Chapter 13
686 Words
13
“She poisoned you?” My Grandma Marion might be critical, but she’s not homicidal.
“Not enough to kill me,” Halli said. “Just enough to make me sick so I’d have to stay home that day.”
“Why did she want you at home?”
“Because she was going to die.”
“You mean she did it on purpose?”
“No,” Halli said, “but she knew. Otherwise she wouldn’t have poisoned me.”
Parallel universe or not, the story didn’t make any sense. People didn’t act that way. Unless I was right about what I thought before: maybe the humans on this planet behaved in ways completely different from what I knew.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t . . . ”
“Understand?” Halli finished. “Believe me, it’s taken me a year to even begin to think I understand. I still don’t know if I do. Ginny left me in a hard position. She’s all I think about, sometimes.”
All this time I thought it would be about me. Me making this great scientific breakthrough. Me traveling to another universe. Me meeting my alternative self. I never considered that the other me might have a whole life of her own, with her own unsolvable problems. And so far, a grandmother who tried to poison her to keep Halli from being there when the grandmother died beat out any of the petty problems I had at home.
“But,” Halli said, “that’s enough of all that.”
“No, really, it’s fine—”
“No, really,” Halli said, “it’s not. I’ve already spent too much time thinking about her. I need to think about other things.”
Which pretty much meant I could forget any of my follow-up questions, of which there were many. Starting with, “How did she poison you?”
But Halli was back to figuring out me and my boxers. “Have you ever heard of bilocation?”
“Bilo . . . no, I don’t think so.”
“It means the ability to be in two places at once. To be there in body—in full physical form—in both locations.”
“You mean like the way someone can split photons?”
“I don’t know,” Halli said. “Maybe. How does that work?”
“You shine a photon—it’s a particle of light,” I explained, “through a slit, and you split the light into two locations. They’re both still part of the same photon, but now that photon is in two separate places. It’s more . . . complicated than that, but that’s sort of generally it.”
“Okay,” Halli said, “now think about doing that with your body.”
I did think about it. For about five seconds. And then dismissed it. “I don’t see how that would work. There’s too much mass involved—no one has ever done that before.”
“The ancient yogis did it,” Halli said. “All the time.”
She told me that according to some of the histories she’s read, ancient yoga masters could appear in two places any time they wanted. Their bodies would be in meditation in one town, and would appear in front of a student in another town miles away.
“As a spirit or something?” I asked.
“No, as a full physical form. Their students could hug them, eat with them—no different than if the master was there in the room. Which he was. While he was also in deep meditation somewhere else.”
Now I thought about it for more than five seconds. A campfire is good for helping organize your thoughts. I stared into the flames for a good long time and let what Halli said percolate in my brain.
“So I’m in my bedroom at home right now.”
“Possibly,” Halli answered.
“And I’m also here—you can see me, Red can smell me and feel me—his head isn’t just passing right through my lap onto the ground.”
“You’re here,” Halli confirmed. “You drank my cocoa.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, wow,” she agreed.
I couldn’t help but grin. “This is way better than I imagined. No one has ever done experiments like this.”
“But what about what you were telling me before?” Halli said. “About the three-branes, and bridging the gap between the universes and all of that? Does this still mean you did it?”
I had to think about that. “I’m not sure. I’ve made contact—obviously—but I don’t know if that’s the same as leaving one dimension and traveling to another. That’s a good question.”
“Or staying in one dimension and still traveling to another,” Halli pointed out.
“Wow,” I said again.
“I think the next question is,” Halli said, “can we make it happen both ways? Can you send yourself here, and I send myself there?”
Chills went through me, and not just because of the cold night air.
“I don’t know—do you want to try?”
“Maybe you should go home first,” she said. “Then we’ll wait a little while and we’ll try to contact each other again.
“But then you have to try to stay where you are,” Halli added. “I’ll focus on coming to you.”
“I can’t believe we’re even talking about this.”
Now it was Halli’s turn to grin. “Fun, isn’t it?”
- Writer
