Lester

  “Knock, knock!”

  My office door creaks open and a soft light falls over my walls and desks. It takes me a moment to understand what’s happening after so many days in the dark, but when I do, I see that the light comes from a press lamp in the palm of a—

  I’m tempted to say ‘young woman’, but that wouldn’t be accurate.

  Tamika Potts.

  It’s the first time I’ve actually seen them. Tamika is Black, about five-foot-nine, with curly blue hair hanging like a cloud around their head. They’re wearing an enormous backpack and carrying several rolls of paper under their arms.

  “Lester? Are you in?”

  “You’re late.”

  “Yeah.” They shrug. “Sorry. Kinda busy outside.”

  They set the press light on the table. “Oh! You’ve really cleaned this place up!”

  “Yeah, well,” I reply, flattered they noticed. “I figured a little elbow grease wouldn’t kill me. Again.”

  Tamika laughs, presumably out of politeness. “Well, I’m glad you feel that way, because I’ve got some ideas about sprucing up the place, if you’re interested.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Well, you know how we talked about adding a bit of light to the office?”

  “As opposed to sitting in a tomb. I remember.”

  “Well, the electricity’s still down, but I figured that, with a few of these nifty things”—they hold up the press-lamp-—“you can have as much light as you want. My dad used one in our garage and the batteries are super long-lasting. Or, well…they were. Do you mind if I hang this one on your wall?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  They bring one of my chairs next to the wall and pull a hammer and a bag of nails from their backpack. Then they hesitate.

  “Wait…if I put a nail in the wall…will it hurt?”

  “No idea. Give it a try.”

  They climb onto the chair and press a nail against the plaster by the ceiling. “You’re sure?”

  “Give it a whack.”

  They bring the hammer down, driving the nail.

  “Aaaaarrrgh!”

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry!”

  “I’m just messing with you. Actually, I barely felt it.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Sorry. It gets really boring down here.”

  Their face is in shadow, but the fact that they’re rolling their eyes can more-or-less be assumed. They bring the hammer down a few more times, harder now. Then they retrieve the press-light from the table and hang it.

  “Well, that’s a start, at least.” They climb down. “You can probably use a few more of them, but at least you can see now.”

  “Thank you.”

  In the light, Tamika can inspect my office as a whole. “So, I guess your fine motor skills have improved a bit, huh?”

  “I’ve been working on them.”

  “You did all this in the dark?”

  “By feel, yeah. I mean, I’m haunting everything here, so it wasn’t that difficult.”

  Tamika doesn’t press matters. “I thought you might like some posters too, cover up the uglier bits. Well—the ugliest bits.”

  They lay some rolls of paper out on a desk. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I grabbed a little of everything.”

  If I had a body, I’d shrug. “So, what have we got?”

  “How do you feel,” they say, unrolling the first poster, “about unicorns?”

  “You know I’m a man, right?”

  “No need to be so normative,” Tamika mutters, rolling it back up. “Actually, I wonder if unicorns are real now, come to think of it. Maybe they’re really mean. I should probably look into that.”

  “What else?”

  Tamika unrolls another. “New York City by night. Very manly. Ideal for McMansion home offices and other places where serious dudes conduct serious business, probably while drinking whisky and smoking cigars.”

  I regard the skyline for a moment. “I wonder what New York is like now.”

  “Not much fun, by the rumours I’ve heard,” Tamika notes. “But hey, maybe you could…reflect on the heights from which mankind has fallen or whatever.”

  I consider this. “It’s kind of ‘blah’, to be honest.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Tamika says, rolling it up. “I’d hoped you’d have better taste than that.” They pick up another. “Now, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this band, but—”

  “Listen, this is very nice of you, Tamika, but what I really want…” My voice trails off as I try to put it into words.

  “An escape?” Tamika suggests. They unroll a print of a path leading into a beautiful green countryside; the sky above is perfectly blue and an old-timey cottage stands in the middle distance, colourful flowers growing by its wall.

  I’m transfixed by it. It’s so simple and yet—

  “It’s perfect.”

  Tamika grins. “I figured you’d like that.”

  I pick out a few more along a similar vein: a white sandy beach leading onto a turquoise ocean; some misty mountain peaks; a broad, orange desert with a cactus in the foreground. All places I’ll never go, each more tantalizing than the last. Tamika hangs them one by one; each blocks my view from the part of the wall on which it’s situated but looks good when seen by my ‘eyes’ elsewhere in the room.

  “You’re sure I can’t interest you in a paint job?” Tamika asks as they settle into a chair. “These beige tones are just so…70s.”

  “If you painted over me, I’d be blind.”

  “Fair enough.” They cross their legs and set themselves at ease. “So…have you been doing experiments?”

  “Yes. I went through the entire Intro Physics manual. For all of the good it did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My results were exactly what I expected.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that physics has changed! There’s no way I should be getting the exact same results as before the Shift!”

  “Okay, okay,” they say, uncrossing their legs. “Well…is it possible that, aside from the magic, the laws of physics are all the same?”

  “No,” I insist. “Everything about magic violates physics. Like, watch this.”

  I grab a book as carefully as I can from the shelf next to Tamika, flexing my imaginary muscles.

  Tamika gasps and leaps to their feet. “Is that you, Lester?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry, I guess seeing books move is a little freaky—”

  “No, it’s not that! I can see you, Lester!”

  I drop the book. “What?”

  “I can see you!” Tamika repeats. “Or I could. For a moment. Kind of. You looked a bit…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well…ghostly,” they say apologetically. “But I could definitely see a human shape grabbing the book!”

  “I’ve been doing a trick to help me move things. Pretending I actually have a body.”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant though!”

  “But I’ve been doing it in the dark. It didn’t occur to me that I’d be…you know…visible.”

  I pause. “How do I look?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” They hold out a makeup mirror on the palm of their hand.

  I reach out—very carefully because I don’t want to hurt them—and grab the mirror. I can actually see shadowy fingers wrap around it. I lift the mirror to where my face should be.

  At first the image is indistinct—“ghostly,” like Tamika said. But the longer I look, the more I can make out. Brown skin, strong jaw, short-cut hair. Me. Lester Briggs. Only…not.

  Tamika grins. “You handsome devil.”

  “I…never looked so good.”

  “Well, I’m glad your self-esteem is back.”

  “No, I literally never looked this good. I mean…it’s me. Or Lester. I recognize myself. But—”

  “You never looked like that when you were alive.”

  “That’s it exactly, yeah.”

  “…Maybe you look how you think you do,” Tamika suggests.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “What?”

  “What I mean is…we all have self-images, right? Notions of how we look that aren’t necessarily—or, well, ever—the same as what we actually look like. You know…clear skin, different build. Different sex, for some of us. But in your case, your self-image is all you have. So you look—”

  “Like I’ve always assumed that I look.”

  “Yeah.”

  I keep studying myself in the mirror. Hello, you handsome devil.

  Finally, I force myself to snap it shut.

  “You were about to explain physics to me?”

  “Oh yeah. Well, take this mirror for example. Right now, it’s being pulled towards the ground by the weight of the Earth. But it’s not falling, because—well—I’m holding it up.” I wave the mirror up and down. “I am doing work on it against the planet’s gravity.”

  “I’m with you so far…”

  “But how am I doing work?” I ask. “Now, if you were holding the mirror, it would be obvious, right? You’d be taking energy from the chemical bonds in your food and converting it—through, like, cells and stuff—into work. But me, I have no muscles. And I don’t eat. So where is that energy coming from?”

  “Does it need to come from anywhere?”

  “According to ‘pre-Shift’ physics, yes. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, just transformed from one form to another.”

  “But now you’re creating energy, is what you’re saying.”

  “That’s how it looks. And that implies that conservation no longer holds. Which makes sense, I guess, since everything’s different now—”

  “But your experiments upstairs all behave exactly the same.”

  “Yeah! And that makes no sense!”

  “Well, is there some way that everything could look the same at first, but then—sorry, I’m not putting this very well.”

  “You’re asking if physics could look the same in a certain, preliminary situation and then look radically different when you go into detail.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes. We call those ‘higher-order effects’. And I’ve thought of that.” I wish I could sigh. “I guess I just need to experiment more.”

  Tamika smiles sympathetically. “Wish I could help.”

  “That’s alright, I’ve got a dog to help me.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You know,” they muse, “it’s a little funny hearing you talk about conservation of energy and all that. It comes up a lot in those parapsychology books I’ve been reading.”

  “Let me guess: people saying it proves the existence of life after death.”

  “How did you guess?”

  “It’s a bunch of nonsense.”

  “Says the literal ghost.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’m a ghost, but it’s not because the energy in my brain astral-projected when I died or whatever. That energy was probably just radiated away as—”

  My voice trails off.

  “Lester?”

  “Heat.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Something just occurred to me. I’m… annoyed that I didn’t see it earlier.”

  “What is it?

  “Well, let’s assume I’m not creating energy. Then that energy has to come from somewhere—within me, presumably.”

  “You’re saying you really are made of energy?”

  “Everyone is made of energy,” I comment. “But no. What I’m saying is that I’m a room. Basically. And what have I got inside me?”

  “Desks? Some chairs?”

  “Besides that.”

  “Me?”

  “Besides that.”

  Tamika thinks a moment. “Air?”

  “Air! Air at a temperature above absolute zero. Which means it has heat in it.”

  “Heat’s a form of energy!”

  I feel a sudden rush. “I would bet…that I was somehow converting heat into work.”

  “Which would bring the temperature down!” Tamika leaps to their feet. “And ghosts are associated with cold spots!”

  “Just one problem: temperature can’t spontaneously decrease in a closed system. It’s thermodynamically impossible.”

  “You mean it used to be impossible!”

  I think about it for a moment. “You know there’s this old…thought experiment. Maxwell’s Demon.”

  Tamika looks puzzled. “You’re still talking about physics, right?”

  “Physicists were more poetic in the nineteenth century. Anyways, the thing is that thermodynamics emerge from the statistics of large numbers of particles; not on a particle-by-particle basis.”

  “I…think I understand.”

  “Yeah. And this guy, Maxwell; he wonders: what happens if you manipulate a gas particle by particle, instead of all at once? What if you had a little demon, say, who could let all the fast-moving particles pass through a wall and stop all the slow-moving ones?”

  “Go on?”

  “Well…the upshot is that, if you do it that way, it gets colder on one side and hotter on the other. Entropy—the amount of wasted heat in the system—goes down and you can actually do work with it. Assuming you have a little invisible demon selectively sorting through trillions of particles, of course.”

  “Is that what you think you are? Maxwell’s Demon?”

  “It…makes sense. But I don’t know what the mechanism is. I’m certainly not aware of sorting through billions of particles.”

  “But that doesn’t necessarily matter.”

  “How do you mean?”

  They sit down again. “Well, when I move my finger, there must be billions of things happening in my body: nerves electrifying, blood flowing, muscles twitching. But I’m not aware of any of it. For me, it just feels like I’m moving my finger. Maybe that’s how it is for you. Autonomous. You don’t even think about it.”

  I consider this. “It fits…I think we’re onto something.”

  “Me too.”

  Suddenly, I have an idea. “Tamika Potts, would you care to help me with an experiment?”

  They grin. “Sounds like fun.”

  *

  “Thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres by twenty-five centimetres,” Tamika reads off. They roll up their tape measure. “I feel bad for whatever fish had to live in here.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I think that aquarium was custom-made for fluid dynamics. Now, you need to tape the bottom to the floor—”

  “So air can’t get in. Gotcha.”

  Within a few minutes, the aquarium is completely isolated, its open side duct-taped down against the hallway’s linoleum floor. It’s now its own little room—or so the theory goes. Inside sit three objects, which I can see from the open door to my office: a digital precision thermometer, a 5-kg weight, and a paper clip I’m currently haunting.

  Tamika grabs another roll of tape—masking tape, this time—and stretches a piece along one of the edges rising up from the ground. Without prompting, they start marking each centimetre in felt marker. “So…is there a reason we couldn’t just do this in your office?”

  “My office is too big.”

  “I bet that’s a phrase you never thought you’d say.”

  “Physically speaking. It’s about fifty cubic metres of air. The amount of energy it takes to lift a kilogram weight would only change the temperature by about one ten-thousandth of a kelvin. So, either I lift, say, a car—”

  “Or you find a smaller room. Gotcha.” They consider something. “Although…”

  “What?”

  “Well, why couldn’t we have just set this aquarium on the floor of your office? I mean, it’s enclosed, right? So would it still be part of you or would it have its own little genius loci?”

  “I…don’t know,” I admit. “And I’d prefer not to complicate things.”

  The truth is that I find the idea of cutting up my own consciousness…wrong. I’d call it viscerally wrong, even, but I don’t have any viscera.

  “Probably a good thing to research in the future,” says Tamika. “Actually…what would happen if someone were to knock out a wall between two rooms? Would they still have separate genii—is that the plural?—or would they merge? And if your friend Professor Chen is right and everything has a soul, what happens if you merge two things together? Like, does every atom have one and then molecules have ‘composite’ souls or—”

  “You’d make a good scientist.”

  Tamika side-eyes me through my office door. “I am a scientist.”

  “Well, psychology,” I say, realizing my faux pas. “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “Psychology is a science!” they exclaim. “And it’s doing a lot better than physics right now, boy.”

  “Okay, fair point.”

  “Maybe that’s what caused the Shift,” Tamika mutters, returning to marking the masking tape. “God smiting all you arrogant ‘hard sciences’ types.”

  I try to change the subject. “What do you think actually caused the Shift?”

  They look up. “I think it was ecology, personally.”

  “Ecology?”

  “Yeah! I mean, think about it: before the Shift, the Earth was basically in the middle of a mass-extinction event! Global warming, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity. Then one day, what happens?”

  “The laws of physics change.”

  “Yes, but they don’t just change, right? They change in a way that makes the bulk of our tech useless while preserving life itself.”

  “You’re saying it’s, what? ‘Gaia’s Revenge’?”

  “Mother Nature protecting herself, more like! I mean, my God? What’s the first thing the Gentry do when they get here? Start an ice age—i.e., end global warming!”

  “The Shift…does seem localized to Earth,” I admit. “At least according to Dr. Chen. All the stars and planets seem to be behaving like they always have.”

  “Well, there you go. The Shift just so happens to occur on the one planet in the universe that we know has life on it, and just when that life comes under threat. Now, call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound like a coincidence.”

  “That’s…pretty convincing,” I admit. “But how do the Gentry fit in?”

  Tamika shrugs. “Fairies are what in mythology? Nature spirits, right? They’re all temperamental and hang out in forests and have complicated rules no one understands.”

  “And here I was thinking they were just tiny ladies with wings.”

  “Frigging Disney.” Tamika laughs. “Out of curiosity, what do you think caused it?”

  “Well, right now, I’m liking your hypothesis.”

  “Yeah, but everyone has a pet theory. So, be honest: what was your first instinct?”

  I wish I could sigh. “That the universe was trying to spite me. Personally.”

  “Somehow, Lester, that figures.”

  They pop the cap back onto the marker and lay it on the floor. “Done. Should we begin the experiment?”

  “May as well.”

  “What am I looking for here?”

  “Changes in temperature. My hypothesis is that the energy needed to lift the weight is taken from air. That should cause the temperature within the aquarium to cool down noticeably. I’ve worked the numbers on that sheet on my desk, assuming 100% conversion efficiency. Those are our minima. If the temperature drops by at least this much, it’ll support my theory.”

  “I’m sure you were very clever,” Tamika says. They grab my list of figures. “So, you’re going to lift the weight now?”

  “Just a minute…”

  I try to focus my attention on the paperclip in the aquarium, shutting out all other sensory inputs. Now I just need to find the genius of this place…

  The aquarium’s genius isn’t exactly a genius. In fact, it’s so simple, it makes Intro look like Einstein. But it’s eager to help, or at least it doesn’t know it can refuse. Unfortunately, it’s also too simple to understand a request like “lift the weight by ten centimetres”, so I need to use simple commands. Thankfully, “lift weight” and “hold there” are all I need.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I say. “I’m going to make this thing lift the weight and you’re going to say when it reaches five centimetres, okay?”

  “Got it.”

  “Right.” I focus in on the genius loci. Lift weight, I think.

  The weight shoots straight up, so quickly that I barely have time to think hold before it smashes the ceiling. Thankfully, it stops just in time and hovers ominously in mid air. Tamika scribbles a reading in their notebook.

  Lower weight, I think. Slowly.

  The weight gradually sinks like a feather to the floor.

  “Five centimetres!” Tamika announces as its bottom reaches the mark.

  Hold.

  The weight hovers. Tamika takes a reading: “-11.76 °C. Just like you said.”

  Lift weight slowly.

  “Ten cm!”

  Hold.

  “-13.51 °C. Again, exactly like you calculated.”

  “Exactly? You’re sure?”

  “To the last digit.”

  That surprises me. But such things happen.

  Lift weight slowly.

  “Fifteen!”

  Hold.

  “-15.27 °C. Exact again.”

  A thought occurs to me. An experiment within an experiment.

  Lift weight slowly, I think. Then: hold.

  “Why did you stop? It hasn’t reached twenty.”

  “What’s it at?”

  “Eighteen and a half, about.”

  “Write it down, anyways. I’ll run the numbers later.”

  “Gotcha.”

  *

  As I complete the experiment, I hold the weight not just at twenty and twenty-five centimetres as planned, but also at other random points. Twenty-one and a half. Twenty-three. Twenty-six. Tamika reads the temperatures each time.

  I already know what I’ll find, but I run the numbers, anyways, just to be sure. I colour-code the results for “planned heights” in black and “random heights” in red.

  Tamika sees the pattern immediately. “It looks like we’re bang on the dot for all the temperatures you calculated beforehand. But the ones you did afterwards—”

  “Are completely random! Look, here: between 20 and 20.5, the temperature actually goes up! Between 25 and 26, it drops an order of magnitude more than it should!”

  “So, your hypothesis is wrong.”

  “Obviously!”

  Tamika frowns. “I know you’re upset, but you don’t need to shout.”

  “Sorry,” I say after a moment. “I just—I really thought I was onto something there. Sorry.”

  They brighten-up somewhat. “I think we did learn something though, at least.”

  “The pre-calculated temperatures. The only way this degree of agreement makes sense is if the system itself somehow responds to our expectations.”

  Tamika nods. “And since we don’t have any preconceptions about random heights—well, other than that the temperature should change a bit—we get a bunch of random values. Like the system is giving us what it thinks we want.”

  “You mean…some kind of observer effect?”

  Tamika shrugs. “It happens all the time in psychology. Subjects respond to the tester’s expectations.”

  “Well, what do you do about it?”

  “Phrase the question more neutrally? Convince them that we’re testing one thing when we’re really testing something else?”

  “Hm. I don’t know if that would work here; we don’t even know what’s responding to us! The heat? The genius loci? The thermometer? Some combination of them? How do we fool it?”

  “…Could we use a camera?”

  “How do we know the camera won’t just show us what it thinks we want to see too?”

  They shrug.

  I squeeze my imaginary eyes between my thumb and forefinger. “There’s observer effect in physics too, you know.”

  “Yes, in quantum mechanics. I read about it.”

  “Except it doesn’t work like this. It doesn’t care what you want to see; it just cares whether you see it. What’s the system even responding to?”

  “Our will, I guess.”

  “Hm. How can we shut that off?”

  “Extreme meditation, maybe? I don’t know. Maybe we could find someone else to run the test.”

  “Like who?”

  “Someone with no idea what the outcome’s ‘supposed’ to be, I guess. With no vested interests.”

  I pause. “You mean…someone who just likes running experiments for the sake of it?”

  “Sure.”

  A smile forms on my imaginary lips. I’m not sure how I’m going to make it work, but it’s an idea. A good idea.

  “Tamika,” I say. “Let me introduce you to my dog.”