Will The Real Jason Please Stand Up

Title: Dark Matter

Rating: 4 Stars

You wouldn’t think that a novel based on Schrödinger’s Cat would be exciting, but you would be wrong.

Jason Dessen was a once promising physicist that, years ago, got his girlfriend pregnant. Faced with a choice, he decided to forego his demanding research and marry Daniela. Fifteen years later, he is happily married and a devoted father to his son Charlie while teaching introductory physics at a nondescript university. He has no regrets but does sometime think about the road not taken that could have yielded him reputational fame as a celebrated physicist.

His life takes a turn one night while walking home. A man in a mask abducts him. The man does not want his money. He asks Jason some basic questions about his life. The abductor injects Jason with some kind of liquid and then shoves him into a black box.

When Jason comes to, he is, to put it mildly, quite confused. He is apparently in an advanced, state of the art lab setting. Everyone around him is applauding him as if he’s a returning hero. They believe him to be Jason Dessen, world famous physicist that has developed a technique to traverse multiverses. He is the first person to actually leave his current universe and come back.

Before, I go any further, I think that I need to explain just a little bit of the quantum mechanics that the plot makes use of.

The first thing that I should explain is Schrödinger’s Cat. It’s a thought experiment that I’m going to grossly oversimplify. There is a cat in a box. Also in the box is poison that could be automatically triggered. If triggered, the cat will die. The box is completely enclosed. The cat is unobservable. According to quantum mechanics, during this state the cat is both alive and dead. It is the act of observing that creates the state of the cat being alive or dead.

The second thing is the concept of the multiverse. Everyday, every person makes a nearly impossible to comprehend number of decisions. According to the multiverse theory, each one of these decisions creates a different multiverse. For example, there is a multiverse where I, having a cold and not feeling all that well, decided to say fuck it, and not write this blog post tonight.  The thing is that all of these multiverse branches all simultaneously coexist. Somehow our brain, to keep from going insane, has evolved so that we’re only conscious of one multiverse at a time.

OK, now back to the book. Jason Dessen, the world famous physicist (I’m going to call him Usurper Jason for later obvious reasons) has built a human sized Schrödinger’s box. Along with the box, he has to inject himself with something that somehow allows his consciousness to open up and become aware of the many multiverses. When he’s inside the box, the multiverses manifests as an infinite number of doors that he can open. Anyone of them opens up to a specific multiverse.

Usurper Jason somehow stumbled upon the multiverse in which the first Jason (let’s call him Protagonist Jason) lives. Although Usurper Jason is a world famous physicist, he sees the happy, contented life of Protagonist Jason and covets it. So, Usurper Jason concocts a plan that sends Protagonist Jason back in his place in his universe and becomes the husband to Daniela and father to Charlie in Protagonist Jason’s universe.

Got all of that? Even though Protagonist Jason is now a world renowned physicist, he desperately misses his wife and daughter. Not only that, but the people in Usurper Jason’s universe are becoming increasingly suspicious of Protagonist Jason’s lack of expertise in advanced research physics.

Protagonist Jason steals some injections and manages to get into the black box. He injects himself and sees an infinite number of doors. How does he choose the door that will send him back to his specific multiverse? Among the doors that he chooses include a vast wasteland from something like a super volcano eruption or a nuclear Armageddon. Another option is the frigid result of some climate change event. Yet another is a glittering futuristic looking multiverse.

He finally does make it home to his multiverse. The problem is now, how does he usurp the Usurper Jason? What kind of story can he tell Daniela and Charlie that proves he’s the real Jason?

That’s not even the worse problem. All along this time, he’s been making decisions. Each of those decisions has spawned off new multiverses. Therefore, he’s no longer alone. There are at least hundreds of Jasons now in his multiverse, all desperately trying to get back to Daniela and Charlie. The thing is that all of these Jasons, unlike Usurper Jason, are essentially the same Jason that have just had different experiences in the last month or so. Therefore, among those Jasons, there is no clear ‘real’ Jason. They all started from this same multiverse. How will this get resolved?

Right off the bat, I have to tell you that I have no idea if the physics of this makes any sense. To me, it doesn’t really matter. The concepts held up long enough that I was able to suspend disbelief and allow myself to get sucked into the plot.

The multiple Jasons descending upon one universe actually made me laugh out loud. Because of the nearly infinite branching of a multiverse, this one universe could easily end up with thousands if not millions of Jasons wandering around. That idea amuses me. Can you imagine living in a world where all of a sudden a whole bunch of clones show up and start walking around, all fighting amongst each other to lay claim as the one true husband and father?

Especially after struggling through Rushdie’s Midnight Children, I needed a fun, entertaining, fast paced read. This novel exactly fit that bill.