The arrow of time is “irreversible”—time goes forward. On microscopic quantum scales, this seems less certain. A recent experiment shows that the forward pointing of the arrow of time remains a fundamental rule for quantum measurements.
** QUANTUM SHORTS 2023/2024: HONORABLE MENTION
My wife Gemma has another life, and I’m not in it.
I’m trying to be okay with that.
I am not succeeding.
She didn’t have to tell me. It was like any other Tuesday—work, unwashed dishes, our neighbor’s kid strangling scales on his trumpet—but I noticed the knot in Gemma’s gaze as we unpacked groceries. When I asked her what was wrong, she put the ice cream down and took my hands as though they were wounded animals.
My pulse surged through my neck; whatever had happened, it was big.
“Everything’s okay,” she said. Then she sat me down, and explained, and nothing was okay.
I turn over this memory often. Us sitting on the bed, the blat of trumpet in the background, the forgotten ice cream oozing into vanilla soup. I smear love over every detail, hoping it’ll hide my hardening belief that it was cruel, or at least foolish, of Gemma to tell me about the parallel world.
“Remember the physics experiment I participated in a couple months back?” she started.
“Sure,” I said. “The Many Worlds stuff.” Gemma worked at the university as a career counsellor, and one of her hobbies was taking part in studies. It was usually psych or social science, so she was tickled to see that a physics researcher was looking for human test subjects.
She squeezed my fingers. “Something happened.”
She went over the theory—how reality branches into alternate universes, how there are endless variations based on the results of quantum events—holding up a finger when I nodded along impatiently. She wasn’t allowed to tell me the specifics of the experiment, except that they were trying to access those alternate universes.
She’d thought nothing had happened at first. But over the course of a few weeks, she’d developed an awareness of a parallel reality, another Gemma, G2. “It was gentle,” she said. “Like a light fading on.” The other reality wasn’t wildly different from this one—Earth wasn’t ruled by evil space squids, or anything—but G2’s life had diverged from hers at some point.
“Like what, what’s different?” I asked.
“Lots of things.” She looked away. “I’m married to someone else, for one thing.”
My insides went cold. Our marriage wasn’t in trouble, exactly, but I’d been worried lately that our comfortable midlife plateau was allowing us to wander away from each other. “Are you… happier there?”
Her eyes went wide and she pulled me into a hug. “Don’t ever think that, Dylan,” she murmured. “I’m happy here.”
Which, I realized later, wasn’t a complete answer.
My questions spanned into the weeks and months beyond her revelation, but on the first night, she focused on explaining how she experienced G2’s reality.
“Think of your left foot,” she said. I crunched my toes in. “You weren’t thinking of it until I mentioned it, right?”
“I guess not.”
“It was just there.”
“Sure.”
“It’s like that. She’s just there. Living her life. I don’t really notice unless I specifically pay attention.”
“So, if you were to pay attention right now, what’s she doing?”
Without blinking, Gemma said, “Putting her daughter to bed. Different time zone, it’s almost nine there.”
“Daughter? She has children?”
“Well, Marwa’s his child, technically.”
“His?”
She shook her head. “It’s not important.”
“Can you control her? Like, wiggle her toes, say?”
Her brow pinched. “It’s not a perfect analogy.” Then she stood abruptly. “Dylan—the ice cream!”
Gemma reassured me that this new ability of hers changed nothing about us. It was just an awareness; she and G2 couldn’t affect each other in any real way. She was casual about the whole thing, as though she had come home from the experiment with a new coat instead of an entire parallel life. But the connection between the two universes was stronger than I was comfortable with. Like the day she came home with this feathery short haircut.
“G2 tried it, and loves having short hair,” she said. “Figured I’d give it a go. What do you think?”
I kissed her in answer, messing up the stylist’s hard work. The haircut was great. Except… I didn’t like G2 leaking into my reality. G2 who loved someone else.
I hate that I’m like this.
We tried tracing the path of divergence, but it was some decision so innocuous that Gemma couldn’t pinpoint it. Sometime in university was the best she could come up with.
“So, did G2 take that third-year anth seminar?” I asked. The class where we’d met.
She nodded faintly and reached forward to turn up the volume on the show we were watching. I paused it.
“Wait, Gemma. What happened?”
She puffed out a breath. “We never dated, okay?” she said. “G2 and you hardly talked. I don’t know why.”
“Were you already involved with what’s-his-name?” Gemma refused to name her alternate reality husband.
“No, we met years later.” She clicked the show back on with a sharp look. I took the hint, and settled into her warmth.
I’ve been having nightmares every night for the past three months. Nothing flashy, just Gemma leaving in pursuit of G2’s life, here in our reality.
I’m sitting up in bed, startled awake again. Gemma rolls to consciousness beside me. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Gemma.” I find her hands and massage the slopes of her heart lines with my thumbs. She waits. “You’ve said there are millions of branching realities.”
“More like gazillions, if we want to be technical.”
“Do you think… maybe there’s a reality out there, where everything happened the same, even the whole experiment, except … in that reality, you never told me about G2?”
Gemma goes still. I hang onto her hands desperately, a man drowning in one and a half realities. “Could we go to that world, please?”
“Oh, babe,” she says. “Nobody said this was going to be easy.”
“What,” I ask listlessly. “Alternate worlds?”
“Loving someone,” she says.