The Hollow Man

again in a telepathic whisper.

Jeremy winces a bit. That’s the sci-fi term.…

Science fiction, corrects Gail. But this Hugh Everett, he postulated a splitting of reality into equal and separate parallel worlds … or parallel universes … right?

Jeremy still frowns at the language but glimpses her understanding of the concept. Sort of. Uh … take the two-slit experiment for instance. When we try to observe the spread-out electron wave, the particle knows we’re watching and collapses into a definite particle. When we don’t watch, the electron keeps its options open … particle and wave. And the interesting part is, when it acts like a wave … remember the interference pattern?

Yeah.

Well, it’s a wave-form interference pattern, all right, but according to Born’s terms, it’s not electrons passing through the slits that produces wave-pattern interference, but the probability of waves passing through. What’s interfering are probability waves!

Gail blinks. You lost me, Kemo Sabe.

Jeremy tries to draw an example, but ends up sending primitive equations:

I = (H + J)²

I = H² + J² + 2HJ

         not

I = I₁ + I₂

He sees her frown, sends Shit!, and mentally erases the mental blackboard.

Kiddo, it means that the particles are particles, but that the act of us observing them makes them choose a course of action … this hole? that hole? so many choices!… and since the probability of going through one hole is the same as going through the other, we’re recording probability waves creating the diffraction pattern on the screen behind the slits.

Gail nods, beginning to understand.

You got it, kiddo, urges Jeremy. We’re watching probability structures collapse. Alternatives fizzle. We’re watching the bloody universe sort itself out from a finite range of probabilities into an even more finite set of realities.

Gail remembers the tree that Jeremy had been thinking about. And this Hugh Everett’s theory …

Right! Jeremy is ecstatic. He has been wanting to share some of this with Gail for years, but has been afraid of appearing pedantic. Everett’s theory says that when we force that electron to choose, it doesn’t really choose which slit or which probability, it just splits another entire reality in which we … the observer … watch it go through one slit while its equal and separate probability partner goes through the other hole.

Gail is physically dizzy from the successful effort to understand the concept. While the “second universe” observers watch it go through the other hole!

“Right!” shouts Jeremy. He looks around, aware that he has shouted. No one seems to have paid any attention. He closes his eyes again to better visualize the images. Right! Everett neatly solves the quantum paradoxes by arguing that every time a bit of quantum energy or matter is forced to make such a choice— that is, whenever we try to observe it choosing—then a new branch grows on the reality tree. Two equal and separate realities come into existence!

Gail concentrates on remembering the blue-and-white covers of her old Ace Double Novels. Parallel worlds! Just like I said.

Not really parallel, sends Jeremy. Words and images just don’t do it, but imagine a constantly growing and branching tree:

Gail is exhausted. Okay … and what you and Jacob were excited and upset about was that your analysis of these holograms … these standing-wave thingees that you think represent human consciousness … they’re like Everett’s theory somehow?

Jeremy thinks of his hundreds of equations at home, filling the chalkboard and enough sheets of paper to create a second dissertation. Jacob’s mapping of the holographic mind shows it breaking down reality probability functions … “choosing” … the same way the electrons do.

Gail is irritated by the simplemindedness of his explanation. Don’t patronize me, Jerry. People don’t have to choose which slit they’re going to pop through. People don’t end up smearing their probability waves as interference patterns on a wall!

Jeremy sends a wordless apology, but his message is insistent and unapologetic. They do! We do! Not just in the millions of choices we make every day … shall we stand? shall we sit? do we take this train or the next one? what color tie should I wear?… but in the more important choices of actually interpreting the data that the universe sends us through our senses every second. That’s where the choices are made, Gail … that’s where the math tells Jacob and me that the probability structures are collapsing and recombining every few seconds … interpreting reality! Jeremy makes a mental note to himself to send for the most recent papers on chaos math and fractal analysis as soon as he gets home.

Gail sees the flaw in this theory. But, Jerry, your reality and my reality aren’t separate things. We know that thanks to our mindtouch ability. We see the same things … smell the same things … touch the same things.

Jeremy takes her hand. That’s what Jacob and I have to investigate, kiddo. The probability structures are collapsing constantly … from almost infinite sets to very finite sets … in all of the observed standing wavefronts … the MR-imaged minds … but there seems to be some governing factor in deciding, for everyone, what that observed reality must be from second to second.

Gail bites her lip. ???????????????????

Jeremy tries again. It’s as if some traffic manager is telling all the electrons which slit to jump through, kiddo. Some … force … some less-than-random probability delineator telling the entire human race … or at least the few hundred representatives of it that Jacob’s tested so far … just how to perceive a reality that should be wildly permeable. Chaotic.

Neither sends anything for a long moment. Then Gail offers—God?

Jeremy starts to smile, then does not. He senses how deadly serious she is. Maybe not God, he sends, but at least His dice.

Gail turns her face to the window. The gray brick buildings they are passing remind her of the long rows of barracks at Ravensbruck.

Neither of them attempts mindtouch again until they are home. In bed.

Wind in Dry Grass

Bremen’s duties were legion.

He had never visited a ranch before, never imagined the scope and variations of physical labor possible on a working ranch of some six thousand acres, surrounded, as this one was, by half a million acres of “national forest,” although there was hardly a tree in sight above the relatively wet canyonlands of the ranch proper. The physical labor, he found in the coming weeks, was not just daunting, it was a backbreaking, ball-breaking, blister-making, lung-racking, sweat-inducing, blood-and-taste-of-bile-in-the-mouth level of labor. When starting, as Bremen was, from the point of a malnourished, inactive, pale and pasty shadow of a skid-row alcoholic, the level of work expected took on new dimensions of challenge.