Entanglement ~ A short science fiction story of a not-so improbable future
Author’s Note: In a “New York Times” survey, when asked if they could travel back in time, 42% of the respondents said that they would go back and kill Hitler when he was a baby.
Evelyn Louise Hatfield had two genetic misfortunes that would prove to make her childhood miserable. She was born preterm in 1989 to a large family in Pike County, Kentucky, and consequently was small in stature compared to her siblings. Evelyn’s hardscrabble mountain family’s only claim to fame was being related to the notorious Hatfields of the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
That she was distantly related to Devil Anse Hatfield was not the source of her difficult youth. Her five sisters and four brothers did not appreciate her brilliance. None of her siblings nor either of her parents had a scintilla of curiosity. Evelyn doesn’t recall any of her family ever reading a book or discussing anything remotely cerebral. Not having anyone to discuss her thoughts with, she gradually became isolated from her family and schoolmates.
If that was not enough to frustrate the young Evelyn, she had an affliction that visited her family every other generation; she was a profound stutterer. Either condition would have made her school years difficult but having both made it unbearable.
The children not only laughed at her stuttering but also called her “Brainy Bitch” and “The Nerd” because she earned good grades and would rather study for exams than hang out under the school stadium and smoke weed. While other girls had posters of rock stars on their bedroom walls, Evelyn had a quote from Einstein above her bed, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.”
Evelyn didn’t mind being the only girl in her class not to be invited to the prom. Evelyn had far more important things to do, such as selecting a college to attend and achieving a high score on her SATs, although she didn’t know who would pay for her education. Her parents barely scraped up enough money to feed the children and keep them clothed.
The only bright spot in Evelyn’s adolescence was her high school biology teacher, Robert Carraway. He saw the budding genius in Evelyn, something that he had never seen in 27 years of teaching science. Robert knew that if she were to realize her potential, she would have to escape poverty and ignorance. With Robert’s guidance and a lot of hard work on Evelyn’s part, she was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a scholarship, and entered the physics program.
Evelyn’s future held great promise, and she would make her mark in the world of science, but not just to make a name for herself. She would drastically alter the world and change it in ways that the greatest on Earth would struggle in vain to comprehend. Furthermore, she would undertake this Herculean task alone and in complete anonymity.
College changed everything for Evelyn. At last, she was among those who wanted to learn as much as they could about our wonderful and sometimes mysterious world. The greatest mystery for her lies in the growing field of quantum physics—the branch of science that explores the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels.
Nothing is as it seems when exploring the weird and unpredictable world of the infinitely small, and this thrilled Evelyn, driving her to devote her entire life to making sense of that which is, in many ways, ineffable.
Rightly assuming that her chosen field would require some public speaking, Evelyn found a speech therapist on campus who, over the next couple of semesters, helped her diminish her stuttering to the point where she felt confident addressing groups.
Evelyn’s painful memories of being taunted and jeered at for her speech impediment soon faded away. Additionally, none of her family ever called or visited her in Boston, so they, too, began to fade from her memory.
The only thing Evelyn brought from Kentucky that carried any meaning was her memories of those who were kind to her: her high school science teacher Robert Carraway, and the pastor at her Presbyterian Church in Pikeville.
Early on in her first semester at MIT, her roommate, also a physics student, asked Evelyn if she was religious when she noticed that she wore a cross on a gold chain around her neck. Evelyn was acutely aware that many in the field of science were nonbelievers, but she told her roommate that she had grown up attending church every Sunday and that it was part of the culture in her community.
Evelyn added that not everyone who attended her church acted in a very Christian-like manner, but she didn’t think that faith and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Although she didn’t tell her roommate, she believed that her years of attending church had instilled in her a sense of morality, enabling her to distinguish between good and evil. Evelyn truly embraced the tenets of Christianity.
There was nothing in science that would dissuade her from her values and beliefs, and her fervent sense of morality would be carried to a length never before seen on this planet. This diminutive woman from the hills of eastern Kentucky would exert a force that would ripple out from her preeminent mind to touch every person on Earth.
Typically, a PhD in physics takes six to seven years to complete, but Evelyn’s rapid progress through the coursework and her highest grades in every class put her on a fast track to graduate in only four years, a first at MIT.
Upon graduating, MIT attempted to recruit Evelyn to join their physics program as a full-fledged professor. Unfortunately, for the esteemed university, she knew that she wanted to devote her efforts to the real work of science, namely research.
Over the next two years, Evelyn conducted research on quantum physics at the University of Oxford in the UK and the Vienna Center for Quantum Science in Austria, focusing on the isolation of the Higgs boson particle, thought to be responsible for mass in fundamental particles.
Her work ultimately led her to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland. Evelyn was there in 2012 when the Large Hadron Collider, at last, discovered the Higgs boson, a landmark in understanding how the particle confers mass to other subatomic particles.
Evelyn had not concentrated on any single aspect of particle physics until 2023, when a peculiar phenomenon, quantum entanglement, was observed for the first time, elevating it from theory to fact. It was this bit of reality that Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” and it would be the focus of her attention throughout the rest of her life.
Her groundbreaking work with quantum entanglement earned her the title of Chief Research Scientist at CERN. As such, Evelyn would have access to all the results from the numerous and varied experiments conducted by scientists worldwide.
In layperson’s terms, quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where two or more particles become linked together in a special way. If you measure a property of one particle, such as its spin, you instantly know the corresponding property of the other.
It’s like having two coins flipped at the same time, but instead of being independent, they’re linked. If one lands on heads, the other is guaranteed to be tails, even if they’re on opposite sides of the universe. Even more surprising is that the reaction is nearly instantaneous; that is, the correlation between the entangled particles is faster than the universal speed limit, the speed of light in a vacuum. (186,000 miles per second.)
The future looked rosy for the benefits of scientific research in the years ahead, but that was not to be. In the next few decades, our world would be thrown into chaos and degradation. In the face of climate change and overpopulation, resources became scarce, sometimes non-existent. In such mayhem, wars raged on every continent.
Rising ocean levels have consumed major cities, creating diasporas with nowhere to go or being unwelcome wherever they do go. Most of the fragile democratic countries fell first, creating a vacuum that autocrats and dictators gladly filled. In some countries, gangs took over and ruled every aspect of daily life; violence was epidemic. Our world devolved from a paradise to a living hell in a matter of a few decades.
By 2037, America had abandoned scientific research altogether, opting instead for pseudo-science, superstition and conspiracy theories. Worldwide, all legitimate scientific research was now centered in the UK, Germany, France and Austria. These countries were the only bastions against a world of ignorance. Evelyn recalled the Kurdish pro-verb, “Fear an ignorant man more than a lion.”
Then, in 2039, at the age of 50, Evelyn, now renowned for her work on the potential applications of Quantum Entanglement, stumbled upon some top-secret data from a Chinese researcher that shocked her. She never mentioned it to any of her colleagues, but what she saw in the Chinese data demonstrated a potential that could either destroy or improve our world.
What had the Chinese discovered and what would Evelyn do with it?
To be continued,
Ken Springer
ken1949bongo@gmail.com
