White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Thirteen

Nobody shows up for the team meeting until Kwon walks in with a plate of cookies. Liu and Krüger are quick to materialize as the smell wafts through the Pod. Liu empties enough notebooks, maps, and mathematical instruments to sink a small canoe onto the coffee table, which wobbles ominously. Krüger looks around for somewhere to leave his coffee. An attempt to clear a spot dislodges several pens, which scatter across the linoleum.

Krüger rescues an antique-looking brass compass from the stack before it slides away, too, and stows it in his pocket before taking resignedly to a couch and perching his laptop on his knees. He snatches his travel mug from the floor as a notebook pile starts to tip. Kwon takes the logical approach and fetches a chair from her workshop to double as a second table. It takes two more to finally bring the scientific detritus under control, then several stools to provide space for laptops and cookies. I pull the latter to my side of the room to hold ransom until the meeting has gotten underway with some semblance of focus.

Finally, it looks like we might actually be able to start. I start the voice recorder on my phone—no way in hell I'm taking written notes—then give the loaded coffee table a side-eye, which Liu catches. "We don't need it all," she says. "I just forgot where I put the calculations. It all needs to go back to the lab anyway."

"As long as we can talk without it, then, fine by me." I lean back in my armchair, which gives a hideous rubbery groan that makes us all wince. "Who wants to start?"

They exchange a glance and a nod. Liu thumps a thick teal notebook into her lap, bouncing her and Kwon's couch. "I can. First of all, how much do you know about demighosts?"

I sit up straighter. This was another kerfuffle in the scientific community, groundbreaking on par with Yahvi's proposition of planetary consciousness, and released only a year earlier. Anyone with a pair of eyes or ears and the remotest access to a news source heard about it—in pop-media form, at least.

"Give us an overview," I say. I don't trust pop media, and I want to make sure we're all on the same scientific page about the details.

Liu nods. "Okay. Well, they're basically objects that move on their own. The kind of thing people would put down to ghosts if they were superstitious... you know, 'teleporting' cups, a door that closes by itself, et cetera, et cetera. Well, demighost theory says there's a reason it happens. It's something to do with quantum entanglement, but it basically means the object that's moving is connected across a parallel dimension to another object in the same one. That other object is the one moving, but because they're linked, they move together. Does that make sense?"

Kwon nods slowly.

"Enough to work with," I say. It's about what I've heard. The first report I ever heard about the phenomena used the example of a pair of doors, each in their own house, on two separate planets. If the pair became linked, one could become a demighost of the other, or both could be equally affected. Whenever someone opened or closed the "host" door, the demighost door would move the same way.

"There are caveats, though," sayd Liu. "A hypothetical 'perfect' case means complete, two-way mimicry: when one door opens, the other opens, and when one closes, the other closes. But that's a perfect case. Most of the time, the link is too small to notice, so most of the 'ghosts are real' stuff with slamming doors and things flying around is exaggerated. It's way more likely that a demighost door would just creak a little when its host moves."

Movement-across-distance is opening up all kinds of possibilities here on Mahaha. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't see how this applies.

"Do you think Mahaha has demighosts?" says Kwon.

"Well," says Liu. "Possibly."

Like I thought.