Departure(60)

In the sky just left of the last finger, I notice a streak like a red-hot poker, driving down through the clouds. It wasn’t there before. What could it be? A meteor? A comet?





Back inside, I expect to find Sabrina in the lab where she and I spoke at length, but it’s empty. She and Yul must be inside the lab tower somewhere.

On the second floor I hear a voice—Sabrina’s—talking at length, with no give-and-take. Not surprising. I approach the door, but something makes me wait. The tone . . . it’s different somehow. It’s Sabrina, yet not as robotic.

“Okay, I’m telling you this . . . well, just in case.”

Sabrina pauses.

“I want to walk you through my notes on the therapy, but first, there’s some personal things I want to say, that could . . . help you if you manage to make it back with these memories.”

It’s Sabrina—future Sabrina—talking with herself.

“The first is to stop seeing your social limitations as an excuse not to socialize. For most of my life I saw my social inability as a reason not to build personal relationships. I felt I was incapable and that it was therefore useless to try. I was wrong. Every mind has limits. Some have a relative disadvantage in language production, short-term memory, math, or spatial ordering. Your mind has a significant limitation in social awareness and interaction. You have some capacity, and it will only erode with lack of use. You must see your mind differently. If math is a weakness, you must do math to get better. In the same way, you must socialize and try to form bonds with people to get better at it. It will be awkward. You will believe it’s a waste of time, but it isn’t. Your range is limited, but it exists—I know for a fact. I’ve had a hundred and sixty-seven years to prove it. When you get back, you must commit yourself to making an effort, and when you fail, ask yourself what you can learn. I kept a journal and reviewed my findings regularly, drawing correlations from my experiences. Your social shortcomings are like anything else: you must practice to get better. You must try, fail, learn, and try again to ever improve.

“There’s one other thing. Steven, in your lab, has a huge crush on you, but he’s far too intimidated by you to ask you out. In three years he’ll marry another tech in your lab. They will never be happy, and she will leave him in another five years. He’ll never be the same after that. Ask him if he wants to have coffee after work, and tell him there’s only one rule: you can’t talk about work. See where things go from there.

“Now. On to my notes. For years I made very little progress. The breakthrough was realizing that a person dies with the same neurons they are born with. Neurons don’t age like other cells. They don’t divide or die off and are rarely replaced by new ones. You are born with and die with the same roughly one hundred billion neurons. However, over the course of your life, the electrical impulses those neurons store changes. The electrical changes are your memories. Like the nodes in the Q-net, the neurons in your brain are made of the same particles in both worlds. The only difference between here and there is the placement of electrons . . .”

I inch around the glass door to the lab, just far enough to peer in. Sabrina sits on a stool with her back to me, hunched over a lab table, her black hair unmoving. There’s another Sabrina staring out at me, her eyes not quite as lifeless as the ones I’ve come to know. She’s still talking. It’s a recording, playing back on a giant screen on the far wall of the lab. The future Sabrina made a video, a just-in-case encapsulation of her notes. These people think of everything. But what does it mean?

Instinctively I back away. I’m lost in thought as I exit the wing. They’re working on something else, an experiment she didn’t tell me about.

The next corridor is the same as the last: glass doors set in marble walls. In the echoing space, I hear another voice. Yul. As before, I draw close enough to the door to hear him. It’s another recording, but it may as well be in Chinese; I can barely understand a word. It’s all mathematical theories and variables and stuff I can’t even wager a guess about.

Then it loops, starting from the top. Yul must be working while listening to the recording in the background.

“Okay. Sabrina wants me to make this video as a backup, a guide to my work in case . . . the worst happens. And I agree there’s a chance of that, but the truth is this: there’s little chance you’re ever going to complete my work—”

Someone shouts offstage—Sabrina, I think—and the video cuts out. It resumes a second later.

“I guess this is take two. I’m supposed to provide personal guidance to you, anything that could help you live a better life, assuming you make it back to 2014 with your memories, which, again is doubtful—”

Another shout, and the camera cuts out again. The voice resumes after a few seconds.

“Anyway, on to the task at hand. The first thing you should know is that your understanding of quantum physics is incomplete. Woefully. In a few years an experiment at CERN will change the way you see the quantum world. Space-time isn’t what you think it is. It’s far stranger. Your current understanding is simplistic and limits your thinking. The discovery at CERN will be the breakthrough that makes everything in the next hundred and thirty years possible. So I’m faced with the impossible task of condensing over a century of breakthroughs in particle physics down into a two-hour video course. Even though I’m teaching a younger version of myself, I still believe it’s impossible, that it will take you years to even grasp the concepts my work is based upon, much less achieve the level of understanding necessary to complete it in weeks or days. Nevertheless, here we go. You’ve been warned.