‘I still wasn’t altogether happy with the numbers and I didn’t feel too comfortable with the whole thing. I said, “Let’s wait a little — at least until we’ve run all the what ifs. Even if we do it with a flea we could change the whole universe.”
‘“Big deal,” she said. “Who’s going to notice a rat-sized change?”’
‘I said, “How can we know it’ll only be a rat-sized change? Mightn’t the rat take everything else with it?” But she was the one who made the decisions, I was only a kind of kept man, never her equal. So we did it with a rat.’
‘Do you think she was crazy? Really crazy, I mean.’
‘What does crazy mean? Crazy is anything different from what the majority think isn’t crazy. Your mother was never with the majority.
‘We always had lab rats around and we had a small VMET we used for parcels. I limited the field to the rat’s cage and checked the shielding to make sure the rest of the room was safe from flare. I did an EEG to get the frequency of the rat’s carrier wave, then I scaled down the phase input figures to that output and printed up an oscillator.
‘It was a male rat, a Delta Three laboratory strain. I anaesthetised him and shaved his head. Helen drilled a hole in his skull and implanted the oscillator which was smaller than the head of a pin. While she was doing that I ran the phase input figures again to be sure they checked out. They did. The first part of the procedure was the same as flicker drive: switching on the VMET would activate the oscillator and phase the rat to M-waves. Then a second signal from a hand transmitter would jump the rat to a parallel phase and presumably another world.
‘The rat was just lying there while we waited for it to come out of the anaesthetic. I checked the phase input figures again and the calibration of the hand transmitter and I set up a videocamera. When the rat was fully conscious and moving around I pushed the button on the newsfax and the 19:45 update slid out. The headline was CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. I laid it on the table beside the cage where the camera could see it.
‘Helen put on a recording of Chopin mazurkas. It was the sixteenth of September 2022, the end of the day. The light in the window was a sad kind of purple-blue. I started the video-camera at 19:48 BST.
‘I tuned the VMET to the WPR and at 19:50 I switched on. The oscilloscope showed in-phase as the rat disappeared. I jumped phase and switched off. I had that funny dropping sensation you get sometimes when you’re drifting off to sleep. I looked at Helen and she looked a little shaken. “You too?” I said, and she nodded. A terrible sadness took hold of me and I began to cry.’
You began to cry! I thought. You and your terrible sadness. For all we know you jumped us into a different world from what we had before. You jumped unborn me and everybody else into this world we’re stuck with now.
‘I remembered my mother giving me hot milk with butter and honey in it when I had a sore throat,’ Sixe continued. ‘I remember my father reading me “The Story of Kwashin Koji”, how a boat comes out of a picture and takes Kwashin Koji back into the picture and away.
‘We looked at the rat and it was only half a rat, the rear half. “Oh shit,” Helen said, “not again.” Then she went into the lav and was sick. I just stood there like an idiot looking at what was left of the rat. The front of the half-body was all scrunched up against the back of the cage — it was pretty messy and there was a lot of blood, it was as if someone had taken a cleaver and chopped the rat in half, severed arteries and split entrails and all that. The rat was backing up when he got the chop: his hind feet were dug in so hard he’d torn through the card he was standing on.
‘When Helen came out of the lav I said to her, “What did you mean when you said, ‘Not again’? Has this happened before?”
‘She said, “Not with a rat.”
‘“With what then?” I said. She didn’t answer. “Tell me, Helen,” I said. “With what?”
‘“You mean with whom,” she said.
‘I said, “Oh my God. What are you saying?”
‘“It happened with my brother,” she said.
‘“What?” I said. “What happened?”
‘“He did it in the middle of the night when I was asleep,” she said. “It was a Wednesday, the thirteenth of April. He’d set a timer to switch on the VMET and he’d got up on the table and arranged himself in the field. Then his head went somewhere but the rest of him stayed behind.”
‘“Where did it go?” I said.
‘“Who knows?” she said. “We lost touch.”
‘“Why did he do it?” I said.
‘“Hard to say,” she said. “He didn’t leave a note.”
‘“Did he do it with a phase jump, the same as we did with the rat?” I said. “Did he have the same kind of oscillator implant?”
‘“The one we used for the rat was wired from Izzy’s diagram,” she said.
‘“Well, if it didn’t work for Izzy,” I said, “why’d you do the same circuitry again?”
‘“It should have worked,” she said. “I checked it every possible way — the only explanation is that Izzy and the rat changed their minds and overrode the phase jump. Izzy certainly started out willing; he planned the whole thing very carefully. He’d been complaining of headaches and dizzy spells and he’d been to hospital for what he said were a couple of days of tests. He wouldn’t let me go with him — we had a regular driver who helped him into and out of buildings — and that’s when he must have had the implant done.”
‘“And you think he changed his mind at the last moment?” I said.
‘“Yes,” she said, “it’s the only explanation.”
‘“We’re talking quantum mechanics here,” I said. “How could changing his mind affect that?”
‘“Maybe all it takes is a little variation in the brain’s electrical output,” she said. “Reality, after all, is subjective.”’ Sixe took some papers from his pocket, selected one, and read:
‘Centricity of event as perceived by a participant in the event is reciprocal with the observed universe: the universe configures the event and the event configures the universe. Each life is a sequence of event-universes, each sequence having equal reality subjectively and no reality objectively. Objective reality is not possible within the sequence, therefore subjective reality, regardless of consensus, is the only reality.’
‘What a load of bollocks,’ I said to Sixe.
‘Izzy wrote that.’
‘I think he must have been a couple of quanta short of a probability by then.’
‘Helen recited that to me, she knew it by heart. I said to her, “Do you really believe that?”
‘She said, “Izzy was a genius. You saw what was left of the rat; I saw what was left of Izzy: both of them changed their minds.”’
As Sixe spoke I saw again the face of Izzy Gorn spread across the darkness of space. Had it tried to speak? I thought I might be going mad. I thought of Izzy lying on the table with his head torn off. ‘What did she do with the body?’ I said.
‘That’s the same question I asked but it was no big problem — one of her medical friends signed the death certificate with cause of death listed as VMET accident, there was a fast and private cremation with a closed coffin, life went on, and here we were with half a rat. Between that and the subjective reality business I was pretty confused, besides which I was worried about that dropping feeling we’d both had.
‘I replayed the videodisc and the date on the newsfax was the same: 16 September 2022. The headline was still CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. The rest of the news hadn’t changed either: Top Exec A had resigned from her post following allegations of financial fraud and B was under investigation for having procured young girls for C; wirecar service would be disrupted by industrial action; and the latest survey showed that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed lied when being surveyed.’