“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 theSliding Doorsconcept. 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,Itis, andIlena 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 chosenhere. 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 radiofrequencies. 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.
