The Day I Met You

A loud knock on the door wakes Emrys from another revery. The visions arrive without warning. Fragments of events he has not lived and places he has never been. He cannot explain it, but he knows it intuitively. On his desk in front of him, notes are scattered all over. He collects them quickly before straightening his posture to invite the visitor. Robbie enters the room, carrying the latest test results. What should have taken billions of years to compute, their quantum computer just completed in five minutes. Emrys knows this proves something remarkable about reality that can’t yet be explained. He suspects the most complete explanation yet in existence, that the machine was running in collaboration with parallel versions of itself across other worlds. But his visions came before the data, with a feeling less like influence from parallel selves and more like memories of his own future. Dr. Nova has spent seven years in near-total isolation. As a theoretical physicist, her work is grounded in the hypothesis that quantum coherence exists in neural processes, and by extending this coherence artificially, the brain can sustain the state long enough to feel the full weight of the branching structure of reality. The device she built is small and elegant, a glowing orb that generates entangled qubits capable of cohering with the quantum processes of the brain. A brain-quantum computer interface. Buried in her work, she lost her father’s final years while risking everything. Now she recently started lecturing again on the Many-Worlds interpretation after having left a prestigious position at a young age to pursue her work. The two meet on the day Emrys’s career is about to collapse. Rather than attend the board meeting that will determine his future, he decides to follow his intuition down a different path. Something in him already knows which choice he will make before he makes it. And he does not yet know why.