Quantum Night (24 page)

T
HE
next morning, Kayla entered the office she shared with Victoria, who today was wearing a black turtleneck and black leather pants; the combo probably wouldn’t work on anyone else, but she rocked it. Vic was staring intently at an image on a forty-inch monitor.

“What’s that?” asked Kayla, standing behind her and bending over to have a look.

“The scan I made of Ross on the beamline,” replied Victoria.

Kayla put a hand on Vic’s shoulder. “When I want to creep on an ex, I look at their Facebook wall or OKCupid profile.”

“It’s not that,” said Vic. She pointed at one part of the display. “See here? That’s the spike showing he’s got one electron in superposition—making him a Q1, a p-zed.”

“Yes.”

“But look here,” said Vic. She pointed at a serpentine line high up on the Y-axis, which was marked with a logarithmic scale.

Kayla nodded. “The background stuff.”

“Exactly. The entanglement we’ve observed before.”

“Right.”

“And, so far, it’s never changed, right?”

“Right,” said Kayla. “If it would
do
something, maybe we could figure out what it represented.”

“Exactly—but look! It
has
changed, see? Right here.” Vic pointed at where the whole line jumped a small amount.

“It increased,” said Kayla, surprised.

“Exactly. It suddenly went up, and it stayed up.”

“Huh.”

“I ran a test on myself yesterday.” Vic did something with her mouse, and a split-screen display came up showing two graphs that looked almost identical. “Both of these are me.” Her triple-superposition Q3 status showed as three distinct spikes on each of the graphs. “But see?” She pointed first to the left-hand display, then the right. “The entanglement level at the top is up from my previous reading, too; that’s never happened before.”

Kayla frowned. “Go back to Ross’s display.”

More mouse movements, and the screen changed again.

“You had Ross in here on Sunday the ninth?”

“Yep. Jeff okayed it.”

“Sure, no problem.” Kayla leaned in, looking at the times marked on the bottom of the graph. “And the entanglement level on his chart went up at 11:19
A.M.
?”

“And twenty-two seconds,” said Vic, pointing at the figure. “And it stayed up, right through to the end of the run I did with him.”

“Wow,” said Kayla softly.

“What?”

“Do you know where I was then?”

“A Sunday morning? Well, we can rule out High Mass.”

“I was at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care.”

“Oh, my God! Right! That’s the day you revived your brother!”

“Jim recorded it on video. It’s in our Dropbox.” Kayla gestured for Vic to get up, and she took her place at the keyboard. Kayla opened a browser and banged away for a few moments until she had the shared folder on-screen—and discovered that Vic had her computer set to show large thumbnails; playing-card-sized images of Kayla and Jim making love popped up on the monitor.

“Umm,” said Kayla.

“NSFW,” said Vic, grinning from ear to ear. She reached over and took the mouse, using it to change the view to a plain directory listing, and then she stepped back and let Kayla find the file she was looking for. A couple of clicks later, and the video Jim had shot started playing.

“My God . . .” said Vic, as Travis’s eyes opened for the first time in almost two decades.

Kayla backed up to the precise moment at which Travis visibly regained consciousness. The little slider at the bottom of the screen showed they were one minute and forty-three seconds into the video. She then flipped back to the file listing, which showed the time at which Jim had begun making the recording, then did the math in her head: the creation-time stamp of the video file plus an additional one minute and forty-three seconds was . . . 11:19:25
A.M.
She said the figure aloud.

Vic let out a low whistle. “That’s really close . . .”

“Too close to be a coincidence,” said Kayla. “And when I used the quantum tuning fork on him the second time—it didn’t work until I flipped it upside down—it was a few seconds before his eyes opened. So, the increase in entanglement you recorded here on Ross occurred at just about the moment Travis woke up. Want to bet that your own level increased at that exact moment, too?”

“Meaning me, my ex-boyfriend, and your brother were—
are
—linked?” said Vic. “The three of us are quantally entangled? But why on Earth would that be the case? I mean, Travis and Ross have never even met.”

“That’s an excellent point,” said Kayla, peering in puzzlement at the screen.

—

Kayla had invited Victoria over for dinner, and the four of us, including Ryan, were still sitting at the square table, although I’d pushed back so I could turn my chair sideways and cross my legs; tomorrow, we’d go to Rebekkah’s place to have dinner with her and Travis.

The ladies had had pot roast while I’d picked my way through a ginormous salad. During dinner, Ryan had told us at length about how
her day-camp counselor had tried to explain the awful goings-on. Although Ryan was still frightened, it sounded to my psychologist’s ear like the counselor had taken the right approach: not sugarcoating things, but not being alarmist, either.

The conversation segued to how I would deal in my summer classes with the dark turn current events had taken—and that somehow led to psychologists who got spooked by their own research.

“It can take a lot out of you,” I said. “Look at Phil Zimbardo. His Stanford Prison Guard experiment was in 1971, but he was still wrestling with what happened to his students, and to himself, thirty-odd years later, when he published his book
The Lucifer Effect,
about how good people turn evil. I have it on one of my required-reading lists.”

“What about the shock-machine guy?” asked Victoria.

“Stanley Milgram,” I said, nodding. “He went the other way after that experiment. He hated that it had become this giant thing, with everyone questioning his ethics, so he retreated into studies that no one could consider controversial. He pioneered the ‘lost-letter’ technique, which tests if people will take the trouble to put stamped envelopes they find on the ground into a mailbox. Turns out most people will, if the letter has a neutral or positive addressee, such as a respected charity, but won’t if it’s addressed to ‘Friends of the Nazi Party,’ or something like that.”

“Still exploring good and evil,” Kayla noted.

“True,” I said, “but in a way that couldn’t hurt anybody. And he spent even more time on something completely benign. Milgram called it the small-world problem, and he was one of the first people to really study it—but it’s better known now as Six Degrees of Separation, or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Milgram showed that any two people are connected by a very small chain, and—”

Victoria sat up straight. “Like Travis and Ross!”

“Pardon?” said Jim.

“Travis—Kayla’s brother—he’s connected to my ex-boyfriend Ross, right, in that very way. Travis to Kayla to me to Ross; hell, that’s only three degrees of separation!”

Suddenly Kayla seemed excited, too. “My God, that could be it!”

“Do you have a computer here with Maple on it?” asked Vic.

Kayla nodded. “Yes, yes! In my study.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

Kayla replied hurriedly: “There seems to be entanglement between Travis, Ross, and Vic, and we’ve been trying to puzzle that out.” I knew that entanglement was a quantum connection—entities intertwined so that no matter how far apart they were physically, what happened to one instantly affected the other.

Kayla’s excitement was palpable. “At the moment Travis gained consciousness, the background entanglement reading ratcheted up a notch for Ross, and we think for Vic, too. And it
can’t
be that Vic’s reading went up just because a random new person gained consciousness, right? I mean, people are born and die all the time, yet we’ve never seen that sort of boost.”

Vic was already on her feet, and Kayla rose while continuing to speak: “But if the spike is proportional to the degree of separation, then someone as close on the small-world network as Travis is to Ross—even though they’ve never actually met—would register, at least a little, while the constant distant background churn of total strangers coming in and out of existence would be too insignificant to be seen.”

The two women hustled off to Kayla’s study, talking animatedly. I turned to Ryan. “Let’s load the dishwasher, then watch some TV.”

“Netflix has
Inspector Gadget!”

“You got it, Ginger Ale.”

—

I ended up putting Ryan to bed on my own; Victoria and Kayla were still working away furiously in the study. When I came back downstairs, I used the living-room TV to look at more news: six dead migrant workers in Texas, a dead eleven-year-old Cree girl in Manitoba, a synagogue bombed in Paris, a mosque bombed near London, another Boko Haram raid. Worse and worse.

About an hour later, the two women emerged—I’d have been delighted to see them under any circumstances, but the pair of ecstatic faces were particularly welcome just then.

“Well?” I said, turning off the TV.

“It all fits,” said Victoria, triumphantly. “We’ll run more tests tomorrow, but it looks like a solid model.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Okay,” said Kayla, coming to sit next to me on the couch. “We already knew that all the microtubules in individual brains are quantally entangled. That’s why they’re all in the same superposition state for any given person, right? Either all of their tubulin dimers have one electron in superposition, or they all have two, or they have all three.”

“Or none,” I offered.

“Yes, yes, if they’re out cold, they have none. Right. Now, we don’t know what consciousness
is
exactly, but
that’s
its physical correlate: the collectively entangled all-in-the-same-state quantum field within a given person’s brain.
That’s
the physical thing that gives rise to whatever level of consciousness a person might be experiencing: the emptiness of a p-zed, the cunning of a psychopath, or the conscience of a quick.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But not only is each human brain an entangled system,
every
human brain is an entangled system.”

I frowned. “I don’t see the distinction.”

Vic took it up: “The sum total of human consciousness—all 7.7 billion people, regardless of what quantum state they individually might be in—forms one single entangled system, connected by small-world networking. It’s the collective quantum inertia of that system that keeps people from changing states. That’s the reason we can’t take a p-zed, say, and boost him up to being at a higher state: you can’t change the quantum state of one individual without affecting all the others, which is why the quantum tuning fork doesn’t have an effect on an already awake individual. The inertia of the totality of humanity prevents any shift.”

“But that can’t be right,” I said. “People get put out for surgery all the time. But
only
the patient is affected.”

“Yes,” said Vic. “That’s a special case, because it involves decoherence. When you are put totally under by anesthesia, you cease to be in quantum superposition and drop back to the classical-physics state—Penrose and
Hameroff proved that—and so, by definition, if only classical physics pertains, you cease to be subject to entanglement.”

“And,” I said, “that means . . . ?”

“It means,” said Kayla, “that you
exit
the collective if you truly lose all consciousness.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But,”
continued Kayla, “everybody
within
the collective—all seven billion Q1s, Q2s, and Q3s; everyone who is
not
in the classical-physics state—could only conceivably change quantum state in lockstep, shifting
en masse.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Kayla said. “It’s one for all, and all for one.”

“Homo sapiens
—one big happy family,” Vic added.

Not so happy of late, of course, but I wasn’t going to ruin their moment of triumph. Still, I looked back at the TV screen. Funny: no monitor made since I was a kid had any sort of burn-in problem, and yet, as I gazed at the black rectangle, I could see the ghostly afterimage of the atrocities it had just shown me.

“Professor Marchuk?”

It was Veronica, in the third row, her hair in long cornrows. “Yes?”

“I get it. I mean, I really do. I get how all this utilitarian thinking can be a good thing. But, well . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, it just seems so
cold,
is all. So calculating.”

I looked out at the students. Veronica appeared genuinely conflicted, but Boris had a smug expression, and his arms were crossed in front of his chest, as if his classmate had just detonated a nuke on my pet philosophy. He looked positively disappointed when I said, “You’re right, Veronica.”

And, for her part, Veronica looked surprised. “I am?”

“Yes, certainly. On the surface, being a utilitarian appears to mean embracing your inner psychopath.” I paused. “Do you guys know the Trolley Problem?”

A few nods, including Boris, but mostly blank faces.

“Well,” I said, “imagine a streetcar is barreling along the tracks, out of control. There’s a split in the tracks: one fork leads
to where five people are standing and the other leads to where one person is standing. The trolley will hit and kill the five unless you throw a switch and divert it onto the other track, in which case it’ll only hit and kill one person. Do you throw the switch? Boris?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Exactly right, comrade. One dead instead of five; pure utilitarianism. But what if there’s only one track, and no switch, and instead it’s you and that exact same one guy, but the two of you are standing on a footbridge over the tracks, and you, you’re a little guy, but he’s a big fellow—so big, he’ll stop the streetcar for sure if you push him off the bridge so that he lands in front of it before it plows into the other five people. Do you push him off? Same utilitarian equation, isn’t it? One person dead instead of five? Veronica, do you push him off?”

“No.”

I smiled. “Nor would most people. In fact, when Bartels and Pizarro studied that scenario, they found it was mostly psychopaths who said they’d do the supposedly utilitarian thing and shove the big guy off the bridge; normal people couldn’t bring themselves to do it.”

“See,” said Boris, “you have to be a psychopath to follow strict utilitarianism.”

“That’s
Doctor
Psychopath to you, comrade.” A few laughs. “But, no, you’re missing the point. Pushing the guy off the bridge is an easy answer for a psychopath because psychopaths don’t give a damn. And not giving a damn is the opposite of utilitarianism.

“In the two-tracks scenario, there’s no room for second thought: I’m killing one guy instead of five. In the footbridge scenario, there’s lots to dither over: how do you know that the heavy guy will be big enough to stop the streetcar; yeah, someone
told
you that he will be, but do you believe that? Are you sure? And are you sure there isn’t a touch of prejudice here? How’d that guy get so fat, anyway? Is his life worth less than someone else’s? Oh, but what if his obesity is due to a glandular condition or genetics?
And is it
really
true that jumping yourself wouldn’t be enough to stop the train? Who says so?

“If it turned out that pushing the fat guy didn’t actually stop the streetcar, so now six people died instead of five, a psychopath would shrug, and say, ‘Live and learn.’ But a utilitarian would be devastated by it. Having a conscience means agonizing over things, it means doing the right thing because you’ve weighed all the factors, it means
caring
so much it hurts. And that’s a feeling no psychopath will ever know.”

I
T
was going to take another two days to fix my car, damn it all, and I needed to get back to Winnipeg. Although it would have been nice to have
Star Trek
’s transporter at my disposal, at least Captain Kirk was able to help me out: I got a bargain last-minute airfare from Priceline.com, and so was now at Diefenbaker, waiting for my plane.

Often when flying in Canada, I ran into people I knew at airports; Canada has only a handful of major cities, and academics travel a lot to conferences. So, I wasn’t really surprised to see Jonah Bratt arrive at the same gate I was at. The flight from here to Winnipeg continues on to Ottawa, and Jonah teaches psychology at Carleton—poorly, according to RateMyProfessors.com.

“Hey, Jonah,” I said, standing up to shake his hand. He was tall and cadaverously thin, with pockmarked skin and graying hair.

“Marchuk,” he said. His grip was almost nonexistent. “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting a friend. You?”

“Attending a colloquium on Jung at U of S.”

“Ah,” I said.

It was a small gate area, and he sat down close to me, with one empty seat between us—leaving the space required by flocking rules, or just being a prick and making it awkward for someone else as the waiting area filled, I couldn’t say.

He pulled out a tablet and began to read what looked like a journal article. My attention was caught by the big TV hanging from the ceiling,
which was showing CTV News Channel.
“More on the horrific news out of Corpus Christi, Texas,”
said the anchor, Dan Matheson. The image cut to what looked like a large natural sinkhole in the ground, and in it were human bodies, most clad in jeans and T-shirts, overlapping like jackstraws.

The anchor went on:
“Work continues on the mass grave found here yesterday, about 350 kilometers south of Houston. Police are now removing the bodies and so far four of them have been identified by their next of kin: Miguel dos Santos, twenty-four; his brother José dos Santos, nineteen; Carlos Lobos, twenty-eight; and Juan Rameriz, twenty-two. Our Ben Pryce has more. Ben?”

The picture showed a man holding a microphone standing at the lip of the sinkhole, Texas State Troopers milling about on the far side.

“Dan, this open-pit grave was located by a couple of hikers early yesterday morning. As you can see, we’re off the beaten path here. The four identified bodies were all migrant farm workers apparently illegally in this country, and I’ve been told, off the record, that the other fifteen bodies—ten men and five women—all appear to be Latino or Latina. Cause of death in most cases seems to have been a single bullet to the head, in what I overheard one police officer call ‘execution-style.’”

The picture changed again, showing a large wooden board on which two words had been painted in ragged brushstrokes.

“Dan, images of this sign, which I’m told was found on top of the bodies, have already gone viral online. As you can see, it reads, ‘As requested.’”

“Like Nazi Germany,” I said, shaking my head.

Bratt looked up. “You lose.”

“What?”

“You lose. Godwin’s Law.”

What he actually meant was a corollary to Godwin’s Law: the implication that any argument has gone irretrievably off the rails when someone trots out a comparison to the Nazis or Hitler. “Because the Holocaust was—what?” I said.
“Sui generis?
Something that could never happen again?” I motioned toward the TV set. “It’s happening right now.”

“It’s just a blip.”

“It’s accelerating—and it’s going to get even worse. Hitler at least had to set up huge government infrastructure to pull off his killings. Fucking McCharles has crowdsourced his genocide.”

“There’s just no evidence that—”

I pointed at the screen. “The evidence is right there! Why—”

But we were interrupted by the Air Canada gate clerk calling our flight. Apparently Bratt’s Altitude status made him eligible for pre-boarding, as he immediately rose from his chair, and, without a word of goodbye, shambled toward the Jetway.

—

The next day, after my classes were done, I headed over to meet Bhavesh Namboothiri, who finally was able to see me again. I took a bus, which gave me plenty of opportunity to observe the damage that had been done during the riots. In many places, windows were boarded up with plywood, fences were still down, and there were scorch marks on the asphalt where cars had been set ablaze.

Namboothiri managed to elicit a couple more childhood memories—which were certainly fascinating to experience, and, under other circumstances, would have been worth the price of admission. But they were just pyrite; we were after nuggets of gold.

And, soon enough, he was turning up those, too: one of Menno’s lectures; then, as Namboothiri repositioned the probes, another by Professor Jenkins—sadly, apparently not the one during which I’d told an orangutan joke; another shifting of the probes brought back memories of me indeed having a tumor removed from my left breast in Calgary; one more repositioning, and Kayla and I were playing strip Trivial Pursuit, in which instead of getting a wedge each time you answered a question correctly, your opponent lost one of their six pieces of clothing; and then—

Oh.

Oh.

So
that’s
what I’d done to David Swinson.

I’d remained in Winnipeg that summer, having taken a data-entry job in the registrar’s office on the assumption that my relationship with Kayla would continue. David, who’d had the dorm room next to mine
during the preceding academic year, had once eaten what was left in my bucket of KFC without permission. And so, near the end of June 2001, I’d gone onto the registration computer and dropped him from every course he’d selected for that coming September—and, for good measure, had him give up his place in the dorm, as well. When he returned to Winnipeg from his summer back home, he discovered he wasn’t registered and had no place to stay. Somehow—perhaps we’d find that memory later—he must have eventually realized I was responsible.

I shuddered, feeling horrible that I could ever have done such a nasty thing—and was grateful when Namboothiri moved on.

Next up were innocuous memories: a few more from my toddler days; going to see the movie version of
Josie and the Pussycats
—something that probably
was
best forgotten; Heather coming for a weekend visit, and—

“Move the fucking probes!”

Namboothiri eased off and the images melted from my consciousness, but I was gasping and my pulse was racing.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “We can stop for the day if—”

I lifted a hand. “No. No, I’ll be all right. Just . . .” My arm was shaking; I lowered it. “Just give me a moment.” Another memory came to me, but not because the doctor was eliciting it; this one was from my verbal index, and relatively recent: Menno Warkentin talking to me in his office, trying to dissuade me from digging into my past.
“Sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie,”
he’d said. But I’d replied,
“No, I can’t do that.”

And I couldn’t.

I had to forge ahead.

I gripped the arms of the chair tightly, forcing the blood from my knuckles, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. I’m ready.”

“All right,” Namboothiri replied, returning the probes to the same spots on my skull.

—

Friday afternoon, June 29, 2001. The corridor outside the office of Dominic Adler. Knuckles rapped against the door, and words were spoken: “Dom, it’s me, Jim. Can I have a moment?”

The door opened, revealing Dominic in russet slacks and a gray, short-sleeved shirt. “Hey, Jim. Come in. What’s up?” He gestured at a chair and turned to walk to his desk.

Jim’s body surged in from behind, and Jim’s hands grasped Dom’s neck on either side. A
crack!
split the air as the neck was twisted ninety degrees to the left. Dominic’s body slumped to the floor.

The front of Jim’s shoe impelled itself into Dom’s kidney, and sounds emanated once more from Jim’s mouth: “Take that, motherfucker.”

—

Without my asking him to, Namboothiri pulled the probes away once more. “You okay?”

Breathing rapidly, my skin slick with sweat, I reached up to wipe my brow—and once again my hand was trembling. “Jim?” Namboothiri said. I scrunched my eyes shut, but the awful memory lingered. “Jim? What did you see?”

I tried to compose myself then swiveled the chair to face him. “You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

He nodded.

“Which makes you an MD, right? A medical doctor?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“So this conversation is privileged, correct? Even though I came to you without a referral, I’m still your patient, isn’t that right?”

“Jim, my God, what did you see?”

“Say it,”
I snapped. “Say I’m your patient. Say this is privileged.”

“Yes, yes, of course. You’re my patient. I can’t be compelled to divulge what we discuss.”

I blew out air, took another moment, then: “Back in 2001 . . .” I shook my head, finding the words almost as impossible to speak as the thought was to think. “I killed a man.”

“Oh . . . God. No, no.”

“Broke his neck. Deliberately.”

Different responses seemed to swirl on Namboothiri’s face, but at last he said: “Who was it?”

“Dominic Adler. Menno Warkentin’s research partner.”

“Was it—was it self-defense?”

God, how I wished it had been! I’d killed that p-zed in the prairie field a short time ago, and that had indeed been self-defense. Even so, I’d barely been able to live with myself since, but this—
this!