The Summer We Came to Life

Chapter

40





“WE CAN CHANGE THINGS.” I FEEL LIKE MYSELF again. Bright as the sun and ready for a fight. I wave my arms across the sky and a flock of Canada geese squawk overhead. Mina laughs appreciatively. “But not just in this world. I mean in the other one.”

Mina is amused. She cocks her eyebrow. Oh yeah?

“I’m serious. You left all those maple leaves. The penny, the clover leaf. If we can manifest things, we can figure out how to materialize. I don’t know whether we’ll be ghosts or what, but we can definitely appear in some form, like that research on quantum bodies. That Goswami guy. Then we can just hang out with them forever. Well, maybe not with Remy forever.” Uh-oh, I see the glitch. “That wouldn’t be very nice, would it? For either of us.”

Mina looks sad. “That’s what I’ve been wrestling with.”

The itchy feeling of disappointment spreads across my cheeks. “So how did you do it? The leaves? And pennies and clover leafs?”

Mina scratches her neck, a nervous habit. “I just do it. I thought about all that stuff you told me about belief. I… sort of…sweep away all doubt, and just believe that the leaf is there.” She looks up. “Like you had to make yourself believe this place existed.”

There is a stirring like robins’ wings in my chest. And then a lightbulb. “But, Mina, when you put the leaves there, I saw them. Meaning you changed what would have happened, in the living world.”

“I never thought about it that way.”

Belief. Belief and consciousness. The thorn in physicists’ sides is consciousness. What is it exactly? What are its boundaries and limitations? What are its powers?

Mina nods, excited. Go on.

Okay, how much do you remember about the electron slit experiment? When you set up an experiment to see where an electron or light particle is, the mathematics tell us it is spread out in many places at once, a wave of possibilities, not a particle. But when we, human beings, do something to measure it, there it is in just one place. Why? Because it is brought into a specific existence by the human consciousness? i.e. The Copenhagen Interpretation. But then there’s Many Worlds Theory, an infinity of different worlds where we exist in each one, living out each possible outcome. Two different theories that say completely opposing things. One where we have divine control, one where we are just copied into infinity. But if there was a way to combine them, a way to control which world we are in, and what happens—

I stop. I look at Mina. She’s not saying a word. Now she purses her lips.

“What?”

Mina has a look of exasperation. “It doesn’t make sense. When we go watch, it’s always the same one. And we’re both dead. Where are all the other universes? And besides that, we don’t know what is happening until we go to them, so it can’t be our consciousness creating the outcome.”

Very good points indeed. I tap my fingers on the dock. Nervous habit. “Well, I suppose if there are universes where we’re alive we can’t see them because we’re living them and then we couldn’t be here to go watch.” My coherency of thought evaporates. “Shit, you’re right. It’s hopeless.”

Mina smacks my shoulder. “Don’t give up so easy. I was just playing devil’s advocate to help.”

I lie back on the dock, feel the stretch in my stomach muscles. Go with your gut. My eternal advice to myself and my friends. I sit up fast and smile at Mina. “You used the word believe. You believed the leaf was there. Well, everybody believes that we are dead. Including us. What if we can believe ourselves back to life?”

Mina has her hands on her hips, a spitting image of the little girl that used to scold me. “What do you propose?”

“For now, research. Let’s go see if we can shake things up.”