“That’s right,” said Mary. She’d finished her chips, and got some Kleenex out of her purse so she could wipe her greasy fingers.
“But,” said Louise, “according to what I read, for sixty thousand years, they thought no thoughts. For sixty thousand years, they did nothing that wasn’t instinctual. But then, forty thousand years ago, everything changed.”
Mary’s eyes went wide. “The Great Leap Forward.”
“Exactly!”
Mary felt her heart pounding. The Great Leap Forward was the term some anthropologists gave to the cultural awakening that occurred 40,000 years ago; others called it the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. As Louise had said, modern-looking human beings had been around for six hundred centuries by that point, but they created no art, they didn’t adorn their bodies with jewelry, and they didn’t bury their dead with grave goods. But starting simultaneously 40,000 years ago, suddenly humans were painting beautiful pictures on cave walls, humans were wearing necklaces and bracelets, and humans were interring their loved ones with food and tools and other valuable objects that could only have been of use in a presumed afterlife. Art, fashion, and religion all appeared simultaneously; truly, a great leap forward.
“So you’re saying that some Cro-Magnon 40,000 years ago suddenly started making choices, and the universe started splitting?”
“Not exactly,” said Louise. She’d evidently finished her first coffee; she got up and bought a second one. “Think about this: what caused the Great Leap Forward?”
“Nobody knows,” said Mary.
“For all intents and purposes, it’s a marker, right there in the archeological record, showing the dawn of consciousness, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose,” said Mary.
“But that dawning isn’t accompanied by any gross physical change; it’s not like a new form of humanity appeared who suddenly started making art. Brains capable of consciousness had existed for sixty thousand years, but they weren’t conscious. And then something happened.”
“The Great Leap Forward, yes. But, as I said, no one knows what caused it.”
“You ever read Roger Penrose? The Emperor’s New Mind?”
Mary shook her head.
“Penrose is an Oxford mathematician. He contends that human consciousness is quantum-mechanical in nature.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that what we think of as intelligence, as sentience, doesn’t arise from some biochemical network of neurons, or anything as crude as that. Rather, it arises from quantum processes. Specifically, he and an anesthesiologist named Hameroff argue that quantum superposition of isolated electrons in the microtubules of brain cells creates the phenomenon of consciousness.”
“Ah,” said Mary dubiously.
Louise sipped some of her new coffee. “Well, don’t you see?” she said. “That explains the Great Leap Forward. Sure, our brains had been just as they are today since one hundred thousand years ago, but consciousness didn’t begin until a quantum-mechanical event occurred, presumably at random: the one and only spinning off of a new universe that happened the way Everett thinks it does.”
Mary nodded; it was an interesting notion.
“And quantum events, by their very nature, have multiple possible outcomes,” said Louise. “Instead of that quantum fluctuation, or whatever it was, creating consciousness in Homo sapiens, the same thing might have happened in the other kind of humanity that existed 40,000 years ago—Neanderthal man! The first splitting of the universe was an accident, a quantum fluke. In one branch, thought and cognition arose in our ancestors; in another, it arose in Ponter’s ancestors. I read that Neanderthals had been around since maybe 200,000 years ago, right?”
Mary nodded.
“And they had even bigger brains than we did, right?”
Mary nodded again.
“But on this world,” said Louise, “in this timeline, those brains never sparked with consciousness. Ours did instead, and the edge that consciousness gave us—cunning and foresight—led to us absolutely triumphing over the Neanderthals, and becoming rulers of the world.”
“Ah!” said Mary. “But in Ponter’s world—”
Louise nodded. “In Ponter’s world, the opposite happened. It was Neanderthals who became conscious, developing art and culture—and cunning; they took the Great Leap Forward while we remained the dumb brutes we’d been for the preceding sixty thousand years.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” said Mary. “You could probably get a good paper out of that.”
“More than that,” said Louise. She sipped some more coffee. “If I’m right, it means Ponter might get to go home.”
Mary’s heart fluttered. “What?”
“I’m basing this in part on stuff Ponter told me, and in part on our own world’s understanding of physics. Suppose that each time the universe splits, it doesn’t do it the way amoebas do—with one amoeba becoming two daughters, and the parent disappearing in the process. Suppose instead it happens more like vertebrates giving birth: the original universe continues on, and a new daughter universe is created.”
“Yes?” said Mary. “So?”
“Well, then, you see, universes actually are of different ages. They might appear absolutely identical, except for your choice of breakfast this morning, but one of them is twelve billion years old, and the other is”—she looked at her watch—“well, a few hours old now. Of course, the daughter universe would seem to be billions of years old, but it wouldn’t really be.”
Mary frowned. “Umm, Louise, you’re not by any chance a creationist, are you?”
“Quoi?” But then she laughed. “No, no, no—but I see the parallel you’re alluding to. No, I’m talking real physics here.”
“If you say so. But how does this get Ponter home?”
“Well, assume this universe, the one you and I are in right now, is the original one in which Homo sapiens became conscious—the one that initially split from the universe in which Neanderthals became conscious instead. All the other googolplex of universes in which conscious Homo sapiens exist are daughters, or granddaughters, or great-great-great-great-granddaughters, of this one.”
“That’s a huge assumption,” said Mary.
“It would be, if we had no other evidence. But we do have evidence that this particular universe is special—Ponter’s arrival here, out of all the places he might have gone. When Ponter’s quantum computer ran out of universes in which other versions of itself existed, what did it do? Why, it reached across to universes in which it didn’t exist. And, in doing so, it latched first onto the one that had initially split from the entire tree of those in which it did exist, the one that, forty thousand years previously, had started on another path, with another kind of humanity in charge. Of course, as soon as it reached a universe in which a quantum computer didn’t exist in the same spot, the factoring process crashed and the contact between the two worlds was broken. But if Ponter’s people repeat the exact process that led to him being marooned here, I think there’s a real chance that the portal to this specific universe, the one that first split from their timeline, will be re-created.”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” said Mary. “Besides, if they could repeat the experiment, why haven’t they already?”
“I don’t know,” said Louise. “But if I’m right, the doorway to Ponter’s world may open again.”
Mary felt her stomach fluttering—and not just because of the potato chips—as she tried to sort out her feelings about that possibility.
Chapter 43
Adikor Huld stared at the mining robot Dern had provided. It was a sorry-looking contraption: just an arrangement of gears and pulleys and mechanical pincers, vaguely resembling a stubby pine tree denuded of needles. The robot had obviously endured a fire at some point; there had been one in the mine about four months ago, Adikor recalled. Some of the robot’s components had fused, some metal parts were extensively fatigued, and the whole thing had a blackened, sooty look to it. Dern had said this unit was to have been sent to the recycling yards, anyway, so no one would mind if it were lost.