Quantum Night (18 page)

V
ICTORIA
Chen had to know for sure.

She was waiting for Ross in the Light Source’s glassed-in entryway. She became even more nervous than she already was when 11:00
A.M.
passed and there was still no sign of him; another researcher had the beamline at 11:30. But at ten after, he finally arrived. Vic got him signed in, had him clip on a dosimeter, and took him on the long walk down to the SusyQ beamline.

“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked as she fussed with her equipment.

Ross was his usual amiable self. “No, of course not. I’d do anything for you, my love. You know that.”

She tapped a series of commands on her keyboard. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a good man. Now, if you’ll just lie down here . . .” She indicated the gurney.

Ross smiled. “Fancy a nooner?”

“Not today, dear,” she said, making a show of waggling her eyebrows, “but there’s always tonight.”

“Indeed there is,” he said, and he lay down on his back. That was either
supine
or
prone
—she could never remember which was which—
but, either way, his lean form, in dark-blue cotton slacks and a light-blue dress shirt, looked
fine.
He really was a good boyfriend: attentive to her but low-maintenance himself; even-tempered; and an absolute machine in the sack.

“Thanks for doing this, hon,” she said as she affixed the head strap. “I think there’s a really good paper in it.”

“My pleasure.”

“Just relax. As the doctors like to say, this won’t hurt a bit.” She used her mouse to click an on-screen button, and the process began. Initially, her monitor showed a plain horizontal line—no superposition—but it did that for everyone; it took about ten seconds to gather the data, and—

Ah, and there it came. The line undulated and then a huge peak appeared at the left side, showing a single superimposed electron. She waited anxiously for the second peak to appear, and then the third one, and—

And she waited and waited and waited. Oh, the usual wobbly horizontal line appeared up high, but the spike down below gained no companions.

Ross shifted on the gurney. She moved over to the beam emitter, which was centered on the crown of his head, and, after a moment, she did the only thing she could think of doing: she flicked her finger against its side, the way one does with electronics that might have a loose connection. But the emitter was solid-state, she knew, and the display remained exactly the same.

One, and only one, superposition. Vic felt her mouth drop open. That was crazy. That was
nuts.
She knew Ross . . . it
was
the right word: she knew him
intimately.
She knew everything about him. He couldn’t be . . . there was just no effing way he could be, but . . .

She found herself backing away, and her derrière bumped against the edge of a desk. She looked at him, and he shifted his eyes to look at her. “Are we done?” he asked.

He meant the experiment, of course, but—no, no, he didn’t
mean
anything. He wasn’t thinking about the experiment, not if what Jim Marchuk had told Kayla was right. He wasn’t thinking about anything
at all. He was just saying something that fit the circumstances, responding to some internal timer or external cue. But the question couldn’t be more apt.
Were
they done?

Jim
must
be wrong. Either that, or the equipment was faulty. She loved Ross—and Ross loved her. She
knew
that. Not just because he said it, but because he showed it, in a hundred—a thousand!—ways.

She moved in, undid the strap, and said, “You can get up.”

And he replied as he always did when she said the words “get up”—the same joke over and over again, the same
routine
—by looking down briefly, then flashing a lascivious smile, and saying, “That’s easy when you’re around, babe.”

Input.

Output.

Could it be? Could he really be a machine—albeit a biological one—not just in the sack but in
everything?

And, if that were true, if Jim Marchuk was right, could she go on dating a . . . a
thing,
an emptiness, a zombie?

She wasn’t ready to give voice to the thought but, yes, damn it all, they were almost certainly done.

—

What the fuck?

Bright light from overhead; Travis Huron scrunched his eyelids shut. What the hell was he doing lying down?

A man’s voice: “Holy Jesus.”

And a woman’s voice tinged by . . . wonder, perhaps? “Travis?”

Travis reopened his eyes, but it took effort; his lashes were sticking together, interlocking cilia on twin Venus flytraps. The light stung, and he was having trouble focusing. He blinked repeatedly. And then the same as-yet-unseen male he’d heard earlier—Travis assigned its owner the name Master of the Bleeding Obvious: “His eyes are open!”

“Travis?” said the female voice again. He turned his head, feeling a twinge in his neck as he did so, and there, standing next to him, her eyes wide, was . . .

Well, if he’d had to guess, he’d have said it was Mom, except Mom
didn’t quite look like that, and was five or six years older. But she
was
Mom-esque, whoever this was.

“Travis?” the woman said again. “It’s me. It’s Kayla.”

“No,” Travis said, the word barely a whisper.

The woman took one of his hands in hers. “Yes,” she replied, squeezing gently. “You’ve been in a coma.”

Travis felt his heart pounding. “A . . .” He’d wanted to repeat the phrase “a coma” as a question, but throat congestion mired the second word before it got out.

The woman nodded. “For nineteen years. It’s 2020 now.”

His head was swimming. That was an eye-test score, for Christ’s sake, not a year. He tried to speak again: “Twenty . . . ,” then stopped, cleared his throat, and pushed ahead. “Twenty-twenty?”

“Uh-huh,” said Kayla.

Travis swallowed, then coughed a couple of times. Next to—well, yes, he supposed it really was Kayla—was a man about the same age.

About the same age . . .

And if Kayla was in her late thirties, then he—Travis himself—must be . . .

He did the math: in 2020 he would turn—
had,
perhaps, already turned—forty-one.

“What”—his voice still rough, the words still difficult to expel—“do I . . . look like?”

The man and woman exchanged glances, then the man moved over to a cabinet and picked up something flat and rectangular. He tapped its surface then flipped the device around, holding it out for Travis to see . . .

My God.

Not just a still photograph, but high-resolution live video of a guy whose jaw dropped as Travis felt his own mouth falling open—a man with hair peppered gray retreating from a forehead marked by horizontal creases, a man who looked at least as much like Travis’s father had as Kayla looked like their mother.

Travis couldn’t bear the sight of what he’d become, but he couldn’t turn away, either. “What’s that?”

“That’s you,” replied the Master of the Bleeding Obvious, gently.

“No, no. The . . . that thing?”

“Oh!” A smile across the man’s kind face. “My iPhone—um, my cell phone.”

“No buttons.”

“It’s a touch screen,” said the man, tapping its surface.

“That’s . . . a phone?”

“Not just that; it’s a talking computer.” He turned it to face himself. “Sear E,” he said—whatever that meant—“um, let’s see. Ah, okay, how ’bout this: if the sun wasn’t blotting them out, what planets would be visible right now?”

A silky female voice emanated from the device: “Venus is high in the sky in Taurus, just two degrees west of the sun. Mercury is twenty-one degrees farther west in Gemini, and Jupiter forty-seven degrees east in Aries.”

The future,
thought Travis.
I’m in the fucking future.

E
VERYTHING
changed for Kayla after that. Travis was suddenly her number-one priority; whatever plans we’d had for my current visit were instantly forgotten. Of course, it wasn’t as if he could just waltz out of the place. His limbs had atrophied, and even his jaw muscles were so weak it wasn’t clear whether he’d be able to chew food. At a minimum, he was facing many months of physiotherapy, and even after that, he might well need a motorized wheelchair for the rest of his life.

We didn’t know whether Travis’s microtubular electrons were going to stay in superposition for good—yes, I had come up to speed on all this; there was no way I was going to be Penny to Kayla’s Leonard—and so Kayla’s mother Rebekkah was summoned at once so she also could spend time with Travis before, perhaps, he slipped away again.

Kayla had never brought Ryan to see her uncle, and given all the things that Kayla and Rebekkah suddenly had to do on Travis’s behalf, it fell to me to look after her. I spent the next three days doing just that—and I have to say I loved every minute. I took her to the Fun Factory, where we played laser tag, and to the Western Development Museum, which had a re-creation of the Saskatoon boomtown of 1910;
the blacksmith let Ryan try out his hammer. We also went to the Children’s Discovery Museum, and to Wendy’s and Dairy Queen. I was curious about how Travis was managing but nonetheless was having the time of my life.

And, as Ryan and I walked along, her little hand in mine, I thought about my son Virgil, and about my life that could have been and wasn’t.

—

Propped up in his bed, Travis looked out the window. The blinds were raised—Kayla had done that for him before she’d stepped out—and, if he needed any further proof that significant time had passed, the summery landscape of green grass and leaf-covered trees provided it; for him, it had been a snowy winter just a few hours ago.

Of course, that January and this June were separated not by just five months but by nineteen years. His sister and mother were elated: his return was a miracle they’d stopped hoping for. But Travis was furious at the loss of all the intervening time, and he was devastated by how his body had wasted away. For Christ’s sake, he was suddenly in his forties! By this point, he’d planned on being a corporate vice president with a half-million-dollar home—or whatever amount a fancy place went for these days. He should’ve had the trophy wife, the 2.1 kids, the red Jaguar. Instead, he had just $347 in his Scotiabank account, plus, he supposed, whatever interest had accrued on it, if monthly service fees hadn’t whittled the damn thing down to nothing.

He’d heard Kayla and his mom talking—funny how candid they were, as if a part of them still felt he couldn’t possibly hear what they were saying. It had been decided that, when the doctors discharged him, he’d move in with his mom—yup, that was his life now, the quintessential loser, in his forties, living in his parent’s basement. But how the fuck had he ended up like this? What the hell had happened?

He clearly remembered everything from the last few days—the last few days nineteen years ago: going to see
Dude, Where’s My Car?
at the Polo Park Cineplex on New Year’s Eve; picking up a girl at the bar afterward; watching a new show called
CSI
and thinking that its gimmick would wear thin quickly, only to have Kayla tell him today that
the damn thing had stayed in production until 2017. But what had caused him to become Rip Van Winkle? Oh, right! He had been—

“Great news!” His sister came back into the room; he was still startled by how she looked now. “I spoke to the dietitian. He’s going to work out a plan to get you back onto solid food. We’ll have you eating cheeseburgers and nachos before you know it.”

“Thanks,” he replied, but he didn’t feel much enthusiasm. He didn’t want to eat; he wanted to walk—he wanted to run!

Perhaps she’d read something in his face because she added at once, “And the physiotherapist will be here tomorrow to do an assessment.”

Just then, a nurse came in, pretty, Asian, maybe twenty-five. Travis turned to look at her as she checked his IV drip, and—

And it should have been obvious. It should have been clear at a glance. He should have been able to see it.

But he couldn’t.

This nurse
might
be vulnerable, she might be afraid, she might be the perfect means to an end—
any
end—for him.

But he couldn’t tell. The sense he used to have, the ability that had been there his whole life, the perception that had guided his interactions with others for so long, was
gone.

The nurse, noting his gaze, smiled at him, but it wasn’t the interested smile he was used to getting from women; it was a comforting “there, there” smile, sympathy for the old man.

The nurse left, and Travis turned back to face Kayla. He used to be able to read her easily, too, but not anymore. And yet he did sense . . .
something.
As he looked at her, he . . . he
felt . . .
“pain,” he supposed was the right word for seeing her this way, although that didn’t . . . it . . . he
couldn’t,
but . . .

He narrowed his eyes, detecting the skin on his forehead, which had clearly loosened over the years, wrinkling as he did so. That was a strange sensation, but not as strange, not as unprecedented, not as fucking
weird
as . . .

. . . as this . . . this
sadness
—that was it!—this ineffable sorrow not for himself, not for the two decades he’d lost, but for his sister, for the toll the passage of time had taken on her, the decay
she’d
undergone.

Still, unlike him, she hadn’t missed out on the last nineteen years. She’d lived them, every moment, doubtless dozens of triumphs and dozens of tragedies. So why did he feel so melancholy when he looked at her? Why did he feel . . .

Why did he feel
anything
for her?

What the fuck was going on?

“You okay, Trav?” Kayla said, sitting down on a chair near his bed.

“I guess.” He paused for a beat. “So, Mom said you’re a big-time rocket scientist now, huh?”

“Quantum physicist,” Kayla replied.

“A professor?”

She shook her head. “I don’t teach. I’m a researcher.”

A question popped into his head, one that it had never occurred to him to ask before. “You happy?”

“With my work? Sure. The synchrotron is an amazing place, and it pays well enough.”

“And other than work?”

“Honestly? My ex is a pain in the ass.”

“Your ex? You’re married?”

“And divorced.”

A huge chapter of her life he’d completely missed. And—my God—he wasn’t even sure he knew his own sister’s name now. “Did you take his name?”

“Nope. Still a Huron. As we say in the physics world: inertia.”

“And this guy was an a-hole?”

“So it turned out. Only good thing that came out of that relationship was Ryan.”

“Who?”

“My daughter.” A pause. “Your niece.”

Incredible.

“Six, going on thirty,” Kayla said. “I’ll bring her by to meet you soon.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. And yeah, to answer your question, basically, overall, life is
good. I’m making amazing breakthroughs at work, and you’ve met my boyfriend Jim; he’s really good to me and Ryan.”

He thought about this—and, oddly, about how he felt about it all. It was very, very strange, but he replied, saying words that he’d said countless times before but meant—
really
meant—for the first time: “I’m happy for you.”