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Tonstant Weader
, May 16, 2019
(view all comments by Tonstant Weader)
Sync begins on a dark and stormy night as Brigid is driving home after visiting her mother in a nursing home. She is distraught because her mother failed to recognize her, her Alzheimer’s exacerbated by the late time of day. The sleet combined with her own tears, impairing her vision so she nearly struck a hitchhiker, coming to a stop after swerving to avoid him. Repentant, she offers him a lift. He is filthy and she soon realizes he is also starving and penniless. She feeds him and offers him a place to shower and sleep until morning, however before morning, someone breaks into her home. She soon learns he is on the run from some very suspicious and dangerous characters.
In fact, he was one of ten subjects in a study exploring the multiverse, but new researcher came on board, things went awry, and now he’s on the run from law enforcement and some very thuggish and violent people. Brigid throws herself into rescuing him and the pair along with Brigid’s dog, Lithium, head straight into the eye of the storm.
Let me start with what I liked about Sync first. The actual conspiracy is a good one. The conspiracy takes place in Chicago where after Homan Square no fictional police corruption will ever match reality so it’s no surprise that the conspirators can enlist law enforcement. The conspirators do an excellent job of tidying up loose ends to avoid detection. I also like the idea of exploring the multiverse as something that could be done for pure or applied research, for good or ill. But then, the rest falls apart.
First, the characters seem not just unrealized, but unrealistic. For example, rather than allowing Brigid to be an empathetic person feeling for a hitchhiker on the roads in a storm, her motivation is given as a desire from some distraction and excitement in the face of losing her mother to Alzheimer’s. Like an encounter with a rapist/serial killer might be a diversion from her troubles? It’s as though the author decided not one person was allowed to act out of altruism. Altruism is how humanity has survived, don’t erase it.
It often seems as though K. P. Kyle needed the characters to do something and cast about for an explanation, not really considering if the explanation made sense. Brigid seems foolhardy and obtuse. Jason seems alternately feckless and stubborn, someone who should never be asked to fend for himself. The other characters, except perhaps Jason’s sister, are equally puzzling.
Then, since the story depends so much on the theory of the multiverse, it would help if it were ever adequately explained. Explanations are proffered by Jason and Ana, the professor who headed the original research project. Neither of them is up to the task which is odd as the theory is not that complex or hard to understand at all. Jason talks about Schrödinger’s cat and Ana mentions the double-slit experiment before deciding they’re too complicated to explain. They are not.
The story rests on a very specific theory of the multiverse called many-worlds theory. The explanations sound like research notes from someone who didn’t understand the concept but memorized it for the test.
The physics we are all used to, gravity, thermodynamics, entropy, and so on explain the world as we can see it with our senses. However, with the technology to observe atoms and inside atoms, we discovered the particles did not follow those rules. A whole new physics called quantum mechanics was developed to identify the rules governing how the world worked at that level. String theory was created to unite the old and the new physics, but it only works if there are more dimensions than the four we are used to. Somehow those dimensions occupy the same space as the dimensions we can see, either because they’ve been smooshed or they’re not within our sensory range or the range of our technology. They occupy the same spatial and temporal dimensions, but differently and we don’t know how. This is not as weird as it sounds, we can’t detect radiation without a machine, we can’t see these dimensions, but we can measure their effects such as dark matter. There are at least six more dimensions, but some think there may be an infinite number.
So the theory explored in Sync is the many-worlds theory. Basically, the idea is every action we take creates another world where we chose differently. Of course, all the rest of the people in history and today are also acting and making decisions and creating new alternate realities. Every reality is like a tree, branching out into new alternate realities into an infinite omniverse of every possibility. These are not alternate histories, but simultaneous histories all happening at the same time. This is not a difficult idea, though it is more a thought experiment than something science is going to prove any time soon. However, if many-worlds were true, the idea that someone could go back to one they have visited is not sustainable. Their presence changed it irrevocably and possibly ended its existence as soon as they left.
The test of understanding is being able to explain to another. Kyle failed the test.
I received a copy from the publisher through LibraryThing.
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