I let it lie. This is why we're so close. Not because we share the same interests, or are bound by a common passion of scientific discovery, or even because I sometimes give her senior authorship on our papers. It's because we don't intrude or pry or try to figure each other out. There's an unspoken recognition of limits, an acceptance. There's complete trust, because we never tell each other anything.
***
I'm down in the real world when I hear her name.
It happens, occasionally. Sounds filter down from the huge clumsy universe where other people live; I can usually avoid hearing them. Not this time. There are too many of them, and they're all talking about Janet.
I try to keep working. Phospholipids, neatly excised from a single neuron, lumber like crystalline behemoths across my field of vision. But the voices outside won't shut up, they're dragging me up there with them. I try to block them out, cling to the molecules that surround me, but it doesn't work. Ions recede into membranes, membranes into whole cells, physics to chemistry to sheer gross morphology.
The microscope still holds its image, but I'm outside of it now.
I shut off the eyephones, blink at a room crowded with machines and the pithed circuitry of a half-dissected salamander.
The lounge is just down the hall from my office. People in there are talking about rape, talking about Jan's misfortune as though it was somehow rare or exotic. They trade tales of personal violation like old war stories, try to outdo each other with incantations of sympathy and outrage.
I don't understand the commotion. Janet is just another victim of the odds; crime waves and quantum waves have that much in common. There are a million unrealized worlds in which she would have escaped unscathed. In a different million, she would have been killed outright. But this is the one we observed. Here, yesterday, she was only brutalized, and today it will probably be someone else.
Why do they keep going on like this? Is talking about it all day going to get any of us into a universe where such things don't happen?
Why can't they just leave it alone?
***
"No fucking convergence!" she yells from the living room. The power is off again; she storms down the hall towards me, a frenetic silhouette backlit by the reflected light of distant fires. "Singular Hessian, it says! I worked on the chiasma maps for five fucking hours and I couldn't even get the stats to work, and now the fucking power goes out!"
She pushes a printout into my hands. It's a blurry shadow in the dark. "Where's your flashlight?" I ask.
"Batteries are dead. Fucking typical. Hang on a sec." I follow her back into the living room. She kneels at a corner cabinet, roots through its interior; assorted small objects bounce onto the floor to muffled expressions of disgust.
Her damaged arm exceeds some limit, goes rigid. She cries out.
I come up behind. "Are—"
Janet puts one hand behind her, palm out, pushing at the space between us. "I'm okay." She doesn't turn around.
I wait for her to move.
After a moment she gets up, slowly. Light flares in her palm.
She sets a candle on the coffee table. The light is feeble, but enough to read by.
"I'll show you," she says, reaching for the printout.
But I've already seen it. "You've confounded two of your variables."
She stops. "What?"
"Your interaction term. It's just a linear transform of action potential and calcium."
She takes the paper from my hand, studies it a moment. "Shit. That's it." She scowls at the numbers, as though they might have changed when I looked at them. "What a fucking stupid mistake."
There's a brief, uncomfortable silence. Then Janet crushes the printout into a ball and throws it at the floor.
"Fucking stupid!"
She turns away from me and glares out the window.
I stand there like an idiot and wonder what to do.
And suddenly the apartment comes back to life around us. The living room lights, revived by some far-off and delinquent generator, flicker and then hold steady. Jan's TV blares grainy light and faint, murky sound from the corner. I turn towards it, grateful for the distraction.
The screen offers me a woman, about Janet's age but empty somehow, wearing the shell-shocked look you see everywhere these days. I catch a flash of metal around her wrists before the view changes, shows us the twisted, spindly corpse of an infant with too many fingers. A lidless third eye sits over the bridge of its nose, like a milky black marble embedded in plasticine.
"Hmm," Janet says. "Copy errors."
She's watching the television. My stomach unclenches a bit.
This month's infanticide stats crawl up the screen like a weather report.
"Polydactyly and a pineal eye. You didn't used to see so many random copy errors."
I don't see her point. Birth defects are old news; they've been rising ever since things started falling apart. Every now and then one of the networks makes the same tired connection, blames everything on radiation or chemicals in the water supply, draws ominous parallels with the fall of Rome.
At least it's got her talking again.
"I bet it's happening to other information systems too," she muses, "not just genetic ones. Like all those viruses in the net; you can't log on for two minutes these days without something trying to lay its eggs in your files. Same damn thing, I bet."
I can't suppress a nervous laugh. Janet cocks her head at me.
"Sorry," I say. "It's just—you never give up, you know? You'd go crazy if you went a day without being able to find a pattern somewhere—"
And suddenly I know why she lives here, why she won't hide with the rest of us up on campus. She's a missionary in enemy territory. She's defying chaos, she is proclaiming her faith; even here, she is saying, there are rules and the universe will damn well make sense. It will behave.
Her whole life is a search for order. No fucking way is she going to let something as, as random as rape get in the way.
Violence is noise, nothing more; Janet's after signal. Even now, she's after signal.
I suppose that's a good sign.
***
The signal crashes along the neuron like a tsunami. Ions in its path stand at sudden attention. A conduit forms, like a strip of mountain range shaking itself flat; the signal spills into it.
Electricity dances along the optic nerve and lights up the primitive amphibian brain from an endless millimeter away.
Backtrack the lightning to its source. Here, in the tangled circuitry on the retina; the fading echo of a single photon. A lone quantum event, reaching up from the real world and into my machines. Uncertainty made flesh.
I made it happen, here in my lab. Just by watching. If a photon emits in the forest and there's no one to see it, it doesn't exist.
This is how the world works: nothing is real until someone looks at it. Even the subatomic fragments of our own bodies don't exist except as probability waves; it takes an act of conscious observation at the quantum level to collapse those waves into something solid. The whole universe is unreal at its base, an infinite and utterly hypothetical void but for a few specks where someone's passing glance congeals the mix.
It's no use arguing. Einstein tried. Bohm tried. Even Schrödinger, that hater of cats, tried. But our brains didn't evolve to cope with the space between atoms. You can't fight numbers; a century of arcane quantum mathematics doesn't leave any recourse to common sense.
A lot of people still can't accept it. They're afraid of the fact that nothing is real, so they claim that everything is. They say we're surrounded by parallel worlds just as real as this one, places where we won the Guerre de la Separatiste or the Houston Inferno never happened, an endless comforting smorgasbord of alternative realities. It sounds silly, but they really don't have much choice.