Might Have Been Ch. 01

It was not the only interpretation, however. Another, formulated by Hugh Everett in the 1950s, hypothesized that the act of observation didn't cause a collapse of the waveform. Instead each possible result of the observation actually occurred, branching off into its own universe. Everett called this the “relative state” interpretation, but in the sixties, more whimsical (or stoned) physicists renamed it the “Many-Worlds Interpretation”.

When I had studied quantum physics at the University of Chicago, “MWI” was presented as just a clever conjecture. In principle, there was no way to choose between the two interpretations. Without evidence, it all came down to aesthetic choices like which interpretation you thought was the simplest. While the Copenhagen Interpretation was dominant, and everyone talked about waveform collapses, rather than spin-off universes, the inability to disprove MWI was an unsolved problem, and we were about to solve it.

One of Fermilab's resident geniuses, Dr. Nguyen, had devised a clever experiment that was supposed to banish the Many-Worlds Interpretation once and for all – at least that is what he said when he wanted funding. Christening the experiment “Project Everett” made a lot of people, including myself, wonder whether he was a closeted Many-Worlder.

MWI reminded too many people of parallel universe stories from science fiction, where an evil Captain Kirk and an evil Spock-with-a-goatee rule the Enterprise with an iron fist. If physicists wanted to be taken seriously most felt compelled to pooh-pooh the notion in public. In private, however, the parallel universe aspect of MWI was part of the appeal. Most physicists were unrepentant sci-fi geeks – a virtue I shared.

I liked the concept of MWI. Human thoughts, after all, are just electromagnetic events occurring in a biological neural network, and are just as subject to the laws of physics as a flashlight beam. If MWI was correct, there would be an alternate universe for every possible decision we had made. That had obvious appeal for me, and fueled my rush-hour fantasies.

It was a beautiful lie – that there was an alternate universe where I had avoided the Tasha Trap and was happily living with Amy, or another Might-Have-Been. Why even settle for one of them? Maybe there was another version of me somewhere who had Natalie Portman writhing on his lap, demanding passionate, frenzied, weasel sex while she fondled the Nobel Prize in Physics the “Alternate Me” had just won.

Alas, the world devoured and shat out scientists who banked their careers on wishful thinking, and we all expected Project Everett to confirm Copenhagen and leave the Many-Worlds to writers of bad sci-fi.

The innovation at the heart of Project Everett was something called the resonance array – a set of eight perfectly-shaped crystals, equally spaced in a lattice of carbon nanotubes, encased in a ring made of rare-earth alloys. A quantum waveform function was entered from a computer, which would then be generated by the array. Observations would be compared to those predicted, and if the Copenhagen Interpretation was correct, there would be a match with predicted values. If the MWI emerged triumphant, certain uncommon states would be seen more often than predicted. The array cost several million dollars – yttrium, high quality crystals, and custom-grown nanotubes weren't cheap.

It would take two years to run all the experiments and analyze the data, but tomorrow’s launch date was still a big day. I had been involved with the project for the past year, working on the computer models behind the experiment. I liked the project, and it had a cutting-edge glamor that beat my last project, where I helped shoot neutrinos at a mine shaft back in Minnesota. My task for today was to ensure the computer system was properly configured for the models to run correctly. That should have been only a few hours work, but as the day progressed, my team members kept changing the experimental parameters based on last-minute input from each other. Each change compelled another round of configuration and testing, and the resonance array was removed for each system reboot.

Dr. Nguyen hovered around the lab all day. When he wasn't wheedling for progress updates, he paced nervously. The image reminded me of an expectant father, and I asked him if he had a box of cigars ready to pass around for the birth tomorrow. His only response was a grimace.

It was clear I wouldn't be leaving early. After the second round of changes, I swore off my final configuration until everyone else had left. I would work late, but this had the upside of making it unlikely I would see Tasha tonight, avoiding fallout. Tasha would be wallowing in guilt about now for ignoring my birthday. Whenever she felt guilty, she manufactured some grievance against me to balance her peculiar sense of karma.

My team members checked in their work by eight, and left for the evening. Dr. Nguyen and I were the last ones in the building. He stood next to me as I started the final configuration. “How much time?” he asked.

“Two hours.”

“I feel bad making you stay this late.”

“It's no problem. You can leave if you want. I won’t go home until I'm done.”

“Weren't you the guy who said this was my baby? What father leaves the hospital during the birth?” His face cracked a rare smile.

I shrugged while running the necessary commands. “It's your choice, but I warn you I work faster without a boss watching over my shoulder.”

Dr. Nguyen understood. “Call me when you're done, or if the timeline changes.”

I grunted assent as I worked. Having written most of the software, I knew what needed to be configured, but the computer system required several reboots, and it was late, so I found myself having frequent downtime, with my only companion a 22” LCD screen displaying a Linux boot cycle. I killed the time by thinking more about Amy.

It was impossible to tell what path my life would have taken if I had accepted her advances that night at the park ten years ago, but I imagined a variety of romantic, social, and sexual events that never happened – a first kiss, words of love, the feel of her breast underneath my fingers, and heated sex in the back of Dad's Taurus.

I made the last configuration change and started the final boot cycle. Once this was complete, I could run a test.

Would Amy have followed me to college, or would we have made a long distance relationship work? I pictured her visiting me in my Chicago dorm room, with a sock on the outside doorknob signaling the desire for solitude. We would fuck like minks, working through the intellectual alphabet between sexual bouts – tonight the K’s, discussing Kepler, Kafka, and Kurosawa. I imagined turning Kepler’s laws of planetary motion into an erotic demonstration – my lips and tongue sweeping equal areas in equal time, with Amy’s nipple as the sun.

I ran the system through its final tests, and I glanced at the clock. It was just after ten. It was almost exactly ten years ago to the minute that my shot at Amy had misfired.

The system checked out, and it was time to install the resonance array. This normally wasn't my job, but there was no one else around, and I had seen it done enough times that I knew the steps. I pulled the array out of its storage case and opened the housing to the power grid.

Amy's face rose once more out of my memory. In my self-flagellation over the years, I had long ago worked out the words I should have said. I grimaced in self-contempt – composing a romantic speech for a woman ten years lost was pathetic even for me.

As I set the array into its slot on the power grid, I simultaneously asked myself two questions.

When Amy had asked me what I was thinking, while we sat on that rock in the park, how would she have responded if I had given her the answer written in the crisp ink of hindsight?

And...

After I finished testing the computer, did I remember to turn off the electricity to the power grid?

The second question was answered first by the audible snap of a voltage arc. There was a sharp pain in my hand, and I smelled the scent of ozone.

I stumbled into darkness.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

October 19, 2001

Stars. I must have hit my head, but cranial-impact stars didn’t typically arrange themselves like Orion, much less make Betelgeuse the correct shade of orange.

“Lance?” It was a woman's voice, vaguely familiar.

The most jarring sensation was the change in environmental sounds. I didn't hear the whirring of ventilation fans that formed the soundtrack to our laboratory. Instead, I heard the wind rustling through desiccated leaves. I could also feel a cool breeze, and smell the dry decay of an autumn night in the woods. My clothes felt different, and I personally felt healthier. The electrical burn on my hand was now just a vague memory of pain, which I rubbed away.

“Lance, what were you thinking about? Are you embarrassed to tell me?” My head spun when I recognized the voice – huskier than I remembered – or else she was lowering her voice for effect.

My eyes adjusted to the night. Amy was lying next to me, her legs dangling from our rocky slab of a sofa. She was idly moving her left foot, playing footsie with the fortunate granite. Her pillowed ponytail supported her head. I noticed each of her ears was pierced by two rings of golden circles. Each ring just touched its partner without overlap, forming a sideways figure eight. Amy's earrings were serendipitously forming the lemniscate – the lazy eight – the mathematical symbol for infinity – as if advertising the endless possibilities before me.

I drank in the sight of her, feeling dizzy. What the hell happened? I glanced down. I had lost the spare tire around my waist and was back to the swimmer physique I had kept until my mid twenties, when I forsook lap pools after Tasha complained about the chlorine smell and the time away from her. I was wearing the pair of cargo pants that had been my favorites back in high school, and there was a watch on my wrist – I hadn't worn a watch since I bought my phone, which I could no longer feel in my pocket. I clutched for it reflexively.

A dream? When I was dreaming, I never considered the possibility I was dreaming, so that seemed unlikely.

Perhaps I was dead, dispatched to a Hell where I was consigned to relive my failures every moment for all eternity. I didn't believe in Hell and didn't think I was a bad person, but Hell might not care whether I believed in it, and I considered that maybe the fundamentalists were right, and I was sentenced to Hell for my heathen ways.

My night-adjusted eyes were captivated by the sight of Amy's breasts, rising and falling in the starlight. No, a fundamentalist Hell wouldn’t offer the chance to peer down Amy's shirt again. A different kind of hell, maybe. Lutheran Hell? Maybe Presbyterian Hell wouldn’t deprive a wretched sinner a glimpse of an occasional heaving bosom as a diversion from the routine of brimstone baths and pitchfork stabbings. What did Presbyterians believe anyway?

Say something...

The resonance array felt heavy in my hand – my only visual connection to the world I remembered – and things clicked together. I thought back to the theories that were behind our experiment, and what had happened just before I blacked out. Did I somehow time travel? Like any geek, I was a fan of Back to the Future, but the resonance array was an unlikely substitute for a flux capacitor, and I had no DeLorean. Could Everett have been right, and the Many-Worlds Interpretation true? Was I back at the point where the quantum waveforms diverged, and I could choose to follow another path into a different universe? It was no less crazy than a tit-populated Presbyterian Hell, and would be more appealing if true.

Too appealing, cautioned my inner scientist – it’s suspiciously convenient, given I spent much of the day reliving this very moment.

Say something...

Amy had sat up and turned onto her hands and knees, peering at me with concern. Her back was arched slightly, giving me a surely-unintended eyeful of her cleavage, which she accidentally emphasized by keeping her arms close together. Inadvertently, she was in a classic cheesecake pose, as if she had studied sexy by staring at swimsuit calendars.

I could live with that.

She moved closer to me. “Lance?”

Bewilderment struggled with fantasy, and bewilderment lost. I put the array in one of the pockets of my cargo pants. I would worry about the details later, because right now I seemed to be having an impossible, on-second-thought-maybe-there-is-a-God chance for a do-over – or else a barn-burner of a comatose fantasy. Even if this were really Presbyterian Hell, I realized it didn’t matter. The only way to truly fuck this up a second time was to do nothing.

I thought of Tasha and felt a twinge of guilt, but I banished it. If anything happened with Amy, it wouldn't be cheating. Instead, it was just the way things should have happened ten years ago, long before I ever met Tasha. It was impossible to cheat on a woman I hadn't met, and it was no more wrong now than it would have been then, I rationalized.

In the starlight, Amy’s eyes were the dark pools I remembered, and they drew me in. I called upon my long-neglected thespian skills – I was once again an actor reciting rehearsed lines from a script. “You know full well what I was thinking.”

She averted her eyes. I couldn’t see her blush in the faint light, but I thought I could hear it in her sharp intake of breath. She had been growing frustrated at my lack of response to her displays and hints, worrying I was simply numb to her appeal – as I had indeed been ten years ago – but now I had responded, and I was bolder than she expected. I could tell this flattered and pleased her.

I raised my hand to steer her face back toward mine, stroking her cheek with my index finger. The tip of my thumb just touched her lower lip, which parted from its mate. She lightly wet her lips with her tongue, and she trembled. I had to suppress a similar feeling of my own. I was lightheaded from the impossibility before me, but the tantalizing touch of Amy's skin under my fingers kept me focused. She was warm and soft, craving more contact. My brain and flesh were responding to a ten-year-old fantasy brought to vivid, innocent life.

She was waiting for me. The man she had been chasing for weeks finally seemed to notice her, and she was caught in the anticipation of what I might do next.

Say the words. I swallowed and spoke. “I was trying to understand why you've been wearing sweatshirts all through high school – why anyone would hide such beauty underneath baggy clothes.” My eyes roved over her form.

Amy smiled and straightened her posture, unconsciously thrusting her chest out further toward me. Her eyes were wide, mesmerized by my words. The reality of what she must be feeling broke upon me. She was an innocent, self-conscious woman, doubting her own beauty, who had decided to take a chance and flaunt her body for the first time. She was being rewarded with the attention and approval she craved, and she drew closer.

Her proximity made me ache for her and the missed opportunity she represented. I could feel her warmth, hear her respiration increase, and smell the mingled scents of her shampoo and perfume – a floral intrusion of spring in the autumn night.

The stars. “I love looking at the stars. Normally they are the most beautiful things in the universe – yet tonight I can't stop myself from staring at you.”

God, I was laying it on thick. The words had sounded more romantic in my head, but when they left my lips they felt calculated – rehearsed. I imagined every girl I dated in college rolling her eyes and snorting.

Not Amy. Her face was beatific as she leaned ever closer.

I continued. “I'm with a woman who puts the glories of the heavens to shame. I'm truly lucky.”

The glow in her eyes banished my cynicism, and I realized I meant every word. She was as perfect as my imagination, and the hope she offered was indeed the most beautiful thing in creation.

“You talk like something out of a romance novel,” she said.

Ouch. Then I remembered. “I've seen you reading romance novels. You like them.” At least, I hoped that was what she meant.

Her smile was shy. “I like the good parts.”

“Kisses in front of fireplaces, the fair maid swooning after being rescued from the swamps by the taciturn hero with piercing eyes?” She was a romantic innocent.

“Which ones do you read?” she teased. “Those are the type my mom had. I liked the way they talked, but they kept cutting out the sex, or they made it all flowery – stuff like referring to the girl's... you know... as 'the womanly center of her pleasure'. I liked reading people talk of love.” She acted shy again. “And I like the sex.”

I couldn’t say much to that. She was an inexperienced woman seeking what she has not yet had, but I didn’t think she would appreciate me pointing that out. “I thought they were all flowery and faded to black at each sex scene.” I remembered poring through some of my mother’s Harlequins as a porn substitute at age fourteen, and being disappointed.

“Some of them. All the old ones are like that. I don’t like them much. You know how we studied storytelling in Mrs. Johnson’s class last year, and it was about conflict, reversals, climax, and denudement?”

Denudement? Oh. “Denouement.” I overemphasized the French “mah” pronunciation at the end, and felt like a pompous prick. I had mastered my memorized lines, but my improv was weak.

“Riding off into the sunset isn’t enough,” she said. “I hate it when a couple gets together, and they don’t show the climax of sex.”

“So to speak.”

“Huh? Yeah. Did you see Titanic?” Amy was really hung up on romances. She must have built up this entire idea of what a perfect romantic night would be. I had ruined it for her ten years ago, but would give it to her now.

“Never heard of it.”

She nudged me in retaliation for my pretense. “You,” she said, dropping her voice at the end, turning the single word into a complete sentence. “Anyway, cutting the sex is like if they cut away from the sinking ship and just showed her after the rescue.”

Tasha had once said something similar, and I hadn’t agreed with her either, but revisiting the issue with Amy would further damage a mood already in jeopardy. How to get this back on track? “I promise if I ever write a romance, I won’t skip the good parts.”

Amy laughed and playfully touched my arm.

That was more like it. “No man alive has ever had a better birthday,” I said honestly.

“But I didn't get you a present.” She took the bait in my last sentence, and her eyes shifted toward my lips. She leaned in, mouth open, holding her breath.

“I'm sure you will think of something,” I said in a low voice I hoped would sound suave. Her face felt flushed and warm in my hands as I drew her in for the magic of a first kiss. She was gentle but assertive. Our lips met and danced, and I felt her tongue tasting mine. She probed into me, wanting more. For years, romance novels had been her only sexual outlet, and she finally had a chance to live the real thing. She was overwhelmed by the excitement of discovery and leaned forward, pursuing my mouth.

Her surprising aggressiveness toppled me off the rock. So much for suave.

Amy tumbled on top of me, laughing kindly to dispel my embarrassment. She gave my lips one more taste, this time accompanied by a grind of her hips against the swelling in my pants.

My celibate existence with Tasha made my Amy fantasies sexual, but not plausibly so. Amy was a virginal girl, and this was her dating debut. I felt a surge of pride that my speech had driven this chaste girl to such obvious arousal.