Quantum Night (26 page)

PRESENT

I
’D
been half-prepared, I supposed, for there to have been something traumatic in my past—but, really, what could have been more shocking than being knifed in the heart, my pericardium slit open, my left atrium pierced, my lifeblood spilling out? More disturbing than being left to die on an icy sidewalk on a cold winter’s night? Surely when you’d come that close to death, no horror you could have survived would be any worse.

But no. I had to keep telling myself that that had never happened.
This
—the things I recalled now—was reality. And almost being killed paled to having
actually
killed.

“But why don’t I remember doing that?” I said, looking up at Namboothiri from the little swivel chair.

“Well,” he said, lifting his unibrow, “if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it was because you didn’t sleep prior to Warkentin knocking you into a coma the second and third times. It’s during sleep that the day’s memories are sorted and the salient ones encoded for long-term storage.”

“But people put under for an operation remember both going down and coming back up.”

“True. But you also had paralimbic damage. I’m not surprised it took a little while for verbal memory encoding to start working properly again. I suspect if we shifted over to probing your verbal index, we’d find you immediately started confabulating stuff to fill in your dark period. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the mind wants a continuous narrative—even if it has to make one up.”

“Hmmm. And—
hmmm.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve had a recurring nightmare for years: a monster I needed to destroy, and me holding a wooden torch, but with dark, frozen flames. That’s got to be the splintered baseball bat.”

“Ah, then you
did
at least partially encode what happened during that brief period.”

“Lucky me,” I said softly. And then I got up and headed toward the door.

“Where are you going?” asked Namboothiri.

“To see Menno Warkentin.”

—

Menno was waiting at the entrance to his apartment as I came off the elevator, Pax in a sitting posture next to him. “Padawan,” he said, moving aside to let me in.

The spacious living room, with its silver-and-cyan furniture, hadn’t changed since the last time I’d been here. Menno headed past the twin totem poles into the kitchen, Pax following dutifully behind; I’d seen the dog lead the way when they were in unfamiliar territory, but she understood Menno needed no guidance in his own home. “Coffee?” he called out. “Tea?”

“Nothing,” I said.

He emerged holding a red coffee mug for himself.

I sat on the couch. “You know Bhavesh Namboothiri?”

“Psychology prof at U of W? Met him once or twice.”

“He’s been helping me recover the memories from my dark period.”

A long pause; even Pax turned to face her master. “Oh,” Menno said at last. “And?”

“I know what happened to Dom. And what I did to you.”

“So long ago,” said Menno. “Another lifetime.”

“How come there was no follow-up? No criminal investigation?”

Menno sat down opposite me. “Somebody helped me dispose of Dom’s body.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I never saw her. I tried to track her down afterward, but no luck. She took some cash, though, and my cards—ran up some big bills. But I never heard from her again.”

“Weren’t there questions about Dom? About what had happened to him?”

“He’d been fairly loose-lipped about doing consulting for the DoD, so I told everyone he’d moved to Washington and had taken a job with them. It sounded plausible; no one questioned it. And the DoD was happy to help cover things up; national security and all that. I think they’re still cashing his U of M pension checks down there.” He lifted his shoulders. “It’s like he isn’t even really dead.”

“But he
is.
And . . . and I’m the one who killed him.”

“Yeah.”

“I killed a man . . . violently, in cold blood. You’re a Mennonite, a pacifist. How could you look at me after that?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Menno said softly. “I didn’t have to.”

A flash of memory: my thumb digging into Menno’s face. I shook my head violently, but there were no adequate words.

Menno lifted his shoulders. “I was angry. Furious. But, well, nineteen years
is
a long time.”

“Still, it must have been awful, having to work side by side with me all this time.”

He was quiet for a moment. Perhaps he blinked behind his glasses. “Jim, I’m the reason you’re at U of M.”

“I know, but—”

“No, you don’t understand.
I’m
the reason. I was department head back then, remember? You’d applied to teach at three other schools. A few phones calls, a few favors called in, twisting the dean’s arm to get you tenure-tracked, and—” He shrugged affably. “Well, the names
haven’t
all changed since you hung around.” And then he sang, off-key, the final verse of the old TV theme song,
“Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back . . .”

“Jesus,” I said. “Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?”

“You’re not my enemy. You’re my . . .”

“Subject?” I said, at last getting it.

“I may have stopped recording them, but those long discussions in my office we’ve always had . . . It
was
fascinating, what had happened to you, and how you built up a coherent history of your missing period pretty much out of nothing.”

“But, still, after what I’d done, why’d you keep it secret? Why didn’t you turn me over to the police?”

Menno’s silver eyebrows climbed above the frames of his glasses, and he spread his arms. “How could I? You know what would have happened if
any
of this had gone public? Milgram and Zimbardo—that was the Wild West, before informed consent; hell, it’s
because
of them that informed-consent rules were put in place at universities across the world. Even with tenure, my career was at risk—flagrant violations of the campus ethical guidelines—and the whole department was at risk, too. U of M could have been decertified by the American and Canadian Psychological Associations. And—you don’t know how big a deal this is, but trust me, it’s huge for a Mennonite: working for the military? I’d have never been able to show my face at my church again. Plus, Jesus God, the legal consequences! If you had decided to sue or press criminal charges for the lost six months, or for the brain damage I’d caused with the lasers, I’d be in ruins, or in jail, or both. Same thing if Travis Huron’s family had sued: that boy has been in a coma for almost twenty years, and it was my fault.”

“He’s not in a coma anymore.”

Menno’s jaw dropped, and he said, very softly, “Oh.” And then, after a moment, “When did he pass?”

“He’s not dead,” I said. “But he’s out of the coma; he’s awake.”

“God, really?”

“He doesn’t remember what you did to him.”

“Are you going to tell him?” Menno asked anxiously.

“He has a right to know.”

“Prisoner’s dilemma, Padawan. Don’t defect.”

“What?”

“You tell Travis what we did to him, and I
will
tell the police what you did to Dominic Adler. There’s a statute of limitations on malpractice; there’s none on murder. The only win-win scenario is for both of us to continue to keep quiet.”

I didn’t like being pushed. “I’ll get off,” I said. “I had a pre-existing condition, thanks to you.”

The obsidian convexities of Menno’s lenses faced me. “The way Devin Becker got off?”

I blew out air.

“Listen, Padawan,
listen!
You know the stakes are higher than either of us. If people start digging—if the truth of what Dom and I discovered all those years ago comes out . . .”

“Yes?”

“Slavery, human trafficking, cannon fodder, experimental test subjects, even Soylent-fucking-Green, for Christ’s sake—that’s just the
beginning
of the things that’ll happen if the world learns that there are countless philosopher’s zombies out there who don’t actually have feelings.”

He was right. Four billion p-zeds, two billion psychopaths, and just a billion quicks. It was a recipe for massive exploitation.

“I have to know,” I said. “Did Dominic Adler have an inner voice?”

“See!” Menno crowed triumphantly. “Even you’re doing it! If he
didn’t
have an inner voice, you’re off the hook, right? Yeah, you—you
terminated
him, but it’s not like that
matters,
right?” He let that sink in. “Anyway, sorry, but there’s no get-out-of-jail-free card for you: Dom had an inner voice; I saw it on the oscilloscope when we were testing our equipment.” A pause, a beat, then a softening of my old mentor’s tone: “As to whether he had a conscience to go with it, though . . .”

“Yes?”

“What do you think? He got me to push ahead with the experiments even after you’d lost consciousness. He didn’t seem to give a damn about what had happened to either you or Travis Huron.”

“A psychopath,” I said. Menno was right: I probably
could
have lived with having killed another p-zed, but even a psychopath was fully conscious: all the reasons why Devin Becker shouldn’t receive capital punishment applied equally to Dominic Adler.

But, nonetheless, I’d snapped Dom’s neck.

Judge.

Jury.

And executioner.

Of course,
I’d
been a psychopath when I’d done it, albeit a paralimbic one, not a quantum one, until . . .

Until Menno had hockey-pucked me into a brief coma and I’d fallen to the laboratory floor, only to reboot—

—to reboot, like Travis Huron eventually did, not at my previous state but—

—but at
the next level up.

I’d come back as the worst-possible combination: a Q2 with amygdalar lesions; a quantum psychopath and a paralimbic psychopath all rolled into one, suddenly conscious after six months of zombiehood. Fuck yeah, such a beast might gouge somebody’s eyes out. And after that, it might—

But there was no
after that,
not for the quantum psychopath. Menno almost immediately knocked me back into a coma again, and when I emerged, on July 2, 2001, I had leveled up once more, becoming fully conscious with conscience—and that conscience, that inner voice, had managed to override whatever the paralimbic damage might have been urging me to do.

Just like it was overriding my urge right now to strangle the life out of Menno Warkentin for what he’d done to me—and for what that damage had led me to do.

I
hadn’t planned to return to Saskatoon for several more days, but I needed to see Kayla, so I had my teaching assistant take my Wednesday and Thursday classes for me.

My car, finally repaired, was now at Kayla’s place; she’d picked it up from the body shop for me. That meant flying was my best option to get to Saskatoon, and, to my delight—the only good news I’d had in days—I was able to get a one-way ticket for only $300; I’d expected much more of a gouge for a same-day flight.

I called Kayla to let her know I was coming. The trip was brief enough that I didn’t have to use the john, which was good because I’d gotten stuck with a window seat and I hated asking someone to move just so I could get out. Kayla was still at work when I arrived, but, since it was after normal business hours, I didn’t feel guilty about going straight to the synchrotron; Ryan was at Rebekkah and Travis’s place, and the last thing I needed was to be on my own in an empty house.

The cab turned onto Innovation Boulevard and headed toward the glass-fronted building that housed the Light Source, but the driver came to a stop a hundred meters shy of the circular driveway. Four Saskatoon
police cars, their roof lights blinking, were blocking the way. I told the cabbie to wait and got out. A uniformed officer approached me.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “No one gets in.”

It was only then that I became conscious of a helicopter overhead. “My girlfriend is in there. What’s happening?”

“No one’s in there,” corrected the officer. “The building’s been evacuated.”

“What? Why?”

“Bomb threat.”

I pulled out my phone—and saw that it was still in airplane mode. I turned that off, and I hit the speed dial for Kayla.

“Jim, thank God,” she said. “I tried calling you, but—” Her next few words were bleeped out by the sound of my voice-mail indicator going off. “—about forty minutes ago.”

“Are you safe? Where are you?”

“At home.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, hurrying back to the taxi. As we drove out, we passed the bomb-disposal van lumbering its way in.

I’d come to Saskatoon because I needed comforting after what Namboothiri had uncovered. But the moment I saw Kayla, I wanted instead to comfort her. I held her tightly in the entryway for a time, then she led me into the kitchen, where she had a drink—amber liquid over rocks—going. She took a gulp, winced, then waved the glass vaguely at the liquor cabinet by way of offering me something. Instead, I opened the fridge and took out a can of beer.

“Why the bomb threat?” I asked as I pulled the tab, a small geyser going up from the opening.

“We’ve been having a lot of protests lately.”

“Why?”

“Remember when people were picketing the Large Hadron Collider because they thought it was going to create a black hole? Some mindless jerks got it into their head that the same thing could happen here.”

“Ah,” I said, shaking my head.

“Anyway, how are you? You came all this way; what’s wrong?”

I took a swig of beer. “I know I did some horrible things to you in 2001, and to Dave Swinson—the guy who became an optometrist. But I found out today that I’d done even worse things. The memory-specialist I’ve been working with helped me recall them.”

I’d expected her to ask, “What things?” Certainly that would’ve been my first question. But she didn’t. She simply swirled her glass, the ice cubes clinking, and said, looking only generally in my direction, “We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of. It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters is who we are now.”

“Yes, but—”

“You literally weren’t yourself back then. You weren’t
anybody.
Just a philosopher’s zombie.”

“I was for most of it, but . . .”

“Yes?”

“But at the end of June, Menno knocked me out again, and I came back as a Q2 psychopath—a
real
psychopath—and then, I . . . I . . .”

“What?”

“I gouged out Menno’s eyes.”

She was quiet for a time, then, finally, she said simply, “Oh.”

“God knows what else I would have done, but he managed to knock me out again, and when I woke up from that, I was back to my old Q3 self, I guess, but confabulating memories to trowel over the missing time.”

“So, wait, wait, you’re saying you were knocked down into a coma three times?” She sounded excited, as if this all confirmed something for her. “Once—what, New Year’s Eve 2000, right? Then twice more at the end of June 2001? And you changed your quantum state each time you rebooted?”

“I guess, yes.”

“Coma, coma, coma, chameleon,” Kayla said.

I was clearly having an effect on her.

“I’m here all week,” she added, but her grin was way wider than her joke deserved. She started toward her study down the hall. “Come with me.”

—

“Look,” Kayla said, gesturing at her large desktop monitor. “That’s the simulation Victoria and I have been developing.” She had taken the seat in front of the computer, and I was crouching next to her.

“Yes?” I said.

“See? It’s looping.”

I thought that was a bad thing, from the handful of Word macros I’d tried to debug over the years; I was proud all out of proportion to the actual achievement of my one that turned MLA citations into APA format. “You mean it doesn’t terminate? It just keeps running?”

“No, no, no, the simulation stops just fine whenever we want it to. It’s not the program that’s looping; it’s the
output.”

“What?”

She hit some keys, and a chart appeared on her screen. “Okay, look. These are the three possible quantum-superposition states: Q1, Q2, and Q3.”

“Right.”

“Well, Vic and I have been trying to solve that problem you discussed with her: you said my brother Travis started as a Q2—a quantum psychopath—got knocked down into a coma, and then came back up as a Q3 quick, right?”

“Right. He leveled up.”

“Exactly. But you started as a Q3, and, after being knocked into a coma back on New Year’s Eve 2000, you revived as a Q1—you leveled
down,
in other words; the exact opposite of Travis, right?”

“Right.”

“And I couldn’t square what the simulation was showing with the reality you’d reported. I had thought you’d gone Q3 to Q1 then bounced straight back to Q3—but you just told me that wasn’t what happened. You actually went Q3 to Q1,
then
to Q2, and
then
to Q3, one step at a time. And that’s exactly what the simulation predicts. See, what happened to you isn’t the
opposite
of what happened to Travis, it’s the same thing: each time you go down to the classical-physics state, you reboot,
if you reboot at all, one level higher up—
but the levels wrap around!”
She pointed at her screen. “The math proves it: the change vector is a modulus, an absolute value. It statistically prefers being positive but, if that’s not possible, a negative delta occurs.”

“Um, so if you started as a Q1—”

“If you started as Q1, you’d come back from a coma as a Q2; if you were a Q2, like Travis, you’d come back as a Q3; and if you were originally a Q3, like you, you’d
wrap around to being a Q1!”

“That’s—wow.”

“Wow indeed. But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother and to . . .” She trailed off.

“That’s fabulous, baby! You’re a genius.”

“Thanks,” she said, but she was frowning. “There’s still one problem, though. Somehow, while Trav was in a coma, the value of his previous superposition state had to be stored for nineteen years. For him to revive as a Q3, somewhere the fact that he’d previously been a Q2 had to be retained even when he was no longer in superposition.”

I’d been trying to come up to speed on all this. “Don’t almost all cells in the body have microtubular scaffolding? Not just brain cells? The ones in neurons are the ones Penrose and Hameroff implicated in consciousness, but maybe regular body cells might retain a degree of superposition even when neuronal tissue doesn’t. Kind of like muscle memory.”

I meant that last bit as a pun, but she nodded as if I were more clever than I really felt just then. “Maybe, maybe.” She shrugged a little. “Who knows? The bottom line is, whatever the mechanism, there clearly
is
such a memory.”

“Cool,” I said. “But, so are you saying this happens to
anyone
who completely loses consciousness? If they revive, they come up at one level higher than they were at before—or, if a Q3, wrap around to being a Q1, as I did?”

“Yes, I think so. But they have to actually have their brain drop into the classical-physics state. That doesn’t happen during sleep; sleeping is a conscious condition, which is why you dream and why external stimuli can wake you up.”

“True,” I said. “And, I’ve heard tons of stories about people who have temporarily lost consciousness through a coma, general anesthesia, or a near-death experience. Those who know them best often say they were changed by the experience. Family and friends say some people who have had NDEs are more mellow afterward—and, in many cases, they
would
be. If you were a psychopathic Q2 beforehand, you’d come back as a thoughtful, reflective Q3. And if you were a Q3 beforehand, you’d wrap around to being a Q1 p-zed, literally without a care in the world. Of course, that doesn’t happen with every case of general anesthesia, but—”

“Welllll,” said Kayla, “not to freak you out or anything, but a lot of the drugs we use in operations
aren’t
really anesthetics; that is, they don’t actually put you out cold. Rather, they’re paralytics that also inhibit memory formation. They keep you from moving during surgery, and they keep you from remembering all the pain, but they don’t actually put you out in the quantum-mechanical sense.”

“Holy shit. Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow. Well, thanks heaps. Something new to have nightmares about.”

She smiled contritely. “But there
are
groups that
do
suffer total knockouts disproportionately: boxers, football players, and so on. Most of the time it’s just—
just!
—a concussion. But every once in a while, one of them really is knocked out cold. And, you know, most of them probably started out as nice-enough guys. But everyone’s read those stories about some of them eventually turning into psychopaths, beating their spouses and so on.”

I nodded. One of the Green Bay Packers was in court just last week over having assaulted his wife.

“Anyway, that’s it!” said Kayla triumphantly. “That’s the pattern! Once you realize that the states wrap around, it’s simple. It’s
elegant.”

—

I was asleep next to Kayla, but even when exhausted, I always dozed lightly, and a small change in the illumination filtering through my eyelids woke me up. Next to me, Kayla, naked, was thumb-typing on her phone.

“Texting your other lover?” I said; I was naked, too.

“No, no.” She continued typing furiously. “I’m sending myself a note. I thought of another mathematical proof that the states
do
in fact wrap around; I don’t want to forget it.” She tapped a little longer, then decisively banged the screen with her index finger and turned to me, illuminated by the phone, a satisfied smirk on her beautiful face.

I gently pulled her back down, so that she was facing me. I stroked her hair, its copper color undetectable in the darkness; stroked her shoulder, the skin smooth; worked my way toward her breast, perfect, round, soft, my palm moving in light circles over her nipple, which hardened; and then, sliding lower down her torso, touching the ridge that marked the leading edge of one of the wings on her blue butterfly tattoo.

The ridge; her scar.

I had one of my own, of course, on the left side of my chest, where that crazed addict’s knife—

No, no. It
hadn’t
been heart surgery; it had been the removal of a tumor in my breast. Above my sternum. No need to saw through bone.

And so no need—yes, yes: that
was
what Cassandra Cheung had told me over the phone from Calgary:
“Says here they cut it out under a local anesthetic.”

Meaning I hadn’t had my consciousness shut off. I wasn’t knocked down to the classical-physics state then, back in February 2001—and so nothing had changed: I was a p-zed before the surgery and a p-zed afterward.

But Kayla—

“Wow, indeed,”
she’d said earlier tonight.
“But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother and to . . .”

And to whom?

But no . . . that was crazy.

And, yet, when I’d started to tell her what I’d done to Menno, she deflected it, saying,
“It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters is who we are now.”

Once were. Are now.

Jesus.

Could it be? Could she—

Kayla must have felt my spine stiffen because she said, softly, “What?”

My heart beat a few times, then. “Your tattoo . . .”

“I thought you liked it?”

“You had an appendectomy.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Abdominal surgery.”

“Yeah.”