"I also didn't know where that tile was from. My assistant, Chantal, had found it - she was remarkable at finding little odds and ends, but she went all over town and never kept records. Probably some pawn shop. We thought at first they made be roofing tiles, but - they had images on them. One had something about cola, one something about noodles. It seemed odd for tiles. Who'd want a drink name on their roof?"

She decides to ignore that.

"The image on the special tile. It looked like a fly, didn't it?"

"You know, that's the funny thing. We could never actually agree. One assistant, Leo, thought it looked like a bunch of scratches. Like someone was playing with the machine. My husband thought it looked like a star. I couldn't be quite sure what I saw; perhaps a tree? It was a funny little thing, regardless."

"But I continued my tests. Had Leo sit in the room and ignore it for an hour. No charge. Tried that again. Someone in the room, not looking at it - multiple someones not looking at it - no charge. Looking directly? No charge."

"It was indirectly that did it. Viewing it out of the corner of your eye, or through the slits in my electron emitter."

"Well, it took a lot more testing to confirm, but basically, anything with the image from the tile on it would spontaneously generate electrons if viewed through a pair of slits smaller then the amplitude of the wavelength of light you were using to view it. So, it didn't work in the dark, and it definitely had to be conductive, the surface. Leo etched it into several pieces of wood at different sizes and those were all complete duds."

"Oh! And it couldn't just be paint, it had to be embossed, or a relief of some kind. That was very important."

Ant nods thoughtfully. "-And it never occurred to you that you shouldn't be poking this?"

"Or that this makes no sense - it's magic, you didn't invent anything scientific, you discovered a magic image."

"There's nothing that science can't shine a light on. And by that argument, humans didn't invent fire, we stumbled upon rubbing sticks together."

"-I'm not sure there's a scientific explanation for two dead people having tea and cakes with a time traveller."

"We just haven't discovered it yet."

"Perhaps," Ant sounds dubious.

"What does any of this have to do with quantum mechanics, anyways?" Bina asks. 

"I theorized that the light packages - the other you had a name for them - oh, photons, yes - well, that the photons weren't being absorbed by the tile, or bouncing off, but doing something else, and that it was the observer that mediated this - like that cat in the box, apparently a famous thought experiment in your time? In the experiment, you take a cat, and put it in a box with a vial of poison, and closing the lid triggers a trap, which contains an emitter, like my electron emitter, except it contains a radioactive atom, and a switch. You set it up so if the atom decays, it will send a particle out of the emitter, which might hit the switch, which breaks the vial, which releases the poison and kills the cat."

"But because quanta, subatomic particles, exist as a wave until they interact with something. Until they are observed, their position is probabilistic. They are somewhere, and we can guess roughly based on their origins, but we can't know. Not for sure, without reacting with them. You can't see a photon without absorbing it. You can't measure an electron without reacting with it."

"So when you close the box, you can't know if the atom hit the switch or not. Not for sure. That means that the rest of the state of the box, the vial of poison, the cat, is also up in the air. The cat's life or death is literally unknowable."

"-Okay. I'm- wasn't Schrödinger's cat pointing out the problem with one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics? Helsinki or Oslo or something?"

"But I proved the theory it was meant to make fun of!"

"-how?!"

"It was meant to make fun of quantum superposition as applied to subatomic particles like electrons and photons, by applying it to a macro-scale object and illustrating that it is counter intuitive, as if that is an argument against the truth - "

"Anyways. I proved that electrons behave in a way consistent with quantum superposition."

"Alright. So. Say this is true. How does this then relate to what's happening here?"

"I figured out how to get both cats out of the box. Rather than a particle collapsing the wave and hitting only a single target, the image it… It made the wave collapse multiple times. Possibly its shape was reflecting some… I don't know, some fundamental pattern that we haven't discovered in the movements of subatomic particles. Or something. It didn't matter."

"It didn't matter? What are you talking about, how could it not matter - "

"I didn't understand it, not entirely, but it was happening. It was observable, and repeatable, and so it had to be accounted for. Maybe I couldn't get the math to work out, or figure out how to answer all the questions it raised, but it was real!"

"I tested it, I tested it a lot but I kept getting different results. The image created energy, but how much and how quickly? I didn't know. It was very frustrating. My equipment kept screwing up. My first meter burned out with only two days of testing and my backup not much later. It was only when I borrowed some more sensitive equipment and got a proper apparatus up and running that I started getting consistent results."

"It turned out that the size of the image didn't matter, provided that the lines were clearly delineated. That was important. I theorized that you could make one very small, perhaps small enough to fit inside a pocket, if you could get the engraving fine enough. The size of the slits? They needed to be placed at a wide enough angle for the image to be entirely visible, and to be narrower then the wavelength of the light used to view it."

"But that wasn't the most interesting thing. The amount of power acquired from a single viewer was tiny. Enough to build up tiny spark over an extended time perhaps, but not enough to do actual work. A single viewer was almost unmeasurable while it was happening. I had to get special equipment from the university."

"But when viewed by two people at the same time, the effects doubled!"

"And if you added a third? Not tripled, but quadrupled! It doubled again!"

"Don't you see!? Twice a spark isn't still isn't much, neither are three sparks, or a hundred sparks! You'd need an entire city to power a building. But doubling every time? You only need eight people and that spark becomes two hundred and fifty six sparks. Twelve people? Over four thousand sparks. My first test with ten people melted to the table."

"My husband, after the incident with the table, he asked me, hesitant you know, as if it were beyond the realm of possibility, if we might, one day, use it to power the factory! Hah! Power the factory!? He didn't understand either! Don't you see? With only seventy three people, I could provide infinite free power to the entire nation! With seventy seven? The entire planet!"

"Josephine!" Bina shouts, having tried to speak up several times during the rant and failed. "That's great, but you're missing something. If it's a fundamental property of the universe, why does it need people to work?"

Josephine seems taken aback - 

And for a moment, so fast it's barely noticeable, the sky isn't so perfect anymore. Is dark and yawning like teeth - 

And then the sky is blue and lightly clouded again. Like it always was.

Ant glances up, and then back down, shaking eir head. "Bina's not wrong. That seems... Too easy."

"It requires people because that's what made the effects work."

She seems to be getting frustrated, or perhaps angry, shoulders tight and jaw tense.

"But there haven't always been people so-" Ant has no idea where ey was going with that, but it seemed important.

"Look, I don't know, okay? I don't know! And I don't appreciate being lectured on it! The other Bina got quite huffy with me as well..."

She crosses her arms over her chest and looks away. She seems upset, now, like she doesn't know whether to start shouting or to cry.