“Well then,” sneered the principal. “Without further ado, let me introduce you to the host of public television’s longest-running science program, none other than Shady Sadie the Science Lady!”
As the trombone music for my favorite program blared over our school loudspeakers, I couldn’t help but feel grateful to the wormhole for making this possible. In my previous New Jersey story line, this would never have happened. But somehow, magically, I’d made it to a version of Parsippany where my television scientist role model was right in front of me in real life.
“Hashtag awesomesauce,” I gushed.
“Hashtag you’re adorkable,” countered someone in a mocking voice. It was Ned, who, I realized, was yet again sitting right behind me. I turned to give him a dirty look, but he gave me a face-melting smile and then handed me a teeny plastic flower bouquet that he produced from thin air. Jovi and Zuzu giggled as, totally flustered, I took the flowers before turning back around.
And then I was busy drinking in the sight of my own personal superhero. Shady Sadie had danced onstage to her show’s theme music and was now standing there beaming at us. Shady Sadie the Science Lady was wearing her signature round dark–rimmed glasses, pantsuit, and bow tie. Today’s suit was a psychedelic blue with the outlines of butterflies all over it. Her bow tie too looked like it might be an actual butterfly resting on her throat. Curiouser and curiouser. What was with all these butterflies? That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
Shady Sadie’s short black hair was all spiky in a zillion directions, and she bopped in place like she didn’t know how to stand still. “Heya, young scientists!” Sadie boomed as the music finally finished. Just like on TV, the audience yelled back, “Heya, Sadie!”
She pressed a button, turning the projector on behind her, so that she was standing in front of a giant dark screen with a tiny pinprick of light in the center. Space, I supposed. But then the tiny light started to expand more and more, until, taking up the whole screen, it seemed to explode in a shower of light.
“The big bang!” Sadie said, her voice echoing impressively through the auditorium. “The beginning of our entire multiverse! From a tiny spark, it has grown infinitely! And it continues to grow every day! Think about all that life—all those stories—expanding without end!”
“Booo-ring!” singsonged Ned from the seat behind me. I felt him tugging at a strand of my hair and whipped around.
“Stop that!” I hissed. “It’s not cute!”
“But I am!” he said all mock-suavely, raising an eyebrow in a way that weirdly reminded me of Neel. He held out his palms all “jazz hands” like—and did I imagine it or did little flames shoot out of both?
Before I could ask what kind of amateur magician could produce fire from his hands, Jovi pulled at my sleeve. “P-to-the-Chen’s looking this way again!”
I whipped back around. I did not want to attract Principal Chenopolis’s attention again, no matter how cute and/or annoying Ned was.
Sadie flicked an image of a boring-looking gray building on screen. Wait a minute, I’d actually seen it before. It was on Route 46, in the shopping center next to my parents’ convenience store!
“We at Smarty-Pants Science Corporation are trying to re-create the environment of the big bang so that we can study it and prevent anything that would reverse the expansion of the multiverse!”
“Why do you keep saying multiverse?” someone shouted out from the audience. “Instead of universe?”
“I say multiverse because I have faith ours is not the only story,” said Sadie. “I have faith there are universes we can’t even see, but that exist in parallel to ours.”
“Like alternate dimensions?” asked Sophie Hiller, one of the hard-core comix kids. “Like on that episode of Star Travels? When the captain gets transported into the universe of green-skinned warrior women?”
Everybody laughed, but good old P-to-the-Chen turned around to shoot some death lasers out of her eyes. The auditorium quieted down pretty quick.
“Kind of,” agreed Sadie, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Multiverse theorists used to think that universes were like strings each held in parallel to each other, which vibrated like the strings on a guitar. Now many think it’s more like thin membranes all lined up—pieces of bread in a loaf—with us as the jelly on the bread! The only thing is, those of us on one slice can’t see any of the other parallel slices.”
The image on the screen changed to a loaf of bread being cut by a knife floating in midair. I sat forward. Multiverse theory wasn’t just an idea for me; it was a fundamental truth of my entire life. It was how I could be from another dimension and at the same time from New Jersey. It was how I could hop from one reality, one identity, one story of my life, into another and back again. Multiverse theory was what it meant to be, well, me.
Sadie was pacing back and forth across the stage now, waving her arms as she spoke. “Anyway, whether you believe in string theory or what scientists now call M, or membrane, theory, the important thing to know about the origin of the universe is that it began because of chaos.”
Wait, what? Someone else mentioning chaos. Why was this word coming up so often? Sesha was working with some sort of Anti-Chaos Committee, and then, I realized with a start, there was that slogan on Ned’s ski hat, Kill the Chaos.
“Chaos is something that you middle schoolers know a lot about, right?” Shady Sadie was asking.
There was a nervous tittering in the audience, which was shut down way quick by our principal turning around in her seat and giving the titterers a laser-eyed death glare.
The Science Lady looked around at us, the stage lights glittering on her dark-framed glasses. “Well, who can give me a definition of chaos?”
Jordan Ogino raised his hand, and when she pointed at him, he shouted, “My bedroom—at least according to my mom!”
There was more tittering, and more quieting down after even more death-glaring from our principal. Shady Sadie took it in stride and said, “Sure, chaos can mean something that’s messy, disordered. What else?”
“Confusion?” shouted Vic Perralta.
“Disorganization?” said Lily Santiago.
“So something bad, right? Something we don’t want in our lives?” said Sadie, holding her arms out wide. “But here’s the thing—the multiverse needs chaos! In fact, it was born, in a sense, from that initial singularity into chaos! The very fabric of the multiverse, and of life itself, is chaos, unpredictability, diversity!”
“That’s not true!” I was surprised to hear the voice coming from right behind me. It was Ned. This time, it wasn’t his hands that were shooting fire, but his words. “What about rules? What about those single stories that bind us all together? What about the all is one, a theory of everything?”
That made me sit up. The all is one, that phrase about the interconnectedness of everything. The last time I’d heard it, Sesha had used it. I shivered. I was getting a really bad feeling about all this.
“Ah!” said Sadie, delightedly pacing the stage as she rubbed her hands together. “We have a future physicist in our midst! Or maybe a philosopher! Yes, indeed, many of the greats—Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking—they were looking for a theory of everything, one master idea that explained everything—gravity, electromagnetics, what have you—in the universe. But we have yet to find such a unifying tale. There is still so much about the multiverse that lies outside of our theorems, our predictions, our understanding.”