Auhtor's note: This is an introduction to a novella / novel in progress. It has been casually edited but is not complete. Copyright © C.O. Kabesh, 2009.
At first Atterman thought the panic attacks were back. Sudden clamping of muscles, blood draining the way oil drains from a litre bottle, and primal fear. He was experiencing lapses, spatial disconnects, and they scared the shit out of him. They began with darkness, indescribable darkness, and then complete dislocation of time and place. Not panic attacks, something new, new and unfathomable.
In his own defense Atterman would say, “ The cat wasn’t my idea.”
But he always followed with “He isn’t so bad. Just stay away and you won’t bleed.”
The cat wasn’t his idea but it took a long time to get to the not to bad part.
The cat happened when they bought the condo on the Quay in New Westminster. But Julie was gone now and the cat wasn’t. He had started out as a stray from the pound, maybe a year old, scared and loud. The staff at the pound was stereotypical. Atterman put them down as the concerned types. Running between thirty-ish and forty-ish, all slightly rumpled, projecting an aura that bespoke their mutual care for the forgotten and abandoned pets that litter the city streets. One, a Charlene or something similar, showed Julie and Atterman into a windowless concrete vault lined with metal cages stacked several feet high on three walls. Each with a single cat, some very young, others whose age virtually guaranteed that this room would be the last they saw. Every imaginable cat colour seemed to be on display, mostly long hairs. Some mewed, others cowered, most had seen it all before and did little but stretch occasionally. One caught Atterman’s eye. A black, or grey-black, short hair snarled at them as they approached and thrust a paw through the grid to take a swipe. Atterman swore that he, as Charlotte confirmed later, never hit the floor when the cage door opened and he burst free, circling the room in a blur.
“ We’ll take that one.”
And $350.00 dollars later (tax, license, dealer prep, litter box and litter, scratching post, catnip, toy mice, and grave misgiving from Charlotte) they turned the freshly named Lego loose in the condo.
For a year, he started to yell as soon as they got into bed. Just far enough out of reach that reprisals were impossible. If Atterman did manage to drift off the damn cat would get close enough for one quick and bloody rake and then… gone. He’d stand next to the bathroom sink, tail and back hair straight up, in full voice against the strange cat opposite. Nights were impossibly long, filled with terror for Lego and, for Atterman, rage.
On the odd occasion that company arrived with children, Atterman was instantly nervous. “Tell your kids that if they see the cat, for the love of God back off. That bastard is faster than hell and he is no pet. More a sign that someone’s God has blamed me for the fate of the Bengal Tiger.”
In time, Lego calmed somewhat, never fully accepting the role of a domesticated cat but an uneasy truce was established
Panic attacks are as various as the flowers of an alpine meadow. Imagine standing, on a spring day, surrounded by every colour on earth. Now take away the whispering breeze, take away the fragrance, and it becomes foreboding, dangerous, a shadow on a wall in a horror movie. Panic attacks are just that, immense forebodings that root you to the ground. Atterman hadn’t had one, at least a full blown, attack in many years, before Julie, before even his family’s death but he remembered each one vividly. Even now, he avoided buffets and cafeterias. One afternoon, at work, he’d had an attack in the company cafeteria. He never returned. Nor did he ever discuss them with anybody. For reasons he could not comprehend these attacks triggered a primal shame which, of course, is a self fulfilling dread.
Over time they subsided but he avoided social circumstances, tried to enter gatherings from the edges, never head on.
He hadn’t even noticed this new thing. Until Julie started asking if he was all right, if she could help. That he seemed to suddenly disassociate. How after a time he even started to fade, somehow losing definition. She wanted to know what the hell was happening. He had no answers. Hoped it, whatever it was, would pass.
But one night at the Pub, Frank, in his Red Wings ball cap, said the same damn thing. This was during game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals and the Wings looked to win it, the first time since the ’54 –’55 season. Forty-some years ago and if old Frank bought a new Red Wings ball cap for every season he’d been a fan, well, he must have a closet full. Frank took the time away from the 3rd period of what, miraculously, turned out to be a four game sweep, to say virtually the same as Julie had. And that got Atterman’s attention.
Atterman started to notice small things. Small disconnects in conversation. Odd lapses. Like paying for a pack of cigarettes then realizing, from the strange look on the clerk’s face, that this sale thing was finished and he could leave. How long had he been there, or more to the point, how long had he not been here?
By the time he started to find himself, fleetingly, in a bar in Erie, Pennsylvania, at a table in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, or in the middle of the main street of Viking, Alberta, he was getting worried. Every time, a place he’d been before, a piece of his past. Nothing special, just a phrase spoken, or maybe the way a woman pulled her hair into a tight bun, sparked a memory. And, as if a bookmark slipped between the pages of a forgotten novel, he was there The years had altered his perspective. The man, or boy, who had left the bookmark had grown, sometimes wiser, sometimes not, but grown, at least, older.
At first, each shift left him shocked beyond any reaction and, as seamlessly as he had slipped in, he slipped back. So shocking was the experience that it took a few slips to realize that there was warning. An instant of instability, then total absence of light. Not darkness but absolutely no light. And, if he reacted instantly, he could will himself back to stability. It came to him that if he could stop the slip, he could control it, maybe. And that odd mix of curiosity and lust that has always driven mankind to unimaginable highs and lows drove him to, not just understand but, to use whatever this thing was.
For a year, he experimented and he read.
Albert Einstein published his General theory of Relativity in 1915. Atterman, and, conceivably, every literate, and most illiterate, people knew of it. Knew it heralded something new, something important, but what it was, specifically, completely bypassed all but a few. Trying to get a grip on the concept, Atterman found an explanation that, if incomplete and possibly misleading, helped him understand a basic tenet: the speed of light is constant and all else is relative to that constant.
Consider an object traveling at 60 KPH. Now consider two observers, one stationary, the other moving at 30 KPH, in the same direction as the object. As the object passes the first observer, it appears to be traveling at 60 KPH. The second observer, however, measures the object passing him at 30 KPH, relative to his own speed.
A central tenet of physics is that the speed of light is constant, relative to nothing. Now consider an object moving at the speed of light. Again two observers, the first stationary, the second traveling, as before, at a speed approaching the speed of light. Because the speed of light is constant irregardless of anything, both observers measure the speed of the object as 299,792,458 meters / second. Since speed is a function of distance and time, and the distance used to measure the speed is fixed, time must be variable. As an object approaches the speed of light time stretches: time elapses slower. Time is relative.
In 1907, Ernest Rutherford took the Chair of Physics at Manchester University, England. His work at Manchester resulted in the Rutherford Model of the atom. A nucleus of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons, now one of the most recognizable models on the planet.
Niels Bohr, after working with Rutherford at Manchester, continued his study of atomic structure. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on atoms and radiation emitted by them. A French scientist, Louis de Broglie, had theorized that electrons had the properties of a wave. Bohr developed the idea that electrons have stable orbits, that is, if the circumference of the orbit is equally divisible by the wavelength of the electron then it is a stable orbit. If not, interference destroys the orbit. An electron can only orbit the nucleus at fixed distances. The greater the frequency, the longer the orbit.
Bohr also discovered that electrons can move from a high frequency orbit to a lower frequency orbit. When this happens energy is released as a photon of light. But the question that had to be asked was, how? At any point in time, the high orbit is a point in space and the low orbit is a point in space. They are both stable orbits and they are separated by destructive orbits. They move from point C to point A without passing through point B and do it instantaneously. Quantum physics had arrived.
Apparently, Bohr wrote Rutherford with his theories. In reply, Rutherford wrote, in essence, that releasing a photon and moving to another orbit was all well and good, but the electron would have to know where it was going.
At the sub-atomic level, the science is completely different than in the observable world. Light, photons, act as both particles and waves. A particle can coexist at different points. A particle’s position may be measured, or, a particle’s momentum may be measured. But not both. Every thing is uncertain.
The Pub sat on the boardwalk at the New Westminster Quay, part of the public market and just about a block or so from his third storey, two bedroom condo overlooking the Fraser River. The bar was shaped like a shepherd’s crook, a long straight length that starched toward the floor to ceiling windows before turning on itself to form a half circle. A place to laugh, tell lies, drink, and generally enjoy the company of strangers as easily as friends.
A Saturday afternoon, a curried shrimp lunch behind him and one more Rum and Ginger Ale ahead, the bar talk was of dentistry horror stories. Atterman recounting in vivid detail growing up under the sporadic care of itinerant dentists in the small Rocky Mountain town of his youth. Old men with Rye Whiskey breathe ending pathetic careers. Tentative kids, learning the profession, always with an eye to finding a place in the city. All working a circuit through small town Alberta, rarely seen twice in a row, working for cash in small offices the town must have owned.
He squeezed a lime slice into the drink, took a hit, swiveled off his stool and announced that it was time for a smoke. Out the door and down three steps to the boardwalk, lighting the cigarette as he moved. And into darkness so complete even up and down evaporated.
Julie had gone, ostensibly just to see her mother, ill in Chicago, but a woman, especially Julie, doesn’t ship all of her belongings to visit anything. Atterman, by this time, quite numb with fear and horror at what was happening to him managed to register this: she did not believe she was coming back. She didn’t believe her mother would survive this cancer and unless Atterman managed to ground himself, she wouldn’t be back. So that is where it ended, Julie standing by the open Royal City Cabs taxi, angry and betrayed by this moron who was allowing something as deadly as had possessed her own mother to infest him, Atterman, destitute on the curb, trying to speak but managing only small short mews of anguish. The driver slammed the trunk closed, said “Airport, Lady?”, and they were gone. Julie was gone.
It was about a month before Atterman noticed she hadn’t completely left. He noticed them entering his Condo one evening. Shoes, a single pair. Women’s size eights with three inch heels, black, a fabric of some kind, and gauzy in an expensive way. They were on the carpet, just beyond the Birchwood entryway, out of the way but clearly visible. One was upright just off perpendicular to the wall, beside it, at a slight angle, the other lay on its side.
Julie liked shoes; more than one box full were part of the shipment to Chicago. She bought shoes regularly and took great care of them. Even though she trashed them as soon as they started to show signs of wear the number of shoes at the bottom of three closets continued to grow. This pair was relatively new, but looked loved and lived-in, like a perfect little house with a groomed lawn and a white picket fence in front. Someone had slipped them off, intending to get right back, but something had happened and so they waited. Waited for a chance to click down white tile corridors, or slide under tables in good restaurants.
Atterman stopped when he saw them. And when he realized there were tears streaming down his face, he went to the kitchen counter for his camera. He took 23 pictures of them, considered nine suitable, and had them blown up to various sizes, framed, and matted. Five now hung over the fireplace, three in the master bedroom and one in the guest bathroom. The shoes stayed where they were. For the woman he hired to clean once a week there were only two rules. Don’t screw with the way the kitchen is arranged and the shoes stay put. Atterman’s rules moved to the top of the list of stories she told anyone who asked about her business.
________________
Quantum theory that made him believe it could be real. Slipping from one time to another is not believable. Nor is quantum theory. Einstein and Bohr spent the rest of their lives trying to disprove it. They failed.
The experiments went through three phases. First he was terrified, terrified of its physical aspect. The immense blackness. The heart stopping dislocation of appearing in a different place and time without any sensation. Then came a new terror. The terror of the self. Was he completely insane? If this wasn’t real, what was? Finally, he accepted a completely irrational quantum crock of shit. It was a crock and is rational mind knew that but, well, whatever it takes.
Experimenting he found that when he slipped from the present, he didn’t completely leave. He couldn’t remember the present but friends told him things he did, bets he lost, jokes he had told. It was said that he behaved oddly, tired, unfocused maybe. After a slide, he fully focused on his new present. Clothes and money was a problem but insurmountable? Hell no!
So, he cobbled up a crock of shit from Einstein’s relativity of time, the Bohr model of quantized orbits, and scores of other sources. In his mind, he referred to it as QCS, Quantum Crock of Shit. And he thought that, just maybe; Einstein and Bohr might have said the same but in Danish or German.
Quantum entanglement makes an appearance in QCS. When two particles are created simultaneously, any action on one causes a reaction in both, no matter if they are separated by light years. And since the Big Bang instantaneously created all matter in the universe, all particles are entangled.
Atterman thought, ”What if we have stable orbits in the universe from birth to death?”
And, “What if time is more relative than Einstein imagined?”
And, “What if all those orbits are entangled?”
Atterman never fully thought out QCS, it was, and is, a mash-up of what-ifs and maybes. But it was enough to take his mind from the terror of the alternatives. He existed in countless, entangled, times and places. His current form could exist in all orbits. His conscious mind, the part that remembered, worked only in one orbit and he could control which orbit he experienced. It slid from one orbit to another without touching any orbit between them. QCS, Quantum Crock of Shit.
The only issue was stable orbits. Rutherford seemed to believe that Quantum leaps relied on the photon knowing where it was going. But what if he allowed a slip without being certain? He could arrive at an unstable orbit. God knows what happens then. But it was sure to be unpleasant. It was tough being Atterman.
At first Atterman thought the panic attacks were back. Sudden clamping of muscles, blood draining the way oil drains from a litre bottle, and primal fear. He was experiencing lapses, spatial disconnects, and they scared the shit out of him. They began with darkness, indescribable darkness, and then complete dislocation of time and place. Not panic attacks, something new, new and unfathomable.
________________
In his own defense Atterman would say, “ The cat wasn’t my idea.”
But he always followed with “He isn’t so bad. Just stay away and you won’t bleed.”
The cat wasn’t his idea but it took a long time to get to the not to bad part.
The cat happened when they bought the condo on the Quay in New Westminster. But Julie was gone now and the cat wasn’t. He had started out as a stray from the pound, maybe a year old, scared and loud. The staff at the pound was stereotypical. Atterman put them down as the concerned types. Running between thirty-ish and forty-ish, all slightly rumpled, projecting an aura that bespoke their mutual care for the forgotten and abandoned pets that litter the city streets. One, a Charlene or something similar, showed Julie and Atterman into a windowless concrete vault lined with metal cages stacked several feet high on three walls. Each with a single cat, some very young, others whose age virtually guaranteed that this room would be the last they saw. Every imaginable cat colour seemed to be on display, mostly long hairs. Some mewed, others cowered, most had seen it all before and did little but stretch occasionally. One caught Atterman’s eye. A black, or grey-black, short hair snarled at them as they approached and thrust a paw through the grid to take a swipe. Atterman swore that he, as Charlotte confirmed later, never hit the floor when the cage door opened and he burst free, circling the room in a blur.
“ We’ll take that one.”
And $350.00 dollars later (tax, license, dealer prep, litter box and litter, scratching post, catnip, toy mice, and grave misgiving from Charlotte) they turned the freshly named Lego loose in the condo.
For a year, he started to yell as soon as they got into bed. Just far enough out of reach that reprisals were impossible. If Atterman did manage to drift off the damn cat would get close enough for one quick and bloody rake and then… gone. He’d stand next to the bathroom sink, tail and back hair straight up, in full voice against the strange cat opposite. Nights were impossibly long, filled with terror for Lego and, for Atterman, rage.
On the odd occasion that company arrived with children, Atterman was instantly nervous. “Tell your kids that if they see the cat, for the love of God back off. That bastard is faster than hell and he is no pet. More a sign that someone’s God has blamed me for the fate of the Bengal Tiger.”
In time, Lego calmed somewhat, never fully accepting the role of a domesticated cat but an uneasy truce was established
________________
Panic attacks are as various as the flowers of an alpine meadow. Imagine standing, on a spring day, surrounded by every colour on earth. Now take away the whispering breeze, take away the fragrance, and it becomes foreboding, dangerous, a shadow on a wall in a horror movie. Panic attacks are just that, immense forebodings that root you to the ground. Atterman hadn’t had one, at least a full blown, attack in many years, before Julie, before even his family’s death but he remembered each one vividly. Even now, he avoided buffets and cafeterias. One afternoon, at work, he’d had an attack in the company cafeteria. He never returned. Nor did he ever discuss them with anybody. For reasons he could not comprehend these attacks triggered a primal shame which, of course, is a self fulfilling dread.
Over time they subsided but he avoided social circumstances, tried to enter gatherings from the edges, never head on.
He hadn’t even noticed this new thing. Until Julie started asking if he was all right, if she could help. That he seemed to suddenly disassociate. How after a time he even started to fade, somehow losing definition. She wanted to know what the hell was happening. He had no answers. Hoped it, whatever it was, would pass.
But one night at the Pub, Frank, in his Red Wings ball cap, said the same damn thing. This was during game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals and the Wings looked to win it, the first time since the ’54 –’55 season. Forty-some years ago and if old Frank bought a new Red Wings ball cap for every season he’d been a fan, well, he must have a closet full. Frank took the time away from the 3rd period of what, miraculously, turned out to be a four game sweep, to say virtually the same as Julie had. And that got Atterman’s attention.
Atterman started to notice small things. Small disconnects in conversation. Odd lapses. Like paying for a pack of cigarettes then realizing, from the strange look on the clerk’s face, that this sale thing was finished and he could leave. How long had he been there, or more to the point, how long had he not been here?
By the time he started to find himself, fleetingly, in a bar in Erie, Pennsylvania, at a table in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, or in the middle of the main street of Viking, Alberta, he was getting worried. Every time, a place he’d been before, a piece of his past. Nothing special, just a phrase spoken, or maybe the way a woman pulled her hair into a tight bun, sparked a memory. And, as if a bookmark slipped between the pages of a forgotten novel, he was there The years had altered his perspective. The man, or boy, who had left the bookmark had grown, sometimes wiser, sometimes not, but grown, at least, older.
At first, each shift left him shocked beyond any reaction and, as seamlessly as he had slipped in, he slipped back. So shocking was the experience that it took a few slips to realize that there was warning. An instant of instability, then total absence of light. Not darkness but absolutely no light. And, if he reacted instantly, he could will himself back to stability. It came to him that if he could stop the slip, he could control it, maybe. And that odd mix of curiosity and lust that has always driven mankind to unimaginable highs and lows drove him to, not just understand but, to use whatever this thing was.
For a year, he experimented and he read.
________________
Albert Einstein published his General theory of Relativity in 1915. Atterman, and, conceivably, every literate, and most illiterate, people knew of it. Knew it heralded something new, something important, but what it was, specifically, completely bypassed all but a few. Trying to get a grip on the concept, Atterman found an explanation that, if incomplete and possibly misleading, helped him understand a basic tenet: the speed of light is constant and all else is relative to that constant.
Consider an object traveling at 60 KPH. Now consider two observers, one stationary, the other moving at 30 KPH, in the same direction as the object. As the object passes the first observer, it appears to be traveling at 60 KPH. The second observer, however, measures the object passing him at 30 KPH, relative to his own speed.
A central tenet of physics is that the speed of light is constant, relative to nothing. Now consider an object moving at the speed of light. Again two observers, the first stationary, the second traveling, as before, at a speed approaching the speed of light. Because the speed of light is constant irregardless of anything, both observers measure the speed of the object as 299,792,458 meters / second. Since speed is a function of distance and time, and the distance used to measure the speed is fixed, time must be variable. As an object approaches the speed of light time stretches: time elapses slower. Time is relative.
In 1907, Ernest Rutherford took the Chair of Physics at Manchester University, England. His work at Manchester resulted in the Rutherford Model of the atom. A nucleus of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons, now one of the most recognizable models on the planet.
Niels Bohr, after working with Rutherford at Manchester, continued his study of atomic structure. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on atoms and radiation emitted by them. A French scientist, Louis de Broglie, had theorized that electrons had the properties of a wave. Bohr developed the idea that electrons have stable orbits, that is, if the circumference of the orbit is equally divisible by the wavelength of the electron then it is a stable orbit. If not, interference destroys the orbit. An electron can only orbit the nucleus at fixed distances. The greater the frequency, the longer the orbit.
Bohr also discovered that electrons can move from a high frequency orbit to a lower frequency orbit. When this happens energy is released as a photon of light. But the question that had to be asked was, how? At any point in time, the high orbit is a point in space and the low orbit is a point in space. They are both stable orbits and they are separated by destructive orbits. They move from point C to point A without passing through point B and do it instantaneously. Quantum physics had arrived.
Apparently, Bohr wrote Rutherford with his theories. In reply, Rutherford wrote, in essence, that releasing a photon and moving to another orbit was all well and good, but the electron would have to know where it was going.
At the sub-atomic level, the science is completely different than in the observable world. Light, photons, act as both particles and waves. A particle can coexist at different points. A particle’s position may be measured, or, a particle’s momentum may be measured. But not both. Every thing is uncertain.
________________
The Pub sat on the boardwalk at the New Westminster Quay, part of the public market and just about a block or so from his third storey, two bedroom condo overlooking the Fraser River. The bar was shaped like a shepherd’s crook, a long straight length that starched toward the floor to ceiling windows before turning on itself to form a half circle. A place to laugh, tell lies, drink, and generally enjoy the company of strangers as easily as friends.
A Saturday afternoon, a curried shrimp lunch behind him and one more Rum and Ginger Ale ahead, the bar talk was of dentistry horror stories. Atterman recounting in vivid detail growing up under the sporadic care of itinerant dentists in the small Rocky Mountain town of his youth. Old men with Rye Whiskey breathe ending pathetic careers. Tentative kids, learning the profession, always with an eye to finding a place in the city. All working a circuit through small town Alberta, rarely seen twice in a row, working for cash in small offices the town must have owned.
He squeezed a lime slice into the drink, took a hit, swiveled off his stool and announced that it was time for a smoke. Out the door and down three steps to the boardwalk, lighting the cigarette as he moved. And into darkness so complete even up and down evaporated.
________________
Julie had gone, ostensibly just to see her mother, ill in Chicago, but a woman, especially Julie, doesn’t ship all of her belongings to visit anything. Atterman, by this time, quite numb with fear and horror at what was happening to him managed to register this: she did not believe she was coming back. She didn’t believe her mother would survive this cancer and unless Atterman managed to ground himself, she wouldn’t be back. So that is where it ended, Julie standing by the open Royal City Cabs taxi, angry and betrayed by this moron who was allowing something as deadly as had possessed her own mother to infest him, Atterman, destitute on the curb, trying to speak but managing only small short mews of anguish. The driver slammed the trunk closed, said “Airport, Lady?”, and they were gone. Julie was gone.
It was about a month before Atterman noticed she hadn’t completely left. He noticed them entering his Condo one evening. Shoes, a single pair. Women’s size eights with three inch heels, black, a fabric of some kind, and gauzy in an expensive way. They were on the carpet, just beyond the Birchwood entryway, out of the way but clearly visible. One was upright just off perpendicular to the wall, beside it, at a slight angle, the other lay on its side.
Julie liked shoes; more than one box full were part of the shipment to Chicago. She bought shoes regularly and took great care of them. Even though she trashed them as soon as they started to show signs of wear the number of shoes at the bottom of three closets continued to grow. This pair was relatively new, but looked loved and lived-in, like a perfect little house with a groomed lawn and a white picket fence in front. Someone had slipped them off, intending to get right back, but something had happened and so they waited. Waited for a chance to click down white tile corridors, or slide under tables in good restaurants.
Atterman stopped when he saw them. And when he realized there were tears streaming down his face, he went to the kitchen counter for his camera. He took 23 pictures of them, considered nine suitable, and had them blown up to various sizes, framed, and matted. Five now hung over the fireplace, three in the master bedroom and one in the guest bathroom. The shoes stayed where they were. For the woman he hired to clean once a week there were only two rules. Don’t screw with the way the kitchen is arranged and the shoes stay put. Atterman’s rules moved to the top of the list of stories she told anyone who asked about her business.
________________
Quantum theory that made him believe it could be real. Slipping from one time to another is not believable. Nor is quantum theory. Einstein and Bohr spent the rest of their lives trying to disprove it. They failed.
The experiments went through three phases. First he was terrified, terrified of its physical aspect. The immense blackness. The heart stopping dislocation of appearing in a different place and time without any sensation. Then came a new terror. The terror of the self. Was he completely insane? If this wasn’t real, what was? Finally, he accepted a completely irrational quantum crock of shit. It was a crock and is rational mind knew that but, well, whatever it takes.
Experimenting he found that when he slipped from the present, he didn’t completely leave. He couldn’t remember the present but friends told him things he did, bets he lost, jokes he had told. It was said that he behaved oddly, tired, unfocused maybe. After a slide, he fully focused on his new present. Clothes and money was a problem but insurmountable? Hell no!
So, he cobbled up a crock of shit from Einstein’s relativity of time, the Bohr model of quantized orbits, and scores of other sources. In his mind, he referred to it as QCS, Quantum Crock of Shit. And he thought that, just maybe; Einstein and Bohr might have said the same but in Danish or German.
Quantum entanglement makes an appearance in QCS. When two particles are created simultaneously, any action on one causes a reaction in both, no matter if they are separated by light years. And since the Big Bang instantaneously created all matter in the universe, all particles are entangled.
Atterman thought, ”What if we have stable orbits in the universe from birth to death?”
And, “What if time is more relative than Einstein imagined?”
And, “What if all those orbits are entangled?”
Atterman never fully thought out QCS, it was, and is, a mash-up of what-ifs and maybes. But it was enough to take his mind from the terror of the alternatives. He existed in countless, entangled, times and places. His current form could exist in all orbits. His conscious mind, the part that remembered, worked only in one orbit and he could control which orbit he experienced. It slid from one orbit to another without touching any orbit between them. QCS, Quantum Crock of Shit.
The only issue was stable orbits. Rutherford seemed to believe that Quantum leaps relied on the photon knowing where it was going. But what if he allowed a slip without being certain? He could arrive at an unstable orbit. God knows what happens then. But it was sure to be unpleasant. It was tough being Atterman.
________________
