“No doubt,” Fred said. “That’s actually a pretty good summary of the situation.”
“Yes it is.”
“‘Skylark,’” he interjected. “‘Slightly larger than a sparrow, brown, strongly streaked; underparts buff white. Voice; note, a clear, liquid chirr-up. Song, in hovering flight, a high-pitched, tireless torrent of runs and trills, very long sustained.’”
She nodded, distracted by Mao, who had clearly caught her attention. “‘Youth, the world is yours as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, so full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.’”
“So full of vigor and vitality,” Fred said, and Qi smiled; they were both sprawled listlessly over the furniture. “I like that ‘eight or nine in the morning.’ He has a specific angle in mind.”
“A specific moment.”
“An angle.”
“But morning light. At sunset it’s not the same.”
“True. Anyway, Mao is more interesting than I would have thought.”
“I know, me too.”
“I thought you knew all about him.”
“Everybody gets told the story at school, but no one reads him. Maybe his poetry. Mostly he’s just a face, or an idea. And I’m only reading you the good stuff. The amount of crap is unbelievable.”
The refrigerator, then the air conditioner. The air conditioner, then the refrigerator. The cheep of birds. An hour of rain. Men in rowboats, harvesting fish. A pilot wave, crossing the bay.
Dozing in the heat, Fred dreamily pondered the pilot wave theory. Their kitchen experiment had been an imitation of a macroscopic analog of the real microscopic two-slit experiments with photons. In the real analog experiments, during which they had gotten tiny oil droplets to skid across the water like skipping stones, they had been able to reproduce all kinds of quantum effects at the macro-scale, suggesting that the same kinds of things were happening down there at the micro. Stochastic electrodynamics, which was one current extension of pilot wave theory, postulated and described an electromagnetic zero-point field, a kind of subquantum realm through which the pilot wave moved. Possibly wave and particle quantum effects were just well-coordinated emergent phenomena that in fact were primarily happening in this speculated subquantum realm. Could there be something smaller than quanta? Sure. Reality shrank beyond their senses and no doubt could go smaller still, until it was smaller than their ability to detect by any means whatsoever. Same in the other direction, with things big beyond the visible universe; for all they knew, their universe could extend forever, or be a neutrino in some larger universe. They could only see what they could see. Beyond that, the unknown. The unknowable.
“I want to be an agnotologist,” he said to Qi. “I want to study what we don’t know.”
“You would be good at that,” Qi said.
The next day one of Qi’s friends tapped at the door and stepped in to give them a couple of plastic bags of food. Fred put it all away while Qi talked to the young woman in Chinese. He was relieved to see that dishwashing soap had been included, per his request to their previous visitor.
This one left unusually soon after arriving, leaving Qi scowling.
“Uh-oh, what?” Fred asked, straightening up.
She glanced at him, looked away. “One of the people who has been bringing us supplies has gone missing.”
Fred considered this. He saw why she was upset. “So what do we do?” he said after a while.
“I don’t know.” After a while she said, “I guess I should stay away from the windows, but could you sit where you can look down, and see if you think anyone is hanging around down there watching us?”
“I can try.” If spotted, he could be any Western tourist. On the other hand he was definitely Fred Fredericks, presumably being looked for by at least someone in the world, with his photo easily available, he presumed. “We have Venetian blinds. I can tilt the blinds so that I can see out and people can’t see in.”
“Good idea.”
After that he spent a fair amount of time looking out their window at the village’s sidewalk and restaurant row. No one appeared to be at all interested in their place. He began to sort out who the regulars were and what they were doing, and they all seemed to have restaurant or fishing business. Almost all; some people just passed through. Tourists, locals, it was hard to tell. It was a very sleepy village. Still, the new tension in the room was palpable. There was no way to be sure they weren’t being watched. Proving a negative was always hard.
“Could this person who went missing just have left or something?” he asked one day.
“His name is Wei,” Qi said sharply. Her look turned dark. “I don’t think so. I mean, maybe, but I can’t think what it would be. So I’m really worried about him.”
And about us, Fred didn’t say.
“I wish I could go back to his last visit and warn him,” she said. “Tell him to get away somewhere.”
“Maybe someone else did that instead of us.”
“Maybe.”
Fred could see, even in his sidelong glances, that she was very worried about this Wei. A friend, perhaps. He wondered again if his family had gotten word that he was okay. “Too bad we can’t take advantage of quantum backdating,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a couple of experiments you can do that show quantum effects that are like going backward in time, or changing the past.”
“Really?”
“Sort of. If you make a certain kind of molecule that combines particular kinds of atoms, you can heat and chill them such that the colder atom in the molecule gives its heat to the hotter one, which breaks entropy and is like a little instance of time going backward. Also, if you do the half-silvered mirror experiment in a certain way, it’s like the two-slit experiment, in that you can tweak it to get either wave results or particle results, but in this version of it, if you tweak the device after the photon has gone through the mirror, it retroactively changes what happened at the mirror. So it’s like you’ve changed the past.”
“Wow,” Qi said. Then, wistfully: “Can’t you make one of your quantum phones do that? I want to call Wei last week.”
“These aren’t actions that can convey information,” Fred explained. “Also they only last milliseconds. They’re just more ways in which the quantum realm is strange. Down at that level, things appear to be a kind of mush. Somehow by the time they layer up to our realm the usual laws of physics hold.”
“Alas,” she said. She sighed, looking grim. “I guess we’re stuck twixt and tween.”
“Like Schrödinger’s cat,” Fred said, trying to distract her.
“Meaning right now we’re both alive and dead? That feels about right.”
“I think we’re alive,” Fred ventured.
“No. Someone has to look at us first, right? Then we’ll find out. Right now we’re both at once.”
“Maybe there’s a pilot wave that already knows,” Fred said. He didn’t know what he meant.
Once Qi woke up out of an uneasy nap and said, “Wow, I can feel it. Come here and feel.”
Fred got up and went to her. She pulled up her shirt and bared her big belly, took his hand and put it to one side of her belly button. This was as much as Fred had ever touched a woman who wasn’t a relative or a dance partner, and he was distracted by that, until he felt a distinct thrust outward from inside her, very startling.