making history!”
Nils felt his heart beat rapidly, and he became very angry with Eddie. A wordless cry left his lips, and he put his hands around Eddie’s throat.
Eddie cried out in surprise, but there was no limit to the rage Nils felt as he squeezed and squeezed, desperate to slay his friend and frantic to escape the prison he found himself in.
Near the top of the box, a lighted display blinked on. 3, it read. 2.... 1....
* * *
Around the world, the ramifications of the confirmation of the Many Worlds Interpretation echoed throughout the sciences. It was scarcely the mere confirmation of one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics; it was, rather, the theory of the quantum universe itself that was the most significant confirmation to arise. A myriad of new scientific creations arose, but the problem remained: how exactly had the experiment which had claimed Nils and Eddie given rise to a pocket universe? Why had the glass box been empty when one of the walls was smashed?
One of the premier quantum physicists of the time, Edmund Gallagher, was able to find an answer to the question. In a detailed and lengthy report, he spelled out the process by which a time trap could create a nonlocal partition between possible universes. In one world, quite simply consisting of the inside of the box, time had been severed from the timeline of the other, larger world to create a pocket universe. Nonlocality was important: the entanglement state which allows the rest of the universe to experience temporal variation at a more or less unified rate had been almost completely severed by the time crystal barrier and ran far faster as a result of the massive reduction in local matter.
Gallagher’s best guess, which was correct so far as anyone could tell, was that the more-or-less unified time the rest of the world experienced was a result of the proximity of massive amounts of matter. In a universe without such matter, time could move faster for the same reason a powerful computer can run a simple game faster than a more complex one. Gravity and the almost limitless number of interactions which caused the complexity of the universe humanity lived in were all simply nonexistent in the pocket universe.
If the phenomenon could be replicated, perhaps it could revolutionize storage, the management of nuclear waste, and even problems such as pollution. On the quantum level, the experiment was groundbreaking because of the scanning technology incorporated into the side of the box. The time warp caused a sort of interference with the glass the scanner was attached to, and this interference itself could be decoded.
This was where the information was coming from. Even cross-dimensionally, the time crystals had to move, and the splintered time shard that contained the little pocket universe intermittently provided a direct link to the multiverse where the machine deduced the paper’s contents. It wasn’t a locality-based link, but the entanglement states of the various subatomic particles on both sides of the time-crystal barrier remained as they were before the experiment had begun. The trick Jean’s software had accomplished was an algorithm capable of discarding the obvious information and choosing between the less-likely interactions of the atoms in the scanner itself to find the contents of the printout.
* * *
The outside world vanished, going entirely dark.
“Let’s start the experiment,” Eddie said.
Nils nodded.
Soon enough, an image was produced by the printer.
“Interesting decay pattern, precisely forty percent,” Nils observed. “The atoms which decayed exhibited a shockingly linear pattern on the graph.” He picked up the document, which contained a repeating pattern of lines, and pressed it into the rectangle to be scanned. Then, he put the paper back down.
Eddie smiled. “Forty percent? How odd! We have made history!”
Nils felt his heart beat rapidly, and he embraced Eddie. “We did it!” he shouted, picking his friend up in a bear hug. He heard Eddie’s back pop.
Near the top of the box, a lighted display blinked on. 3, it read. 2... 1...
* * *
Jean was finished with Pierre. He had been a good teddy bear for a time, but soon his company became tiresome. She dismissed him and built a company to sell her technology. Soon, indestructible “time drives” performed computations in alternate dimensions and returned staggering amounts of information instantaneously; even though the computations being performed required near infinite amounts of work. She thought about him, about Eddie. About Nils, but mainly about Eddie. How could such a wonderful mind be lost to such a strange occurrence? Was it possible to bring him back?
No solutions to the problem entered her mind, and she frankly did not know where to begin, even.
What about Eddie’s state of mind? Surely in one of the infinite number of three-minute loops that he was undergoing, his mind would spontaneously change. He would decide to break out of the loop, or stop it entirely. Jean knew that every possibility would eventually happen, that there had already been more recurrences than there were atoms in the universe, that Nils and Eddie had gone through a staggering number of changes.
However, she also knew that Eddie’s mind was being reset to the exact same state at the beginning of each three-minute loop. That was the problem that had prevented the failsafe battery box from working properly. Why would Eddie have neglected to admit reality in his design? How could he have forgotten that the battery’s electrons would reset their positions as well, thus restoring their energy and powering the box for another run?
* * *
The outside world vanished, going entirely dark.
“Let’s start the experiment,” Eddie said.
Soon enough, an image was produced by the printer.
Nils ignored the printout.
Eddie leaned in toward him. “Nils, my friend, what are you doing?”
Nils felt his heart beat rapidly, and he put his hands around Eddie’s shoulders. “There has been no finer moment than this in all of history,” he said, lovingly, planting a kiss on Eddie’s startled lips.
Eddie struggled, but the larger man easily overpowered him. Finally, Eddie pushed Nils away, and the two men stared at each other uncomfortably.
Near the top of the box, a lighted display blinked on. 3, it read, 2.... 1....
* * *
Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Dylan Daniel
