Lisa followed Doc into the medical bay, where one item immediately drew her attention. Doc's 'magical' staff lay on top of the exam table. It was the only thing that appeared out of place in the otherwise neat, orderly room. He must have noticed her looking at it.
"I still haven't found a good spot for that," he said. "Oddly enough, no storage space in here is sized properly for a magical healing staff."
"I can't imagine how the designers could have overlooked that." Lisa closed the folding privacy door behind them. "So, what weren't you saying before?"
"I may be able to develop something to help us against the orcs, but before we talk about that, I think I should share an idea that's been simmering in my mind almost since we arrived. I'm afraid it's going to sound strange."
"What here isn't?"
"So far, not much," he agreed. "But this one is…well, let me start with this. What do you think the medical analyzer found in Gorbo's blood?"
"I don't know. Something strange, right?"
"No, stranger than that. It found nothing. No DNA, not even blood cells."
"Is that even possible?"
"It shouldn't be. I couldn't believe the test result, so I looked myself using a small optical microscope, and I found the blood cells I expected. I couldn't analyze the DNA manually, of course. The medical bay here is little more than a first aid clinic, but I saw the cells."
"How could you find them if the automated analyzer didn't?"
He leaned against the exam table. "Good question. I asked it myself. The blood and tissue analyzer is far more sensitive than a human eye looking through a glass lens, but I realized that I have one thing it doesn't."
"What's that?" She crossed her arms, wondering why Doc seemed to be belaboring his explanation. He usually came to the point using a more direct route. Whatever idea he was building up to must be either confusingly complex or incredibly odd—or both.
"Expectations. I knew cells must be there, so when I looked, they were."
"Wait a minute. Are you saying they weren't there until you looked?"
He shrugged. "I'm still not sure. First, I assumed the analyzer was malfunctioning, so I tested some of my own blood. It wasn't the machine. It was working fine."
"That's, well, like you said—strange."
"It gets stranger. When I put that sample of Gorbo's blood back in the analyzer, it found the cells, but with a fresh sample of the same blood, it found nothing."
"So are the cells there or aren't they?"
"It depends on who's looking, apparently."
She stared at him a moment in open-mouthed disbelief. "Okay, I know you well enough to know you're not taking any exotic medications, in fact, I don't think you even drink."
He shook his head. "I don't. I never developed a taste for the stuff."
"And this isn't a joke. You're serious." Lisa felt he must be. She knew Doc could joke, but not about something like this.
"I'm afraid so."
"But how can that happen? Either they're there or they're not. It shouldn't depend on who's looking."
"I can't call what I have an explanation. It's more of a working hypothesis—although I'm sure it needs more work."
That was more like a typical Doc joke. A subtle, self-deprecating play on words, unlike something Brax might say. The pilot's sense of humor was more of the whoopee-cushion and banana-peel sort.
"Let's hear what you have," she said. "I don't care how ridiculous it sounds, I promise not to laugh."
She hadn't found much funny since they had left the station. Annoying, disturbing, confusing, all those made it onto her emotional list, but funny had been sadly lacking.
He smiled and picked up the staff from the table, examining it briefly before laying it back where it was. "Consider reality," he began, as if giving a lecture to undergraduates. "Once you get past a certain amount of quantum strangeness, the universe, at least our universe, has an objective reality, or at least it seems to. Things are what they are, regardless of what the people observing them expect to find. As evidence of this, the history of science is full of discoveries that came as complete surprises to the people who made them. Often what they expected to see was not what they found. But we have to bear in mind that a scientific approach—the attempt to lay aside preconceptions and rely only on observable evidence—is a relatively new idea. It didn't really take hold until after the fifteenth century. Until then, even the most intelligent and educated people tended to start with their beliefs, or at best with philosophical contemplation. Observations were simply to provide examples of principles they believed they already knew, and people would often find very clever ways of making observed reality seem to fit faulty preconceptions. That approach doesn't affect the underlying reality, of course, but it does prevent big, upsetting surprises. I'm not sure scientific surprises are possible here. In this place, much of what passes for reality may be subjective."
"How can reality be subjective?"
"In a purely psychological sense, it is for everyone. What you see, or more accurately, how you interpret what you see, depends considerably on what you expect and what you believe. When a person of today sees a lightning storm, he's seeing a natural and impersonal event. His ancestor of a few thousand years ago may have seen a witch's curse or the judgment of an angry god. Here, it may be a bit more than that. The lightning storm may really be an angry god, if you expect it to be. In our world, reality spurs imagination. Here, imagination may shape reality."
"That's impossible."
"I agree. In our universe, observations should not significantly affect the things being observed, again, barring a bit of quantum weirdness, although this also may be largely a matter of perspective and interpretation. Still, it's not impossible. Any observation creates a situation of interaction between the observers and the observed that can, theoretically, alter the behavior of both if some kind of feedback system exists."
Lisa shook her head. "Sorry, Doc. You're losing me." She liked Doc, but he sometimes seemed to feel the need to delve into detailed explanations where they didn't help much.
"Yes, excuse me. I, too, am finding all of this confusing, and searching for an explanation has forced me to consider unlikely physical and even metaphysical possibilities."
She had taken a couple philosophy classes as an undergrad in which she had learned that metaphysics was the branch of philosophy dealing with the ultimate nature of reality. To her it sounded like highly speculative theoretical physics but without all the bothersome math and testability requirements. She did not doubt that insights could be gained from such musings, but, at best, they provided a direction in which to look, not a confirmed destination.
"What have you come up with?"
"The only conclusion I can draw from all of this mental wandering is that we are no longer in our universe. Somehow, the Brane Skip sent us…elsewhere. This place may not have even existed as anything other than a kind of unrealized potential until we activated the device. But wherever or whatever this place is, it is obviously dependent in some way on our reality. That is the only way to explain why there are people here who speak English, and why it includes so many things from human stories, like orcs and dragons. It must be a world shaped by human imagination, but here imagination somehow takes a physical form."
The fact that she seriously considered his idea said a lot about how much she trusted his opinion and how lost she was for something that might sound more reasonable.
"I think I understand what you're saying. It's the ultimate 'what you see is what you get' in a way. I'm still more than skeptical about the physics, but then I'm an engineer, not a theoretical physicist. To be honest, I was never comfortable with the Brane Skip thing either. To me, it's almost as ridiculous as the things going on in this place." She knew she was allowing herself to vent her frustrations again. It wouldn't help. She had to focus, try to understand what was going on, and find a way home. She had a responsibility. "But if this place is what it is because of our expectations, why didn't
the analyzer find cells in Gorbo's blood? You certainly expected them to be there, so they should have been, right?"
"My best guess is that Gorbo's blood cells weren't there because they weren't needed for the original story."
"What story?"
"The one we're in."
"We're in a story?"
"I think so. A scenario, anyway. But it's not my story, so it's not written from my point of view."
"Whose story is it?" she said, realizing as soon as she did that she already knew. "Brax!"
"That's my guess, too. Remember what we were talking about in the ship just before we engaged the Brane Skip?"
"Yeah, Brax's silly role-playing games…." Her fists balled involuntarily. "I'm going to kill him."
"It's not his fault…well, maybe it is, but it's not what he intended. This place is not based on history. It's based on fiction, specifically, I think, fiction with which Brax is familiar. You noticed yourself how the people here do not speak like people from the Middle Ages. It goes further than that. They use words that did not exist in any historical period. Milton once mentioned that magical spells detected thaumic resonances, but 'thaumic' is a word from fiction, specifically Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories. Milton also said that the items he brought to us have dweomers, but that word also appears only in fictional stories and games. Brax would be familiar with their meanings, but no historical character would. That's why I ordered the screen off when it brought up data about the mind flayer. If the story is based on what we know, it could make things worse to learn more."
"You think the thing will only be able to do what he already thinks it's able to do, and that if he doesn't know it, then it can't, even if it's in the rulebook for his game." She thought about what she just said and it sounded confusing even to her, but she was sure Doc understood what she meant.
"Something like that. Again, I'm not sure. I don't know if I'm right about any of this, but it makes sense to me…. I suppose I should say instead that I think it holds up logically given some underlying assumptions. I admit that it doesn't make much sense without those assumptions."
If all the things Doc said were true, Lisa thought she might have a simple solution. "So, if this is all somehow based on something Brax dreamed up, can't we just tell him it's not real? Once he understands that, won't it, well, stop manifesting?"
"We can try that, in fact, I think we should, but I doubt it will work. This isn't a dream. It's more like a story in the process of being written, or an improvisational play being acted out. What happens depends on what those actors do, but the setting and characters are already established. If this universe or dimension, whatever applies, is like a quantum foam of pure potential, the wave function has already collapsed. It's as real as reality gets here. I think the only way out is the way we came in, reengage the Brane Skip device and hope it brings us home."
"And the only way to do that is to get some palladium to fix the thing, which means we'll have to play out our roles as fantasy heroes in this stupid story."
"Yes, but I think one other thing is important, too. If this is Brax's story, then what he knows to be true must be true. He knows that planets are spheres and that they orbit stars, for example. That is why we saw exactly that when we first skipped here. It was so much like Earth that we thought it was at first. When I was talking to the natives, I discovered that they don't know much about planets or stars. Most of them think that their world is flat and that the sun goes around it—if they think about it at all. Brax's knowledge trumps their belief, so the world is round."
"But how can magic work here? I'm sure he doesn't believe in magic, not in the sense that it's real. Well, pretty sure, anyway."
"That puzzled me too, but I think the fact that magic isn't real is what allows it."
There was no way to hide the confusion on Lisa's face and she didn't try to.
Doc nodded. "Let me try to explain. The only rules for magic that Brax knows about are those that pertain to stories and games, so those are the only rules that can apply here. There is nothing to trump them. Even here in a fantasy universe, reality has to work. That realization is what gave me an idea for how we might get past the orcs."
"By using magic?"
"By not using magic. By using something that we know works in reality and therefore can't be countered by magic."
"What's that?"
He pointed to the medical bay's storage locker. "Using the supplies here, I may be able to create a synthetic opioid analgesic with a rapid onset and short duration, which I know would work on any air-breathing mammal."
"Say again?"
"I suppose you could call it knockout gas. It acts quickly, but it will disperse quickly too, outside, that is. The effect should be quite potent in caves and tunnels. It may help us. We just have to make sure that Brax knows that it will work. In our universe, it certainly would."
"Is it dangerous?"
"Unfortunately, yes. If inhaled in large amounts or for prolonged periods, it can be fatal. We will need to handle it carefully and wear breather masks."
"We have those in the emergency gear. Every ship does in case the environmental systems fail."
"If you think it's something you would like to pursue, I'll start work on designing something we can produce."
Her mind was already trying to formulate ideas on how they might use Doc's knockout gas.
"Oh, yes. Do that. I'm going to talk with the others and tell them your idea. Join us as soon as you can. They may have questions."
She knew she still did, but at least she had something to base a plan on now.