Quantum Night (19 page)

W
HEN
he’d been fifteen—which was seven subjective and twenty-six objective years ago—Travis’s hand had gotten sliced open. He’d walked into a plate-glass window at a shopping mall that he’d thought was an open door. It should have been made out of safety glass but wasn’t, and the damn thing broke into giant slabs. As he lifted his arm to shield his face, one of the huge sections dropped from the top of the frame and smashed into the back of his right hand, cutting it down to the bone. The tendons were severed, the wound gaped, and he was rushed to the emergency department.

All of the surgical beds were in use, and so they put him in something like a dentist’s chair, with his hand supported on a little tray, and the reconstructive surgeon, called in from a concert he’d been at, sat on a stool next to him and carefully sutured up the tendons, which looked like gray fettuccine noodles. They’d only used a local anesthetic, and Travis had watched, fascinated, examining the inner workings of his hand.

The scar, Travis was pleased to see, had faded greatly over the last two decades, doubtless the only part of him that had improved with
age. Still,
this
was a bit like that: for the first time, he realized, he was reflecting on the inner workings of his own mind. And, like that—like seeing the tendons, the bone, the whole mechanical infrastructure of his metacarpus—it was interesting for a time, and something he was glad to have experienced, but not anything he needed to do again, and certainly not something he wanted to be subjected to all the time.

Kayla had been sitting with him for the last couple of hours, presenting a compressed version of twenty-first-century history to date: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a second space shuttle blowing up, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the election of the first black American president, Canada being dragged far to the right and then snapping back to the left with—holy crap!—the recent election of a Muslim prime minister, same-sex marriage being legalized across Canada and a decade later across the US, the polar ice caps shrinking, and so much more. It was overwhelming.

But around 6:00
P.M.
, Kayla’s boyfriend Jim showed up to let Kayla take a break. They disappeared into the corridor for a couple of minutes, and Travis looked out the window. The trees were swaying—it had become quite a blustery day. An eagle flew by, passing just above a pole with a tattered, faded Canadian flag.

Jim re-entered and took the seat Kayla had been using. Travis regarded him. This guy was presentable enough, but his sister, even having aged, was better-looking. Travis said, “How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine,” replied Jim.

Travis shook his head. “Last birthday I remember, I turned twenty-two. Now, I’m forty-one.”

“Tempus fugit,”
Jim said, and Travis found himself immediately liking the guy. He didn’t follow the phrase with raised eyebrows, which, Travis knew, would have been literally—yes, literally, not figuratively—supercilious; he didn’t shoot Travis a “That’s Latin” or a “Do you get it?” look. He just calmly assumed that whomever he was talking to was as bright as he himself was.

“Yeah,” said Travis.

“So, listen,” said Jim, “I asked Kayla, and she said it was okay to
talk to you about this. I was at U of M, too, when you were, but I can’t remember things from back then, and, well, I thought maybe you could help me fill in some blanks about my past.”

Travis considered for a moment. Previously, words like those would have been seductive music:
You know something I don’t; you’ve got something you can hold against me.
But he didn’t feel any urge to . . . to
use
this poor sap. He . . .

He wanted to help the guy out.

Christ,
Travis thought,
what’s wrong with me?

—

I looked at Travis Huron, and he looked back at me. Travis was Kayla’s brother, but I felt in a small way like he was my brother, too. After all, he was the only other guy my age I knew who also had no memory of the first half of 2001. Yes, he’d lost so much more than that, but I could qualitatively, if not quantitatively, understand what he was going through. And even if I could somehow recover my memories of my dark period, they would presumably be
old
memories, faded, unreliable, like anyone’s of that long ago. But Travis remembered things from back then as if they’d just occurred.

Except . . .

Damn it, something was niggling at my consciousness. And, yes,
consciousness
was the heart of the matter. Menno Warkentin said I blacked out after trying on his Lucidity helmet. If that contraption did more than render me unconscious—if it really was what put an end to my self-awareness for the next six months—then I could sort of understand why I didn’t remember anything from the period
following
my blacking out, until, for whatever reason, I ceased being a p-zed.

But why didn’t I remember putting on the helmet? Why didn’t I remember going to Menno’s lab on New Year’s Eve? Hell, why don’t I remember going to McNally Robinson and buying that sci-fi paperback earlier the same day? Surely I should at least vaguely recall that stuff, but I couldn’t dredge up anything from the day I became a p-zed.

But Travis hadn’t been subjected to Menno’s lasers. He presumably had no paralimbic damage promoting confabulation; his memories
should be accurate. And so, after he asked me how old I was, and he lamented how old he himself had become, I simply asked him: “Did you take part in an experiment at the university run by Professor Warkentin and Professor Adler?”

Travis managed a rueful smile. “Yup. I remember it like it was yesterday. Those guys still around?”

“Warkentin, yeah; he’s emeritus at U of M. Adler’s in Washington now. So, you remember the Lucidity helmet?”

“I don’t think I ever heard them call it that, but you mean the football helmet with all the doodads attached? Sure. I came in on December fifteenth, they put it on me, and I did some tests, thinking words without saying them.”

“Exactly. Yes. And then they had you come back again, right?”

An odd look passed over Travis’s face, as if he was surprised at how important this seemed to me. “No.”

“They didn’t?”

“No. I came in once, got my twenty bucks, and that was it.”

“What about the day you blacked out? I’d assumed you’d come in again to do an experiment. They found you on campus, and classes didn’t resume until the eighth.”

“Not that I recall.”

Damn.
I’d been so sure Warkentin was responsible for what had happened to Travis. “You don’t remember the day you fell into the coma?”

“Not a thing. I remember going to bed the night before, which was January first. I’d gotten a paperback of this new thriller,
Angels & Demons,
for Christmas, and I started reading that—in fact, that’s just about the last thing I remember.”

There was an obvious joke to be made about Dan Brown novels; I resisted. “But you don’t recall anything at all from the next day? Anything after you woke up?”

He shook his head. “As far as I remember, the next time I woke up, I was right here—with you and my sister standing over me.”

“Huh,” I said, baffled. If Travis had been knocked down into a coma by the same mechanism as me, why didn’t either of us remember putting on the helmet? I could understand losing memories after the
botched stimulation with transcranial focused ultrasound, but why would we lose ones from before that?

“You’re a shrink, right?” asked Travis, looking quizzically at me now.

“I’ve got a PhD in psychology,” I replied, “but I don’t have a clinical practice.”

He waved that away. “But you’re trained in this shit, and—funny, I don’t think I’ve
ever
said this before, but I need somebody to talk to.”

I leaned forward in the chair. “I’m all ears.”

“I feel different now,” Travis said. “Different from the way I did before. I’m fighting it, but . . .”

“What’s different?”

“It’s hard to describe. But I keep thinking about . . . well, about what I’m thinking about. I was always a charge-ahead kind of guy. Never look back, no second thoughts. You know? Just do it.”

“Like Nike,” I said.

“Yeah, exactly. Hey, they still use that slogan?”

“Yup.”

“Anyway, that’s the way I used to be. But now, I keep going over in my mind things I’ve done.”

I frowned. “You never did that before?”

“Never.”

“What about planning for the future? Thinking about things you haven’t yet done?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve always done that: considering alternatives, figuring the angles. But that’s different; there’s a point to that. You can change the future, right? You can’t change the past—so why . . .”

“Obsess about it?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, I guess that
is
the right word.”

“And you’ve only been doing this since . . .”

“Since Kayla woke me up.”

“Are you sure? Did you ever keep a diary?”

“No.”

“A journal? A blog?”

“A what?”

“A web blog; a public online journal.”

“Christ, no. Why would anyone do that?”

“Is it making you unhappy, this ruminating?”

“Yeah. It’s . . . I’ve got these . . . I don’t know what to call them, but . . .”

“Regrets?” I proffered.

Travis repeated the word, as if trying it on, seeing if it fit: “Regrets . . .” And then at last he nodded. “Things I might’ve done differently—maybe
should
have done differently, and . . .”

“And you’re not used to thinking in terms of ‘should.’”

He seemed to consider this, too, then: “Yeah.” He shook his head. “It’s just . . . weird.”

It wasn’t weird, not for Q3s, but . . .

But it
was
for psychopaths. They didn’t ruminate and they didn’t get depressed; it was almost unheard of for a psychopath to become suicidally despondent. “What about your feelings toward, say, Kayla?”

“That’s weird, too! I mean, she’s my sister, right? Always has been, always will be. And I was a good big brother, you know? Wouldn’t let anyone mess with her. But, well, now that I . . .”

“Think about it?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Now that I think about it, that was really about
me,
right? Making sure people respected me? I didn’t—sounds shitty to say this, I know—but I didn’t really care about
her.
I didn’t understand that, not at the time—but now I keep wondering how she’s doing. And I want her to be happy.”

My pulse was racing. There was too much physics and psychology involved to quickly explain this to Travis just now, but I felt sure in my bones that I was right. Yes, the quantum tuning fork—a device almost as cool as The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver—had restored superposition to Travis Huron’s brain, but it had done an even better job than we’d thought. Prior to his falling into the coma, he must have had two of the three electrons in each of his tubulin thingamajigs in superposition, making him a quantum psychopath. But, assuming he
had
returned to Menno’s lab, just as I had, the transcranial ultrasound stimulation provided by the Mark II helmet must have caused those electrons to all
decohere, falling back
en masse
to the classical-physics state, making him lose consciousness.

But when Kayla had goosed his brain, instead of just two,
all
three of the electrons in each pocket had gone into superposition. Prior to 2001, he’d been a card-carrying psychopath, and now, apparently for the first time in his life, Travis Huron was what I had been for most of my life: fully conscious with conscience, a CWC, a quick.

“It’s depressing,” Travis said, after a moment, “having all these . . . these regrets . . . running around in my head.”

I nodded slowly. “Welcome to the club.”

K
AYLA
returned around 7:00
P
.
M
.
, and I went out into the corridor to chat with her again. “How’s he doing?” she asked.

I didn’t know what to tell her—and, anyway, it was probably better to have the conversation about Travis’s change in mental state when we were going to have a longer time to talk. “He’s okay.”

Kayla looked down the corridor with its hard, scuffed flooring, doors alternating left and right, each leading into a room containing one or more patients. “I want to help the other people here,” she said, “if any of the rest of them are in deep, total comas. See who I can wake up, but . . .”

“Yes?” It sounded like a good idea to me.

“But we can’t just pull an
Awakenings
on them all,” she said. “Many of these people have been abandoned for years, decades. Some have no family, and for those who
do
have families, surely they should be present when they wake up. Plus, frankly, I want to be sure that Travis’s superposition
is
holding before we get anyone else’s hopes up.”

“Makes sense.”

“Still,” she said, “this could change the world.”

I looked down the corridor; the sun was setting through a window at the far end. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it could, at that.”

—

I left Kayla with her brother; as they spoke of their childhoods and their parents, I really was feeling like a third wheel. Plus, I was starving, and I only knew two other adults in Saskatoon: the optometrist David Swinson who, if I recalled correctly, planned to urinate on my cemetery plot, and Kayla’s research partner, Victoria Chen. I almost didn’t call Vic, assuming she’d be out with her boyfriend, but then figured there was nothing to lose. To my surprise, she was free and happy to meet me for a bite to eat. She suggested the Konga Cafe, which turned out to be a Caribbean place in a little strip mall here in Riversdale. I got there first, and rose when she arrived. She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

We sat opposite each other, and she said, “So, how are you?”

“Honestly?” I tilted my head. “Conflicted.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I spent some time with Kayla’s brother Travis today. And, well, up until he came out of his coma, it seems he was a quantum psychopath. I haven’t told Kayla yet—frankly, I don’t know
how
to tell her.”

“Are you sure of your diagnosis?”

I shrugged, conceding that there was some room for doubt. “I grant that the only quantum-superposition testing you did on him was while he was in a coma, so there’s no record of his quantum state prior to that. And, as far as I know, no one had ever done the Hare Checklist on him, and I doubt there’s any video of him from the last century that’s high-enough resolution to show whether he was doing microsaccades then. But all of those things are merely correlates of psychopathy. Actual psychopathy is a state of mind: a complete disregard for others; a lack of reflection and rumination—and that’s what Travis described to me.”

“Wow,” said Vic. “Are Kayla or Ryan in any danger from him?”

“No, not now.”

“Good.”

“I’ll tell Kayla before I leave tomorrow, but . . .” I exhaled noisily. “I bet Kayla would have had an easier childhood if Travis had been a Q1 instead of a Q2.”

Sadness washed over Vic’s face, and she said slowly, “Speaking of which . . .”

“Yes?”

“My boyfriend Ross. My ex-boyfriend, I should say. He . . . he’s a Q1. I tested him on the beamline.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head. “It’s . . . difficult, you know? Finding decent guys who are okay with not having kids, that’s hard.”

“Don’t you want kids?”

“‘Want’?” she said. “Yes. But I can’t have any. I
wish
I could, but . . .” She shrugged a little. “Cervical cancer; had a hysterectomy.”

“I’m sorry, Vic.”

“Thanks. Ryan’s the closest thing to a child I’ll ever have.”

“Oh, she’s a doll.”

“Yeah,” said Vic, looking sad. “Yeah, she is.”

“Anyway,” I said. “I’m sorry about you and Ross.”

She lifted her dark eyebrows. “I guess they really
are
everywhere. Makes you wonder how society can function.”

“Ross teaches high school, right?”

“Yes. English.”

“Well,” I said, spreading my arms, “there’s a curriculum laid down by the Ministry of Education, right? He has to teach
these
books in
this
order by
that
time, and prepare his students for taking
this
standardized province-wide test. Any number of people could do that; indeed, any number
do
—there must be thousands of high-school English teachers in Saskatchewan.”

“A good teacher makes a difference.”

“Sure, yeah. But there are lots of bad teachers or indifferent ones in the system, too. I don’t say that being a university professor is
better
—although it pays better—but the requirement to do original research to get a PhD might mean you get fewer p-zeds at that level although I’ve seen lots of trite, paint-by-numbers dissertations in my day. You know what they say: the only word that rhymes with ‘theses’ is ‘feces.’”

“I guess. It’s just—I mean, I really liked him. And I thought he liked me. But he’s . . . he’s a robot.”

The server came; I ordered Red Stripe, an imported Jamaican beer; Vic asked for a Pepsi Next.

“I still don’t get how a society could function with most of its members not being truly conscious,” Vic said.

“Welllll,” I replied gently, “the majority of Ross’s students would likely be p-zeds, too. And most jobs are repetitive. It’s only the length of the repeat cycle that varies: a few seconds if you work on an assembly line, a few hours if you drive a bus, daily if you manage a restaurant, and yearly if you teach a course. Every September, I trot out the same introductory lectures I gave the year before.”

“I guess.” She let out a sigh. “I just can’t believe I was fooled by him.”

I shook my head. “Psychopaths fool people. They deliberately deceive; they get off on it. But p-zeds? They just
are.
Ross wasn’t trying to hurt you; he wasn’t trying to do
anything.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said. The server brought our drinks—mine in a bottle, Vic’s in a can—as well as some johnnycakes as an appetizer. “It’s just hard,” she continued, “not knowing who’s . . . who’s
real.”

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence for a time, then I said, “Anyway, Vic, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Shoot.”

“I said Travis was a psychopath—but he isn’t, not anymore. He was almost certainly a Q2 before his coma, but the coma knocked him out of superposition—or, I guess, the other way around: he got knocked out of superposition, ending up in the classical-physics state, and that caused him to lose consciousness, right?”

“That’s the process, yes,” said Vic.

“But when he came out of the coma, he came out as a Q3—I’d bet money on it. He’s got a conscience for the first time, and, frankly, is gobsmacked by it.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“Yeah, but here’s the part I don’t get. I admit that I’m struggling with all this quantum-physics stuff, so maybe you can explain it
to me. Travis started as Q2, got knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came back up as a Q3—a higher level than he’d been at originally.”

“Okay.”

“But I started out as a Q3—fully conscious with conscience—got knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came back at a
lower
level, emerging from my own blackout as a Q1 p-zed. Why is that?”

Vic’s thin lips turned downward. “That
is
a good question.”

“He doesn’t remember what happened to him any more than I do, but we were almost certainly both knocked out by the same piece of equipment although admittedly we were revived in different ways. Still, he went up, and I went down.”

“Well, if I understand what Kayla told me correctly, you came back—to the extent that you initially
did
come back—almost immediately; Travis was in a coma for nineteen years.”

“True. And I suppose it might be completely random—a throw of the dice.”

Vic nodded. “If that’s the case, given the 4:2:1 ratio of the cohorts, maybe you’ve got a four-in-seven chance of coming up as a p-zed, like you did, and a one-in-seven chance of coming up as a quick, like Travis did. But I’m always suspicious of apparent randomness.”

I took another sip of beer. “Me, too.”

—

When I got back to the facility to pick up Kayla, her mother Rebekkah was just leaving—and so I maneuvered her over to a couple of chairs in the lobby.

“Have you been enjoying Saskatoon?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s lovely. Such sunny days! And no mosquitoes. I’m not looking forward to those back in Winnipeg.”

Rebekkah was a handsome woman with lively eyes. “Tell me about it. I survived fifty-one summers there.”

And that was the opening I’d been hoping for. “Speaking of The Peg . . .”

“Yes?”

“You raised your kids there, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Travis was into sports, even as a kid?”

“Oh, my, yes. The harder, the better. Not Kayla, though: she was the studious one.” Our orange-upholstered chairs were facing each other, and she leaned closer, conspiratorially. “I never told the kids this, but my father—their grandfather—referred to them as ‘Jock’ and ‘Nerd’ behind their backs.” She smiled. “He meant it with love, but it’s true: they were different as night and day.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “Well, look, I’m interested in, you know, nature vs. nurture, and all that. Sometimes sports are displaced aggression. Was Travis, you know, a violent child?”

“Well, there wasn’t much consciousness of it back then,” Rebekkah said, “but, yeah, he was a bully, frankly. My husband and I weren’t really aware of it too much at the time, but he probably wasn’t the nicest guy to other kids. But all the kids’ parents loved him. That boy had the gift of the gab; I don’t know where he got it.”

I nodded. Glibness and superficial charm were classic psychopathic traits; so were bullying and pointless cruelty. But I was hoping for something definitive. After all, the notion that people change quantum states upon rebooting from total unconsciousness was huge, and I couldn’t just rely on what Travis had subjectively told me about his own feelings. “Were there a lot of pets on your street? Dogs? Cats?”

“Oh, yes. Sure.”

I often floated hypotheticals with my students, who always figured out that they were precisely that. I didn’t like doing so with Rebekkah, but I said, even though no such thing had actually happened in my own neighborhood, “We used to have tons of pets on the street I grew up on.” I put on a puzzled face. “But a lot of them disappeared. We didn’t know what to make of it. Turned out this kid up the street was capturing them and killing them.”

“God,” said Rebekkah. “We had the same thing. Some creep was stringing up dead cats from trees—including two kittens that belonged to us—and we found others cut into pieces. It was
awful . . .”
She shook
her head. “I tell you, Jim, I didn’t like that my Travis used to beat up other kids, but I wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten his hands on whoever was doing
that.”

—

Kayla, on the other hand, was another matter; keeping secrets was no way to build a relationship. “I had a long chat with your brother this afternoon,” I said to her, as we lay side by side later that night.

“He told me. He likes you.” She smiled. “Big-brother stamp of approval.”

“He’s a good guy,” I said. “Now.”

“What do you mean, ‘now’?”

“What was he like as a kid, a teenager?”

“You’re getting at something,” said Kayla. “What?”

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “He’s changed,” I said. “Before his coma, he was a psychopath.”

“You said you didn’t remember Travis from before.”

“I don’t. But he described his inner life from then to me: consciousness but no conscience, not until now. He used to be a Q2, but, for whatever reason, he booted up again as a Q3.”

She looked stunned. “No. Really? My God, are you—are you sure?”

“Pretty much.”

“Jesus. So what does that make me? Debra Fucking Morgan? Too much the loving sister to see what her brother really was?”

“I’m not—no one is judging. I just thought you should know.” She said nothing, so I went on. “And at least he isn’t one anymore. He genuinely cares about you.”

“Now,” said Kayla bitterly.

“And let’s hope he stays that way. But, look, you know the Hare Checklist as well as I do. Did he, y’know, have lots of girlfriends?”

“You’ve only seen him now, after wasting away for almost twenty years,” she replied, nodding. “I’m his sister, and even I knew how hot he was.”

“Promiscuity,” I said softly. “Strings of meaningless relationships. And you said he was into extreme sports: that’s need for stimulation.
You also said he was a brick when your father was fighting cancer; I’m betting he kept it together even at the funeral, right?”

“And you’re saying that’s evidence of shallow affect?”