False Vacuum

Jakob Schenk has come unstuck in time - not passively, like Vonneguts Billy Pilgrim, but violently, deliberately, at a cost measured in civilizations. A theoretical physicist at Oxford, Jakob encoded his consciousness into quantum information and fired it across the multiverse, collapsing his entire universe into true vacuum - ten billion lives erased at the speed of light for the chance to love one woman again. Her name is Christina Hamilton. She did not die. She left him.

In each new timeline, Jakob arrives younger, richer, more desperate. He engineers their meeting at the Ritz in Paris with a line from Aeschylus. He amasses seventy-five billion dollars on the memory of stock tickers not yet invented. He runs guns to Kurdish fighters in the siege of Raga and strangles a Russian intelligence colonel in a Damascus church. He builds fusion reactors that double as doomsday devices. And he watches Christina die seventeen times, in seventeen timelines - by bullet, by cancer, by cardiac arrest, by the slow indifference of probability. Each time, he pulls the trigger on another universe to try again. What emerges is a closed loop with the elegance of mathematics and the cruelty of myth: Jakob is his own benefactor, his own origin, the ouroboros funding the research that creates the machine that demands his beloved's death as fuel. A spectral auditor named Lindholm delivers the verdict - she dies in ninety-three percent of all possible worlds; she lives only in the seven percent where they never meet.

Moving between the dreaming spires of Oxford and the rubble of the Syrian war, between a Pacific Heights mansion wired with hidden MRI scanners and an island outside time where a painter and a physicist try to build a door out of paradise, False Vacuum is a novel about the space between observation and collapse - the quantum-mechanical truth that to measure something precisely is to destroy what you hoped to find. It is structured like the multiverse it describes: forking, recursive, dense with footnotes that contain entire alternate histories, threaded through with Eliot and Milton and the quiet refrain borrowed from Slaughterhouse-Five- So it goes - deployed each time another universe winks out of existence because one man's grief refused to do the math.

J.S. Finberg has written a book about love as a cosmological force - not gentle, not redemptive, but gravitational: warping everything around it, bending light, and at sutticient intensity, swallowing worlds whole.