Category: Usman T. Malik

Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik

Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik (Wired, 11th December 2020) starts off in mainstream territory with a diabetic Pakistani man called Bari whose mother is suffering from dementia. He cares for her, and he worries about what will happen if he gets ill.
After a few pages of scene setting (including a childhood flashback), Bari agrees to join the New Suns to better care for his mother. This involves him joining a starship crew after he is given quantum consciousness:

Decades ago, the Penrose-Hameroff theory ushered in a new era of quantum consciousness: Although gravity prevents the occurrence of large objects in two places simultaneously, subatomic particles can exist at opposite ends of the universe at the same time.

The remainder of the story sees Bari switch his consciousness back and forth between his body on the starship and a telepresence robot in his mother’s house. Because of the relativistic effects (time passes much more quickly on Earth than it does on the ship), a few seconds away from the ship equates to hours on Earth. Eventually (spoiler) the relativistic trips start to have a mental toll on Bari, which in turn causes the failure of a relationship with a woman on board the ship. Then the mother dies a couple of weeks or so after launch (on Earth, over a decade has passed).
What we have here is a mainstream story with a clunky SF idea bolted on, i.e. a hand-wringing story about family and dementia, and not one about quantum consciousness.
* Mediocre. 2,950 words. Story link.