It was late afternoon when Rianne got the notification. She was sipping peppermint tea with her friend Cyrus. They sat on a picnic blanket laden with fruit. Blackberry thickets rose up behind them, attracting butterflies and hummingbirds, and a honeysuckle hedge expelled puffs of sweet perfume.
Rianne looked at the notification, a little pop up in the corner of her vision, courtesy of her network-linked contact lenses.
5:37 PM Monday, Coordinated Universal Time
#3b1091 Departure
Now boarding: Aerik, Argadic, Berguen, Bledhoq, Briawanet, Brilan, Caratigirn, Cend, . . .
It was a public service announcement for a departing stringship. The stringships ferried people through Einstein-Rosen bridges. Going through an Einstein-Rosen bridge was necessarily a one-way trip.
Rianne scrolled through the list of passengers distractedly. She stopped. Her cat’s name was in the middle of the list. At first Rianne did not think anything of the coincidence. It must be another cat with the same name. But paranoia wormed its way into her mind, and she checked her cat’s location, and saw that her cat was indeed there, at the stringport. It was truly happening.
“I’m sorry,” she told Cyrus, “I have to go.”
“Go?” Cyrus turned.
“Sorry, finish the picnic without me.”
“You’re going home already? Wait — ”
“Not home! My cat is at the stringport. I have to go get him.”
Understanding dawned on Cyrus’s face. “Your cat?”
“Yes, my cat.” Rianne stood and gathered her things, knocking over her cup of tea in her haste.
“Oh. Your cat . . . at the stringport? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why is your cat leaving? I thought he was happy with you. Oh, hold on, wait!” Cyrus protested, but Rianne was already off and sprinting across the lawn.
Palms clammy with fear, leaving Cyrus on the grass, dumbfounded and staring after her, Rianne dashed to the stringport, brimming with the conviction that she would reach her cat’s docking terminal before the stringship departed. She tried to picture her cat following the other passengers onboard, strapping himself into a docking terminal like a bee burrowing into the petals of an unfurling lily.
The stringship was a spiral-shaped vessel. It was composed of loosely-arranged fractals that wound around each other, leaving small divots to accommodate riders. When the sun’s rays hit the fractals, they threw rainbow rectangles on the walls around them. Upon departure, the stringship would vanish in a soft white flash, and Rianne’s cat would vanish with it. It was unimaginable. But it was happening.
Cyrus’s question chewed at her. Why would her cat leave her? She had no answer for Cyrus. Rianne did not know why her cat would leave her, why her cat would embark on a stringship and escape to a parallel universe. She treasured her cat. She loved her cat more than anyone in the whole world. Evidently her cat did not feel the same way about Rianne. She recalled that morning. Her cat seemed perfectly normal, reclining in his usual patch of sunlight on the kitchen floor. Her cat had given no indication that he would cause this world-shattering change of events.
On the way to the stringport, Rianne mulled over the encounter with the talking squirrel from a week ago.
“Hello. Yoo hoo!” the voice had called from the trees.
Rianne had looked up. “Excuse me?”
A gray squirrel was nestled in the branches of an aspen tree. “Hello,” it said.
“Um. Hi,” Rianne was not sure what the squirrel wanted.
“It’s a beautiful, blustery day today, isn’t it?”
“I guess.” The sky was aquamarine and cloudless. Rianne brushed a lock of hair off her face.
“What are you up to?” the squirrel asked.
“I’m walking home.”
“Did you come from the university?”
“Yeah, I just got out of a meeting.” Rianne worked for the astrophysics research group at the university. Her colleagues were trying to derive a theory to unify the theory of relativity with the theories of quantum mechanics. Such a theory would unite previously irreconcilable laws of physics, and was thus dubbed the “God Equation.” She made a mental note to check the results of the program she was running when she got home.
“I’ve scurried along fences all day and seen lots of people, but you’re the first person that I decided to stop,” the squirrel admitted. “I have a special gift, you see.”
“What kind of gift?”
“The gift of clairvoyance.”
Rianne marveled at the squirrel. “Does that mean you can see the future?”
The squirrel shook its head. “I only have premonitions. For others, never for myself. Every time I have one, I go on a quest to find the person it applies to. It’s very interesting to see how they try to change their fate, even though it never works. I have a premonition for you. This only happens once in a purple moon, you know.”
“I’ll hear it.”
The squirrel’s tail quivered excitedly. “Okay, here goes: You must stop helping the physicists find their God Equation. If you continue helping them, you will lose your cat forever.”
Rianne bristled. “What? What does my work have to do with my cat?”
The squirrel shrugged.
“I can’t just give up my life’s work. So many people are depending on us, and our progress has the potential to impact our entire civilization.”
“It’s either them or your cat.”
Disgusted, Rianne began walking away. She refused to listen to another word.
“Dance to the plastic beat! Another mooooorning comes,” the squirrel belted suddenly.
Rianne whirled. “What did you just say?”
“Plastic Love by Maria Takeuchi. I heard it spilling out of someone’s living room window. It was a vaporwave rendition of the original. You should listen to it.”
“Ooh, I’ve always been fond of vaporwave. I’ll give it a listen later,” Rianne said, walking away. Maria Takeuchi! This squirrel might be annoying, but it certainly is a rodent of culture.
Cyrus had never seen Rianne look so distraught, and he felt that he ought to follow her and make sure she didn’t cause a traffic collision. He bundled up the picnic blanket into his backpack and ran after her as quickly as he could. To his surprise, he saw her take a fairy path through the forest.
He took the same path. The forest draped him with tendrils of gossamer. Deer’s eyes peered out at him from the dark depths of sycamore trunks. Even at dusk, the air was full of the wistful strains of mourning doves, while a cacophony of cicadas chirped over them.
While tracking Rianne, Cyrus was intercepted by a brown and white tortoiseshell cat.
“I am the guardian of the forest,” the cat said.
Cyrus thought quickly. “O guardian, allow me to make my passage in your domain peacefully and unobtrusively.”
“You’re eloquent for such an anxious-looking traveler. Where are you rushing off to in such a hurry?”
“I’m chasing my . . .” Cyrus trailed off in hesitation. Colleague? Friend? Close companion?
“The ones we chase are always so infuriatingly elusive.”
“My friend,” Cyrus decided. “Did you see my friend pass here just a little bit ago?”
The cat licked her paw languidly. “I saw no such thing.”
Cyrus sighed. “Well, I’ll be off, then.”
“I can tell that there’s something weighing on your mind. Feel free to unburden yourself.”
“How can you tell?”
“Your eyes.”
“To be frank, I am exhausted. Not physically, okay? I mean, mentally.”
“That is normal.”
“I mean, it’s exhausting to talk with people who don’t want to talk to you. Even if it’s their job. You have to try so hard to make yourself heard, and you feel terrible afterward. You feel like an idiot.”
The cat blinked slowly at him. Go on, she insinuated with her body language.
Cyrus told the cat about the discussions he was having with the research group. The research group had found the answer to the ultimate question.
The quest to unify relativity and quantum mechanics was over. It was Rianne’s program that performed the final calculations, and the equations were drawn up just an hour ago. “If the researchers published them, and the peer reviews substantiated their findings, the impact would be astronomical, no pun intended,” Cyrus said.
The brown and white tortoiseshell looked impressed, but not terribly so.
“How extraordinary,” she said politely. “The rules of physics, the language of the universe, you say, would be rewritten. I disagree. Nothing will be rewritten. It will all stay the same. Everything will be the same, as it always has been.”
Cyrus shuffled his feet impatiently. “No, it’s the opposite. If we’re right, the conventional laws would be overturned, or at the very least, modified, to fit our sounder understanding of the universe.”
“The universe. The universe is so tiny.” The cat gazed at Cyrus earnestly. “Yet we all seem to be leaving, one after another. Please don’t abandon me. Take care of the forest. Please don’t neglect the forest,” she begged.
“I’m not sure I follow you completely.”
“You know I want to stay here. I never wanted to go, but something changed in the fabric of the universe — ”
“Huh?”
“ — and I knew it was time. I am the guardian of the forest and the task of maintaining the greenery has grown to infinitely difficult proportions. I have no choice but to go.”
“Oh. Um . . . I don’t mean to be rude, but speaking of going, I have to go as well.” Cyrus strode forward, embarrassed. “If you’ll excuse me. Sorry!”
The tortoiseshell’s whiskers twitched. “Once, our streams were pristine enough that the fairies bathed in them. The water glowed yellow from their incandescence, of all the — ”
“Sorry!”
“ — werelights in this forest, you would think that — ”
“Sorry! Bye!” Cyrus skittered off, stumbling over a clump of dead branches. He squinted at the darkness ahead, but could not tell whether the black silhouette in the distance was Rianne or the swaying shadow of a pine sapling. What should I say when I catch up to her?
I love you, the night breezes whispered.
It was getting dark now, and Cyrus realized he lost sight of Rianne. Damn it, I should have caught up to her when I had the chance, but I didn’t expect her to take a fairy path. He continued northwest, toward the city center.
Presently, Cyrus broke out of the undergrowth and into the town square, where the billowing Sea-River buffeted the pink-brick shores. Not many people were in the town square on a Monday evening, and out of the few there, Cyrus could pick out Rianne. She was standing in front of a display of croquembouche cakes in the window of a cafe. He jogged across the square to her. “Rianne!” he called.
She turned to look at him. To his horror, he saw that her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks tear-streaked. “He’s gone. My cat. I was too late,” she whispered.
Cyrus’s heart dropped. “No, it hasn’t been that long at all. The stringship couldn’t have left yet.”
“It left. He’s gone forever.”
“No!”
“Yes. He’s gone, and I’ll never know why.”
“I . . .”
“I loved him.”
Cyrus could not think of how to comfort her except to awkwardly place his hand on her shoulder.
She opened her mouth, but he blurted out a clumsy “Wait,” cutting her off. He instantly regretted it. He knew it was not an appropriate time to tell her, but that day, he had set up the picnic for her in preparation, and he thought about the message he had scrawled the night before, in which he had divulged all his secrets. He was planning to give the message to her, afterward, if he failed to say everything out loud. He tried before, but his nerves had clamped his throat shut like a vise. He wished the sad incident with her cat had not soured the occasion.
“Tell me what?” Rianne asked.
“Well, I just — actually, I don’t — ”
“Shh, I know.”
“You know?”
“Yes,” Rianne said. She knew what Cyrus’s revelation would be. It was not news to her. Her program computed the God Equation a week ago, the same day she met the talking squirrel. She had solved the true nature of dark energy, the enigmatic force physicists could not identify. They could only observe its effects in the universe’s cosmic microwave background radiation. It was the repulsive force that pushed galaxies farther and farther apart from each other until there would be nothing but emptiness everywhere forever.
“You guys finally deciphered the God Equation from my computations, didn’t you?” Rianne breathed.
After a pause, Cyrus replied yes, mortified that he was expecting her to say something else.
“So, you understand now? The truth? Can you believe it?”
Cyrus blinked. “If you are referring to the truth of the universe, well . . . if there is anything truer, it will never be understood by sentient creatures, at least not in our lifetimes.”
“No, it will not.” Rianne procured a white reflective shard from her backpack which she pinched tightly between her index finger and thumb. “I created a bridge in the lab. I’m going after my cat.”
“Rianne . . .” Cyrus reached for the shard.
In spite of herself Rianne could not help but slap his hand away. “Are you suicidal? This bridge is small and unstable! It can only fit me!” It would collapse immediately if we entered it together, crushing us into oblivion.
Cyrus shook his head. “I was not going to enter it. I was trying to see if it was genuine. You should not hold it like that. Einstein-Rosen bridges that aren’t bound to stringships are dangerous.”
“Only if you don’t know how to handle one properly. Goodbye, Cyrus. I’m going now.”
“Rianne . . . I hate to say this, but we both know your cat is unreachable. He went on a stringship into an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Even if you went through a bridge too, you will never go to the same place your cat went.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I’m not wrong.”
“I will see my cat again.”
“That is impossible,” Cyrus said gently.
Rianne’s voice was barely audible. “But I have to find out why he left.”
Cyrus remembered the tortoiseshell cat from the forest. “Listen. Do you know what the implications of the God Equation are?”
Rianne pondered the question. “Yes,” she said.
“What are they?”
“The expansion of our universe is akin to a piece of spandex getting stretched to its maximum length. Upon release, it will spring back into its original shape. We are currently in the stretching state, and it will last for who knows how many years before the reverse process begins. The universe is not expanding . . . it is oscillating.”
“Sooner or later, everything will go back to the way it once was, then,” Cyrus mused.
“Yes, you could think of it like that.”
“Then it implies, one day, you and your cat will be reunited.”
“What?”
As he spoke, Cyrus became more and more convinced of the reality of his words. “Right now we are in the stretching phase. Your cat is pulled away from you. When we spring back here, your cat will return.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“I think that’s exactly how it works. Previously, we did not know, because the true nature of the universe was obscured as if behind a film and the image flipped. We are aware now, thanks to your breakthrough, and your cat has left.”
Rianne’s eyes blazed. “What are you saying? That my cat left as a consequence?”
“Rianne, your cat left because it was impossible for him to stay once we discovered the truth of the universe. For the truth to hold, the proposition, ‘God Equation is solved and your cat is here’ must be a contradiction. Your cat could not be here, given what we know now.”
“Are you saying that my cat remaining with me would have led to a contradiction in the universe?”
“After you computed the God Equation, yes, that would have led to a contradiction, or a paradox.”
Rianne brooded for several minutes. Cyrus, why do you have to take the side of the talking squirrel? I should have ignored that damned thing.
“My cat is gone.” Rianne murmured. She dropped the shard into Cyrus’s outstretched hand. An air of glum acquiescence hung about her.
Palming the shard and slipping it into his pocket, Cyrus invited Rianne to have coffee with him in the cafe they were standing in front of. “There is another thing. That I wanted to tell you,” he said.
Rianne examined Cyrus’s flushed cheeks. “All right.”
They stepped into the cafe.
