The Flicker Men (7 page)

Satvik was silent for five full seconds. “Is such a thing possible?”

“Of course not, but there it is. Unless a conscious observer makes an ascertainment of the detector results, the detector itself will remain part of the larger indeterminate system.”

“I don't understand.”

“The detectors don't induce the phenomenon of wave function collapse; conscious observation does. Consciousness is like this giant roving spotlight, collapsing reality wherever it shines—and what isn't observed remains probability. And it's not just photons or electrons. It is everything. All matter. It is a fault in reality. A testable, repeatable fault in reality.”

Satvik said, “So this is what you wanted to see?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it different for you now that you've actually seen it?”

I considered this for a moment, exploring my own mind. “Yes, it is different,” I said. “It is much worse.”

*   *   *

We ran the slit experiment again and again. The results never changed. They matched perfectly the results that had been documented and written about decades earlier. Over the next two days, Satvik hooked the detectors up to a printer. We ran the tests, and I hit
PRINT
. We listened as the printer buzzed and chirped, printing out the results—transferring the detector's observations into a physical reality you could hold in your hand.

Satvik pored over the data sheets as if to make sense of them by sheer force of will. I stared over his shoulder, a voice in his ear. “It's like an unexplored law of nature,” I said. “Quantum physics as a form of statistical approximation—a solution to the storage problem of reality. Matter behaves like a frequency domain. Why resolve the data fields nobody is looking at?”

Satvik put the sheets down and rubbed his eyes.

“There are schools of mathematical thought which assert that a deeper, harmonic order is enfolded just below the surface of our lives. Bohm called it the
implicate
.”

“We have a name for this, too,” Satvik said. He smiled. “It is
Brahman
. We've known about it for five thousand years.”

“I want to try something,” I said.

We ran the test again. I printed the results, being careful not to look at them. One from the detector, the other from the capture screen. We turned off the equipment.

I folded both pages in half and slid them into manila folders. I gave Satvik the folder with the screen results. I kept the detector results. “I haven't looked at the detector results yet,” I told him. “So right now the wavefunction is still a superposition of states. Even though the results are printed, they're still unobserved and so still part of the indeterminate system. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Go in the next room. I'm going to open my folder with the detector results in exactly twenty seconds. In exactly thirty seconds, I want you to open the screen results.”

Satvik walked out. And here it was: the gap where logic bleeds. I fought an irrational burst of fear. I lit the nearby Bunsen burner and held my folder over the open flame. The smell of igniting paper and a flare of bright yellow light. Black ash. It was over quickly. A minute later Satvik was back, his folder open.

“You didn't look,” he said. He held out his sheet of paper. “As soon as I opened it, I knew you didn't look.”

“Because I lied,” I said, taking the paper from him. “And you caught me. I destroyed the detector readout without looking at it. We made the world's first quantum lie detector—a divination tool made of light.” I looked at the paper Satvik had given me. The interference pattern lay in dark bands across the white surface. The wavefunction had not collapsed. I would never know which slit the particle had gone through because those results were now ash. Therefore, the particle had gone through both slits as a probability wave. “When that result was printed, it meant I was never going to look at those results. So did I really have a choice? Could I have looked if I wanted to? Some mathematicians say there is either no such thing as free will, or the world is a simulation. Which do you think is true?”

“Those are our options?”

I crushed the paper into a ball. Something slid away inside of me—a subtle change—and I opened my mouth to speak, but what came out was different from what I intended.

“I did have a breakdown.”

I told Satvik about the arrest in Indianapolis, stumbling and shouting in the street. My sister's neighbors watching through their blinds. I told him about the formula that I'd been working on to unite quantum mechanics with the rest of physics, like a lost theory of everything. I told him about the drinking and the eyes in the mirror and what I said to myself in the morning. I told him about my uncle coming to me when I turned eighteen: “I was his brother,” he'd said, “but you were his son.” As he handed me the evidence box still banded with police tape. Kept for years, the most powerful talisman. “It should be yours if you want it.”

I told him about the smooth, steel
ERASE
button I put against my head—a single curl of an index finger to pay for it all.

Satvik nodded while he listened, the smile blasted from his face. I spoke for a long while, pouring it all out in a single rush, paying for all the weeks of quiet, and when I finished, Satvik put his hand on my shoulder. “So then you are crazy after all, my friend.”

“It's been thirteen days now,” I told him. “Thirteen days sober.”

“Is that good?”

“No, but it's longer than I've gone in two years.”

*   *   *

We ran the experiment. We printed the results.

If we looked at the detector results, the screen showed the particle pattern. If we didn't, it showed an interference pattern.

After so much talking, we worked silently through most of the night. Near morning, sitting in the semidarkness of the lab, Satvik finally spoke. “There once was a frog who lived in a well,” he said.

I watched his face as he told the story.

“One day a farmer lowered a bucket into the well, and the frog was pulled up to the surface. The frog blinked in the bright sun, seeing it for the first time. ‘Who are you?' the frog asked the farmer.

“The farmer was amazed. He said, ‘I am the owner of this farm.'

“‘You call your world
farm
?' the frog said.

“‘No, this is not a different world,' the farmer said. ‘This is the same world.'

“The frog laughed at the farmer. He said, ‘I have swum to every corner of my world. North, south, east, west. I am telling you, this is a different world.'”

I looked at Satvik and said nothing.

“You and I,” Satvik said, “we are still frogs in the well. Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“You do not want to drink?”

“No.”

“I am curious, what you said with the gun, that you'd shoot yourself if you drank…”

“Yeah.”

“You did not drink on those days you said that?”

“That's right.”

Satvik paused as if considering his words carefully. “Then why did you not just say that every day?”

“That is simple,” I said. “Because then I'd be dead now.”

 

10

When I was four, I stepped on a fire ant's nest in the backyard and was stung nearly a dozen times. The ants crawled up my pant legs and got lodged at the elastic waistband where they could climb no higher, and so stung me again and again in a ring around my waist and on my thighs and calves. I remember my mother shouting and stripping me naked in the grass while I screamed—shaking the ants loose from my clothes, crinkly red insects lodged in my flesh.

Inside the house she tore open cigarettes and placed the tobacco on the stings, holding them in place with Band-Aids.

“To draw the poison out,” she said. And I marveled at her skills. She always knew just what to do.

I sat on the couch, watching the old TV until my aunt came to babysit. My mother had a dinner party to attend, and Father was meeting her there after work.

“Go,” my aunt told her. “He'll be fine.” And so my mother left. I stood in the window and watched her car pull down the driveway. She was gone.

But minutes later, I heard keys in the door. My mother had come back, and though my aunt frowned and shooed her away, she would not leave.

“You need to go,” my aunt said. “It's a company party.” But my mother only waved her off and sat next to me on the couch. “There'll be others,” she said. Though there never were. “I can't leave.”

She held me as we watched the nature channel for the next hour while my stomach cramped, and the pain grew, and my legs purpled and swelled and wept.

*   *   *

Satvik and I left for the night, and I found myself in my car, hesitating at a green light. I idled in the left lane, watching the light turn yellow, then red. I turned my car around. I returned to the lab and climbed the stairs and looked at the machine. Some wounds you cannot leave. My mother had shown me that.

I ran the experiment one final time. Hit
PRINT
. I put the results in two folders without looking at them.

On the first folder, I wrote the words
detector results.
On the second, I wrote
screen results.

I drove home to the motel. I took off my clothes. Stood naked in front of the mirror, imagining my place in the indeterminate system.

According to David Bohm, quantum physics requires reality to be a nonlocal phenomenon. Deep in the quantum milieu, location no longer manifests, every point merging to equivalence—a single, concordant frequency domain. Bohm's implicate order that lives beneath everything.

I put the folder marked
detector results
up to my forehead. “I will never look at this,” I said. “Not ever, unless I start drinking again.” I stared in the mirror. I stared at my own gunmetal eyes and saw that I meant it.

I glanced down at my desk, at the other folder. The one with the screen results. My hands shook.

I laid the first folder on the desk.

In the closet, I knew, was a small security box mounted to the wall. I walked over and opened it. I made up a pass code—my mother's birthday, 2-27-61—and put the folders inside.

Keats said,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
. What was the truth?

The folders knew.

One day, I would either drink and open the detector results, or I wouldn't.

Inside that second folder, there was either an interference pattern, or there wasn't. A yes or a no.

The answer was already printed.

*   *   *

I waited in Satvik's office until he arrived in the morning. He put his briefcase on his desk, surprised to see me sitting in his swivel chair. He looked at me, at the clock, then back at me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Waiting for you.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since four thirty a.m.”

He glanced around the room to see if I'd changed anything. The same clutter of electrical equipment. To the rest of us, it was chaos, but Satvik probably had it memorized. I kicked back in his chair, fingers laced behind my head.

Satvik just watched me. Satvik was bright. He waited.

“Can you rig the detector to an indicator?” I asked him.

“What kind of indicator?”

“A light.”

“How do you mean?”

“Instead of a readout, can you set up a light that goes off when the detector picks up an electron at the slit?”

His brow knitted. “It shouldn't be hard. Why?”

“I thought before that there was nothing to prove with the two-slit experiment, but I might have been wrong.”

“What is left?”

I leaned forward. “Let's define, exactly, the indeterminate system.”

 

11

Later that morning, Point Machine watched the test. He stood in the near darkness of room 271. The machine thrummed. He studied the interference pattern—the narrow bands of phosphorescence.

“You're looking at one-half of the wave particle duality of light,” I said.

“What's the other half look like?”

I turned the detectors on. The banded pattern diverged into two distinct clumps on the screen.

“This.”

“Oh,” Point Machine said. “I've heard of this.”

*   *   *

Standing in Point Machine's lab. Frogs swimming.

“They're aware of light, right?” I asked.

“They do have eyes.”

“But, I mean, they're aware of it?”

“Yeah, they respond to visual stimuli. They're hunters. They have to see to hunt.”

I bent over the glass aquarium. “But I mean, aware?”

*   *   *

“What did you do before here?”

“Quantum research.”

“Meaning what?” Point Machine asked.

I tried to shrug him off. “There were a range of projects. Solid-state photonic devices, Fourier transforms, liquid NMR.”

“Fourier transforms?”

“Complex equations that can be used to translate waveforms into visual elements.”

Point Machine looked at me, dark eyes tightening. He said again, very slowly, enunciating each word, “What did you do,
exactly
?”

“Computers,” I said. “We were working with computers. Quantum encryption processing extending up to sixteen qubits. I had a partner with a whole team under us, working at a start-up right out of college. It was all applied theory stuff. I was the theory part.”

“And the applied part?”

“That was my friend Stuart. He was interested in dynamics-based modeling solutions. Packing more polygons into the isosurface meshwork of 3D renders.”

“So what happened?”

“We pushed model fidelity by an order of magnitude but eventually came up against the computational constraints of the system. Near the end, we used the Fourier transforms to remodel the wave information into visuals.”