Status: This is the strangest story you will ever have the pleasure of reading.
The Entanglement of Cat and Rin Schrodinger
Ch. 17
Chapter seventeen
Cat
When we reach the busy street again, I take Meina’s device out of the small messenger bag Shomei gave me and study it. It’s hard to read; it’s like an annoyingly confusing compass with a great number of needles instead of just one, all pointing different directions. Meina had tried to explain that it’s “the wiggly one” I should look for, but I have the feeling those instructions were lost somewhere in translation from Meina’s mind into everyday speech. I’ll have to feel it out.
Rin watches me curiously with her uneven, translucent eyes that have unnerved me since we first met. Carefully she tugs at the device in my hands and I let her take it. She’s holding it in her hands, nearly caressing it and gazing at it so intensely that for a moment I seem to imagine her and the small object she is holding are the only two things in the universe. I shake my head to clear it.
Rin breathes out quickly and turns to me. “Do you know how this works?”
“Well...no,” I admit.
“This is amazing. It’s like a...a Geiger counter only for much bigger...movements,”
“Really?” I come closer to get a better look at it. “Well, I suppose that’s exactly what it does. It senses different worlds, or parallel universes.”
Rin raises an eyebrow at me. I think she’s just skeptical about my sanity, but then she shakes her head and says “No, it can’t register worlds. Just atom—I mean, like energy shifts. Random energy shifts, as in...rifts,”
I suck in my breath rapidly and look at Rin, who is so enwrapped in Meina’s device that she’s ignoring all else in the world. She knows how it works. She doesn’t need me to explain anything. She is perfectly competent and has absolutely no idea that she is.
“How does it work?” I ask cautiously.
Rin pauses for moment, reordering her thoughts for me. “It—we, as a...person, a human are constantly putting out an energy field. The photons, and atoms, that sort of thing, around that energy field will react to the large movements of energy that are...connected to them. This is basically a computer of that reaction. It’s like a Geiger counter, only controlled by the human element. I’m sorry, I can’t explain it that well.”
“How do you know so much about Quantum Physics?”
“A subscription to Science News has a ‘bill me later’ option. I can usually get a few copies before my mom cancels it. Then I just send for it again.” She’s still holding the device, completely mesmerized.
I look uneasily at the girl who just moments before was a weak, crying, and scared wreck and now’s transformed into a half mastermind in minutes. I’m so damn curious to know who she is at this moment. And the next. And the next.
“There’s a scientific word for the connection you were describing,” I state carefully “It’s called entanglement.”
Rin glances up quickly to me, startled. She holds my gaze. So it’s happened to both of us. I think. We both have some type of unexplainable connection to this word.
Then suddenly reality and the city streets rush back to me and I know we really are pressed for time. I still have to find a rift and even with Rin’s unexpected knowledge of Meina’s world-finding mechanism, it’ll take awhile. “Rin, can you work the rift sensor or whatever it is so that you can find one of the huge energy shifts?”
“I can try,”
So we slip into New York’s everyday foot traffic looking, I can imagine, like the average set of teenage girls going shopping in the city on a sunny summer’s day.
Cat
When we reach the busy street again, I take Meina’s device out of the small messenger bag Shomei gave me and study it. It’s hard to read; it’s like an annoyingly confusing compass with a great number of needles instead of just one, all pointing different directions. Meina had tried to explain that it’s “the wiggly one” I should look for, but I have the feeling those instructions were lost somewhere in translation from Meina’s mind into everyday speech. I’ll have to feel it out.
Rin watches me curiously with her uneven, translucent eyes that have unnerved me since we first met. Carefully she tugs at the device in my hands and I let her take it. She’s holding it in her hands, nearly caressing it and gazing at it so intensely that for a moment I seem to imagine her and the small object she is holding are the only two things in the universe. I shake my head to clear it.
Rin breathes out quickly and turns to me. “Do you know how this works?”
“Well...no,” I admit.
“This is amazing. It’s like a...a Geiger counter only for much bigger...movements,”
“Really?” I come closer to get a better look at it. “Well, I suppose that’s exactly what it does. It senses different worlds, or parallel universes.”
Rin raises an eyebrow at me. I think she’s just skeptical about my sanity, but then she shakes her head and says “No, it can’t register worlds. Just atom—I mean, like energy shifts. Random energy shifts, as in...rifts,”
I suck in my breath rapidly and look at Rin, who is so enwrapped in Meina’s device that she’s ignoring all else in the world. She knows how it works. She doesn’t need me to explain anything. She is perfectly competent and has absolutely no idea that she is.
“How does it work?” I ask cautiously.
Rin pauses for moment, reordering her thoughts for me. “It—we, as a...person, a human are constantly putting out an energy field. The photons, and atoms, that sort of thing, around that energy field will react to the large movements of energy that are...connected to them. This is basically a computer of that reaction. It’s like a Geiger counter, only controlled by the human element. I’m sorry, I can’t explain it that well.”
“How do you know so much about Quantum Physics?”
“A subscription to Science News has a ‘bill me later’ option. I can usually get a few copies before my mom cancels it. Then I just send for it again.” She’s still holding the device, completely mesmerized.
I look uneasily at the girl who just moments before was a weak, crying, and scared wreck and now’s transformed into a half mastermind in minutes. I’m so damn curious to know who she is at this moment. And the next. And the next.
“There’s a scientific word for the connection you were describing,” I state carefully “It’s called entanglement.”
Rin glances up quickly to me, startled. She holds my gaze. So it’s happened to both of us. I think. We both have some type of unexplainable connection to this word.
Then suddenly reality and the city streets rush back to me and I know we really are pressed for time. I still have to find a rift and even with Rin’s unexpected knowledge of Meina’s world-finding mechanism, it’ll take awhile. “Rin, can you work the rift sensor or whatever it is so that you can find one of the huge energy shifts?”
“I can try,”
So we slip into New York’s everyday foot traffic looking, I can imagine, like the average set of teenage girls going shopping in the city on a sunny summer’s day.