“Lost track of time.” Jonas moves to the whiteboard, erasing an equation with the heel of his hand and replacing it with a different calculation.
“Your wife’s a lucky woman,” Eva observes. Is it a trace of envy Jonas hears in her voice?
“Being dead, she might disagree,” he notes.
“What I mean is, any woman would be lucky to have a man willing to search the world for her. Your wife has a man willing to search an infinite number of worlds.”
Still at the whiteboard, Jonas stops writing. He’s only gotten this far by denying the enormity of his task. He could do without the reminder.
“Have you ever heard of Henri Thibault?” Eva asks.
“Of course,” Jonas says, finally turning from the whiteboard. “His paper on Bohmian mechanics served as one of the foundations for my Many Worlds Proof.”
“Have you thought about asking him for help?”
“I certainly would, if he hadn’t died eight years ago.” He hopes he doesn’t sound patronizing.
Eva arches an eyebrow. “You strike me as much smarter than that, Dr. Cullen,” she says, playfully parroting the words he’d used with her back when they’d first met.
The epiphany hits Jonas right in the center of his chest. “Thibault is alive in this reality.”
“He’s a very difficult man to get an appointment with. Fortunately, one of my patients knows someone who knows someone who was willing to make a few calls for me.” She pauses, as though about to reveal a secret. “Do you want to meet someone even smarter than you?”
By the end of the day, Jonas and Eva are standing in the middle of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s sprawling modern campus. Students and faculty shoot across the quad, its concrete peppered by patches of fake grass meant to convey the image of protons in flight.
Jonas studies the man sitting on the bench in front of him, peering intently at the glow of Jonas’s MacBook. Apart from the consequential quality of being alive, this universe’s Henri Thibault, PhD, is no different from the one Jonas knew back in his own reality. This Thibault favors the same wire-rimmed glasses and tweed sport coats, appears older than his years, and coughs with the rigor of an ex-smoker. Jonas considers telling Thibault that his doppelgänger died of lung cancer and thinks better of it.
It feels to Jonas as though it’s taking a dozen lifetimes for Thibault to render a verdict on his work. Hoping to prompt some response, any response, he tries humor. “I’m relieved you’re not calling for the men in the white coats.”
If Thibault considers this amusing, he doesn’t show it. His focus never leaves the computer’s screen as he remarks, “You and your wife died two years ago, Dr. Cullen. I read your obituary. And yet, here you are, standing opposite me, talking to me. If I were to call for a psychiatrist, believe me, it’d be for myself.”
“Both of you can relax,” Eva says. “I’m a practicing psychologist, I’m a licensed and published psychologist, and I’m here to tell you I don’t find either one of you to be the least bit nuts.” Then, apparently as impatient as Jonas is, she adds, “What do you make of Jonas’s equations?”
“I could spend the rest of my career studying them and barely scratch the surface,” Thibault says. He pulls himself from the screen to marvel at Jonas. “Your work is the stuff of Einstein and Heisenberg. Of Podolsky and Rosen. Theoretical physicists spend their entire careers hunting—praying—to identify a paradigm shift like you have here.”
That paradigm shift, as Jonas had explained to Eva, had been that the scope of the multiverse isn’t limitless. The universe favors certain outcomes, and minor differences aren’t enough to prompt the birth of a new reality. “With the multiverse reduced to a series of calculations,” Thibault exults, “the mathematics changes to one of probabilities. And if the universe is predisposed to some realities, it becomes possible to calculate the likelihood of those realities.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Eva admits.
“Think of a beach,” Thibault says. “With an uncountable number of grains of sand, rocks, pebbles, seashells. To catalog it all would be impossible. But Jonas has figured out a way to calculate, to predict, how many grains of sand, how many rocks, et cetera.”
Eva grasps the point. “And he’s looking for the grains of sand where his wife is still alive.”
“That’s correct.” Thibault stands with a resignation that fills Jonas with creeping dread. The affect of an oncologist armed with a damning MRI scan. “But I think you already know what I’m going to tell you.”
Jonas does. “The reason,” he says, “that I’m having such difficulty calculating the reality where Amanda survives the accident . . .” His voice trails off. The act of giving voice to his lack of hope fatigues him beyond his capacity to speak.
Thibault picks up the train of Jonas’s thought. “Out of a nearly infinite number of probabilities, there’s only one where your wife is still alive.”
If hope were a living thing, this is a death sentence. One that Jonas had rendered weeks ago but lacked the courage to face.
Eva shakes her head, confused. “Wait. Just wait.” The two men watch her think, wrapping her brain around the impossible. “You’re saying that out of the entire multiverse, Amanda dies in every single one.”
Thibault is the first to answer. “I’m saying, Dr. Stamper, that while there may very well be an infinite number of worlds, they all tend toward the same qualities. They all have gravity, for example. Oxygen. People. The multiverse is replete with these tendencies, these ‘laws,’ for lack of a better term. In the case of objects, we call them ‘physics.’ But in the case of people, we call them . . .”
“Fate,” Eva breathes, her tone full of epiphany.
“Fate,” Jonas echoes. “Or destiny.” Fate and destiny aren’t phenomena that scientists care to traffic in, any more than faith and religion, but he’s found them to be as real as time, as immutable as gravity. “It’s Amanda’s destiny to die in that accident,” he finally acknowledges. The words catch in his throat. In his mind’s eye, he watches his wife die for the millionth time.
“I’m very sorry,” Thibault says.
“You said . . .” Jonas lurches, his mind flailing. His thoughts are plummeting, thrashing about, desperate for any handhold. “You said that according to my calculations, there is a reality where Amanda is alive. ‘One reality,’ you said.” His eyes plead with Thibault for this to be true.
The older professor’s head bobs slowly, almost imperceptibly. Jonas can see the man’s prodigious brain working. Game, as his students used to say, recognizes game. “Through my university,” Thibault says, “I have access to a supercomputer that should aid considerably in making the calculations required to pinpoint it under your rubric.”
It’s all Jonas can do not to drop to his knees in gratitude. “You would do that for me?”
“Publishing wouldn’t be without its challenges,” Thibault muses, indulging in massive understatement. He winks like a coconspirator. “But I’ve been craving another Nobel.” He hefts the laptop with some reverence. “All kidding aside, the work you’ve done here, Dr. Cullen, is beyond what even a room full of Nobels could acknowledge.”
Terms are negotiated. Thibault will need a week at least. He’s free to publish whatever he wants, wherever he wants, and to use Jonas’s name and all his calculations. But even as Thibault negotiates, Jonas’s mind is somewhere else. He feels an emotion so alien to him he didn’t even feel it at CERN. For the first time in two years, he feels hope.
Night falls, and Jonas remains ebullient as Eva drives her secondhand FIAT down the Seidenstrasse, a modest two-lane highway. She doesn’t speak. After nearly a half hour on the road, the silence has grown loud.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he ventures. “Do they have that idiom in your universe?” Maybe he can lighten the mood with humor.
