Korridorium

♫ The Birth of the GraviPhone ♫

123/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor lead­ing to Pro­fes­sor Cer­il’s lab­o­ra­tory. It’s made of a gleam­ing, sil­very mate­r­ial that flows in curved shapes: no sharp edges or right angles. The pro­fes­sor claims that walk­ing con­tem­pla­tively down this cor­ri­dor gets him in the zone for his work, height­ens his con­cen­tra­tion, and deeply inspires him. I don’t notice any of that. Instead, I slip on the uneven floor and go sprawl­ing. It echoes as if some­one had struck a giant Chi­nese gong. Luck­ily, I did­n’t hurt myself too badly.

“That’s the break­through!” Cer­il’s unmis­tak­able voice greets me from inside the lab. He seems—too absorbed in his research—not to have noticed my gong per­for­mance. Every­thing in here is blink­ing and beep­ing, and I have trou­ble spot­ting the pro­fes­sor behind all the cables, sus­pen­sors, and pul­leys hang­ing from the ceil­ing, and the var­i­ous arti­facts of past exper­i­ments. Wear­ing head­phones, he is bent over a small metal box cov­ered in but­tons. Excit­edly, he explains to me that he’s devel­oped a vir­tual micro­phone he can send to any coor­di­nates in the world via grav­i­ta­tional waves. At first, I don’t get it.

“I can enter any coor­di­nates, and then I hear what­ever there is to hear at that loca­tion. It’s a kind of grav­i­ta­tional-wave radio that can receive sig­nals from vir­tu­ally infi­nite stations—namely, from any point in the uni­verse.” I must look pretty lost. That does­n’t change when he hands me a sec­ond pair of head­phones to demon­strate his inven­tion. Just to test it out, he types in the coor­di­nates for the White House. “Let’s do a lit­tle spy­ing,” he says with a mis­chie­vous grin.

I hear the rustling of silk sheets and soft whis­pers of love, though despite an intense read-through of an Eng­lish dic­tio­nary two or three years ago, I don’t catch every word. But I do pick out two names: John and Cindy. Now Ceril looks pretty lost, too. I enlighten him (after all, I have to live up to my rep­u­ta­tion as a child prodigy every now and then): “McCain and his wife?” Ceril won­ders what on earth they could be doing in Oba­ma’s bed­room, but then light dawns on him: “We’re eaves­drop­ping on a par­al­lel world! One where McCain won the elec­tion instead of Obama. Yes, that must be it—the laws of physics are pro­tect­ing them­selves from a son­i­cally infin­i­tes­i­mal recur­sion. Just like the uncer­tainty prin­ci­ple.”

Ceril imme­di­ately punches in the coor­di­nates of his own lab, and sure enough, we wit­ness a con­ver­sa­tion between him and me—except, he says, these are our alter egos from a par­al­lel uni­verse. Inter­est­ingly, in that real­ity, I seem to be the aging inven­tor and he’s the teenage assis­tant.

Before I can learn any more, Ceril switches off the device, takes off his head­phones, and turns to me: “This opens up fan­tas­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties, kid! I can eaves­drop on other ver­sions of myself who have already worked out my many ideas”—he taps the mas­sive index card box beneath his desk—“which saves me lengthy test­ing phases.” And saves me, I think, from poten­tially per­ilous real-world tests of his count­less inven­tions. “I just need to mod­ify the thing accord­ingly.” With that, he starts scrib­bling com­plex for­mu­las on paper with one hand while twist­ing wires together with the other. As for me, I am com­pletely for­got­ten.

Would I even be inter­ested in what other ver­sions of me have to say? On the walk back through the cor­ri­dor, I shake my head. What good would that do any­way? Then I remem­ber why I went to see Ceril in the first place: to ask if he could build me a machine that spits out what teach­ers will want to know on exams a few days in advance. Then again, I have to admit to myself that even with­out a pre­dic­tion machine like that, I’ve always known every­thing anyway—and school should­n’t get any more bor­ing for me than it already is.

(And it won’t. Quite the oppo­site. Because of her. But that’s another story.)