Quantum Night

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “You got a party to get to?”

  “Kinda. Bunch of friends, we’re going to Garbonzo’s—hang out, watch Ed the Sock do Fromage.”

  “I’m sure that means something,” said Menno. “Anyway, we’ll get you out of here long before midnight.”

  “I’m happy to come in,” said Jim. “Dorm’s kinda lonely. But my parents are off on a cruise for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, so not much point in going back to Cow Town.”

  Dominic Adler entered the room, carrying the Mark II. “That’s not the same helmet as before,” said Jim, but there was nothing suspicious in his tone; he was just making conversation, and it beat talking about the weather.

  “True,” said Dominic. “Completely new design.” They were hoping that by using transcranial focused ultrasound—a new brain-stimulation technique the DoD was experimenting with—they could boost the phonemes enough to punch through the background noise.

  “Great,” said Jim, reaching for the helmet. It had different modules attached to its surface, and, in addition to ones that looked like decks of cards, there were two—one on either side—that looked like green hockey pucks.

  “Put it on,” Dominic said.

  Jim pulled it over his head, and Dominic loomed in to make various adjustments. “It’s a snugger fit than the old one,” Jim offered.

  “Yes. We thought maybe we were losing alignment with the previous setup.” Dom pulled on the chin strap, cinching it. “How’s it look, Menno?”

  Jim glanced toward Menno, as if expecting an assessment of his appearance, but Menno was peering at the oscilloscope, which showed the thick, chaotic trace of the para-auditory scan. “I think it’s fine,” Menno said.

  “Okay,” said Dominic. He glanced at his calculator watch, then: “Take your seat next door, Jim.”

  Jim headed out into the corridor and went into the other room, lowering himself onto the swivel chair on the opposite side of the glass.

  Menno turned on the cassette recorder, which had a little microphone on a plastic stand. “Project Lucidity, stage two, test number fourteen on thirty-one December 2000, 7:49 P.M. PIs: Dominic K. Adler and Menno Warkentin. Subject JM is in place.”

  Menno looked at Dom, who said, “Okay. Let’s rock and roll.” Menno nodded and typed “execute” at his computer’s command prompt. He poised his chubby index finger over the backward L of the enter key, took a deep breath, then tapped it.

  Through the window, in the chair, they could see Jim’s head loll back, as though he were looking up at the ceiling, the way one might when lost in thought.

  Menno and Dom exchanged glances. Menno halted the program, then touched the intercom button. “Jim?”

  No response.

  “Jim?” said Dom, as if somehow the young man could hear him even if he couldn’t hear Menno. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, shit,” Menno said, pointing at the oscilloscope, which showed nothing but a perfectly flat green phosphor line.

  Dominic’s eyes went wide, and the two of them rushed toward the door, did a hasty turn in the corridor, then entered the testing room.

  “Jim!” said Menno, crouching before him.

  Dominic tipped Jim’s head forward by gently lifting the back of the helmet. The student’s chin dropped to his chest.

  Menno attempted to check for a pulse in Jim’s right wrist. Unused to doing the test he’d seen so often on TV, his own heart raced as he tried to find it, but at last he did, feeling the rhythmic movement of Jim’s radial artery, good and strong and at the normal pace, too. “He’s just fainted.”

  “Maybe the helmet is too tight,” Dominic said as he undid the chin strap, then pulled the helmet off, setting it gently—it had cost sixty thousand dollars, after all—on the tile floor. “Might have restricted his circulation.”

  Menno tried something else he’d seen on TV: lightly slapping Jim on one cheek and then the other. “Come on,” he said. “Wake up.” But there was no response from Jim. Menno then held his own hand in front of Jim’s nose, feeling breath—warm, regular—on his palm.

  “What should we do?” asked Dominic.

  “Let’s get him out of the chair and onto the floor, before he falls out.”

  They did just that, laying Jim on his back.

  “He’s not sweating,” said Menno. “He’s not breathing hard. He’s just . . .”

  “Unconscious.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But the others we tested,” said Dom, “the ones who normally didn’t have an inner voice—nothing happened to them.”

  “True.”

  “So,” said Dominic, sounding increasingly desperate, “why in God’s name won’t he wake up?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Menno, “but we’ve got to call 911.”

  “No, we can’t do that.”

  “But he’s unconscious.”

  “There will be too many questions. Lucidity is classified.”

  “Yes, but this boy—”

  “Look,” said Dominic. “He’s breathing. His pulse is steady.”

  “What if he’s in a coma, for God’s sake? He needs to be in a hospital. He’ll need water soon. Food. And he’ll have to go the bathroom.”

  “Well, how do we explain—”

  “I don’t care about that!” snapped Menno. “We’re in no position to look after him.”

  “We’re under a military nondisclosure agreement.”

  “Damn it, Dominic!” Menno took a deep breath. “Okay, all right. Fine. Let’s get him out of here, out of the lab. Move him down to, I don’t know, the men’s room. Then we can say we stumbled upon him, found him passed out. New Year’s Eve—they’ll take him for a drunk student.”

  “Until they do a blood test.”

  “Look, I’m not going to just abandon him. Now, are you going to help me move him or not?”

  Dominic thought for a moment. “What if we’re seen?”

  “Everyone’s gone for the night. Come on!”

  Dominic hesitated.

  “For Christ’s sake, Dom. If I drag him on my own, it’ll leave dirt on his clothes and scuff marks leading back here.”

  Dom frowned, then bent over and took Jim’s ankles in his hands. Menno nodded his thanks and grabbed Jim’s arms just below the shoulders. They lifted him so his bottom cleared the floor by a few inches and moved, Dominic walking backward. At the threshold, they put Jim down for a second and Dominic opened the door. He checked that the coast was clear, then took his end again, and they quickly moved Jim along the corridor, going by closed doors, the little windows in them nothing but dark squares.

  They were just passing the women’s room—the men’s was the next one along—when Menno heard a grunt. He looked down and saw that Jim’s eyes were now open, showing whites all around the irises.

  —

  Hearing was restored, as was vision. Fluorescent tubes behind frosted panels moved by overhead.

  A male voice: “Dominic, stop.” And then the same voice: “Jim, um, you, ah, you passed out. How do you feel?”

  A response required; one made: “I’m okay.”

  Arms freed; legs, too. Pressure on the back.

  A different voice: “Can you stand?”

  Knees flexed; palms pushed against the dusty floor. The word “yes” was uttered as hands moved to brush away dirt.

  The first speaker again: “You gave us quite a start.”

  Silence. Then, filling the space: “I’ll be all right.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the second speaker quickly. “Of course you will.”

  —

  Hours later, long after Jim had headed off to his sock-and-cheese thing—whatever the hell that was—Dominic and Menno were in the lab, still trying to make sense of it all. Dom was sitting on a three-legged stool, looking at a printout of the oscilloscope
tracings, showing the noise in Jim’s auditory cortex disappearing at the instant he lost consciousness. On the wall behind him, held up by a pair of U-shaped acrylic braces, was a souvenir baseball bat, commemorating the two consecutive World Series wins by the Toronto Blue Jays. Menno, leaning against the opposite wall, looked at it, idly wondering what it was like to be a bat.

  His reverie was interrupted by Dominic, saying for what seemed like the hundredth time, “For God’s sake, all we were trying to do was boost the queued phonemes so they wouldn’t be drowned out by his inner voice. What could have possibly gone wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have people like Jim,” said Dom, trying to puzzle it out, “who do have an inner voice, and then there are those who are—what? Monologue-less? Soliloquy-free?” He shook his head. “Bah. Those are both awkward names.”

  “True,” said Menno softly, as his heart suddenly began pounding. “But, my God, there is an established term for those without inner voices—at least in my field of study . . .”

  12

  PRESENT

  “Okay,” I said, looking out at my first-year psych class, “how many of you drive to the university each morning?”

  About a third of the students put up hands.

  “Keep your hands up. The rest of you: how many of you have had a job you’ve driven to day after day?”

  Another third raised hands.

  “Okay, now keep your hands up if this has ever happened to you: you arrive at your destination—school, work, whatever—and have no recollection of the actual drive.”

  Most of the hands stayed in the air.

  “Cool,” I said. “Lower your hands. Now, think about that: you undertook a complex task; you operated a vehicle weighing over a thousand kilos, you negotiated traffic, you avoided collisions, you obeyed signs and the rules of the road—you did all that without high-level conscious attention; that is, you did it while your mind was on other things.

  “Let’s try another one: how many of you have ever been reading a book—not one of mine, you understand, but somebody else’s—and gotten to the bottom of a page and realized you had no awareness of what the page said?”

  Again, lots of hands went up.

  “Okay, you might argue that driving a car is an example of what laypeople call muscle memory, although the technical term is ‘procedural memory’—stuff you do without thinking about it, like returning a serve in tennis or playing a musical instrument. But what about the reading example? Your eyes tracked across each successive line, and, on some level, your brain was presumably recognizing and processing the words. In fact, you can contrive priming tests to demonstrate that the words were noted. If the page referenced, say, a porcupine, and you’re asked, even though your mind wandered off while reading so you say you have no high-level conscious recollection of the page, to name a mammal, chances are you’ll say ‘porcupine.’ So, reading can’t be dismissed as just muscle memory, just your eyes tracking without actually seeing. And yet you can do it, too, without real attention.”

  I let that sink in for a moment, then went on. “So, it’s clearly true that you can perform sophisticated acts without your full conscious attention some of the time. And, by logical extension, if you can do those things that way some of the time, then it’s presumably possible there are people who do them that way all of the time. Of course, we’d have no way to tell, would we? When you’re reading but not absorbing, nobody can tell that from the outside. And when you’re driving but not paying attention, again, well, if the police had a way of detecting that by some external sign—your eyeballs rolling up into your skull, say—you can bet they’d pull you over. But there is no external indication.”

  I took a sip from the coffee cup on the lectern, then went on. “And that brings us to one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy. Imagine a being who didn’t just drive all the time without paying attention, and who didn’t just read all the time without paying attention, but who in fact did everything all the time without attention. An Australian philosopher, David Chalmers, is the guy most associated with this proposal. He says it’s logically coherent—that is, there are no internal contradictions—to the notion that a whole planet could exist full of such entities: beings for whom the lights are on but nobody’s home, beings who are, quite literally, thoughtless.” Another sip, then: “Anybody got a suggestion for what we should call such creatures?”

  I was always happy to set that one up, and my students never disappointed. “Politicians!” called out one. “Football players,” called another.

  “Well,” I said, “almost anything would be an improvement over the term we actually use. Such beings are called ‘philosophical zombies’ or ‘philosopher’s zombies.’ It’s a terrible name: they’re not the walking dead, they don’t shamble along. Behaviorally, they’re indistinguishable from the rest of us. Sadly, the phrasing ‘philosophical zombie’ is more common in the literature than ‘philosopher’s zombie,’ but it doesn’t make sense: the one thing such creatures are unlikely to be is philosophical. Oh, they might say things a philosopher would—‘A could well follow from B,’ or ‘Yes, but how can we be sure your experience of red is the same as my experience of red?’ or ‘Would you like fries with that?’—but they’d only be acting like a philosopher. There would in fact be no inner life, no rumination. Me, I mostly avoid the zombie word. In the States, they can’t really abbreviate ‘philosopher’s zombie’ to its initials because it comes out sounding like ‘peasy,’ as in ‘easy-peasy.’ But here we can safely call them p-zeds, so let’s do that from now on.”

  One of the students, a muscular guy named Enzo, raised his hand. “Well, then, Professor Marchuk, if all that’s true—if it really is possible—then how do we know you’re not a p-zed?”

  “How indeed?” I replied, smiling beatifically at them all.

  TWO DECADES AGO

  “WE have to try again,” said Dominic firmly, on January 2, 2001.

  “Are you insane?” replied Menno. “You saw what happened to that student, Jim Marchuk.”

  “Which is precisely why we have to try again. We have exactly one data point now. We can’t draw any conclusions from that.”

  “That boy might have died. What if he’d never regained consciousness?”

  “But he did. And, really, we don’t even know that our equipment is what caused him to black out.”

  “Oh, come on! It happened the moment we activated the helmet. What else could have caused it?”

  “Who knows? Correlation is not causation. But, anyway, if the effect was unique to him, we need to know that. I’d hate to cancel a whole program based on one failure.”

  “You know who else said that? General Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove—right before the world came to an end.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dominic. “It’ll be fine. We’ll be prepared this time. No fucking Laurel and Hardy carrying the body down the corridor. We’ll belt the next subject into the chair so he can’t fall out—don’t want a concussion! And if he does lose consciousness, well, we’ll just wait patiently. Marchuk revived in a matter of minutes, after all.” He thought for a moment. “Let’s try that business student, the runner. He had an inner monologue, too, and he’s from Winnipeg; he should be around. What was his name?”

  “Huron,” Menno said reluctantly. “Travis Huron.”

  —

  “Okay, Travis,” said Menno into the intercom. “We want you to just think about the test message, all right? Just that, nothing else. Do you remember it?”

  On the other side of the window, the athletic young man nodded. “‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy.’”

  “Exactly. Just repeat that subvocally over and over once I say ‘go.’”

  Another nod.

  Menno had his finger poised over the enter key, but just stood there, unable to bring himself to press it.

 
After about ten seconds, Dominic, standing next to him, muttered, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” reached over, and stabbed the other enter key on the numeric keypad, and—

  —and Travis’s head tipped forward, and his strapped-in body sagged.

  “Shit,” said Menno, rushing out the door and into the adjacent lab. He unstrapped the helmet and tossed it across the room to get it out of the way. It was just like with Jim Marchuk. Travis’s pulse was good—Menno had no trouble finding it this time—and his respiration was normal.

  Dominic entered, too; Menno had run here, but Dominic must have fucking sauntered to take so long. “Well?” Dom said, as if inquiring about the score in a sporting event he didn’t really care about.

  “Unconscious,” said Menno. “Otherwise fine . . . I guess.”

  “It must be the transcranial focused ultrasound that makes them black out,” said Dom, “but I’m not sure why.”

  “We shouldn’t have done this,” said Menno, feeling nauseated. He looked at his watch. “Two minutes.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Menno started to pace. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  They waited . . . and waited . . . and waited, Travis breathing calmly the whole time, although a little drool had started to come out of his half-open mouth.

  “There!” said Menno. “It’s been fifteen minutes. That’s got to be at least three times as long as Marchuk was out. We have to call 911.”

  —

  Kayla ran up to the nursing station. “What room is Travis Huron in?”

  The nurse—a stout, middle-aged woman—pointed to a green chalkboard on the opposite wall. It was a chart of patients, with their room numbers and the names of their attending physicians; Kayla found the line about Travis and hurried down the corridor, low heels clicking against flooring marked with colored stripes.

  The door to Travis’s room was open. He had a bed whose front could rise; it was supporting his back at a forty-five-degree angle. His eyes were closed and his hair—dark, like Kayla’s—lay flat against his scalp. Some sort of drip was going into his left arm, and his right index finger had a pulse monitor clipped to it. He was wearing a hospital smock the color of an old woman’s hair rinse.