Solution Hospital

Sam woke up in the hospital a few days later after the ordeal of the airplane crash. She had spent a harrowing four minutes flying through outer space and then survived the initial impact with the water. Nearly an hour later, she was pulled onto a rescue boat and airlifted to the hospital where she stayed for a few days. Her mother had been notified and had flown in to see her daughter.
The nurse pulled back the curtains on Sam's "private" room which was shared by four patients who survived the wreck.
"Your mother's coming to visit you during visiting hours," she announced cheerfully.
Samantha groaned. "Step mother," she muttered.
The nurse heard the groaning. "It's okay, dear, you'll get your pain meds soon. That leg will heal just fine."
Sam nodded. She clicked the button next to the bed rail, hoping for the morphine release. The machine stubbornly refused to go over the allotment she was requesting. Sam ate some slimy jello and a plastic cup filled with orange juice for breakfast. It was hard to eat with one hand, even though it was her dominant right. The left arm was in a cast all the way to the neck and it was suspended from a pulley system next to her bed.
Before she had fully acclimatised to the idea of her mother arriving, her mother arrived.
"Hello, dear Sam," her mother clucked, standing next to the bed on Sam's left opposite the raised arm cast.
"Oh, mother," said Sam irritably, "did you come to gloat?"
"Oh, no. Not gloat," said her mother. "Although I do enjoy a bit of _schadenfreude_ every so often."
"I can't believe you won't give a bit of sympathy to another human being, much less your daughter," Sam said.
"Not my real daughter," corrected her mother.
"Why even bother to show up then?" Sam asked.
"Oh, I don't know. I thought maybe the news reports were a lie. You know, maybe nobody had survived the crash and I could be free of all my familial obligations once and for all."
"You're horrible. You probably killed dad, you evil witch."
"I didn't kill him." Sam's mom said with an evil smile. "I wouldn't have been able to collect the insurance and pension if I did."
"He was a good man. I don't know why he stayed with you," said Sam.
"He was a good man, all right," her mother agreed. "Until he had that dalliance with that wretched Thorne hussy."
"Maybe he had an affair because you were a despicable, loveless human being and drove him away," said Sam.
"That's not a valid excuse," her mother said.
"Mother!" cried Sam.
"I know, I know," her mother said. "I'm horrible, blah blah blah. You always say that. I don't know when the disillusionment set in on either side. Or which side it set in on first."
"I never hated you," said Sam.
"I couldn't tell," said her mother.
"You're too aloof. You don't even know there are other people around you, and that they have feelings and emotions. You don't even know what a person is, except a bunch of distractions from your mathematical proofs," said Sam.
"Oh, feelings. Please," said her mother. "If feelings actually existed then we could get rid of them. That would suit me fine."
"I'm still alive and making you feel embarrassed," Sam said. "I wasn't even wearing clean underwear when the plane crashed."
Her mother hissed. "I told you about that. What did I say about always having clean underwear? You should always have clean underwear. What if you died and they had to undress your corpse and found your dirty skivvies... Oh, too repulsive to imagine."
"I knew you'd be disappointed," Samantha said.
"We were always disappointed," said her mother. "You seemed bright... But of course, when the college rejections started pouring in, we knew..."
"Don't say 'we'. Dad was supportive."
"Maybe," her mother allowed. "It's funny because your father always wanted a daughter. I couldn't give him any children because my uterus was scraped thinner than a coconut shell during the sixties. He wanted a daughter, as I say, and so he wanted to adopt a girl. We never knew what sex you were going to be when we met your birth mother. She wouldn't tell us. You were Schrödinger's Baby. So we called you 'Sam'. 'Samantha' if your father got his way and 'Samuel' if I got mine."
"You've always told me that story."
"I didn't tell you that I wanted a boy because at least he would be worth a damn at math and science."
"It's a wonder how I don't kill myself every single day," said Samantha.
"At least you weren't an orphan after we adopted you. We must have done something of value in your life."
"That's not really enough, mom," said Samantha. "You're supposed to actually care for your children, not raise them like livestock. At least orphans don't hold out hope that their mother will love and care for them. Orphans just try to pass each day in survival. I thought I could be normal."
"Normal doesn't cut it," said her mom. "Or, rather, at least normal would have been acceptable. We never thought any man would be attracted to you, much less be apathetic enough to give you a loveless marriage of convenience."
"No man was ever attracted to me," Sam said bitterly. "It's hard to be excited about a relationship when the Mean Value Theorem is more interesting than going out on a date."
"We always thought there must be someone out there for you, at least mathematically speaking," said her mother.
"That's the difference between science and engineering," Sam said. "One is theoretical and the other is applied in the real world."
"But enough about you and the past," her mom said abruptly. "Tell me about the airplane crash?"
"I was a little freaked out," said Samantha.
"Ha," giggled her mother.
"You try going through a plane crash and see how composed you are," Sam retorted. "The plane kind of jolted a few times before it broke open. I thought I saw some strange things. Hallucinations, maybe altitude sickness as the plane was depressurising."
"You were sitting two rows behind the split, apparently."
"That's what they told me. I saw several people floating around as we fell. That must have been some people waiting in line for the bathroom."
"Wow," said her mother.
"I also... As I say, I was hallucinating," Samantha began.
"Go on," said her mother.
"I saw another plane. Two planes, strangely. One of them was the same plane as us, just phased out a bit. I saw myself sleeping in one of the chairs as we separated. We bumped up and I could see the other image of the airplane shaking and passengers moving as well."
"Out of body experience," said her mother. "Near death, fight or flight responses."
"I think so. But it's like the many universes theory. As if time were an actual storage dimension. Imagine if every copy of every possibility of the universe were being expressed in multiple dimensions. If they were to collide you could see a slightly different universe from ours that would be close but subtly different somehow."
"Nonsense," said her mother. "There are no multiple universes. You'd have to store every particle and each piece of information about that particle's position, spin, momentum, charge, and mass for every single combination... It's impossible."
"I know," said Sam. "You and dad raised me as a Copenhaganist. But you haven't seen the problems at in my lab or at CERN. I looked at all the data and we're seeing some very strange states. Strange things are happening at the macro level and they're bubbling up from the quanta."
"You sound like a science fiction novel," her mother scoffed.
"Well, you tell me, mother," Samantha retorted. "What would happen if the speed of light were changing?"
"Oh, I don't know," said her mother. "Your father was the astrophysicist."
"What if the Planck length was growing? What if the NSA somehow manipulated the Hubble to record a diffraction array from a ground laser and could gather the which-way information from a double-slit experiment? What if we looked at Schrödinger's cat and saw the cat as both dead and alive?"
"Impossible," repeated her mother.
"What if the plane I was on split in an interference pattern and instead of being awake, I was asleep? And what if I was asleep and had died like those other 115 passengers? What if the plane interfered with itself in an alternate dimension and crashed in the sky?"
"They are saying the GPS was faulty," said her mother. "I think you're delusional from whatever they're pumping into that saline bag, dear."
"You never cared anyway if I were alive or dead. Now you're just here to torture me more and mock me. Just leave already," Samantha cried.
"I bet I'd be a good mother in the alternate universe," her mom joked. "Maybe I'd be a good wife, too. That's probably too much to ask. Ten thousand universes couldn't contain that contradiction."
"I'm just trying to get well enough so I can go to the Thorne Industry hearings," Samantha said. "I can't do that with you upsetting my healing process."
"Yes, I suppose," said her mother. "I know someone who works at the Whitehouse. My niece. She could get you an interview with the president. I think it would help."
"I don't understand," said Sam.
"My niece. She is the president's personal assistant. She could get you into the Whitehouse. I could get you an audience with the president. Maybe he can help you fix this," her mother said.
"I don't understand why you're helping me, I mean," said Sam.
"Maybe I want to get back at that horrid Thorne family," said her mom as she smiled evilly.