Ball Lightning(74)

“Maybe for you. But me...?I can’t take it anymore,” I said, pulling at my hair.

“I don’t know whether or not supernatural phenomena exist, but what you’ve seen is certainly not that.”

His words calmed me down a bit, like an adult’s hand grabbed by a child in the terrifying dark, or the firm ground beneath a drowning man’s feet. But this feeling immediately made me depressed. Before Ding Yi, my mind was weak; before Lin Yun, my actions were weak. I was such a fucking weakling—no wonder I placed after Ding Yi and Jiang Xingchen in Lin Yun’s heart. Ball lightning had molded me into this form; from that night of terror in my youth, the shape of my psyche had been determined. I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.

Biting the bullet, I followed Ding Yi into my room. Past his thin shoulder I saw that the computer on the table had entered screen saver mode, the star field. Then the screen went dark. Ding Yi moved the mouse and the desktop came up again. I had to avert my eyes from the strange grass.

Ding Yi picked up the computer and, after inspecting it, passed it to me. “Take it apart.”

“No.” I pushed it aside. When I made contact with its warm case, my hand jerked back as if shocked. Something about it felt alive.

“Fine. I’ll take it apart. You look at the screen. And find a Phillips screwdriver.”

“You don’t need one. I didn’t put the screws back after the last time.”

And so he began feeling around the laptop. They were ordinarily hard to dismantle, but mine was a late-model modular Dell, so he was easily able to open the bottom of the case. As he worked, he said, “Do you remember the first time we used the high-speed camera to record the ball lightning’s energy discharge? We played it back frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the incinerated wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the image. Do you remember what Lin Yun said then?”

“She shouted: ‘It’s like a cubic bubble!’ ”

“That’s right....?Pay attention to the screen as I look inside,” he said, then bent at the waist and peered into the interior of the open computer.

At that moment, the screen went black, except for two lines displaying a self-check error message, indicating that no CPU or memory had been found.

Ding Yi flipped over the computer to show me the motherboard, where the CPU and RAM slots were empty.

“The moment I observed this, the quantum wave function collapsed.” He set the computer carefully down on the table. Its screen remained black.

“Do you mean that the incinerated CPU and memory sticks exist in a quantum state, just like the macro-electrons?”

“Yes. In other words, when the chips experience matter-wave resonance with the macro-electron, they turn into a macro-particle in a quantum state. Ball lightning’s energy release is essentially the full or partial superposition of the probability clouds of it and its target. The chips’ state is indeterminate—they exist between two states, destroyed and undestroyed. Just now, when the computer started up, they were in the latter state, the CPU and memory completely unharmed and plugged into their slots in the motherboard. But when I observed them, their quantum states collapsed back into a destroyed state.”

“In the absence of the observer, when will the chips exist in an undestroyed state?”

“That’s undetermined. They only exist as the probability of an event. You can consider the chips in this computer to be within the probability cloud.”

“Then the animals that were burned up—are they in a quantum state, too?” I asked nervously, with the premonition that I was nearing an unbelievable truth.

Ding Yi nodded.

I didn’t have the courage to ask my next question, but Ding Yi looked calmly at me, and clearly knew what I was thinking.

“Yes, the people too. All the people who have been killed by ball lightning exist in a quantum state. Strictly speaking, they haven’t really died. They’re like Schr?dinger’s cat, and exist indeterminately in two states, living and dead.” Ding Yi stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the deep night. “To them, to be or not to be is indeed a question.”

“Can we see them?”

Ding Yi waved a hand at the window, as if resolutely dismissing the idea from my brain. “Impossible. We’ll never be able to see them, since their collapsed state is death. They exist alive for a certain probability of the quantum state, but when we appear as observers, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state, to their urns or graves.”

“Do you mean they’re alive in some parallel universe?”

“No, no. You’ve misunderstood. They live in our own world. Their probability cloud might cover quite a large area. Perhaps they’re even standing in this room, right behind you.”

The skin crawled on my back.

Ding Yi turned around and pointed behind me. “But when you turn around to take a look, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state. Trust me: neither you nor any other person will ever be able to see them. That includes cameras and other observers. Detection of their presence is impossible.”

“Can they leave traces behind in the real world that are not in a quantum state?”

“They can. I suspect you’ve already seen such traces.”

“Then why don’t they write me a letter!” I shouted, losing control. By “they,” I meant only two people.