Short Story: The Wave Function of Azure Cove

When I wrote my most recent novel, The Azure Cove Assignment, I wanted to make it clear that weird science fiction events were not unknown in the setting, and that my characters had dealt with many of them in the past. Some of these I wrote out as full stories while I was prepping to write the novel. Some astute readers of the novel have noticed that a character from an entirely different book was referenced in the novel. Dean Bolek had been previously last seen surfing his way out of the novel End Times At Ridgemont High. Here is the short story of what happened when he surfed his way across time and space into the setting of Azure Cove.  

The Wave Function of Azure Cove

“Why are we here, officer?” Sarah asked. She had long had a conflict with the beach. She loved the ocean, but didn’t care for the sun. The older she’d gotten, her distaste for sunlight had grown and she didn’t come to the beach at all. She didn’t really like even being out of her house for that matter. But here she was with her team in the parking lot for the cove that the City of Azure Cove got its name from.

The cop scratched his head just under the brim of his hat. “They tell me you’re the experts.”

Sarah looked to each of the others in her team: Tran, Maria, Melvin. When the police called, Sarah figured she’d bring the whole crew, if nothing else safety in numbers just in case it was some sort of trap. While they had worked with the police before Sarah still didn’t trust them farther than she could throw them, and she’d never been particularly muscular. And why would the cops want them at the beach anyway? It was true they had expertise in a number of sciences, arts and humanities, but what that had to do with a surfer in the Cove’s parking lot… “An expert on whatexactly?” she asked.

“They said if there was weird shit, you were the ones to call.”

Sarah shook her head. This was probably the police chief’s way of getting back at her for all the times they’d butted heads in the past. Then again, she’d helped him out a few times, enough that it should’ve earned her a get-out-of-fuckery-free card. “Very well. I guess we can talk to him. See if there’s any data to record.”

Tran and Maria went off to the van to collect equipment. The cops had gone back to their cop cars to presumably do cop things, call more people in to do the actual work for them most likely.

She followed Melvin over to where the surfer sat cradling his knees, a large towel had been draped over his back, but he seemed to be warming up. His wet suit sure had seen better days. There weren’t full holes, but it was scratched in several places, badly worn in others.

Sarah leaned down. “My name’s Sarah and this is my colleague Melvin.”

“Dean.” He smiled up at her. He must have been the same age as her undergraduate students. He knew his name anyway. Whatever he’d said that caused the cops to call her, he was aware of who he was.

“Can you tell me what happened, Dean? What it is you said that has all these cops bothered?”

“It doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me.”

“You’d be surprised.”

The way he looked at her she could tell he doubted it. “I just asked where I was. If I was back. In California. In the real world.”

Sarah guessed it was the last bit that caught their attention.  She thought about answering him with “One of them,” but thought better of it at least until she heard more. Not everyone got her sense of humor and most found it difficult to tell when she was joking. She didn’t often always know when she was joking, probably because there was a fair amount of overlap between what she thought was a joke and what she thought was serious, especially when investigating the weird science events that often arose in Azure Cove.

“I was somewhere else. Another world. There had been hundreds of worlds after the first. I left a dying world only to surf to one that was already dead. I looked around a bit, but could tell I couldn’t stay. There was nothing to eat.”

Sarah did what she could not to laugh. He sounded so earnest and at least a little stoned. Probably a lot stoned. Still there was a reason he was talking to her and not getting a ticket from the cops.

“I figured if a wave took me there. A wave might take me back. Maybe I was stoned and dreamed that my world was dying. That the bad things came out of the water on grad night.”

Tran brought a tool chest over. Dean kept telling the story of grad night and beyond starting with man-sized sea monsters attacking his classmates and surfing out to sea and into some beyond space just as some sort of Kaiju-sized beast came to shore.

“I think just the Geiger Counter for now, Tran.”

Tran ran it over the surfer, who looked remarkably sedate. Sarah wasn’t sure if he’d never heard of a Geiger Counter before. He’d seen so much in his journey if he was to be believed, still he wasn’t agitated. Maybe he was just permanently stoned, either way he remained calm, which was just as well. The counter clicked only a little above normal.

“What do you think?” Tran asked.

Melvin shrugged, “It’s not that far over the norm, definitely nothing alarming.”

“Likely the difference in background radiation from the universes he encountered,” Sarah said. “Every universe has at least a slight difference.” She said to Dean, “At least you didn’t pass through any highly-radiated worlds.”

He smiled but said nothing. He seemed earnest, he believed what he told them. Sarah wasn’t sure how much of it was true or not, but she had witnessed many things strange enough that she figured best to treat his story as real until she knew otherwise.

“Is there someone we could call?” Sarah wondered what to do with the young man. The sun was starting to set, and she wouldn’t feel right in leaving him in the parking lot, even if there weren’t more tests she’d like to run if she could get him to consent to some time in the lab.

“My dad.” His voice lilted. He must’ve understood it wasn’t a sure thing. Sarah didn’t figure the parking lot at the Cove was a good venue for a lecture on Hugh Everett and the Multiple Worlds theory of Quantum Mechanics or for that matter the many other theories about multiple universes… if such a venue existed.

The call went through but it was a pizza place.

“I don’t understand. I could swear this is his number.”

“Things change.” She didn’t add that world even in the sets of worlds that were most alike, still have multitudinous differences.

“It hasn’t been that long. Has it? It was only a couple of weeks?”

“Time as a variable,” Sarah thought aloud. “I hadn’t thought of that. When do you think it is?”

“Late June. Early July?”

“It’s October I’m afraid.”

“It’s been that long?”

“Could be worse.”

“I surfed that wave away from the pier on June 13th, 2017.”

Sarah frowned. Unless she’d dreamed the last six years, it was 2023. “It’s worse.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

“The way where?”

“We’re going to take you to our labs. You can rest. Get a good meal and figure it all out there.”

#

When they got back to the cul-de-sac where their houses and garage laboratories were, Sarah showed him into her living room since hers was the least cluttered of any of the team’s homes. Sarah and her late husband had bought five homes on the cul-de-sac initially as potential rentals, but over the years following his death Sarah sold the others off to friends and colleagues in an effort to limit any power the HOA have over her.

They’d talked less than Sarah might’ve liked on the drive, but she imagined each thing she told him would take time to set in. He handled the loss of six years remarkably well, as to being in a different universe than the one he’d originally surfed out of, he was quiet about that. At first Sarah thought he might be devastated contemplating the implications, but then he started asking about the gear on the racks of the van and whether it was a deflection or not she was happy for the distraction.

Fortunately, he was easy to feed. If anything, he was too open to options on the food they had on hand, and they had to decide for him whether to feed him a rice bowl or tacos. In the end they decided on tacos because a rice bowl would lead to which of the rice bowls, though even tacos had a lot of options. The team’s culinary tendencies tended to operate under that theory that everything was better in tortillas or over bowls of rice.

Once he was fed and feeling more comfortable, they set about trying to find the town he came from, if there was a Dean Bolek in this universe, and if he had relatives in this universe. The town he was from doesn’t exist, but with the description he gave them of it… it sounded remarkably similar to Redondo Beach. Dean even recognized pictures of the high school and other locations. He went silent though when they showed him the pier. Then he said, “That’s where it happened. Everyone who stayed for grad night died.”

The monsters he described would have boggled Sarah’s imagination, but she’d already had decades to imagine differences in worlds throughout the multiverse, and although it did seem almost supernatural to her, it wasn’t as strange as the possibility of worlds where with entirely different physical laws, so she nodded and listened.

“I think I’d like to smoke what he smoked,” Tran said.

“I doubt that it was hallucinations,” Sarah said, “but perhaps you should go get the bong anyway, Tran?”

For the first time since they’d met him Dean seemed to perk up a bit.

They smoked two bowls while Sarah told Dean about several of the theories about multiverses, starting with Hugh Everett and the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Fortunately, she’d gotten used to Melvin interrupting her every time he thought she was going to lose Dean, and fortunately Dean was so overtly stoned there was no chance of her losing his attention.

He seemed particularly interested when Sarah talked about “the wave function” and its “collapse.” Though she wondered if he understood it wasn’t really that sort of wave, but then, and it was likely Tran’s potent weed affecting her thinking, she started to imagine surfing the wave function of the universe to its collapse and catching another wave.

Through a haze of smoke Dean said “So there’s infinite worlds.”

“Possibly. But I think the math suggests there’s a finite number, an actual number, it’s just so vast that the human brain couldn’t contemplate it, which people often confuse with the concept of infinity.”

Dean smiled and said, “You are the best people I’ve ever smoked out with.”

They talked for a long time while Maria ran some searches on her laptop. Sarah was impressed by how little Dean interrupted. She wasn’t sure how much he got the topics they talked about, but he seemed willing to listen.

“You must be teachers.” He nodded to Sarah. “You remind me of my history teacher. She was the best.”

“I teach physics. Maria teaches history. In her spare time, she makes robots,” Sarah motioned to Maria. “Melvin teaches mathematics. Tran teaches chemistry and botany.”

Dean’s ears perked up. “Hence the righteous buds.”

Sarah smiled. “Hence the righteous buds,” she said back.

Maria looked up from her laptop. Something was clearly wrong. She said to Dean, “We searched for your father’s name to see what came up. I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

“What happened?”

“In this world he was killed in a car accident a decade ago,” Maria said.

Dean looked sad but also confused. “He always was sort of a dick, but…”

“He was your dad,” Maria finished the sentence for him.

“Except he wasn’t, not exactly. I mean in this world he wasn’t your dad,” Sarah said. She wanted to add, “No idea if he was also a dick or not,” but decided not to.

“That’s not all,” Tran said. “It seems this world’s Dean also died in the same car crash.”

Dean had been unfazed by everything to that point, at this for a moment he looked upset, but then he shrugged. “At least I’m not going to meet myself. That would be weird.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Sarah didn’t know what to do and the weed was making her a little sleepy. There was just one thing she wondered about. “Where did you find the information about the crash?” Sarah asked Maria.

“It’s an obituary. It says that they are survived by Alice Bolek.”

“My mom?” Dean asked.

“I guess so.”

“She’s still around?” he asked.

“Let me see. Yeah. She has social media accounts it seems.”

Dean stood up for the first time since they brought in the bong and went to the computer and stared at the screen. “She looks good. I hadn’t seen her in years even before grad night.”

“What happened?” Melvin asked

“I don’t know. But people used to disappear. When things were just starting to go bad. She was one of the first.”

“What do we do? Do we contact her?” Maria asked.

Sarah shrugged. “And say what? Something tells me with his experience, Dean is more open than most people to the concept of multiple universes.”

“She’d want to see me,” Dean said.

“It could be upsetting to her,” Tran said.

“But she’d still want to see me.”

Sarah thought a moment. Usually, her impulse was to experiment regardless of what people thought, but she’d been told before that this could be bad when people were concerned. “She might not be the same.”

“No. But she’d be close. She was so good to me. If she’s even a bit like my mom, she’d still be great.”

“Okay. How do we get in touch with her?” Maria asked.

“And if we do what the hell do we say?” Sarah regretted asking without thinking first.

This stumped everyone.

“No words will do. If we’re going to go through with this, I think we need to bring him to her and hope for the best,” Sarah said. She didn’t want to predict odds on how that would go. Would she recognize him at all? Would she just think it an eerie coincidence that he looked sort of like what her son would have had he lived?

Fortunately, Alice Bolek didn’t do much to keep her socials private and they found that she was likely to be doing yoga in the park that evening. Traffic was hell driving from south Orange County to Redondo Beach on a summer evening, and they took the wrong turn and had to make an illegal u-turn. Still, they got to the park just as the class was starting to break up and Melvin parked the car while the others got out.

Dean walked tentatively ahead of the rest as the women came toward the curb holding their yoga mats.

Sarah braced herself for Alice to walk straight past Dean or worse to yell for the cops as he said, “Mom?” but instead she stopped walking, took a tentative step forward, and started crying as she embraced him.

When they stopped hugging, they got into her car and drove off, Dean looking back just once to smile.

They waited for several moments after Dean and his mother left.

“Does it bother you at all?” Maria asked Sarah.

“What does?”

“I know your own son won’t even call.”

Sarah thought about it a moment. “No. Better to see two people happy than to wish for things that are unlikely to ever be.”

“It’s strange though. It’s like they’ve been reunited, but they’ve never really met before.”“I would guess that across the myriad of multiple worlds, some things just feel the same whether they truly are or aren’t.”