Infinity: A Jenlisa AU

Chapter 13

Jennie sits up.

Clearheaded and alert.

Jisoo and Rosé aren't lying on the floor anymore. They're standing several feet away with their backs to Jennie.

Jennie calls out to them, asking if they're both okay, but Jisoo and Rosé didn't answer.

Jennie struggles onto her feet.

Jisoo is holding the lantern and as Jennie moves toward her, she see that the light isn't striking the wall of the box, which should be straight ahead of them.

Jennie walks past them. She follows with the lantern.

The light reveals another door, identical to the one they just came through from the hangar.

Jennie continues walking.

Another twelve feet brings them to another door.

And then another.

And another.

The lantern only exudes the brilliance of a single, sixty-watt bulb, and beyond seventy or eighty feet, the light dwindles off into haunting shreds of illumination, glinting off the cold surface of the metal walls on one side, the perfectly spaced doors on the other.

Beyond their sphere of light—absolute darkness, Jennie stops, awestruck and speechless.

Jennie think of the thousands of articles and books she have read in her lifetime. Tests taken. Classes taught. Theories memorized. Equations scribbled on blackboards. Jennie think of the months she spent in that cleanroom trying to build something that was a pale imitation of the current place she's in.

For students of physics and cosmology, the closest one can ever get to the tangible implications of research are ancient galaxies seen through telescopes. Data readouts following particle collisions we know occurred but can never see. There's always a boundary, a barrier between the equations and the reality they represent.

But no more. Not for Jennie, Jisoo and Rosé at least.

Jennie can't stop thinking, She is there. She is actually in that place. It exists. At least for a moment, fear has left Jennie and instead, she's filled with wonder.

She says, " 'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.' " Rosé looks at her. "Einstein's words, not mine."

"Is this place even real?" Rosé asks.

"What do you mean by 'real'?" Jisoo responds.

Rosé wonders, "Are we standing in a physical location?"

Jennie understood her question and said, "I think it's a manifestation of the mind as it attempts to visually explain something our brains haven't evolved to comprehend."

"Which is?" Rosé asks again.

"Superposition." Jennie answers.

"So we're experiencing a quantum state right now?"

Jennie glance back at Rosé and Jisoo then stares down the corridor; Into the darkness ahead. Even in the low light, there's a recursive quality to the space, like two mirrors facing each other.

"Yeah. It looks like a corridor, but I think it's actually the box repeating itself across all possible realities that share the same point in space and time." Jennie finally said.

Jisoo, with her knowledge of the other Jennie's research, asked, "Like a cross-section?"

"Exactly. In some presentations of quantum mechanics, the thing that contains all the information for the system—before it collapses due to an observation—is called a wave function. I'm thinking this corridor is our minds' way of visualizing the content of the wave function, of all possible outcomes, for our superposed quantum state."