"Indeed!"

"I then did what any reasonable person would do. I ran a set of experiments."

"It took a while. We were busy, fall is always busy for anyone dependent on farmers, and the results were baffling. I spent all of September and October of that year messing with them and not getting very far.

"If you left them alone, they did nothing. If you took them out of the room? Nothing. Took them too far away from the table? Nothing."

She pauses, apparently waiting for a response.

Ant doesn't actually know what response to give to that.

"Weird," Bina produces after a long moment.

Josephine seems satisfied by that. "It was indeed weird!"

"And worse, I could never see the charge going up. I'd measure them when I got the room. Nothing. Ten minutes later, there'd be a charge! I once stood there for half an hour with the meter, staring at the needle, daring it to move, and it did nothing. Five minutes later, I checked again and there it was!"

"It was bizarre. I stopped disassembling the device, I had an inkling that the effect was connected to the electron emitter, and I was worried that taking the device completely apart would stop the effect before I understood it."

"I also tried to test if it worked with all of them. I'd had them tied with twine to a board, all forty. So I separated the stack in two. Only one stack worked. And I separated them again. And again, only one stack worked. I repeated this, until I'd narrowed it down to a single tile."

"I ran every test I could think of. Tried to see if it had a magnet, or contamination by radium, or a natural sort of battery - nothing."

"...You hadn't already looked for these things before the original experiment?"

"They weren't actually part of the experiment, you see. They were the backing to prevent the experiment from affecting other things."

Ant nods, and holds back a slightly snide remark.

"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 - "