“Professor!” I stopped and turned at the sound of the voice of my newest Ph. D. candidate. “Hey, Tom. I was just on the way to my office.” I gestured vaguely down the hall and took a step in that direction, but he shook his head. “You gotta come to the lab. I figured out the Everett Device!” I sighed and reached up to push my glasses up against my face. “The Everett Device doesn’t work. This has been proved by dozens of scientists. It’s a dead end.” Tom shook his head again, his disheveled brown hair only growing more so from the violence of the motion. “I got it working! I can prove it!” I sighed again, louder this time. “Come with me to my office,” I said, turning my back and gesturing with my hand to follow. “You don’t believe me.” I rolled my eyes with my back turned to him; wouldn’t do to show him impatience. “I’m sure you [i]think[/i] you got it working, but I’m sure I can explain to you why you didn’t.” I didn’t wait for a response as I walked towards my office, my shoes thudding dully on the tile floor. When I got to my office door, I swung it open and stood aside, looking at Tom expectantly. Tom rubbed his hand through his hair as he walked down the hall, glancing into my office before stepping inside and pulling up the chair on the near side of my desk. I closed the door behind him before going to take my own seat, folding my hands on my desk. “So, you think you’ve figured out how to get the Everett Device to function.” “I did! I know it works.” He leaned forward over my desk, his hands pressing down against the wood. “I can prove it.” “Tom. What does the Everett Device do?” I asked, staring at him across the desk. Tom scowled. “You [i]know[/i] what it does.” “Humor me.” I leaned back in my chair, folding my hands behind my head. He groaned. “The Everett Device transfers mass between parallel dimensions.” “Yes. And it doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as parallel dimensions,” I said, nodding my head. He grinned. “And what if I said there was? What if I said--” “You stepped into the device and you aren’t actually the Tom I know, but actually a Tom from another dimension. At which point you’re going to try and cite some minute detail that would vary between dimensions, and I would be surprised.” I waved my hand. “Everyone knows the machine doesn’t work. Power goes in, you go back out, everything is exactly the same on the other side. It goes nowhere. There have been dozens of experiments, and all of them show the same thing.” Tom’s frown returned. “Look, Professor. I know you don’t believe me. But the math is flawed. If you go back and look at the basic equations, they clearly show—” “That the machine works. Everyone knows, Tom. We can all do the math.” Tom shook his head. “You don’t get it! If you work through, all of the published equations make the same mistake. In the sixth set of equations, when you—” “We all know, Tom. It’s not like we don’t do it on purpose.” Tom blinked. “What?” I sighed again. I hated explaining this to newbies. “Look, you’re familiar with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum dynamics. That’s the entire premise of the Everett device. Things don’t go the same way on the quantum level, boom, two parallel realities. Never interacting.” I meshed my fingers together. “Well, not without an Everett device anyway. Two possibilities, two ways things might have gone. Or a lot more than that, most of the time.” “I’ve taken—“ “Yeah, and so have I. You think every physicist made the same math error accidentally? The device works, but all the results show that there’s zero divergence between parallel realities. In a million realities, there’s a million yous having this exact same conversation with a million mes.” “Well, there’s some variation—“ I laughed. “No, there isn’t. All of the experiments show zero divergence. It’s all the same.” “That doesn’t make any sense!” “Why not?” I shrugged. “No reason to expect different realities to turn out different. Really, it’s all in the math.” He stared at me. “If you know this, then why isn’t it published?” I leaned forward, arching my fingers. “What choice do I [i]really[/i] have?”