The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  “We may need more resources.”

  “Then you’ll have it.”

  “And a budget.”

  “As much as you want,” the manager said. “As much funding as you want.”

  * * *

  It took ten days to arrange. We worked in conjunction with the Franklin Park Zoo.

  Transporting large numbers of animals can be a logistical nightmare, so it was decided that it would be easier to bring the lab to the zoo than the zoo to the lab. Vans were hired. Technicians assigned. Point Machine put his own research on hold and appropriated a lab tech to feed his amphibians. Satvik’s research also went on official hiatus.

  “I don’t want to interfere with your work,” I told him when I found out.

  Satvik shook his head. “I must see this through.”

  It was a Saturday morning when we set up the experiment in one of the new exhibits under construction—a green, high-ceilinged room that would one day house muntjacs. For now, though, it would house scientists, the zoo’s strangest and most transient tenants. Blocking out the light was the hardest part, with canvas deployed over the broad glass entryway. The working floor itself was still unfinished and recessed below the level of the entrance; so three short stairs had to be assembled that led down to the wide octagon of bare concrete on which the tables were set up. Satvik worked the electronics. Point Machine liaised with the zoo staff. I built a bigger wooden box.

  This box was six feet square, reinforced on all sides with two-by-four studs every twelve inches. It was large, strong, and lighttight.

  Satvik noticed me with the electric saw. “Be careful,” he said. “Shortcuts lead to long cuts.” As he walked away, I wondered if that was one of his expressions, or if he’d made it up special.

  The zoo staff didn’t seem particularly inclined to cooperate until the size of Hansen’s charitable donation was explained to them by the zoo superintendent. After that, they were very helpful.

  Setup continued through the weekend until everything was up and running, just like at the lab. As a control, I put Satvik in the box and ran the test. He saw the light. The interference pattern collapsed into two distinct points on the capture screen.

  “It works,” Point Machine said.

  The following Monday we started the experiment. We got to the zoo early, and the keepers let us in the gates.

  To corroborate our earlier work, we’d already agreed to start with frogs.

  Satvik checked the light one final time, and then Point Machine put one of his frogs in the wooden box.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  He nodded. I looked over at Jeremy, who’d arrived with an entourage a few minutes earlier and now stood off to the side, near the wall. His face was set in concentration. Behind him, two managers in suits sweated in the muggy darkness. They were here to see the machine work. Point Machine stood by the capture screen, along with a handful of technicians.

  I hit the button. The machine thrummed like a guitar string.

  “How’s it look?”

  Point machine checked the screen. He gave a thumbs-up. “Just like at the lab,” he said. “No change.”

  * * *

  We ate lunch in the zoo cafeteria among the milling crowds. A thousand visitors, kids in tow. Balloons and ice cream. A double stroller jutted into an aisle while families came and went. No one had any idea about the experiment that would take place behind the construction signs just a few dozen yards away.

  Point Machine ordered pizza but couldn’t finish.

  Across the table, my own stomach twisted, appetite gone.

  “Which ones will it be?”

  “There’s no way to know.”

  “If you had to guess.”

  “It’ll happen somewhere between class and order,” Point Machine said. “The primates for sure.”

  “What do you think, Satvik?”

  He looked up from his paper plate. “I don’t know.”

  Point Machine drained the last of his Pepsi.

  “I’m telling you,” he said. “Somewhere in Primatomorpha. That’ll be our first hit.”

  * * *

  We ran the first experiment just after noon. Satvik hit the button. The interference pattern didn’t budge.

  Over the next three hours, we worked our way through representatives of several mammal lineages: Marsupialia, Afrotheria, and the last two evolutionary holdouts of Monotremata—the platypus and the echidna. The zookeepers walked or wheeled or carried the animals to us in cages. One by one, the animals were placed carefully in the wooden box. The machine ran. The interference pattern never changed.

  The next day, we tested species from the Xenartha and Laurasiatheria clades. There were armadillos, sloths, hedgehogs, pangolins, and even-toed ungulates. The third day, we tackled Euarchontogliries. We tested tree shrews and lagomorphs. Hares, rabbits, and pikas. None of them collapsed the wavefunction; none carried the spotlight. On the fourth day, we turned finally to the primates.

  We arrived at the zoo early that day. Zoo staff escorted us through the gate and up the hill. They unlocked the muntjac house and turned on the lights. Satvik provided the zookeepers with the day’s list, which they then discussed among themselves for several minutes.

  We began with the most distantly related primates. We tested lemuriformes and New World monkeys. We put them in the box, closed the door, hit the button.

  Then Old World monkeys. Subfamilies Cercopithecinae and Colobinae. The red-eared guenon and the Tonkean macaque.

  Then a single Sumatran surili, which clung to the zookeeper’s arm, face like a little gremlin doll. A stuffed animal that blinked. Finally, we moved to the anthropoid apes. All failed to collapse the wave.

  On the fifth day, we did the chimps.

  “There are actually two species,” Point Machine told us while the zoo staff prepared the transfer. “Pan paniscus, also called the bonobo, and Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee. They’re congruent species—hard to tell apart if you don’t know to look. By the time scientists caught on in the nineteen thirties, they’d already been mixed in captivity.” Zoo staff maneuvered two juveniles into the room, holding them by their hands like parents leading a child. “But during World War II, we found a way to separate them again. It happened at a zoo outside Hellabrunn, Germany. A bombing leveled most of the town but, by some fluke, left the zoo intact. When the keepers returned, they expected to find their lucky chimps alive and well. Instead, they found a massacre. Only the common chimps stood at the bars, begging for food. The bonobos lay in their cages, dead from shock.”

  The zoo staff led the first chimp toward the box. A juvenile female. Its curious eyes met mine. They closed the door, and Satvik secured the latch.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  Satvik nodded.

  We tested both species. Chimp and bonobo. The equipment hummed. We double-checked the results, then triple-checked.

  The interference pattern did not budge.

  Nobody wanted to speak.

  “So that’s it then,” Point Machine said finally. “Even chimps don’t cause wavefunction collapse.”

  I toggled the power switch and turned the machine off for the last time. The hum faded to silence.

  “We’re alone,” I said.

  * * *

  Later that night, Point Machine paced the lab. “It’s like tracing any characteristic,” he said. “You look for homology in sister taxa. You organize clades, catalog synapomorphies, identify the out-group.”

  “And who is the out-group?”

  “Who do you think?” Point Machine stopped pacing. “The ability to cause wavefunction collapse is apparently a derived characteristic that arose uniquely in our species at some point in the last several million years.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s the most parsimonious interpretation. None of our sister taxa have it. This is a uniquely derived trait. An apomorphy. It must have arisen after our split from the other primates.”

 
“And before that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Before that. Before us.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Those millions of years. Did the Earth just stand dormant as so much uncollapsed reality? What, waiting for us to show up?”

  13

  Writing up the paper took several days. I holed up in my lab, organizing the data, putting it into a clear structure that could be read, digested, submitted for publication. The shakes were bad in the mornings, so I took my prescription, washing it down with coffee and orange juice. Once the paper was complete, I wrote the abstract. I signed Satvik and Point Machine as coauthors.

  SPECIES AND QUANTUM WAVEFUNCTION COLLAPSE.

  Eric Argus, Satvik Pashankar, Jason Chang. Hansen Labs, Boston, MA

  ABSTRACT

  Multiple studies have revealed the default state of all quantum systems to be a superposition of both collapsed and uncollapsed probability waveforms. It has long been known that subjective observation is a primary requirement for wavefunction collapse. The goal of this study was to identify the higher-order taxa capable of inciting wavefunction collapse by act of observation and to develop a phylogenetic tree to clarify the relationships between these major animal phyla. Species incapable of wavefunction collapse can be considered part of the larger indeterminate system. The study was carried out at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo on multiple classes of vertebrata. Here we report that humans were the only species tested that proved capable of exerting wavefunction collapse onto the background superposition of states, and indeed, this ability appears to be a uniquely derived human characteristic. This ability most likely arose sometime in the last six million years after the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

  * * *

  Jeremy read the abstract. We sat in his office, the single sheet of paper resting on the broad expanse of his father’s desk.

  Finally, I spoke. “You said you wanted something publishable.”

  “Serves me right, telling you something like that.” The crease between his eyebrows was back again. “This is what I get.”

  “Not so bad, is it?”

  “Bad? No, it’s incredible. Congratulations. This is amazing work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Still,” he said. “It’s going to start a shit storm. You must know that.”

  Jeremy looked down at the paper I’d written, his blue eyes troubled. I could see him as a boy, eighteen again, sitting in the university library where I’d first met him. His face smooth and young. The ice storm and sliding truck still two years in his future. The paper that would complicate his life still more than a decade from his desk.

  He looked up from the paper. “But what do these results mean?”

  “They mean whatever you think they mean.”

  * * *

  Things moved fast after that. The paper was published in the Journal of Quantum Mechanics, and the phone started ringing. There were requests for interviews, peer review, and a dozen labs started replication trials, all with a keen eye toward finding the flaw in the procedure. And always it was assumed there must be a flaw. Outside the research community, it was the interpretations that got crazy, though. I stayed away from interpretations. I dealt with the facts.

  Like this fact: there is exactly one liquor store on the shortest route between work and the motel. I took the long way, trees lining the road—and I didn’t drink. Some nights I didn’t trust myself to go home at all, didn’t trust that I’d take the long way, so I stayed the night, bathing in the safety shower of the chem lab on the first floor of North building, a flagrant violation of lab protocol and all things holy. Around me were bottles of every chemical known to man—potassium sulfate, antimony trioxide, caustic potash, nitrogen sulfide, ferric ferrocyanide—every chemical, that is, except alcohol in a form that wouldn’t poison me.

  Satvik’s office was still back in the main building, though he could be found, more and more often, only in his lab space, a small room he’d acquired on the second floor of South building.

  Satvik, for his part, worked on perfecting the test itself. He worked on downsizing it, minimizing it, digitizing it. Turning it into a product. He was an electronics guy, after all, and the big, awkward setup at the zoo had cried out for improvement. It became the Hansen double-slit, and when he was done, it was the size of a loaf of bread—a small dark box with an easy indicator light and a small, efficient output. Green for yes and red for no. I wonder if he knew then. I wonder if he already suspected what they’d use it for.

  “It doesn’t matter what you know,” he said as we stood in his office after that first demonstration of the new machine. He touched the small, magic box he’d created. “It’s about what is possible to know.”

  He abandoned his gate arrays. So, too, his easy smile was abandoned, and I wondered at the price he’d paid to work on the project. Gone was the talk of his daughter and the complaints about the crops back home. Now he spoke only of the experiment and his work on the box. Above his workstation I found a quote taped to the wall, torn from an old book.

  Can animals be just a superior race of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence?

  —Thomas Henry Huxley, 1859

  14

  That Friday night, I swung by the motel office before heading up to my room. Pink flamingos on the front lawn. I never understood that. The property wasn’t themed as far as I could tell. The name, generic: The Blakely Motel. It was brown and rectangular, nearly featureless, two squat levels with an outside walkway that ran along the upper floor. It looked like any of a dozen other old motels that dotted the seaboard in this part of the world—a certain well-worn shabbiness—but there were those two pink plastic flamingos on the front lawn. Or maybe that was the point. Maybe a featureless brown motel needs those two flamingos.

  The clerk at the front desk saw me coming and waved a stack of envelopes.

  “Mail here,” she said. Her name was Michelle or Marla.

  I took the mail from her outstretched hand and then paid for another month in advance. I got the feeling that they liked the long-term tenants. The once-a-week cleanings. I took the mail up to my room and threw it on the table.

  Two letters. One, neat and businesslike. The other hand-scrawled.

  The first was from work. I tore it open, and inside I found a single folded sheet of paper:

  HANSEN LABORATORIES

  Eric Argus

  Employee 1246

  Direct deposit confirmation

  Dear Mr. Argus, I’m happy to inform you that you’ve passed your probationary hiring period and have been converted to full-time employment. Enclosed please find a $1,000 bonus check as appreciation for your hard work. A 15 percent increase in salary is rendered effective immediately. Welcome to Hansen Laboratories.

  I put the letter down and stared at it. I read the first sentence over and over. Full-time employment. I wasn’t sure what to do. A part of me wanted to jump into the air. Or call somebody. What was the expected protocol? Full-time employment; I realized then that I’d never really expected it. Not even after the paper.

  I took out my checkbook. I wrote five hundred dollars on the line. Dropped it in a new, fresh envelope. I wrote my sister’s address.

  I owed her more than that. Much more. The doctor bills alone.

  I thought about calling her—the push of a few buttons on my phone. I wanted to tell her—tell somebody. I wanted to talk and get it all out. The experiment, the zoo, the paper. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and held it in front of me, but I couldn’t make myself hit the button.

  It wasn’t enough, I realized. The two months sober. The five hundred dollars. It wasn’t enough.

  And how to explain the paper? Jeremy’s voice still in my ear, what does it mean?

  Instead of calling, I closed my phone. Soon enough, I told myself. When I had another month of sobriety. When I could call her and tell
her that I’d done something worthwhile. Then I’d call. I folded the letter and slid it into my pocket.

  Only then did I look at the second piece of mail that I’d received. The writing scribbled and hurried. I looked at the name on the return address. A street in Indianapolis. It meant nothing to me. The name, though, was one I knew well.

  I tore open the envelope.

  Inside was a single sheet of paper.

  Handwritten. A single line.

  We need to talk.

  —Stuart

  I looked at it for a long time. I wondered how he’d gotten my address. Science could be a small world. He could have read about the experiment. Or maybe the timing was coincidence. Maybe some new fire had arisen phoenixlike from the ashes of our previous work, and he was reaching out. A darker thought occurred. Or maybe he was in trouble.

  We need to talk. Just that single sentence.

  I crinkled up the paper and threw it in the trash.

  15

  Over the course of the next month, there were other letters from other sources, gradually filtered through official channels at work. A medical doctor named Robbins made his interest in the project known through carefully worded correspondence.

  Those letters turned into phone calls. The voices on the other end belonged to lawyers, the kind that came from deep pockets. Robbins worked for a consortium with a vested interest in determining, once and for all, exactly when consciousness first arises during human fetal development.

  Hansen Labs turned him down flat until the offer grew a seventh figure.

  Jeremy tracked me down that morning while I was changing the coffee filter, presumably because he knew my defenses would be down. “He wants you to be there.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Robbins asked for you specifically.”

  By then the negotiations had been going on for some time.

  “And I’m specifically saying no.” I poured the coffee grounds into the filter and slid the plastic receptacle into its slot. “I don’t want any part of it, and you can fire me if you want to.”