Divergence

by D.B. Libby

Jerald Finley knew his present course of investigation was correct because of a simple, easily overlooked clue – his favorite shirt. The morning had been cool and crisp, along with the perceptual change that came with early autumn weather, and he had slipped on the long-sleeved crewneck shirt to guard against the chill. It was deep, dyed-in-the-thread blue with a ring-spun outer shell integrally woven with a soft lint-like lining, and it fit him like it had been loosely knitted to his body.

Not today. As he sat on the back porch and sipped his custom-blended cup of steaming morning coffee, he could see quite clearly as he looked down at his outstretched arm, the shirt was not the same. It was blue, no doubt, but it was not his favorite shirt, though it still seemed oddly familiar. It was more of a thin, long-sleeved tee, lacking that certain heft and deep-dyed color, and seemed abnormally wrinkled for having been just put on fresh-folded from a drawer.

He even got up restlessly and went to the bedroom, poking through the dresser to see if he had mistakenly put on a long-forgotten shirt after showering. It would not have been surprising in the mental haze he was experiencing from not having slept for several nights. But no – it had been in the drawer right where it had always been, and there was no other to be found. A smile of satisfaction spread across his face.

It had been three days since he had shown up at the Karl Planck Institute for Quantum Research, and although they had been very tolerant of his erratic attendance, he needed to go to work tomorrow, a Friday. Tonight he would sleep deeply, perhaps starting early, to synchronize himself once more. He had remained awake without any stimulants beyond his favorite coffee for two nights in a row, which, according to his calculations was the minimum amount of time necessary to cause the macroscopic quantum effect. It could be something as small as a misplaced set of keys, a forgotten name of a friend who no longer was a friend, or perhaps an unnoticed change well outside the ordinary purview of his daily life, but he had been fortunate. It had been his favorite shirt.

Tomorrow was a special Friday at the Institute. Once a month, he was required to update the Committee on his progress, and normally he went through the motions to satisfy their concerns. It usually took a half an hour, with an introduction littered with obscure and admittedly largely meaningless terms, segueing seamlessly into complex Power Point equations that always brought some stifled yawns, yet gave the appearance of further progress into his line of inquiry. While (at least ostensibly) further funding depended solely on these monthly reports, his reputation—despite his youth—and his intriguingly novel research, not to mention the reportedly bottomless pockets of the Institute, turned what could be a stress-inducing regular chore into a mere inconvenience time-wise for him, his continuing research ultimately rubber-stamped by the members of the Committee.

Tomorrow would be different. He had held back on the more relevant mathematics in the previous monthly updates, wanting to be certain of his conclusions before revealing them, but tomorrow he would wow them, stun them, awe the Committee. All thanks to his favorite shirt.

He had come to the Institute’s attention eighteen months before, when his doctoral thesis had spread like wildfire on the Internet after being cribbed by a skeptical reviewer. What was meant to be an outing of his ridiculous ideas had turned into acceptance and widespread respect – his maths were unequivocal. The paper, entitled Quantum Asynchronicity in the Cerebral Cortex, had opened up a vista onto untrodden ground. While Jerald was certain that now others were working furiously in the same directions, he felt comfortable in his advantage of a head start of several years, not to mention his typical omission of key equations in his thesis. And he had never really mentioned the central idea—that sleep was the brain’s way of re-synchronizing itself to the proper quantum dimension. It was like two blinking turn-signals at a stoplight—no matter how perfectly they started out together, eventually there was drift.

Jerald knew he was not well-versed in the biological sciences and could not imagine that he would do anything more than open doors to further research, but the possibilities were stunning. Perhaps his theory would do much to explain the schizophrenic’s auditory and perceptive hallucinations, the autistic’s lack of communicative skills. Maybe those were just symptoms of an unsynchronized mind, the hallucinations being reception of stimuli from a parallel dimension, and autism being lack of response to conversations unperceived by the non-quantum-synchronized mind. By extension, the need for excessive sleep in infants and teens could merely be the unformed brain’s necessity of a longer period of synchronization to the appropriate quantum reality. Heck, even birds and fish and grasshoppers needed sleep!

All the thoughts of sleeping began to wear heavily on Jerald’s tired mind, and he went to bed quite early, and slept for eighteen hours. When he awoke, he felt abnormally refreshed, as well as feeling quite elated. He went through his morning ablutions with clarity of thought, the sparkling sunlight streaming in through the windows of his apartment, lighting his surroundings with a sharpness to match his re-synched brain. Although he was to appear before the Committee today, it was still a casual Friday and he decided in the interest of comfort to don his favorite shirt.

He quite enjoyed the lengthy drive to work, and as he drove through the Institute’s front gates, he solemnly saluted the bronze statue of Planck gazing forbiddingly across the lawn. Even old Ernst could not intimidate him today, with his confidence at an all-time high. He glanced down at the neatly buttoned cuffs of his shirt and couldn’t help but admire the light blue flannel, soft as clouds upon his wrists, the collar points neatly buttoned on his absolutely favorite shirt.