Many Worlds of Albie Bright Page 3

  After Grandad Joe brings me home from school, he sits me down in the kitchen to eat some lunch.

  “You need to keep your strength up, Albie lad.” Grandad scrapes what looks like a fried insole off the bottom of the saucepan and slides it on to my plate. “This will soon have you feeling right as rain.”

  I stare down at the plate in front of me. It looks like a CSI crime scene in a burnt-out butcher’s shop. I’d watched Grandad Joe get sausages, streaky bacon and black pudding out of the fridge, but apart from a greasy lake of baked beans, everything else on my plate has been burnt beyond recognition. I give what looks like a roasted finger an experimental poke with my fork. Its prongs bounce straight back, unable to pierce the banger’s jet-black skin – now more non-stick saucepan than sausage.

  Burnt food is carcinogenic. This means it can cause cancer. If I eat this sausage then one cell in my body might mutate and then another and another and I wouldn’t know that I had cancer until it was too late. Just like my mum.

  I push the plate away. It isn’t worth the risk.

  “Come on, Albie. Eat up, lad.”

  I can hear the worry in Grandad’s voice but this doesn’t stop me from shaking my head.

  “Mum usually makes me a sandwich,” I tell him.

  Grandad Joe sighs as he sinks down in the kitchen chair next to mine.

  “Flaming hip,” he mutters, wincing as he tries to bend his leg under the table. “I’m sorry, Albie. I can make you a sandwich if you want; just give me a minute.”

  Now he’s got me feeling guilty, so I quickly shake my head.

  “It’s OK, Grandad. I’ll just eat my baked beans. It’ll make a nice change.”

  Grandad Joe sighs again.

  “There’s been too much change round here lately and none of it for the better.”

  After Mum died, the vicar came round to our house to talk about the funeral. As usual, Dad and Grandad ended up arguing about everything – the flowers, the hymns, the music. Dad wanted “Across the Universe” by the Beatles, but Grandad said it wouldn’t be a proper funeral unless you had “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. In the end the vicar said that they would start the service with “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and then play “Across the Universe” at the end. I didn’t care – the only song that made me think of Mum was the one we used to dance together round the kitchen to, and I didn’t want to hear that at the funeral. It’d only remind me that she wasn’t here any more.

  Before he left, the vicar tried to give me a little booklet with a sad-looking rabbit on the front called When Bunny Lost Her Mummy. I told him I was too old for picture books, so he gave me the leaflet for grown-ups instead. This was called Coping with Grief and was all about the feelings you have when someone close to you dies. The booklet said that most people go through five stages of grief.

  1. DENIAL. This is the stage Dad’s still stuck at. Disappearing down into the Deep Mine Lab and pretending that everything’s OK. It’s not and I just wish he’d help me to solve the problem instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist.

  2. ANGER. This is the stage Grandad Joe’s at – that’s why he keeps on arguing with my dad. Yesterday I overheard him telling Dad that it must have been working at the Large Hadron Collider that made Mum ill. He said all that messing about with atoms must have given her cancer. Dad told him he was being ridiculous, but Grandad just swore at him. I’ve never heard Grandad Joe swear before so this shows you how angry he is.

  3. BARGAINING. This is what I did when Mum first told me she had cancer. If I didn’t step on a crack when I walked to school then she’d be OK. If I saw a shooting star then her cancer would go away. I’d drive myself crazy trying to make these challenges come true, but nothing ever worked.

  4. DEPRESSION. This is how everyone at school thinks I should be feeling, but I’ve not cried since Mum died. You see, I’ve realised that feeling sad is just a waste of time and I’ve got to keep my focus on putting things right.

  5. ACCEPTANCE. The booklet said this final stage means facing up to the fact that the person who’s died is never coming back. But the thing is, since Dad told me there’s a parallel universe where Mum’s still alive, the only thing I’ve been able to think about is how I can get to see her again.

  After taking a mouthful of beans I push my plate away with a grimace. Grandad might have scorched the sausages and bacon but he’s forgotten to heat up the baked beans.

  “I’m not feeling very hungry at the moment.”

  “Let me make you a sandwich instead.” Grandad Joe glances up at the clock on the kitchen wall. “There’s a good film starting on the telly in a bit – Back to the Future. That used to be one of your mum’s favourites. We could watch it together.”

  Whenever Dad was away for the weekend filming for his TV show, me and Mum used to have movie marathons on a Saturday night. We’d binge-watch all the Star Wars films, Doctor Who box sets, Back to the Future 1, 2 and 3. Mum said that Back to the Future was the film that made her want to become a scientist, but she was a bit disappointed that she hadn’t managed to invent a time machine yet.

  At the time I laughed, but now I remember what Grandad Joe said yesterday. Maybe if Mum hadn’t become a scientist then she’d still be here today.

  “Do you really think it was Mum’s work that made her ill?”

  Now it’s Grandad Joe’s turn to look guilty.

  “I’m sorry, Albie,” he says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “I didn’t mean for you to hear that.” He sighs again, the last of his energy seeming to sag out of him in a single breath. “No, I don’t think it made her ill. I was just looking for somebody to blame. I was as proud as punch of your mum when she told me she was going to be a scientist. The first in this family ever to go to university, and Cambridge University at that. Of course, I didn’t understand any of that par-tic-u-lar physics stuff she was studying – atoms, protons and all those thingamajigs – but after your Grandma Joyce died she tried to explain it to me. We had the telescope out in the back garden, looking at the stars – just like we used to when your mum was a little girl. But this time she was telling me how everything we could see – all the thousands of stars in the sky – once fitted into a tiny bubble a thousand times smaller than the head of a pin. She said that the Big Bang had created all this and her experiments were exploring how the universe was made. It sounded incredible to me but, like I said to your mum, it needed someone to make the bang in the first place.”

  “So do you think Mum’s in heaven, Grandad?”

  “Of course she is,” he replies confidently, pushing his glasses back into place. “Your grandma will be sorting her out with her wings as we speak.” He gets up out of his chair with a wince. “So, shall I get the popcorn out?”

  I shake my head. Watching Back to the Future again isn’t going to help me find Mum.

  “I think I’ll skip the film, Grandad. I’ve got homework to do.”

  My bedroom is at the top of the house. It’s where all my stuff is. Actually it’s where most of Mum and Dad’s stuff is too. When we moved back to England there wasn’t time to unpack everything with Dad taking Mum to all her appointments at the hospital, and loads of boxes filled with their work stuff got shoved out of the way up in my room.

  “It’s just a temporary storage solution,” Dad said when I complained that I didn’t have enough room to swing a cat. “We’ll sort them all out when your mum’s feeling better.”

  So one half of my bedroom floor is still covered in cardboard boxes that I have to climb over every morning when I get up. My bedroom back in Geneva was twice the size of this attic room and I had it just how I wanted it. There was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase for all my books and comics, a huge desk where I could set up my school projects, and above my bed a giant star map showing every constellation in the Milky Way.

  I sit down on the edge of my bed. Now I’ve got no bookcase and piles of books and comics everywhere, a teeny desk that isn’t big enough to do my homew
ork on and no room on the walls for my star map. The only poster that I have put up is a map of the solar system, but this is just to disguise the rubbish decorating job that Grandad Joe did when he heard we were moving back. This room used to be my nursery when I was a baby and underneath Grandad’s rushed paint job you can still see the old Paddington Bear wallpaper if you squint.

  In the middle of my room is my telescope, pointing up out of the attic skylight. Mum and Dad bought me this for my last birthday to help me keep an eye on any dangerous asteroids that might be heading towards Earth. I follow @AsteroidWatch on Twitter to get any early warnings. You can’t be too careful. Mum says that it was a mega-asteroid strike that wiped the dinosaurs out, and there are thousands of asteroids in space. One could be heading straight for us right now, so I’ve got to keep watching the skies.

  That was the one good thing about moving back to Clackthorpe. The village is right in the middle of a Dark Sky Park that covers most of the moors. This means there’s no street lamps, no light pollution – nothing to stop you from seeing thousands of stars in the sky.

  You should really set your telescope up outside to get the best results, but the cold air made Mum start coughing up her guts so instead we used to sit up in my room together to stargaze.

  I close my eyes as I remember Mum sitting on the edge of my bed, snuggled up in the fluffy dressing gown I’d bought her last Christmas, now two sizes too big for her after all her treatments at the hospital. As my new telescope spins round the sky, Mum tells me about the wonders we can see. Comets and meteors, the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda Galaxy, the ice rings of Saturn, and Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. One of my favourite sights is Omega Centauri – a cluster of ten million stars orbiting the Milky Way. Staring down the eye of the telescope this looks like a swarm of fireflies in space.

  Mum told me that when you look up at the sky at night you’re actually staring into the past. Omega Centauri is over 15,000 light years away. This means when I look at it through my telescope I’m seeing the stars as they were over 15,000 years ago. Some of these stars might have died ages ago, but their light is still travelling towards us. Even Barnard’s Star, which is one of the nearest stars to Earth, is still six light years away. That means if I want to know what this star looks like right “now”, I’m going to have to wait until I finish secondary school for its light to reach me. Mum said her experiments at the Large Hadron Collider were looking back billions of years into the past to take a photo of the very beginning of the universe.

  If an alien in the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system was staring through a super-powerful telescope at Earth right now, would they be able to look through my skylight window and see Mum sitting next to me on the bed?

  I open my eyes and look around the empty room. Now all they’d see was the black hole she’d left behind and nothing could ever fill that.

  This is going to sound awful, but sometimes I wish it had been Dad who’d died instead of Mum. You see, there’s tons of clips of him on YouTube and I can even watch the box set of his TV show, but I don’t have any videos of my mum. I can’t just click on a clip to see her face or hear her voice.

  I open up my school bag. The only homework that matters now is finding my mum. Leaving my packed lunch on the bed, I pull out Dad’s book and flick again to the page showing the zombie cat, still trapped half dead and half alive inside the box. If I want to understand how quantum physics works then I’ve got to read the rest of his explanation.

  But not all scientists believe that Schrödinger’s cat can be dead and alive at the same time. A scientist called Hugh Everett had a very different explanation for the strange ways that atoms behave in the quantum world. This is the Many Worlds Interpretation. His theory said that when the box is opened, the universe splits in two. In one universe the cat is dead and in another universe the cat is alive. Both of these parallel universes are real and could even be in the same place in space but separated in different dimensions.

  Parallel universes, different dimensions – quantum physics sounds more like science fiction than science fact.

  According to the Many Worlds Interpretation there are an infinite number of these parallel universes, each one filled with a copy of you, living an identical life, but with one tiny change where a different choice has been made. Scientists now working at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN think their experiments might even be able to detect whether these parallel universes exist by creating nano black holes.

  Wait a minute! Mum never told me this. I thought her experiments at the Large Hadron Collider were all about trying to find out how the universe began, not discovering parallel ones. I look up at the cardboard boxes littering my room, most of them filled with Mum’s stuff from CERN. Maybe the clue to finding a way to one of these parallel worlds is hidden in one of these boxes…

  Opening up the cardboard flaps, I start to unpack the nearest of the boxes. The first things I find are piles of boring-looking magazines called the International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Nuclear Instruments and Methods and Physics Letters. I flick through the last of these but it doesn’t have any interesting problem pages like some of Mum’s other magazines and to be honest I can’t understand a single word.

  Underneath these magazines there’s a pile of stuff that Mum used to keep on her desk at CERN. One by one, I pull these out of the box. There’s a digital USB Geiger counter for detecting radioactivity, a Newton’s Cradle desk toy with its wires all tangled up, an Albert Einstein mouse mat, a laptop stand and an old ammonite fossil.

  Mum and me found this fossil when we were walking on the moors together on one of our trips back to visit Grandad Joe. It’s about 3cm wide, gold-coloured and shaped like a spiral. When we found it, Mum told me it was all that was left of an extinct sea creature that lived 100 million years ago. Dad said he was going to make the fossil into a necklace for Mum, but he never got round to it. I put the ammonite in my pocket.

  Next in the box there are more piles of paper – computer printouts filled with endless lines of strange messages that don’t make any sense. DECAY ACTIVATED AT BEAMPIPE AND LEVEL 1. IONIZATION ACTIVE IN 2 MAIN VOLUME. I don’t know what any of this means. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m not a quantum physicist – I’m only in Year 6.

  My initial burst of hope starts to fade away. If Mum couldn’t find a parallel universe then what chance do I have? But as I pull out the last of the papers I see the answer to my prayers at the bottom of the box. It’s a leather shoulder bag – the one that my mum took with her to work every day.

  Unzipping it, I pull out Mum’s laptop. She brought this back from CERN when she thought she could carry on working from home – before the first blast of radiotherapy left her too weak to eat, let alone work.

  Mum told me that her laptop was a prototype quantum computer, millions of times more powerful than any ordinary laptop you’d find in PC World. You see, Mum’s laptop is linked to the Grid – a huge network of computers dotted around the world. The Grid analyses the billions of tons of data churned out by the Large Hadron Collider every time it smashes atoms together. Most ordinary computers would take years to analyse each collision, but Mum’s quantum supercomputer can do this in seconds. It’s even got its own mini particle accelerator on a computer chip inside – a micro Large Hadron Collider – that can virtually replay the results of her experiments. Nanotechnology, Mum said, and even Dad looked impressed when he saw it for the first time.

  I open the laptop, the screen blinking into life almost before I press the button to turn it on. A stream of numbers pulses across the screen – zeroes and ones – flashing by so quickly that they all blur into one. This is the data streaming in from the Large Hadron Collider. If Dad’s book is right, the proof that parallel universes are real is hidden somewhere inside this.

  This is when I have my Eureka moment.

  Scientists say “Eureka!” whenever they think up amazing new theories. It was all started by this scientist called Archimedes wh
o lived in Ancient Greece over two thousand years ago. Apparently he had some brilliant idea when he was jumping into the bath and then ran around in the nuddy shouting “Eureka!” I think it’s an old Greek word that means “I found it” or maybe just “I’m freezing cold!”

  Anyway, I don’t start running round Clackthorpe in the nude, but as I look at the empty cardboard box and the flickering laptop screen, I have my own brilliant idea.

  On his TV show Dad once said that the greatest scientific discoveries are made when scientists look at something and think, “I wonder what will happen if I change this a bit.”

  That’s what an experiment is.

  So if Schrödinger’s cat could be sent into a parallel universe when it was put in a box with a lump of radioactive uranium, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison, what would happen if I climbed into the box instead? Obviously I don’t want to turn up in a parallel world as dead as a dodo, so I can ditch the bottle of poison. I’ve already got my mum’s digital USB Geiger counter, but looking round my room I can’t see any lumps of radioactive uranium. But I do spot my packed lunch.

  One cheese-and-pickle sandwich, a bag of Hula Hoops and a banana.

  Do you know that bananas are radioactive? Take a look at the fruit bowl in your kitchen. If there’s a banana in there, the chances are it’s just given you a dose of radioactivity. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you’re going to turn bright green if you take a bite. You’d have to eat about five million bananas to turn into a mutant zombie. It’s radioactive because as well as all the vitamins you find in normal fruit like apples and pears, bananas have a secret ingredient called potassium-40. This means that at any moment there’s a 10% chance that a banana will give you a blast of gamma-ray radiation when an atom inside it decays.

  Grabbing the banana from my bed, I put this next to the laptop, digital Geiger counter and cardboard box on the floor. If there’s a 10% chance of the banana going radioactive then according to Dad’s book this should split the universe in two. In one universe the banana will sit there harmlessly, while in another it will spit out a radioactive gamma ray. If I hook up the Geiger counter to Mum’s quantum computer then maybe it can find a shortcut to the parallel universe where this happens. I decide to call this the Quantum Banana Theory.