Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

THE UNIVERSE DECIDES

"So that," Justin Case concludes triumphantly (he is dreaming about giving a lecture to an audience of trans-vestites), "the elements in the montage may be of any number-five, fifteen, fifty, whatever-and there be any emotions you can imagine implicit in each one of them separately. Nonetheless, the total emotional effect emerges from the montage, not from the elements. Film is the visual demonstration of Fuller's synergetic geometry."

"You're fuller shit!" one of the transvestites yelled.

Who shit? Justin shit. Bullshit! Who shit? He was being carried around by the time-dwarfs in a jeweled chair wearing the Crown of Thorns. It was Mardi Gras. He was having a swell time. He decided to go on lecturing them.

"The montage of Chinatown or Chapel Perilous takes us to the Lair of Fu Manchu-the center of Power-the occult Nine Unknown Illuminated Ones who rule the world-the secret of capitalism and ownership-the cruel Cross that separates inside from outside, without windows."

But then he wet his pants and they were all laughing at him, laughing mockingly and childishly, as they closed in with the tar and feathers. They had found out he was a no-good shit.

"In other words," Blake Williams lectures, "what collapses the state vector and er um determines or ah least ways brings it about that a new quantum state appears can only be a Hidden Variable implicate in the whole system- the biggest whole system."

"You mean when Ignatz throws the brick-"

"If Ignatz is a quantum physicist and is throwing a photon, Krazy or Schrodinger's Cat can be in any of several eigenstates, um, yes, so that in effect the whole universe participates in the ah decision as to whether the Kat will be hit by the brick um ah or the photon ah as the case may be."

"Professor," Natalie asked finally, driven to the Edge, "are you putting me on?"

"My dear I am um merely giving you the most consis-tent and literal interpretation of Bell's Theorem as devel-oped by Dr. Jeffrey Chew at U.C.-Berkeley and Dr. Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics."

"The whole universe decides?"

"Well there is um a certain degree of metaphor in-volved…"

"You know, Professor"-Natalie sits up and gives him a level glance-"I met a midget once, a nasty little son-of-a-bitch, but he told me something I never forgot. All that exists is metaphor, he said, and whoever controls our metaphors controls us."

"As an anthropologist," Blake Williams said, "I must agree. Are we living in an occult thriller, a porn movie, a philosophical treatise, a sci-fi novel? It depends on which parts of our experience we choose to highlight. That brings

us to the question: Are we writing our life-scripts, or is there a Hidden Variable, as the new quantum theories suggest?"

"You mean the whole universe will decide what we're gonna do next?" Natalie wanted a straight answer.

"Well um that's the alternative to saying there are multiple universes where anything that can happen does happen ah and it's quite democratic, really, since every lesser system within the whole system gets its vote."

Natalie's semantic circuit was working on overload. "You're telling me that each of us and the chair over there and each atom in us and in the chair and in Marvin's cocaine-we all get one vote?"

"Um perhaps we have carried the metaphor till it staggers…"

"It sounds like Mozart's music," Natalie said, seeing the window again. "All as mechanical as a clockwork and yet as free as a dream…"