“My point is that an academic paper is meaningless—literally meaningless—if other scientists don’t read it.” He sighed. “And no one will publish me.”
“They will.” Amanda’s voice was steel. “Because you are going to finish. Because you’re compelled to. You’re going to finish, and it will be brilliant. Because you’re brilliant. That’s not—look at me. That’s not anything anyone can take away from you. Not ever.”
His lips bent to a thin smile. She knew him well enough to know that he was considering it, working the problem. “I’m unemployable, with no savings to speak of. To be honest, I’m pretty close to broke.”
“I’m an artist. Broke is our default.” She punctuated this with her best wink.
He looked at her with disbelief. “Anyone else would run away.”
Amanda gripped the sides of his head and drilled her eyes into his. “I’m not going anywhere.” It felt like the most important thing she’d ever said to the most important person in her life at the most important moment in her life. “I’m not going anywhere,” she reiterated.
She waited for his reaction, and it was worth it. Slowly, at the speed of a sunrise, Jonas began to smile. Starlight bounced off the edges of his eyes, slick with tears. Their lives really were entwined, and she would never let him give up on his gifts.
They sat together on the bench, their fingers woven. Overhead, the stars blinked down on them in silence.
NOW
Eva Stamper’s office at Von Braun University is a thirty-five-minute commute from her flat on a good day. On a bad day, when the city’s overtaxed subway system strains under the burden of its outdated infrastructure, it’s a fifty-five-minute trek. Nearly an hour. Today is a bad day. And so Eva is in a mood. She could have used that time to work on her presentation this morning. She would have awakened earlier but for the fact she’d been working on that same presentation until three in the morning.
She stomps toward Heisenberg Hall, wishing she hadn’t tried to save a few minutes by foregoing her morning coffee. The building is locked. She’s the first one at work. Typical. As she works to fish her keys from her purse, she notices a homeless man curled up atop the heating vent. A rare occurrence but not unheard of.
“This isn’t a hotel,” she admonishes. “If the University Guard sees you, they’ll throw you in prison.”
The bum stirs and turns over, revealing a face marked by bruises and coated with stubble. His clothes look like they’ve been through a war, and his hair is a rat’s nest. As he stands, he appears astonished.
“Eva,” he breathes.
To hear her name from this stranger’s lips is unnerving. Eva feels herself pale. “Do I know you?”
“I suppose that would all depend on your definition of ‘know.’” She stares back, not knowing what to say. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “Inside joke.” She’s unnerved by the way he stares at her as though they’re friends. But the man is a stranger. “Would you give me five minutes of your time?” he asks.
“And why would I do that?” She says it like a dare.
The man answers by pulling up his left sleeve to expose a line of equations running down his inner forearm. “These formulae,” he ventures. “I’m willing to bet you’ve seen a piece of this somewhere before. In college.”
Eva feels a flush of panic. Who is this stranger? How does he know what she learned in college?
“You studied physics,” he says with surprising urgency. “You thought about changing disciplines. To psychology. But here, in this world, you didn’t. Here, you became a physicist.”
Eva brightens. Suddenly, it all makes sense. She understands what’s happening here, and she’s relieved. “Roberta put you up to this, didn’t she? Tell her that her sense of humor still needs adjustment.”
She turns to unlock the door, but the man won’t be deterred. “This equation here,” he says, jabbing at his skin and leaving tiny white circles on the formulae, “this is a Schrödinger equation. What do you know about the Many Worlds Theory?”
Eva doesn’t have time for games. “Only what I learned in Introduction to Quantum Mechanics,” she tosses off.
“You got an A, though.”
Eva looks back at him, utterly flustered. It’s not that he knows her college transcript—anyone could uncover that—it’s that he knows exactly what she was about to say, and the way she was going to say it. She pales. Her stomach performs a barrel roll, and she stares at him with frightened eyes.
“Invite me inside, Dr. Stamper,” the man says. “We have a lot to talk about.”
One of the corollaries of the principle that all universes share certain qualities is that people’s reactions demonstrate a relatively predictable consistency. Although hardened by coming of age in a fascist society, this reality’s Eva retains her inquisitive spark, the same curiosity that drew “his” Eva to Jonas, that opened her mind to the incredible. Jonas can’t help but find the quality alluring.
Eva spends twenty minutes sweeping her modest faculty office for listening devices. After pronouncing the room clean, she explains, “I admit it’s more than a little paranoid, but I’ve heard stories of the State Directorate conducting surveillance on academics. Ideas are the most dangerous things in the world. And I have a feeling your ideas, Mr. Cullen, are among the most hazardous.”
This observation proves to be a profound understatement as Jonas shares his story, beginning with the night in Stockholm, the Nobel, the crash. He tells her about his tether and the quantum energy slowly leaking from his body. He explains that he knows what she’s thinking because of his encounter with her doppelgänger. He leaves out Victor and Amanda’s second death. He omits the other Eva’s demise.
Eva appears to take it all in with the same calm as her twin. “If I understand the Many Worlds Theory properly, there’s a world where you and your wife are both alive, where perhaps the accident never even happened.”
Jonas has to admire the parallel. “Yes. There’s already a world where I’m happy,” he says, remembering the words of her doppelgänger. He watches her startle slightly, knowing that’s what she was going to say next. It’s like a form of telepathy. “But I—this me, myself—I can’t be happy without her. I can’t be anything without her. I might as well be dead.”
He feels her staring, and he lets her. He can only imagine the multitude of thoughts that must be racing through her mind as she works her way from skepticism to acceptance. On some level, he admits that he wants the turn to be quick, to get back to the same easy rapport they had once enjoyed.
From the new vantage offered by this alternate reality, he notices qualities her twin had possessed but which he hadn’t allowed himself to notice. The way the left corner of her mouth curls up ever so slightly in a subtle perpetual smirk as though she sees through you but is amused by what she observes. How the lilt of her voice betrays a reassuring kindness. Despite the omnipresent dread of this universe, she has a vibrancy to her even her counterpart didn’t possess.
For a breath, they share a gaze like a cable pulling taut between them. That this all unfolds instinctively, in a matter of seconds, doesn’t shield the moment from feeling like a betrayal. He watches her move to a state-issued computer and begin typing away.
“What are you doing?” Jonas asks.
“Searching the internet for information about your wife in this reality.”
“I already did. I stole a smartphone, or whatever it is you call it here. She doesn’t exist in this universe.”
“You ran a search on a commercial phone using public internet, the information on which is heavily redacted by government censors.” She types away, eventually stopping with the final stab of a key. “You said your wife—”
“Amanda.”
