Eyes closed, he was studying the new living things in the orphidnet: shiny disks on short thick stalks, with the disk edges curled under. Virtual mushrooms! Each mushroom had six or seven eyes on top, and the fatter mushrooms had baby mushrooms growing out of their sides. Some were boys and some were girls. They were cute and friendly—and glad to talk to Chu. When he asked where they came from, they said they were emergent orphidnet AIs and that people’s thoughts were their favorite thing to look at. They spoke really well, although often their thoughts came across in fatter chunks than just sentences and words.

Chu steered the conversation around to cuttlefish. One of the cartoony mushrooms said, “Look,” and he showed Chu the cuttle-data flowing to ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat. Chu decided to analyze the data himself, with the orphidnet AIs helping him.

Pretty soon he noticed something interesting about the cuttlefish. Every so often, one of them would totally disappear.

Chu wondered how this could be. One of the mushroom AIs obligingly did a quick search of all the science papers in the world and found a theory that there’s another world parallel to ours, less than a decillionth of a meter away, and that objects can quantum-tunnel back and forth between the worlds, thus seeming to disappear or, on the other hand, emerge from nothing. The paper called the worlds “branes,” like in “membranes.”

“When I set something down it always stays put,” mused Chu.

“People collapse the quantum states of things they look at,” said the mushroom AI, wobbling the cap of her head. “The watched pot never boils. Objects stay put in the presence of a classical observer.”

“Sometimes I do lose things,” allowed Chu. “I guess they could disappear when I look away.”

“When things are on their own, they can sneak and quantum-tunnel to the other brane,” agreed the mushroom. “Or maybe someone from the other brane comes over here and takes them.”

“People in the other world are taking our cuttlefish?” said Chu. “But we’re using the orphids to watch the cuttlefish all the time. So they should stay put.”

“Orphids are quantum computers. They don’t observe; they entangle. An orphid isn’t like some bossy schoolmarm who keeps everyone in their seats until she looks away. It’s perfectly possible for an orphid-tagged cuttlefish to quantum-tunnel to a parallel brane.”

“What’s the name of the other world?” asked Chu.

“What would you like to call it?” asked the mushroom. “You’re the one discovering it.”

“Let’s call it the Hibrane,” said Chu. “And we can be the Lobrane. Can we see a Hibrane person catching a cuttlefish?”