Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom.
23. Cat
Sunbeams filtered through the filthy windows, lighting tiny dust particles floating around, swirling every now and then when someone took a deep breath. The warmth of the sun's rays made everybody drowsy, and eyelids started to close as the voice of Mr Falluca droned on, explaining something not quite within his students' grasp.
Sitting in the back, out of sight, Danny was struggling. His eyelids seemed to fall down on their own, his head kept nodding forward, his eyes had a hard time focusing on anything but what was happening outside. And nothing happened outside.
His mind started to wander again, to the broken off session of Doomed he and Tucker had been playing the night before, a slight worry about his English assignment, his plans for the weekend. No plans, really. Just ghost hunting until he dropped.
"...in the box. In this state, the cat is both dead and alive, and this is what we call a 'superposition' of states, and only when we open the box..."
"What!"
Twenty-one heads turned simultaneously to the back of the class, where the black haired boy had jumped up from his desk, and was staring at his teacher.
"Mr Fenton, what seems to be the problem?" Mr Falluca asked, annoyed by the interruption.
"Uh, um, what you said," Danny stuttered, sitting down again, red faced, "I didn't catch that. I-I'm sorry."
"Schrodinger's cat," Mr Falluca said acidly, "I was trying to explain the theoretical experiment of Erwin Schrodinger. The cat in the box..."
Apparently, the whole class had woken up from Danny's outburst. Paulina raised her hand.
"Mr Falluca, how can an experiment be theoretical?"
Mr Falluca rolled his eyes. "I explained that yesterday, Ms Sanchez. It's when you describe an experiment without actually doing it. Now where was I... The cat. The box contains a device that contains a vial with poison, and a trigger. We don't know when the trigger will go off, so we don't know if the cat is alive or dead, and that's what we call..."
"That's cruel!" Dash exclaimed, "That poor cat..."
"Not for real, you moron," Danny said to him, "In theory."
Dash turned around to him and made a cutting motion along his neck with his finger. Danny flinched, but didn't back down.
"Mr Falluca," he said, "What you said, about the cat being both dead and alive, how is that possible?"
Mr Falluca opened his mouth to answer, surprised that the boy actually took an interest in quantum mechanics, but Paulina beat him to it.
"It's not, you idiot, It's just that you don't know."
"Then how can we know?" Kwan asked.
Paulina smiled brightly. "You open the box!"
"But there could be poison gas in there," Dash said worriedly, "We're all gonna die!"
Danny let his head drop on his desk.
"Actually," Mr Falluca began, but he was interrupted by the bell. The entire class, fully awake by now, took that as a sign to be as noisy as possible, making it impossible for Mr Falluca to read out assignments. Resigned, Danny gathered his books and followed the others out of the classroom, out of the school and into the weekend.
Jack Fenton was sitting on the old, but comfortable couch in the living room, doing his needlepoint. He was carefully examining a picture of himself in his orange suit, blasting a ghost with an ecto beam, while another part of his brain was thinking about something completely different.
He had been noticing strange things about the ghost boy lately, stranger than the fact that he seemed to be fighting his own kind constantly, always claiming to be a hero. He obviously had an obsession there, Jack could see that, but what had surprised him was that the ghost actually seemed to care.
The week before, there had been a fire, and Phantom had saved three people from the burning building, but hadn't been able to save a fourth one, a father of three children, trapped in the fire, unable to get out. Phantom had tried to get to him, but the building had collapsed before he could even get close. And Phantom had cried.
Thinking about it, Jack recalled that the ghost actually showed a whole range of emotions, from happiness, to anger, and even fear. In fact, if Jack didn't know any better, he would say the ghost was human. And it was this impossibility that had driven him to his needlepoint. To think.
The front door opened, and his son entered, looking tired and a little disheveled. Jack looked up from his work and smiled brightly at him.
"Hello son, want some fudge?"
Danny shook his head.
"Good!" Jack said, "All the more for me then. How was school? Teachers still trying to teach you... stuff?"
"Yeah dad," Danny answered, strangely hovering in the living room, instead of rushing upstairs to his room. Jack looked at him questionably.
"Um, dad?" Danny asked, "Do you know anything about a cat in a box? That is both dead and alive?"
Jack's eyes lit up. "Old man Schrodinger's cat!" he exclaimed, "Sure do, son. Learned all about it in college. Or your mother taught me, I never could figure that out. They're teaching that stuff in high school now?"
Danny shook his head.
"I don't know," he said, "I, um, missed the beginning of the speech, but I think Mr Falluca was just trying to get us interested in it, and we had a discussion in class, so he couldn't finish his explanation, and I was wondering..."
"Say no more, son," Jack said, putting down his needlepoint, "I'll explain it to you. See, the thing is, the cat in the box is not real. It isn't really both alive and dead, but because we don't know which state it's in, we say it's both alive and dead. It's called... well, I forgot. If you open the box, you know, but by opening the box, you influence the outcome. The outcome is only there because you open that box. But it's only on an atomic level. In real life..."
Jack frowned, as a thought struck him, and he stared at his son, still standing near him, holding his backpack.
"What if you never open that box?" Danny asked.
Jack didn't hear him.
"Dad?"
"The ghost boy," his father said, "Is both dead and alive."
He didn't notice his son back away from him, but instead, tried to hold on to his train of thoughts, eyebrows furrowing in concentration.
"He's alive. That's why we can never catch him, that's why he shows emotion."
Danny had reached the stairs.
"He's also a ghost, because he does ghostly things. But he's not a full ghost, he's a... half ghost!"
Danny grabbed hold of the banister, his knuckles going white.
"How could that happen... he didn't die... not really... maybe an accident with a huge amount of ectoplasm... where would you get that... Danny, how did you get that portal to work?"
Jack looked around for his son, but he had disappeared.
Danny closed the door of his room tightly and leaned against it.
"Stupid cat," he muttered.
Dunno if I explained it right... I'm not saying here that Danny is in a quantum state. It's just Jack's mind making a leap here.
