Chapter Nineteen

“This doesn’t make sense,” Sofia said, for the third time in the last half hour. The smell of the body had mostly dissipated, though a low rotten stench still pervaded the room. She had returned to pacing, though everyone else seemed mostly at ease. They believed the mystery had been solved, that the Speaker’s secretary was responsible, and they’d just received word that the Security team had caught him in his dormitory and were holding him. That was that, as far as they were concerned. Only the Speaker seemed as ill-at-ease as her.

“sofia,” Sai said, “relax. it’s over.”

“But…the secretary? He’s from Herald, he’s about as likely to kill the King as Panagos is.”

“or lars?” Sai said, and if they had eyebrows to raise Sofia sensed they would have done so.

“There’s no way Matthelm knew about the cover-up.”

“Why not?” said Isi, overhearing them. “If our guy here worked it out, then someone working at the heart of the Service could have done it too.”

Sofia had no good answer to that, so she turned to Mairin. “But where did he get the Overkill? Didn’t you say you thought it might be a mole?”

Mairin shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t tell anymore. I can’t tell what’s actually happening and what’s crazy-person speculation they’ve fed me. I thought it might be, but…” she trailed off.

“Got to say, I still don’t trust y’all,” Isi mused. “Maybe he’s a Herald kid, but that doesn’t mean the poison didn’t come from you or one of the others.”

“You think we just smuggled something as dangerous as Overkill aboard?” Mairin was affronted.

“Why not? We just had a shuttle, and I note your Colonel conveniently left just in time. I don’t know what you people are capable of, but I do know what you want at the end of all this.”

They stared each other down, but it was Panagos who interrupted. “Sorry, excuse me, what… what do they want?”

Kei started to say “Don’t,” but Isi wasn’t playing ball. He turned to Panagos.

“They’re going to try and close the rift, if they can. They don’t trust us, they don’t like us, and they never wanted to be here.”

Mairin looked to Kei. Apparently they had already discussed this, and the older woman wasn’t expecting the attack. It wasn’t news to Sofia, who had been the first to discover the information from Graves and share it with Control. But apparently the Herald faction hadn’t picked up on it, and the shock was written on their faces.

“That’s not true,” Mairin started.

“All of it?” Isi jabbed back.

“We are trying to protect you!” she roared. “Like I told your little friend -“

Kei widened her eyes. “Excuse you?” Mairin continued without pause.

”- the other people on my world will try to come up here, and they will try to hurt or kill you. We,” she hissed, “are trying to protect you. If you can maybe value your own life as highly as you value your executive positions and your contracts, then perhaps you could start to see that.”

Isi and Mairin began to shout over one another, and soon everyone else was jumping in. Sofia noticed that Sai was staying back – they were normally happy to get into arguments they thought they could win, but since the news about Control hadn’t yet reached the public eye they might have been wiser to hold off.

Sofia drew back. She couldn’t think with all this going on. She had been so close to a breakthrough, and she had had a theory to present to the King, and now she couldn’t help but escape the feeling that the two were connected. There were patterns here that she could find, if she could only focus. She closed her eyes and imagined her old base back on Tenerife, the star patterns swirling into constellations only she could see.

Someone clapped her on the back and she jumped. It was the Speaker. Unlike many of the more senior delegates, she hadn’t had the chance to privately talk to him, and he honestly intimidated her a little. But now his face was soft and his sonorous voice was low.

“He didn’t do this,” he said, and she knew he meant Matthelm. “I’m not supposed to get involved, of course, but… I know he didn’t. I know him. Besides, there’s no evidence that he left his room after I saw him.”

“I agree,” she said gently, “But I don’t know what else it could be. He served the coffee, and he made it. He was the only one with the opportunity.”

“But the poison?”

“Perhaps he has some way of communicating with someone on Garden, and he asked them to bring it. We just had a shuttle deliver all sorts of goods, after all.”

A glint caught her eye as she looked around the chamber. It reminded her of her stars back home, but on closer inspection it was a security camera, turning to see the arguments playing out on the chamber floor. Then, a thought occurred to her, and it brought friends. They piled up in her head, a sudden revelation. “No,” she said to herself, and the Speaker looked at her oddly. “No!” she said again, this time as part of a laugh. It was ridiculous, it was impossible, but…

“I’ve got it.” she returned to the centre of the chamber, where everyone stopped shouting to look at her. “It wasn’t him.”

“Then who?” said Panagos.

“I have a theory about that.” Sofia took a deep breath. She wasn’t the most natural speechmaker, but there was nothing else to be done.

“Sai, would you pass me my flipchart? Thank you. I’ve been thinking a lot about Baron and Baroness Gray. You remember them? From the very first bill the King introduced – the one that ratified their marriage. Lars and I had been looking at their photographs, and there was one that we couldn’t quite place. It had a church that had been knocked down years ago, behind the newlyweds, but the photo wasn’t altered in any way. I checked it with my sources, and they confirmed – it was a totally unaltered photograph. We couldn’t make sense of it, and the King told us to stop looking into it. Maybe he was right, but I don’t think he knew the truth. I’m not sure anyone did.

“So, I started looking into the history of Baron Gray, where I could. The information was limited, and I couldn’t ask Lars for help – sorry, but I couldn’t. The King already hated me, but I didn’t want to get you in more trouble. Anyway, I found out that he had been married before. Once before, to a woman who sadly passed away about ten years ago. Leukaemia. So I asked my informants to send me a photograph of the old Baroness Gray, on a hunch. And, as chance would have it, they sent the exact right photo.”

She flipped over the first sheet of her flip chart, which showed two photos side by side. They appeared identical, though one had been touched up with colour while the other was more muted.

“This photo,” she pointed to the first one, “was in the package we were sent when voting on the bill. This one,” she pointed to the other, less saturated photo, “is the previous Baroness Gray.”

“But they’re the same?” Lars said.

“Exactly. And that’s why the church is there – it’s a twenty-two-year-old photo, from before she died. And, through some mix-up, a photo of the old Baroness accidentally slipped its way into the media package they sent us. So you’ll see that the two women, the two Baronesses, are identical.

“Now, I thought probably the same thing you’re all thinking now.” she prompted.

“the baron has a type?” Sai suggested.

“No. I was thinking, how is that possible? What are the chances of identical twins – or something like it – growing up on different worlds? Well, that got me thinking even harder, and I eventually I came up with a theory. Sergeant Graves, your pal,” she nodded at Mairin, “was asking all about divergence and how the universes had come to be. A lot of people were wondering that, but I have a different question. How could it be that the rift in spacetime opened up on these four specific universes?

“We had assumed, for a long while, that we were somehow within each other’s proximity in a multidimensional kind of way – neighbours, in something we can’t even begin to measure. But with our current theories of how parallel universes are formed, that shouldn’t work. The closest idea we have comes from quantum mechanics, and it states that when there are multiple states in which a single particle can exist, it exists in all of them simultaneously until observed.”

“Schrodinger’s Cat,” said Mairin. Sofia gave her a puzzled look before continuing.

“Right. Anything that can happen, happens in a different parallel universe. I don’t pretend to understand it totally, and there’s no empirical proof that the theory is real, but it’s our best guess. The thing is, if that’s true, then new universes are coming into existence literally every second. Every nanosecond. And a massive number of them, too – the airflow of the atmosphere generates new universes where it’s slightly colder or slightly warmer, creating knock-on effects that radiate outwards, and this has been happening as long as time has existed. The number of universes there should be out there is… well, it would boggle the mind. It ought to be uncountable. So how did these four get put together?

“Statistically, at least if the rift opened at random, we should be looking at four universes that were essentially the same. Four Earth: Carmens, or four Heralds, or four Gardens, all with totally undetectable differences. A particle out of place here to there, but nothing so major as different people. But we didn’t. So that leads me to wonder, if we really are neighbours, what happened to all those other universes? The odds of hitting these four would be beyond astronomical if the others were still out there.

“Gravity gave me a clue. It was just yesterday – Lars and I were talking about gravity, and the way it pulls things in the universe together over time. I wondered – what if there was a force like that, but for parallel universes? Look.” Ignoring her baffled audience for a moment, she flipped to the next page of her chart, which showed a horizontal line. With a marker pen, she drew a second line diverging slightly from the first. “This is a parallel universe with a tiny difference. What if it’s in the nature of the multiverse to pull them together again?” She completed the arc of the second line by merging it with the first.

“How would it do that?” Lars asked.

“Probability,” she replied. “The odds of any one thing happening in this divergent universe become slightly more likely – proportional to the impact of the divergence – to match the original timeline. Once they basically match each other, they can be considered the same universe again. No more parallel world. And remember, most of these changes are so minute that the universes might only exist for seconds – less, perhaps – before getting pulled back in.

“If we take this as read -“ some of her audience started to protest, but she held up a hand to interrupt them “- I know, I know, but stay with me. There’s evidence coming, of a sort. If we go with this theory then we can say that there is an original universe, and every other universe goes through a process not just of divergence, but also of convergence. And maybe there is no prime timeline, maybe it’s just chance which one takes over when they merge.” Now she was theorising off the top of her head, which was dangerous. “That doesn’t matter right now. Because that’s only the small things. What about the big decisions?”

“Hold on, Sofia,” Isi said. “For the slower members of the audience here,” he pointed at himself, “are you saying that probability isn’t equally weighted? Like, a die might be more likely to roll a certain number? Because I’m pretty certain that isn’t physically possible.”

“Right,” she said. “The die is equally weighted. From the perspective of you and your universe. It’s only when you go outside that system that it would look weighted, if that die specifically helped return things to the original state. But there’s nothing to say that the physics of individual universes don’t work differently.” Apparently satisfied, Isi nodded.

“Anyway, like I say, that’s the small things. They shouldn’t have much impact. As opposed to the big differences such as, say, human cognition. Because that’s all our brains are – electrons sparking different synapses and making certain decisions by chance. Under the many-worlds theory, there’s a universe in which I don’t say any of this, and maybe – I hope – this world has a different outcome than that one. It would have to. Our decision-making power, our free will, is too consequential to converge again immediately afterwards. So we break free of the original timeline. Going back to gravity, our brains are like rocket ships escaping the pull of the Earth. I was talking with Mairin about cause and effect, and she said that Novus Ordo Seculorum believes humans are inherently unpredictable, and this is the reason why. It’s because we keep breaking the model.”

She drew more lines emerging from her main universe, branching off at random directions. “That’s our power as sentient, sapient creatures. If I punch you in the face, Lars – sorry, just an example – but if I do, it probably creates a divergent universe where I didn’t do that, and the difference between the two would be pretty stark, at least for a couple of minutes. But that pull still exists – the divergent world wants to return to the prime one, so as time passes it no longer matters whether I punched you or not. The memory and the consequences fade, and they merge. That universe could sustain for days – maybe years, if Lars holds a grudge – but we’re looking at cosmic timescales here. Eventually we’ll both die, and it won’t make a difference what happened.”

“The universes would converge because by then they were effectively the same,” said Lars. She was privately thrilled – he got it!

“Right. We can’t escape the gravity forever.” She drew lines returning her more dramatic divergences to the main timeline, then flipped to a fresh sheet. Here, she drew a new line and an enormous branching path. “But sometimes there are huge decisions. Alexander chooses not to walk his entire empire, and survives another decade. A city rebellion causes a mass emigration. A great plague is stopped in its infancy, saving millions who might have died. A bomb goes off that never should have been armed. Things that cause ripples that will last for millennia. Those universes stick around for much longer. And that’s us. That’s why we’re all together – we’re some of those universes where the changes mattered, creating more choices, creating more divergence, sustaining us up to now.”

“Sofia,” said the Speaker, “What does this have to do with Matthelm?”

“Or with the married couple?” added Panagos.

“or the murder, for that matter?” said Sai.

“Hold tight,” she said. “I’m nearly there.” Her explanation was coming thick and fast now as the pieces slotted together in her head, and she made an effort to slow down for her audience’s benefit. “You see, we’re all separate universes, but I think we’re still going to converge over time. It will be centuries, probably millennia, from now, and maybe not until humanity is gone for good, but the work has already started. Probability is shifting – things that happened on one Earth are now more likely to happen on another Earth, to better increase our chances of merging. It’s a gradual process, and we won’t see most of the effects, but every so often we’ll see a coincidence. Lars, you knew about Occam’s Razor, and so did I. Mairin, you just mentioned Schrodinger’s Cat – I call it Weinberger’s Cat, but that experiment should never have happened in both our universes, unless…”

“…we’re converging,” finished Kei.

“The song,” Mairin said suddenly. “There was a song playing in the bar, right after the election. I was sure I’d heard it back home, but Cristian insisted it was a Carmen song.”

“There you go. There are probably patterns like that all over the place. Like I say, we won’t see most of them, but we’re becoming more similar over time. So, go back to the two Baronesses. What can we conclude from this theory?”

There was a silence. Sofia wondered if they weren’t getting it, but she was patient – she let them work it out. Lars was the first to provide the theory.

“You’re saying they’re the same… the same person? On different Earths.”

“Right. Clones. Or, quantum clones, if you like. Two women who grew up totally separately, and were given different names, but are genetically and socially similar.”

“Except one passed away, and one didn’t,” said the Speaker.

“Yes. But here’s the evidence, or the closest thing I have. Last night, I wasn’t so sure about any of this, so I requested the health records of the new Baroness, since she was originally from Earth: Carmen. That sort of thing is public record after enough time, anyone can get it.” She didn’t tell them where she had gotten those records, because the secret of Control’s presence still seemed to be under wraps, for now. “And guess what I found? Her family history shows that she is genetically at risk of suffering from leukaemia.”

Nobody spoke for a long while. Sofia was all prepared to take questions – there was still Matthelm to cover – but the implications of this last revelation clearly needed time to sink in. Before she could speak again, however, the silence was broken by a beeping as the Speaker received an alert.

“It’s the Security Chief again,” he said slowly, reading as he spoke. “They say –” he looked up at Sofia like she was an oracle, and before he said it she knew she was right. “They found someone in their camera station. They think he was trying to rip footage of the murder. He tried to fight them back – he had a gun – but they managed to disable him and are holding him there. Sofia… the intruder looked identical to Matthelm.”