by R. Foster
Think carefully before you cast these dice.
When you first pick them up, they don’t seem different. The same heft as a pair slipped into your palm in a Vegas casino. But if you step up to that dark table, you’ll know pretty quickly how far from ordinary QuDice are. That first toss sends your mind tumbling in ways you never come back from.
Quantum Dice.
They were an unexpected outcome of a backroom project at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Weapons Superblock. The guys were struggling with how quantum effects were limiting the yield of their device.
It drove them nuts. Neutrons, protons, they can never make up their minds. First, they’re a particle, then they’re a wave. How could you ever understand that insanity?
Well, what if you could experience quantum behavior firsthand? In everyday objects, like baseballs and basketballs? They shared the same particle-wave duality as subatomic particles. But weirdly, even though baseballs were much bigger than protons, their wavelengths were much smaller. As objects got bigger their wavelengths shrank down to nothing. And their quantum nature disappeared.
Those guys took it as a personal challenge: Make quantum behavior visible by making wavelengths bigger. You’ve got to hand it to our geniuses. They found a metamaterial that would curve spacetime so tightly it could redshift particle wavelengths up orders of magnitude.
I did the calculations, and it blew us all away. It would expand a hardball, or a human’s wavelength up into the centimeter range. You could experience your own wave nature. You could live in a quantum world.
So, they locked themselves in the cleanroom, and worked round the clock refining fab routes. The crystal structure was crazy hard. Learning how to grow it took the better part of a year, but when they got the processing parameters dialed in, they were seeing flawless samples as big as your thumb.
At first it was strictly research. They were going to rewrite all the textbooks. Nobel prize stuff. But somewhere along the way, overwork and arrogance gave way to bad judgement, and somebody said, “Dice.”
That was it. Such an obvious choice.
They grew two 1.5 cm cubes and etched a slit straight through each. Two vertical stripes of darkness, double slits staring you down.
Snake eyes.
I tried to warn them. I kept saying: Listen to Einstein. Even God wouldn’t touch these dice. But when they passed them to me, my knees went weak. I remember my hands shaking so hard I could hear the QuDice rattling like bones.
I threw and time shuddered. The QuDice tumble through space, and I’m tumbling too, falling, squeezing into those double slits. There’s this incredible rush, as my body thins and ripples. Suddenly I’m surging forward, a thrilling frequency vibrating through me, a cosmic Om ringing out hosannas. I can feel my wavelength stretching and expanding, probability distribution blowing up to fill the room. I don’t exist anywhere in particular. I’m everywhere, all at once. For a few moments that feel like forever, I am a cloud of probabilities, every location and every state, all suddenly superposed and all existing simultaneously. I see every conceivable me-state exploding out in a dazzling kaleidoscope of endless multiplicity and I am them all. Everything is possible and nothing is determined. Then in an instant, the QuDice hit the table, skid to a stop and I collapse.
Word got out. Everybody came to try. A young post doc brought in her boyfriend, and they tossed the dice together. Sex in superposition. Two bodies intermingle, merge and entangle. They share every quantum state, as they pour from the double slit, interlaced waves cresting and breaking. Love’s fringes of light and shadow, brilliant hot peaks of passion, cool dark hollows of surrender, reinforce and cancel, again and again, fading to infinity.
After that, there was a line out the door. The Lab Director tried to shut it down, keep it quiet, but it was too late. The QuDice had already tunneled out. You couldn’t build barriers high enough. Dice parlors started materializing all around the South Bay and nobody could stop them.
In the end, even I couldn’t quit. God, I tried. But when I held those QuDice in my hands, nothing else mattered. To touch the pure bliss of the quantum wavefunction, every state superposed, every reality coexisting. You could see it all, know it all, be it all. If only for an instant.
That’s why the crash is all the crueler. When the QuDice tumble back to earth, the wavefunction collapses. The bubble of possibilities pops and the superposition of states reduces to one eigenstate. The state that is your life.
But what really hurts, is that as you’re being squeezed down, reduced to that one lousy reality, you don’t even get to choose. You watch all those possibilities slip through your fingers. All those choices disappear and none of them are yours. The cold probability of the wavefunction decides the state you find yourself reduced to. And it’s completely random.
There is no choice. No free will.
Everything that you are, all that you feel, the state you’re in right now, is nothing but chance. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you want, or decide, or that mirage you call intention. You are nothing more than an errant particle surfing a probability wave. And the universe is a casino, that calculates the odds, shakes the dice and throws you out to a random fate.
It feels so bad, so low. Your palms start to itch. Your head pounds. You’ll do anything to get back to all those possibilities, desperate to toss the QuDice one more time. You know you will. You’ve got no choice. Your whole reality is just a roll of the dice.
~
Bio:
R. Foster lives in Washington State with his wife and son. As an engineering researcher, he has authored more than 100 technical publications. This is his first published work of fiction.
Philosophy Note:
Quantum mechanics underpins the world as we know it. Yet, on the small time and length scales where classical physics gives way to quantum descriptions, the mathematics points to outcomes so weird and nonintuitive they challenge anyone who encounters them. Is there any way to make sense of the craziness? I wanted to try to imagine what it would be like to experience quantum reality firsthand. What if you could exchange your existence as an entity with a well-defined position for life as a cloud of probabilities? Or enter a state of entanglement with your lover? The result is a trip of equal parts ecstasy and despair. Stretch your wavelength, expand your mind and play dice with the universe.
