John Adams - Other Worlds Than These

“In the history of the world, real scientists are rarer than poltergeists.”

“And if such things did happen to a scientist, how many of them might have done as you urged me to do—ignore it. Pretend it was a hallucination. Move to another place where such things don’t happen. And the scientists who refuse to blind their eyes to the evidence before them—what happens to them? I’ll tell you what happens, because I’ve found seven of them in the past two hundred years—which isn’t a lot, but these are the ones who published what happened to them. And in every case, they were immediately discredited as scientists. No one listened to them any more. Their careers were over. The ones who taught lost tenure at their universities. Three of them were committed to mental institutions. And not once did anyone else seriously investigate their claims. Except, of course, the people who are already considered to be completely bobo, the paranormalists, the regular batch of fakers and hucksters.”

“And the same thing will happen to you.”

“No. Because I have you as a witness.”

“What kind of witness am I? I was hit in the head . Do you understand? I was in the hospital, delirious, concussive, and I have the scar on my face to prove it. No one will believe me either. Some will even wonder if you didn’t beat me into agreeing to testify for you!”

“Ah, Leonard. God help me, but you’re right.”

“Call an exorcist.”

“I’m a scientist! I don’t want it to go away! I want to understand it!”

“So, Bêto, scientist, explain it to me. If it isn’t a ghost to be exorcised, what is it?”

“A parallel world. No, listen, listen to me! Maybe in the empty spaces between atoms, or even the empty spaces within atoms, there are other atoms we can’t detect most of the time. An infinite number of them, some very close to ours, some very far. And suppose that when you enclose a space, and somebody in one of those infinite parallel universes encloses the same space, it can cause just the slightest bit of material overlap.”

“You mean there’s something magic about boxes? Come on.”

“You asked for possibilities! But if the landforms are similar, then the places where towns are built would be similar, too. The confluence of rivers. Harbors. Good farmland. People in many universes would be building towns in the same places. Houses. All it takes is one room that overlaps, and suddenly you get echoes between worlds. You get a single chair that exists in both worlds at once.”

“What, somebody in our world goes and buys a chair and somebody in the other world happens to go and buy the same one on the same day?”

“No. I moved into the house, that chair was already there. Haunted houses are always old, aren’t they? Old furniture. It’s been there long enough, undisturbed, for the chair to have spilled a little and exist in both worlds. So…you take the chair and put it on top of the door, and the people in the other world come home and find the chair has been moved—maybe they even saw it move—and he’s fed up, he’s furious, he smashes the chair .”

“Ludicrous.”

“Well, something happened, and you have the scar to prove it.”

“And you have the chair fragments.”

“Well, no.”

“What! You threw them out?”

“My best guess is that they threw them out. Or else, I don’t know, when the chair lost its structure, the echo faded. Anyway, the pieces are gone.”

“No evidence. That clinches it. If you publish this I’ll deny it, Bêto.”

“No you won’t.”

“I will. I’ve already had my face damaged. I’m not going to let you shatter my career as well. Bêto, drop it!”

“I can’t! This is too important! Science can’t continue to refuse to look at this and find out what’s really going on!”

“Yes it can! Scientists regularly refuse to look at all kinds of things because it would be bad for their careers to see them! You know it’s true!”

“Yes. I know it’s true. Scientists can be blind. But not me . And not you either, Leonard. When I publish this, I know you’ll tell the truth.”

“If you publish this, I’ll know you’re crazy. So when people ask me, I’ll tell them the truth—that you’re crazy. The chair is gone now anyway. Chances are this will never happen again. In five years you’ll come to think of it as a weird hallucination.”

“A weird hallucination that left you scarred for life.”

“Go away, Bêto. Leave me alone.”

“I call it the Angler, and using it is called Angling.”

“It looks expensive.”

“It is.”

“Too expensive to sell it as a toy.”

“It’s not for children anyway. Look, it’s expensive because it’s really high-tech, but that’s a plus, and the more popular it becomes, the more the per-unit cost will drop. We’ve studied the price point and we think we’re right on this.”

“OK, fine, what does it do.”

“I’ll show you. Put on this cap and—”

”I certainly will not ! Not until you tell me what it does.”

“Sure, I understand, no problem. What it does is, it puts you into someone else’s head.”

“Oh, it’s just a Dreamer, those have been around for years, they had their vogue but—”

“No, not a Dreamer. True, we do use the old Dreamer technology as the playback system, because why reinvent the wheel? We were able to license it for a song, so why not? But the thing that makes this special is this—the recording system.”

“Recording?”

“You know about slantspace, right?”

“That’s all theoretical games.”

“Not really just theoretical. I mean, it’s well known that our brains store memory in slantspace, right?”

“Sure, yeah. I knew that.”

“Well, see, here’s the thing. There’s an infinite number of different universes that have a lot of their matter coterminous with ours—”

“Here it comes, engineer talk, we can’t sell engineering babble.”

“There are people in these other worlds. Like ghosts. They wander around, and their memories are stored in our world.”

“Where?”

“Just sitting there in the air. Just a collection of angles. Wherever their head is, in our world and a lot of other parallel worlds, they have their memories stored as a pattern of slants. Haven’t you had the experience of walking into a room and then suddenly you can’t remember why you came in?”

“I’m seventy years old, it happens all the time.”

“It has nothing to do with being seventy. It happened when you were young, too. Only you’re more susceptible now, because your own brain has so much memory stored that it’s constantly accessing other slants. And sometimes, your head space passes through the head space of someone else in another world, and poof, your thoughts are confused—jammed, really—by theirs.”

“My head just happens to pass through the space where the other guy’s head just happens to be?”

“In an infinite series of universes, there are a lot of them where people about your height might be walking around. What makes it so rare is that most of them are using patterns of slants so different that they barely impinge on ours at all. And you have to be accessing memory right at that moment, too. Anyway, that’s not what matters—that is coincidence. But you set up this recorder here at about the height of a human being and turn it on, and as long as you don’t put it, say, on the thirtieth floor or the bottom of a lake or something, within a day you’ll have this thing filled up.”

“With what?”

“Up to twenty separate memory states. We could build it to hold a lot more, but it’s so easy to erase and replace that we figured twenty was enough and if people want more, we can sell peripherals, right? Anyway, you get these transitory brain states. Memories. And it’s the whole package, the complete mental state of another human being for one moment in time. Not a dream. Not fictionalized , you know? Those dreams, they were sketchy, haphazard, pretty meaningless. I mean, it’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, how cool is it to actually have to sit through them? But with the Angler, you catch the whole fish. You’ve got to put it on, though, to know why it’s going to sell.”