In Any Lifetime

by Marc Guggenheim

In a universe of infinite possibilities, the only constant is love.

He felt Amanda’s eyes on him, watching him the same way he occasionally caught himself watching her, trying to breathe her whole being into him, to consume her soul through his gaze, an expression of astonished bewilderment that asked how he could ever be so lucky to share his life with this other person.

He felt a surreal sensation, a reminder that he was living out a dream. “Tonight, it is my privilege to introduce this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his mathematical theorem

confirming the existence of parallel universes—otherwise known as the ‘Many Worlds Proof’—Dr. Jonas Cullen.”

“The American poet Robert Frost—” “Told you.” Amanda grinned. “—famously wrote: ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both

and be one traveler . . .’ There are those who contend that this poem is an allusion to multiple realities, the universe diverging into multiple paths. Dr. Cullen has used quantum theory to prove the existence of such a ‘multiverse.’

All custom made. All woven from cotton and other natural fibers. Even the soles of his leather shoes are made from caucho, a natural rubber. Each article of clothing—save for his socks and underwear—is dyed black. Nothing is artificial. Not a stitch is manufactured. This is important.

the most important component—the reason Jonas is here—is the large circular ring that constitutes the world’s most powerful superconducting solenoid magnet.

Quantum decoherence—the loss of a definite phase relation between a quantum state and its environment—led to a wave function collapse, among other things.

Proving the existence of parallel worlds was the academic equivalent of summitting Everest. But to travel to one . . . that’s landing on the moon.

She was a diamond he could envision examining from every conceivable angle, each facet rewarding him with a new color.

Out of an infinite multitude, that’s the only reality that exists for him.

“The multiverse does prefer efficiency, which it achieves by limiting branch points—instances where circumstances could go right or left and, therefore, birth a new universe—by constraining the number of times that it happens.”

“By favoring certain outcomes. Which limits the total number of realities in the multiverse from the impossibly infinite to manageably so.”

“My body is now suffused with quantum energy. The process essentially unanchored me from my reality, allowing me to slip into yours.”

“It’s never pathetic to love someone, and it’s certainly not pathetic to mourn them.”

any woman would be lucky to have a man willing to search the world for her. Your wife has a man willing to search an infinite number of worlds.”

“the mathematics changes to one of probabilities. And if the universe is predisposed to some realities, it becomes possible to calculate the likelihood of those realities.”

“Out of a nearly infinite number of probabilities, there’s only one where your wife is still alive.”

If hope were a living thing, this is a death sentence.

A reminder that, in the end, everyone shares the same human shortcomings, the same pain.

His eyes widened, and he saw the city as the pigeons did: an endless horizon of glass and steel, rods and shafts of silver and gray erupting from the ground beneath a canopy of blue roped with white.

Jonas turned, and their eyes locked. “I’ll always find you,” he said. “In any multitude. In any lifetime.” The promise felt like a vow.

It felt like fate. When they were together, there was no time. No past. No future. There was only now.

Faith is belief in the absence of knowledge.

“Philosophy tells us that two contradictory things cannot be true at the same time. Physics tells us that two different objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Quantum physics, though, contends the philosophers and the physics experts are wrong.”

Falling in love with Amanda, and Amanda’s falling in love with him, was the equivalent of Dorothy’s journey from Kansas to Oz, from black and white to Technicolor. “I was never alive until I met you.”

Ideas are the most dangerous things in the world.

“Freedom,” she said, “is hard for some people. I suppose it’s hard for most people. Life is easier when there’s someone above you telling you what to do.”

She reminded herself that her tears and her joy weren’t the products of the promise of marriage but rather her appreciation of Jonas, a man who had gone from thinking that singing was “silly” to doing it as loud as his lungs permitted in front of anyone around to witness it.

The truest freedom, she realized, is not to be aware of how free one is.

Pursuing a vendetta is exhausting business. Vengeance takes its toll on the vengeful.

But then he’s taking her in his arms, and his embrace feels like the most real thing she’s ever known. She surrenders to the moment. If this is what her losing her mind is like, she doesn’t want to be sane.

Jonas’s fingers tremor toward her face. Blood peeks from between his teeth. “I did it,” he breathes. “I made it back to you.”

In the end, Professor Emeritus Victor Kovacevic ends his life as the equivalent of a human airbag.

“If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

“You can’t swim against the tide of the universe.”

One of the cruelties of death is its capacity for delusion, for creating hallucinations of divine perfection as one slips the bonds of life.

But as Jonas stares up at the woman he loves more than his own life, the two of them are the only two people who exist in the entire world. In the entire multiverse.

after all, was the beauty of the multiverse: its penchant for endless possibility.

Some will die without ever having made a mark upon their world.

All will experience the exquisite torture, the brutal blessing, of what it means to be human.