The Many Worlds of Albie Bright Read online

  Nearly as fast as an atom whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider, Wesley’s fist shoots out to give me a dead arm.

  “Ow!”

  “You’d better help me tomorrow,” Wesley warns me, “or else. And don’t think you can use your mum as an excuse. Loads of people haven’t got a mum, but you won’t catch me crying about it.”

  Wesley lives with his nan and granddad. Kiran told me that Wesley’s mum went on holiday to the Costa del Sol when Wesley was in Year 3 and never came back, but at least he gets to see her during the summer holidays.

  Mrs. Forest suddenly appears like a library ninja from behind the geography and history bookshelves.

  “What’s going on here?” she says, a look of suspicion on her face. “Wesley, what are you doing out of class?”

  “Miss Benjamin just sent me to check that Albie was OK, miss.” Wesley drops my dad’s book back into my lap as he gets up from the sofa. “You know, because of his mum and everything.”

  “And are you OK, Albie?” Mrs. Forest asks, looking down at the open book in my hands. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  As my dead arm aches, I look down again at the cartoon cat—the zombie pet still half alive and half dead. I don’t have a clue how Schrödinger’s crazy experiment could help me find my mum again. Quantum physics is seriously confusing. I need time to think, but there’s no chance of that happening in school. Especially not with Wesley MacNamara dead-arming me to take part in his latest crazy scheme. I can feel my brain shutting down to take the pain away, leaving me empty inside. I’ve got to get out of here.

  “I’m not sure, miss.” I sniff, wiping a bit of wetness from the corner of my eye. “I just want to go home.”

  As Mrs. Forest bustles me off to the school office to phone Granddad Joe, Wesley calls out after me.

  “See you tomorrow.” I look back to see Wesley clench his fingers into a fist. “Or else,” he mouths.

  After Granddad 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.” Granddad scrapes what looks like a fried insole off the bottom of the saucepan and slides it onto 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 Granddad 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 nonstick 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 Granddad Joe’s voice, but this doesn’t stop me from shaking my head.

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

  Granddad 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 again.

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

  Granddad Joe sighs again.

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

  After Mum died, the vicar came around to our house to talk about the funeral. As usual, Dad and Granddad Joe ended up arguing about everything—the flowers, the hymns, the music. Dad wanted “Across the Universe” by the Beatles, but Granddad Joe 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 around the kitchen to, and I didn’t want to hear that at the funeral. It’d only remind me that she wasn’t here anymore.

  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 leaflet said that most people go through five stages of grief.

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

  2. ANGER. This is the stage Granddad Joe’s in—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 Granddad Joe just swore at him. I’ve never heard Granddad 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 haven’t cried since Mum died. You see, I’ve realized that feeling sad is just a waste of time, and I’ve got to keep my focus on putting things right.

  5. ACCEPTANCE. The leaflet said this final stage means facing the fact that the person who 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. Granddad Joe 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.” Granddad Joe glances up at the clock on the kitchen wall. “There’s a good film starting on the TV in a bit—Back to the Future. That used to be one of your mum’s favorites. We could watch it together.”

  Whenever Dad was away for the weekend filming his TV show, Mum and I used to have movie marathons on a Saturday night. We’d binge-watch all the Star Wars films, Doctor Who box sets, and Back to the Future films. 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 Granddad Joe said yesterday. Maybe if Mum hadn’t become a scientist, she’d still be here today.

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

  Now it’s Granddad 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 fit 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, Granddad?”

  “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, Granddad. 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 a giant star map above my bed 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 homework on, and no room on the walls for my star map. The only poster I have put up is a map of the solar system, but this is just to disguise the rubbish decorating job Granddad Joe did when he heard we were moving back. This room used to be my nursery when I was a baby, and underneath his 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 toward Earth. I follow Asteroid Watch 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 streetlamps, 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 like crazy, 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, then two sizes too big for her after all her treatments at the hospital. As my new telescope spun around the sky, Mum told 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 favorite sights is Omega Centauri—a cluster of ten million stars orbiting the Milky Way. When I’m 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 fifteen thousand light-years away. This means when I look at it through my telescope, I’m seeing the stars as they were over fifteen thousand years ago. Some of these stars might have died ages ago, but their light is still traveling toward us. Even Barnard’s Star, which is one of the nearest stars to Earth, is 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 billions of years into the past to take a photo of the very beginning of the universe.

  If aliens in the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system were staring through a superpowerful telescope at Earth right now, would they be able to look through my skylight 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 is the black hole she 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 are 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 video to see her face or hear her voice.

  I open up my schoolbag. The only homework that matters now is finding my mum. Leaving my packed lunch on the bed, I pull out Dad’s book and flip 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 is 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 the existence of these parallel universes 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 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 in Physics Research, and Physics Letters. I flip 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 is 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 pad, a laptop stand, and an old ammonite fossil.

  Mum and I found this fossil when we were walking on the moors together on one of our trips back to visit Granddad Joe. It’s about three centimeters wide, gold-colored, 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 around 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 s
trange 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.

  I unzip it and 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 analyzes 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 analyze 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 zeroes and ones pulses across the screen, 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 who 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 nude shouting “Eureka!” I think it’s an old Greek word that means “I found it,” or maybe just “I’m freezing cold!”