Inversion - 8

Part III: Quantum Chrysalis

Chapter 8

Maya’s lab became Laurel’s second home, though home was perhaps the wrong word for a place that looked so much like a hospice. Two weeks had passed, and his weight loss was only declining faster despite Maya’s attempts at intravenous nutrition. The IV solutions helped a little, but they weren’t going to save him in the end.

“The mouse died,” Maya announced, not looking up from her microscope. She’d been working sixteen-hour days, running experiments on lab animals that she’d subjected to the same teleportation process that had transformed Laurel. “Third one this week.”

Laurel was slumped in the corner chair, a book on quantum mechanics open but unread in his lap. “How long?”

“Four days post-teleportation.”

“Longer than expected.”

“Not long enough.” Maya finally looked up, her eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion. “I tried feeding it the synthesized D-amino acid supplements. Same result as with you – temporary improvement, then rapid decline.”

They’d discovered early on that Laurel could process artificially synthesized right-handed amino acids, but the supplements were expensive, difficult to produce in quantity, and didn’t address the broader metabolic chaos wracking his system. His body was like a factory retooled for a completely different product, with every assembly line running in reverse.

“What about re-teleportation?” Maya asked, though they’d been over this ground before.

Laurel shook his head. “I ran simulations on the quantum decoherence patterns. A second teleportation would not reverse chirality. It would just introduce more uncertainty into the quantum state.”

Maya pulled off her gloves and tossed them in the waste bin with more force than necessary. “What you are saying is that the process is not symmetric, not like flipping a switch twice to get back to the original position.”

“The subject’s molecular structure exists in a quantum superposition during teleportation. When it is reconstituted, the waveform collapses into a definite state, but there’s no mechanism to ensure it collapses back to the original chirality. It’s like…” He paused, searching for an analogy. “Like trying to unscramble an egg by scrambling it again. The entropy is irreversible.”

Laurel looked away. Part of him had hoped that Maya’s increasingly frantic effort might yield a solution for him. Hope, he was learning, was a cruel thing – it kept you focused on impossible futures instead of impossible presents.

“Look at the decoherence data,” he said.

Maya hesitated. “Laurel…“

“Look.”

He pulled up the simulation on his screen. The display showed a three-dimensional model of quantum probability waves, beautiful and terrible in their complexity. Maya studied the patterns, thinking that she might finally be able to understand what they showed.

“Here,” Laurel pointed to a cluster of oscillating curves. “This is what happens to molecular chirality during the transmission phase. The handedness information becomes quantum uncertain – it exists in superposition between left and right.”

“And during reconstitution?”

“The collapse is random from the universe’s perspective, but deterministic from ours. The quantum field equations force a specific outcome based on local environmental factors. In my case, those factors favored right-handed rematerialization.”

Maya leaned closer to the screen. The waves pulsed with hypnotic regularity, each oscillation representing billions of molecular decisions playing out at the quantum level. “What about external field manipulation? Could we bias the collapse toward left-handed rematerialization?”

“I ran those calculations.” Laurel pulled up another screen. “The energy requirements would be enormous – we’d need to generate a magnetic field strong enough to influence quantum spin states across every atom in your body simultaneously. Even if we had that kind of power, the process would likely kill me before the chirality could be corrected.”

They lapsed into silence, the computer’s fan humming softly in the background. Outside Maya’s lab window, campus life continued its normal rhythm – students hurrying to classes, professors walking purposefully between buildings, groundskeepers tending to flower beds that would bloom in ignorance of molecular handedness.

“There’s something else,” Maya said quietly. “Something I haven’t told you.”

Laurel looked up from the screen. “What?”

“The blood work from yesterday. Your cellular regeneration has slowed significantly. Not just muscle mass – everything. Your immune system, tissue repair, even brain function.” She pulled up a medical chart covered in declining curves. “You’re aging faster, Laurel. Maybe twice the normal rate.”

The information was a blow. He’d known he was dying. That much had been clear from the beginning. But dying quickly was somehow worse than dying slowly, as if the universe were impatient to correct him out of its existence in revenge for messing with its secrets.

“How long?”

“Weeks, not months. And that’s if we can maintain your nutrition artificially.”

Laurel stood abruptly, the book sliding from his lap to the floor. “I need air.”

“Laurel…”

“I need air.”

He pushed through the lab door and into the hallway, his footsteps echoing off polished floors that seemed to stretch infinitely in both directions. Students rushed or sauntered by, youthful faces full of possibility, their amino acids blissfully conventional. He envied them their normalcy, their ability to eat cafeteria food and digest it into energy and growth instead of pain, nausea, and early death.

Outside, the afternoon felt warm on his face, though he knew the feeling was likely an illusion caused by his altered physiology. Did light itself look different when filtered through inverted proteins? Were colors shifted slightly from their normal spectrum? He had no baseline for comparison. He was a sample size of one, an experiment with no control group.

He found himself headed toward the physics building, drawn more by habit than intention to the place where it had all begun. The teleportation apparatus sat silent in his lab, its surfaces reflecting the fluorescent lights like funhouse mirrors. The machine that had should have saved him, but damned him to death instead.

Laurel approached the transmission platform and placed his hand on its smooth surface. The metal felt cool and solid, deceptively ordinary for something that had fundamentally altered the nature of his existence. He thought about the moment of transport – the brief sensation of dissolution, of becoming information without form, and then the snap back to consciousness on the receiving end.

Had he felt different immediately after? He tried to remember, but the memory was clouded by excitement and triumph. He’d been so focused on the success of the process that he’d ignored any subtle changes in sensation or perception. The nausea had started later, gradually, like a slowly rising tide.

“Laurel?”

He turned to find Maya standing in the doorway, her expression carefully controlled.

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I figured you might be.” She stepped inside, her eyes avoiding the apparatus. “You’re planning something stupid, aren’t you?”

“Define stupid.”

“Anything involving that machine.” She gestured toward the transmission platform. “I know that look, Laurel. I’ve seen it before, usually right before you do something brilliant and dangerous.”

He almost smiled. “This would be more dangerous than brilliant.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“I’m dying anyway, Maya. We both know that.”

“Yes, but dying trying to fix things is different from dying while things are broken. At least this way we have time to…”

“Time for what? Time to watch me waste away? Time to run more tests that won’t change anything?” Laurel moved away from the machine, but his eyes remained fixed on it. “I’m not going to spend my last weeks as a scientific curiosity.”

Maya crossed the room and stood beside him, close enough that he could smell her shampoo – something floral and normal and utterly foreign to his transformed senses.

“What if I told you I had another idea?” she said quietly.

“Do you?”

“Maybe. It’s not a cure, but it might… extend things. Give us more time to find an actual solution.”

Laurel finally looked at her. Maya’s face was flushed with excitement and exhaustion, her dark eyes bright with the fever of discovery.

“Tell me,” he said.