Pizza to Go
Matt Heck
From “Giant Death-Lasers and Other Children's Toys”.
Copyright 2003 by Matt Heck. All rights reserved.
The pepperoni was missing.
Having run for his life from the street down into the parking garage, sprinted under gunfire through an unmarked access door, and finally lost his pursuers in a huge maze of blindingly white underground hallways, he had opened the pizza box that he was-- somehow-- still carrying.
And the pepperoni was missing. Not a slice. Instead, something that looked like...
A voice: “Wait a second, did we check that one?”
Pablo froze. His ears seemed to all but stretch out from his head, straining to catch anything that could be caught. They proudly pulled in an unnerving silence with flawless accuracy. Looking around, he saw only the same doors he'd seen everywhere in the white maze-- evenly spaced every twenty feet, on both sides of the hallway, with lever-style doorknobs that didn't so much as rattle if you tried them. He started trying them again anyway, tapping the handles sharply with the heel of his palm as he tiptoed quickly down the hall, looking over his shoulder.
Tap. Next.
Tap. Next.
Tap. Next.
Then: “What the-- Carlos, didn't you just run down that hallway?”
And: “Well where the hell did you come from, Eddie? Thought you were right behind me...” Pablo could hear running footseps.
Ham, his nose told him, the bastard put on ham. What a horrible thing, for a person to botch the last thing he'd ever do in his life. Suddenly, Pablo realized that the smell had been forced to his nose-- there was a faint breeze coming from one of the next few doors. He tried them rapidly, as the sound of the footsteps increased, echoing off the walls until it sounded as though a whole bowling league was after him.
Tap. Next.
Tap. Next.
Click.
As soon as the door gave, he pushed it open-- against a significant pressure differrence-- slid inside, and eased it closed. Slowly, quietly, he let the handle return to center.
“Hello,” came a flat voice. Pablo nearly jumped on top of the door frame. He spun around, and found himself facing a balding, forty-something man in a white labcoat. He stood in the center of the room-- itself, the same perfect white as the hallways-- carrying a small clipboard, and a pen. Behind him was a small, white, empty lab table.
“I gotta call the police!” Pablo blurted out.
The scientist nodded solemnly. “Yes... well, someone, anyway. Hawking, perhaps.”
“No, no, no--” Pablo shook his head and gasped for air. “There's three guys chasing me, shooting at me. I saw them kill the cook in this pizzaria-- they blew him away, right in front of me!” His glance flew back to the door handle, looking for a lock-- there wasn't one. “They're right behind me!”
“How did you get in here?”
Pablo tried to splice his memories together under pressure. “I ran a few blocks, then down into a parking garage under an office building, and through this door on the lower floor. Please, we gotta call the cops!”
“Which door?” the scientist pressed, a hard look in his eyes.
“I... I don't know, it wasn't marked. I ran through it into this long white hallway, and then I turned through a couple of other other hallways, and then I wound up here.”
The scientist hopped up on the edge of the table, sat there, and swung his legs. “Oh dear,” he finally said.
“There's no phone in here,” Pablo observed. “Where the hell are we, anyway? Everything around here looks exactly the same.”
The scientist pointed at him, as if picking out a man in a line-up. “Exactly,” he said, “that's the very thing.” He hesitated a second, then continued. “How long would you say that hallway out there is?”
“What? I-- I don't know, pretty damned long. I don't remember being able to see the end of it. That's why I started trying these doors. It's blind luck that I picked yours.”
“Not as lucky as you might think. And the other hallways?” he asked, swinging his legs again.
“Mostly just as long, with a couple of short ones that dead-ended, I don't know, maybe fifty feet in either direction.”
The scientist nodded. “Yes, those are the real ones.”
Pablo cocked his head. “What? You mean the ones with stairwells or something?”
He sighed. “This building contains the main research labs of the Morrison-Montoya Corporation. We do a mixture of quantum computing, quantum fields research, and, for some reason, accounting.”
“Yeah, okay; I think I saw you guys on Nightline or something.”
“Hmmm,” he nodded, “that was the end of most of the accounting. We now perform work primarily for the Department of Energy. This subfloor is used mostly by my group, the Tesseral Displacement Activity, and contains a few dozen small labs-- including this one.”
“A few dozen! But there must've been hundreds--”
“I know. There was an accident.”
“What? What kind of an accident?”
He held up his hands. “I'm going to have to tell you a very strange story, and I need you to not say anything until I'm done.”
“But what if they come in here?”
“They won't. If they do, there's nothing we can do about it, anyway. There's no quick way for you to get out of here, especially not without running into them. Now listen.”
Pablo sank to the floor, and sat there. “Fine.”
The scientist hesitated, then clasped his hands together, and began. “How many differrent layouts would you say you can fit on a checkerboard?”
Pablo stared at him for a long time. “I thought you told me to listen,” he eventually said.
The scientist rolled his eyes. “How many?”
“I don't know, a lot. What the hell does it matter?”
“A lot, but not an infinite number. Right? You only have so many spaces, and so many pieces. Assuming each piece has to line up on a space, there's only so many differrent arrangements you can have. Well, it turns out that in the fabric of space and time, the quantum particles that make up atoms, are like that-- they have to align themselves with a sort of ultra-fine cosmic grid. There are only so many spaces, so to speak, in the universe. There is also a fixed amount of energy, and therefore matter, in the universe, and because of those two things, there are a finite number of possible states of the universe, at any given point in time. And we believe that all of these states do, in fact, exist-- somewhere. The next checkerboard over, so to speak.”
“You mean the whole parallel reality thing? Like there's another me on another Earth somewhere, who didn't flunk out of college?”
“Yes, more or less. Sorry to hear that, by the way. We were experimenting with ways to connect a very small chunk of space-- called a Planck volume-- in our reality, to another reality, by causing it to be... well... easier to express, I suppose you could say, in that other reality. And it does seem that we managed to do that, among other things.”
“You're trying to tell me you guys came up with a way to go to... an alternate Earth? Any alternate Earth?” Pablo's eyebrows almost met in the middle.
“No,” he said, with emphasis. “Not all of them. What keeps you from seeing all those possible checkerboard combinations in an actual game? Why are there some you won't ever see?”
Pablo thought for a moment. “Because not all of them follow the rules,” he finally offerred.
“Precisely.” Another emphatic finger pointing. “Not all the possible states of a universe for any given point in time are legal for our laws of physics. A mind-bogglingly huge subset of them are legal, but not all of them. So the actual state may exist, but because our laws of reality won't allow us to represent it, or more accurately to transition to it, we can't interact with it. So far as we know, anyway. So there was a very large, but not infinite, number of states we expected to potentially be able to interact with.”
“So what the hell happened?” Pablo demanded.
“Well... we decided that it was most likely that we'd connect with another universe very similar to ours, because less-- ah-- tweaking was required. So, it wasn't all that unreasonable to assume that our mirror team in the alternate reality would be conducting the same, or similar, experiment. We set up the field generator, a transmitter, and a detector, and started shooting photon pulses through the shared Planck volume. At first, we thought nothing happened--” suddenly, he looked very perplexed-- “and what happened next is really difficult to describe, but suddenly the entire experimental apparatus wasn't there anymore, even though I really can't say I saw it disappear, exactly. It just wasn't there anymore, even though this table was still here, and all of us were here. Like a magician's card trick.”
Pablo just stared at him.
“We opened the door, and the hallways, it seemed, had somehow connected to themselves. Our test volume must've somehow expanded to encompass a chunk of the whole floor, though I don't understand how, at all. Luckily, it was a busy day, and the real hallway, so to speak, was full of people-- we just had everybody retrace their steps, and followed them out. Otherwise, we'd have never found our way back out. That's what this map is,” he finished, showing Pablo the clipboard. “Luckily, we didn't lose anybody. We think.”
Pablo shook his head, jumped to his feet, got ready to yell at him-- and then suddenly opened the door and stared down the hallway. He took a good, long, hard look. He tried to remember the longest hallway he had ever seen. He tried to remember the longest distance he had ever seen. Finally, he closed the door and sat back down.
“Okay, this is more than I can deal with,” Pablo said, and slapped his head on the box. “Please just show me where the exit is.”
“What do you have in that box?” the scientist asked.
“A pepperoni pizza,” Pablo replied.
The scientist eyed the box; Pablo handed it to him. He took it, opened the lid partway, stared into it for a few seconds, and then snapped it closed again.
“This,” he said, tapping the lid with his index finger, “is ham.”
“Well, it was supposed to be a pepperoni pizza.”
The scientist regarded him gravely. “Indeed. I think we should step out into the hall. There's something I need to show you.”
“I don't think that's a good idea. Those guys are armed.”
“I'm pretty sure they're already lost. Or worse, they may have taken one of the exits.” He opened the door. Pablo rose to his feet, and followed him out.
The scientist aimed his laser pointer straight down the unterminating length of the hall, and angled it around. Pablo thought he saw a red glint off something-- and suddenly realized there was a bright red spot on the back of the scientist's hand. It shuddered, not quite steady, as if the muscle tremor had been exaggerated over a long distance.
“Oh, shit.”
“Mmm,” the scientist nodded approvingly, “that was my reaction, as well. That was our first experiment. This was our second.” He took the laser pointer and chucked it down the hall, getting a good amount of distance. Pablo watched it clatter to the floor-- but the sound seemed too loud, too close. He looked down, and another laser pointer was rolling to a stop in front of his feet. He spun, and looked behind him-- but saw nothing. He stared at it, picked it up, and ran a few dozen meters ahead.
There, on the ground, in the same orientation as the first, was an identical laser pointer. He picked it up and ran back to the scientist. “What is this, a copy?”
“A copy, or another one from a similar reality that's somehow been mapped into part of the kinked toroidal space containing these hallways. Or, possibly, the same physical object mapped into multiple positions in spacetime. Some of these hallways seem to go on forever without copying anything-- those are probably windows into alternate realities mapped edge-to-edge. Others look the same, but seem to replicate things-- those are probably the same window mapped into the same reality multiple times. Though that reality might only exist while you're standing in it. I've been trying to think about it, but it's a good way to give yourself a headache.”
Pablo chucked both of the pointers down the hall. With a clatter, they landed in the distance-- and two more landed at his feet. He felt a chill go up his spine, and a thought struck him.
“Oh my god, what happened when I was running around in here?”
The scientist nodded, again, and winced slightly. “That's what I wanted to tell you, but there was no way you'd believe it until you saw it yourself. There's a good chance there are a couple of copies of you running around in here now. They, in turn, may be inadvertently copying themselves. And, of course, there are almost certainly additional yous from alternate hallways, doing the exact same thing. Somewhere in here, you're likely to run into a copy of yourself that might be hard to recognize. There might be considerable differrences in some cases, and practically none in others.”
“And those goons that chased me in here?”
“Them too, I suspect. I have a hunch it's going to get more crowded in here as time goes on. The only reason we don't see them right now is that there's an almost, but not quite, infinite amount of space. There's a very small number of them. However, if they're really copying themselves as they run around, the population density is going to rise exponentially. In fact, the only thing in here that might be truly infinite is the number of potential copies. Of course, on the other hand, when you ran up to get that first laser pointer, nobody ran up beside me, so I'm just as confused as you are. Maybe there's something else going on.”
“What the hell do we do now? How do we get out?”
“Well, assuming these hallways are just transforms on whatever it is that contains multiple spacetimes, the transforms seem to work in reverse. So you just have to zig where you zagged, so to speak.”
“So if I can find a way to retrace my steps, I can get out of here, right?”
“Right.” The scientist tapped his clipboard. “I'm okay, because I know where I am right now, and how to get back. You, unfortunately, don't have a map. Speaking of which...” He tore off a blank sheet of paper, copied his map onto it, and handed it to Pablo, along with a second pen.
“Does it really work?”
“Oh, yes,” the scientist said reassuringly, “I've been up to the cafeteria for lunch and dinner a few times since the incident. Even left the building entirely, a couple of times.”
“But what reassurance do you have that you were returning to exactly the same reality you left?”
“None whatsoever,” he admitted with a weak smile. “It's driving me to drink a bit, in fact. Fortuantely, it still seems to be the same bar.”
“Can't I just go out with you?”
“You could, but there's no guarrantee it'll be your universe. You and I aren't even sure we're from the same one, though it must be very similar, what with the Nightline thing and all. But what the hell, it's worth a shot-- come on. Once we go back to the room, it's only one turn and a few doors up.”
Presently, they arrived at the door the scientist had circled three times on his clipboard. He opened the door and stepped through into what he recognized as his cafeteria. Pablo, however, took one look at what was being served, dropped his jaw, and stepped back.
“Shit!”
“Oh dear. That obvious, is it? Are you sure it isn't just our poor decorating habits?”
Pablo looked straight into his eyes. “I am so unbelievably sure, I have absolutely no idea how to convey my level of certainty to you without using a considerable amount of foul language.”
The scientist clicked his tounge. “That bad, huh?”
Pablo nodded, looking past him and turning pale. “I guess I'll have to start looking.”
The scientist raised his eyebrows, shrugged, then nodded supportively. “Welp, take this--” he tossed one of the laser pointers to Pablo, who caught it-- finding it to look somehow more familiar in his hands than in the air-- and started to back out of the door frame, back into the maze, with its not-quite-infinite number of Pablos no doubt being slaughtered by a not-quite-infinite number of gunmen.
“And look on the bright side-- somewhere in there, there's got to be a pepperoni pizza.”
Copyright (C)2003 by Matt Heck. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce.
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