Number two and three start him off about the jellyfish.
The man on the stool next to me places his empty shot glass down onto the saturated wood of the bar, right in line behind his first two. The man with a face that’s all cheek bones, skin like a latex glove stretched tight across the cartilage of his nose, he tells me how there’s a species of jellyfish, the turritopsis nutricula, that can revert back to its first stage of life. Biologically immortal, he says. It can live forever. The man hiding behind an ivory pair of thick-rimmed, Ray ban sunglasses, white on white, he says it’s because this species can perform a process called transdifferentiation and change one type of its cells into a different kind. Some animals like the salamander and the starfish can grow back tails and arms, but this jellyfish can turn back the aging process on all of its cells. Reverse the life cycle, he says. Turn back time, so to say.
Five and six and the man sitting next to me at the pub is talking about the future. Not the kind that’s worried about how he’s getting home or where home will be in the next couple of years. No, three drinks after the jellyfish and it’s onto science fiction. The Delorean time machines and superstring theory kind of future. Just a handful and a thumb of shots and he tells me how some scientist will discover the physics behind time travel.
“I’ll take another,” he holds his bony pointer finger up to the bartender. The tinted lenses, black holes into the back of his skull. He lowers his skeletal hand, still pointing, and with the other he cocks back his thumb like the hammer on a .45, aims right at me and closes one eye, “Bang.” His hand recoils. “You know,” he blows the tip of his finger, “He already has the idea now. It just takes him some time to realize it.”
“Who are you talking about?” I ask into my glass.
“The Scientist.” He slips his hand into his pocket. It still looks like a gun outlined in denim. “I’m talking about me, kid.”
I keep staring into the bottom of my drink. What I should do is finish it, pay my tab, and get back to the lab. That’s what I should do. None of this erratic chit-chat is going to help me write my thesis. Shouldn’t encourage him, but this is the best conversation I’ve had in weeks. I pour the rest of my glass into my mouth and signal for another before I set the empty one down. “So you’re from the future?”
“Do you know anything about quantum physics yet?”
“That is my concentration,” I laugh. “Well, that and biophysics. So yeah, a little bit.”
“Of course,” the Scientist says. “Let’s see if you can keep up then.”
The bartender brings over another round and it turns into a full blown physics lesson. Number seven and he goes off about the Copenhagen Interpretation, which claims that a quantum particle exists in all of its possible states at once. How, for example, a photon, the smallest measure of light, can be both a particle and a wave, simultaneously. Coherent superposition, he calls it. It’s only when we observe a quantum particle that it is forced into a single state. Observation collapses the superposition and the photon has to make a decision. A particle or a wave. To be or not to be.
“But how did that inspire a time machine?” I loosen my tie and grab a pack of cigarettes out of my shirt pocket.
“Instead of thinking of time as a linear line, or a string of pearls, or however it is you perceive it, consider for a moment, time as a quantum particle.”
“You’re losing me.” I slam the pack against the palm of my hand two, three, four times.
“Time, like the photon, exists in all of its states at once. Everything that will happen, already has. Start to finish. It is only when you observe time that it is forced to choose a single state.”
“Lost.” I shake one cigarette half way out and lift it up to my mouth. I set it on my bottom lip and it sticks as I pull the pack away.
“You’ll get it.” The Scientist says. I pick a book of matches out of a dish on the bar.
“For example,” he says, “Right now, you are observing your life at a point where you are listening to me explain the theory behind time travel. Your observation forces this exact state.”
“So what if I choose not to observe time at all?” I rip a match out, set it on the strike strip, and fold the cover back on top of the head.
“If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one around to hear it,” he says, “Does it make a sound?”
What?” I aim the cigarette hanging out of my mouth at the pile of shot glasses in front of the Scientist. “How many of those did you have so far?” I yank the match from between the cardboard and it pops, flares to life.
“Do you really have to do that here?” He points his gun finger at my mouth.
I breathe in deep as I light the cigarette and talk out the smoke, “I’m allowed to do this here.”
“You’re going to kill yourself,” he says.
I switch the cigarette to my other hand and pick up my lager, “If you figured out how to travel through time, why would you get drunk here, at this bar?” I hold my beer out and pan my arm around the room. The pub is deserted. We’re surrounded by empty bar stools and the jerseys of a local football team that never wins hanging on the wall. The rain falling heavy outside keeps anybody else from stepping through the door. “Why not crash, like the Last Supper?” I take a sip. “Or a Presidential party?”
He smiles. It’s familiar, like old photographs. I tap my cigarette and start to fill the ashtray. Déjà vu and it fades while number eight gets closer to his mouth, and then they both disappear behind his lips. He leaves enough time between shots for me to smoke down to the filter. Number nine and his head’s on the bar. I can’t even imagine the kind of headache he’s going to have tomorrow. I grind the butt into the ceramic tray and then reach for my wallet.
From the side of his mouth, the other half kissing the counter top, through the slur from the better half of a fifth, “You wanna know the truth about vampires?”
I cough up lager, “Hold on.” I take another sip, wipe my mouth with the thumb wrapped around the sweating glass, and then set it back down on its coaster. Then I let go. “You mean like Dracula?”
He sits up straight in his stool, puts his elbow on the bar and props his head up with one hand, the other still outlined in his pocket. He tells the bartender to leave the bottle. Then to me, he explains why vampire folklore became so prominent in the early eighteenth century.
“Fifteen years from now,” he fills number ten to the brim, “My team successfully applies the transdifferentiation process to the cells of a lab mouse.”
“You mean the jellyfish cell process?”
He raises his overflowing glass, “Five years after that, the first human subject.” He swallows and sets it empty next to the other nine. “We cure death.”
I shake my head. “How is that even possible?”
The Scientist keeps the bottle upside down until number eleven spills over and he tells me that they are able to induce all cells to renew themselves into different types. The ones that make up our bones can regenerate as skin cells. The kidneys can rebuild the stomach lining. And all of this at an instantaneous rate, he says.
I pull another cigarette out. “So what you’re saying is—”
“What I’m saying,” he puts the bottle down, “Is that the life span for all cells drops to nanoseconds before they reincarnate as brand new cells.”
“So they never really die,” I set the tip on fire.
“We become biologically immortal.” Number eleven sits untouched in front of the Scientist. “Inside of eighteen months, we have global distribution. We’re marketing the fountain of youth.” National ad campaigns, he says. Selling everlasting life, so to say. Then he leans in close to me, close enough to taste the tequila on his breath, close enough that I might get second-hand drunk. “Two years after all of that,” he smiles again, “And it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“To recognize the flaw in our research.” His team didn’t recognize that the transdifferentiation process actually causes the erythrocytes, the red blood cells, to mature at a decelerated rate. The opposite of the rest of the body. “Before we can pull it off the shelf, the majority of the world’s population is afflicted with the immortality epidemic.”
I take a deep breath. Take a quick look around the room. It’s still empty.
“Blood transfusions are the only way to keep from blacking out.” He lowers his head.
“Blacking out?” I exhale smoke, “Like what you’re doing now?”
The Scientist raises his hand to the folds in his forehead and water spills from behind the tinted glass. “The red blood cells taint the oxygen that is carried to the rest of the body. The blood turns black.”
“So they died?” I crush the smoldering filter into dust at the bottom of the ash tray.
“They can’t.” Tears stream down his cheeks. “The body restores itself too quickly.”
“So what happened to them?”
Their eyes completely dilate until they are all pupils, he says. They glass over like obsidian rock. The stagnant oxygen in the blood poisons the brain and cripples the prefrontal lobe, which is directly linked to higher cognitive function and personality. “Without fresh blood, they become hollow.” He wipes his face. “They cease to be human.”
“Holy—” I cover my mouth. “What did you do?”
“After the blood banks, people started cleaning out each other for fresh blood,” he says to his tequila. “A small faction of us lasted long enough to go back and stop the global outbreak.”
“Like, in time?” I lean closer. “You mean you went back in time to stop it?”
“We didn’t fully understand the theory behind time travel yet.” He clears his throat. “We went back too far.”
I stare back at my tinted reflection. “So you took a group of blood-hungry immortals,” I point at him, “With that baby-white skin, back in time?”
And that’s why vampire folklore became so popular in the early eighteenth century.
“We were damned in the beginning by our need to collect blood to save our lives. To save the lives of everyone else.” By collect blood, he meant stalk town people, usually young girls, kidnap them, and hold them hostage. He meant chain up, cut open, drain out. “And blood type matches,” he says, “They were hit or miss.” And by hit or miss, he meant impossible. He meant that he watched every member of his team reject the makeshift transfusion while they watched back with dead eyes. Big bang and the universe expanded eyelid to eyelid. “I lost all of them,” he picks up eleven. “There is so much blood on my hands.” He slips the tequila between his lips and coughs some up while it forces its way down. “I’m the last of my kind.”
A dozen, then a baker’s, and I can’t believe he’s still conscious. I don’t know what to say. I add another link to my chain smoking. Part of me wants to ask him what kind of BAC vampires get. Another part wants to ask him for help with my thesis. Instead, “So now what?”
With a sober straight face, he goes, “We have to go back in time and kill the Scientist.”
“But you are the Scientist.”
“That’s right.”
“Well then how are you supposed to kill yourself?”
“I can’t,” he slams his fist down on the bar and earthquakes the glasses. “You don’t think I’ve tried? Conventional suicide is physically impossible.” He squeezes one of the empties in his frail hand hard enough that both might shatter. “Quantum suicide, however, is a whole different kind of physics.”
“Quantum suicide?” I flick ashes into the tray.
It was a thought experiment developed at Princeton at the end of the twentieth century. Ahead of its time, he says.
“So you’re not going to kill yourself?”
“Not exactly,” he spins an empty shot glass on its side. “Close your eyes.”
“What?” Smoke spills out of my mouth.
“Just close your eyes. I need you to picture a bullet in your head.”
“What do you mean?” I close my eyes anyway. “That’s arbitrary.”
“You’re right. This time, I mean imagine a bullet, loaded in a gun, aimed at your head. Not a bullet actually lodged inside of your head.”
“You’re not aiming a gun with this bullet at my head, are you?” I keep my eyes tight.
He laughs. “This gun, let’s say it’s hooked up to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle every time the trigger is pulled. Clockwise the gun fires. Counter it doesn’t.”
I hear the sound of spinning glass, stop, and start again on the bar. “So it’s like Quantum Roulette?”
“You pull the trigger and click. Nothing.” He pauses and so does the glass. “Pull it again, and click. Still alive. But according to Copenhagen, the particle is simultaneously spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise.” The sound of a second glass whirls along with the first. “All states at once. You are both dead AND alive.”
“How is that possible?” I rub my eyes open.
“Each time you pull the trigger, the universe splits in two. One with you alive. Brained in the other. Into infinity, splitting again and again every time you squeeze it back.”
“So there’s at least one universe where I’m always alive?”
He smiles. “You are theoretically immortal.”
“Okay, but if Copenhagen was right,” I pull in another drag, “When we observe the spinning particle, it’s forced to choose a direction. Eventually, won’t it be forced to spin clockwise?”
“That depends on when we decide to observe.” He sets one glass upright on the bar, and he spins the other as hard as his frail hand can manage. “I am incapable of death in my current state.” It spins and spins on its side. “But like the photon, I also exist in a state in which I am susceptible to suicide.” He knocks the first glass over like a king cornered in a chess game. “In the past.” The second glass comes to a sudden stop, right on cue. And he puts his hand into its holster.
“So how does pulling the trigger take you back in time?”
“No, you misunderstood.” He starts sliding his hand back out of his pocket. “You have to go back in time to pull the trigger.” He smiles one last time. “Otherwise, you live forever.”
I smile back the same smile. “What?”
“Just close your eyes. I need you to picture a bullet in your head.”
I put out my last cigarette and everything goes black.
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