“How was the conference?” I asked.
“Amazing,” Vic said. “Everyone was making the same joke: you’d think if anyone could do it, quantum physicists could; there was so much good simultaneous programming, we all wanted to be in multiple places at once.” She shook her head in wonder. “Haroche and Wineland were there, and D-Wave unveiled a new one-kiloqubit model, and . . .”
And Kayla was clearly following all this; for my part, I took the handle of Vic’s rolly bag and pulled it along while the two women talked quantum mechanics. After a bit—or a qubit—it proved too much for Ryan, though, and she plucked at Victoria’s sleeve. “Aunt Vic, did you bring me anything?”
“Ryan!” admonished Kayla.
“What do you think?” Vic asked Ryan with a sly grin.
“I think you did!” Ryan exclaimed.
“I think you’re right!” Vic exclaimed back. She had a shoulder bag, and we stopped while she reached into it. She pulled out a small plush animal—a zebra, which seemed an odd thing to bring back from Ontario. But then I saw the letters IQC embroidered on its rump; it was swag from the conference, and the stripes, now that I got a good look at them, were in the classic two-slit interference pattern. None of that meant anything to Ryan, but she squeed appropriately at the gift.
“And, since we’re stopped,” said Vic, “I also brought something back for you, Kayla—sort of. It’s really for the Light Source, but I won’t be going in to work again until Monday, so, technically, you wouldn’t be taking it from work if you borrow it between now and then.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small, rugged-looking aluminum case. There were some chairs nearby, and she walked over to them, sat, and opened the case. Inside, cushioned by black foam rubber cut to precisely cradle it, was a silver device maybe thirty centimeters long.
“What’s that?” Kayla asked.
“Well, for want of a better name,” Vic said, “they call it a quantum tuning fork.”
It did indeed look like a tuning fork. Half its length was a cylindrical handle; the other half consisted of two parallel cylindrical tines, each about as thick as my index finger. But that didn’t justify using the Q-word. “What’s quantum about it?” I asked.
Victoria pried it out of its case and held it up as if she were warding off a vampire. “They developed this at IQC. The handle contains a nonlinear crystal in an optical cavity that lets photons bounce around repeatedly, resulting in twin beams coming out of the tines; the beams promote electron superposition.”
Kayla looked impressed, and I decided this was a good time to do some social mimicry of my own; I copied her expression.
Vic went on: “We’re giving the institute some beamtime in exchange for the loan of this prototype. It works pretty well as far as it goes. It’s great at getting things into superposition, but it doesn’t make the superposition any less prone to decoherence. Still, you take a block of material, use this on it, and you have a working quantum-computing test bed for the nanoseconds until decoherence occurs.”
Kayla got it immediately. “What happens if you use it on a human being?”
“On a normal human being?” asked Victoria. “Nothing at all; a bunch of us tried it.” She acted out pointing it at her forehead. “But on someone who isn’t already in a superposition state?” She smiled a megawatt smile. “It sounds like an experiment worth conducting, doesn’t it?”
“Oh my God,” Kayla said, astonished, then, more softly, almost reverently, “Oh my God.”
—
The “facility,” as Kayla always called it, was cleaner than such things had been in the past. Still, most of these people had been abandoned to the state, the staff looking after them with all the compassion and care of cowhands tending livestock. Travis didn’t have a private room; there was no point in that. Three other people, each of whom had been diagnosed as being in either a coma or a persistent vegetative state, shared the space. The Venetian blinds were down, as they had been on my previous visits; I imagined they’d been down for years.
I looked at Travis, eyes closed, face blank, lips slightly parted, snoring softly. Nineteen years he’d lain here—or, before that, in similar facilities. The years of inactivity had taken their toll; the scrawny creature before me showed no signs of his erstwhile athleticism.
I looked at the gaunt face, the pale skin—skin that had last basked in the sun when George W. Bush had been in the White House and Bill Cosby had been a role model, back before the world had ever heard of Sarah Palin or Amy Schumer, before the Kindle and Facebook and Megamatch, before Breaking Bad and Mad Men and The Big Bang Theory.
“Hey, broski,” said Kayla, in her ritual greeting; as I’d seen on previous visits, it had settled into a routine, a schtick, a mindless template.
She paid no attention to the other occupants, two men and a woman; of course, no one had to worry about propriety with these . . . patients? Inmates? Residents? No, no, patients was the right word: they were all infinitely patient, waiting out wars and recessions, fads and trends, with equanimity.
Travis’s chest rose and fell rhythmically. In the corridor, I could hear a couple of women walking by, chatting. My iPhone case had a little kickstand on its back; I set it on top of a cabinet opposite Travis so it could quietly video what we hoped would be a wondrous event.
“Anyway,” said Kayla, perhaps to Travis, perhaps to me. She reached into her soft-sided briefcase and pulled out the tuning fork, the handle bifurcating into its two parallel tines like a map of possible outcomes. Down one path, the status quo, with Travis lying here another decade—or six—until finally some part of him gave up the ghost, and the state was relieved of its burden. Down the other path, just maybe, a new life for him, an awakening after so many dark winters. And clutched in Kayla’s hand, the superposition of those two paths—both possibilities, renewed life and living death.
She looked at me and gestured with her head at the doorway. We hadn’t told the staff what we were going to try; if anybody here decided it was a medical procedure or test, there’d be mounds of paperwork. On the way over, Kayla had said it had taken weeks to get permission from the facility’s insurer for that time she’d brought Travis to CLS.
Everything here was routine, I’m sure, and it wasn’t as though Travis was going to be interrupted by a nurse bringing dinner on a tray; his sustenance flowed into him via a gastric feeding tube going into the left side of his abdomen. Still, I moved to the doorway and checked up and down the dreary corridor. The women I’d heard before were gone; the coast, as the saying went, was clear. I closed the door, turned back to face Kayla, and nodded for her to proceed.
She loomed over her brother and touched the twin tines to his forehead, one above his closed left eye and the other above the closed right. And then she thumbed a red slider switch on the handle.
It would have been cool if the tuning fork had begun to glow with violet energy or had emitted a sound like sheet metal warping, but nothing happened—either on the device, or, as far as I could tell, to Travis. Of course I felt sorrier for Kayla, who’d had her hopes raised, than for Travis, who had had no change in his happiness—or lack thereof.
Kayla pulled her hand back, withdrawing the tuning fork. And then, with a what-the-heck lift of her eyebrows, she rotated it a half turn so that the tine that had been on the right was now on the left, and she again gently but firmly pressed the twin tips against her brother’s forehead, and—
—and Travis’s eyes fluttered open.
23
VICTORIA Chen had to know for sure.
She was waiting for Ross in the Light Source’s glassed-in entryway. She became even more nervous than she already was when 11:00 A.M. passed and there was still no sign of him; another researcher had the beamline at 11:30. But at ten after, he finally arrived. Vic got him signed in, had him clip on a dosimeter, and took him on the long walk down to the SusyQ b
eamline.
“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked as she fussed with her equipment.
Ross was his usual amiable self. “No, of course not. I’d do anything for you, my love. You know that.”
She tapped a series of commands on her keyboard. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a good man. Now, if you’ll just lie down here . . .” She indicated the gurney.
Ross smiled. “Fancy a nooner?”
“Not today, dear,” she said, making a show of waggling her eyebrows, “but there’s always tonight.”
“Indeed there is,” he said, and he lay down on his back. That was either supine or prone—she could never remember which was which—but, either way, his lean form, in dark-blue cotton slacks and a light-blue dress shirt, looked fine. He really was a good boyfriend: attentive to her but low-maintenance himself; even-tempered; and an absolute machine in the sack.
“Thanks for doing this, hon,” she said as she affixed the head strap. “I think there’s a really good paper in it.”
“My pleasure.”
“Just relax. As the doctors like to say, this won’t hurt a bit.” She used her mouse to click an on-screen button, and the process began. Initially, her monitor showed a plain horizontal line—no superposition—but it did that for everyone; it took about ten seconds to gather the data, and—
Ah, and there it came. The line undulated and then a huge peak appeared at the left side, showing a single superimposed electron. She waited anxiously for the second peak to appear, and then the third one, and—
And she waited and waited and waited. Oh, the usual wobbly horizontal line appeared up high, but the spike down below gained no companions.
Ross shifted on the gurney. She moved over to the beam emitter, which was centered on the crown of his head, and, after a moment, she did the only thing she could think of doing: she flicked her finger against its side, the way one does with electronics that might have a loose connection. But the emitter was solid-state, she knew, and the display remained exactly the same.
One, and only one, superposition. Vic felt her mouth drop open. That was crazy. That was nuts. She knew Ross . . . it was the right word: she knew him intimately. She knew everything about him. He couldn’t be . . . there was just no effing way he could be, but . . .
She found herself backing away, and her derrière bumped against the edge of a desk. She looked at him, and he shifted his eyes to look at her. “Are we done?” he asked.
He meant the experiment, of course, but—no, no, he didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t thinking about the experiment, not if what Jim Marchuk had told Kayla was right. He wasn’t thinking about anything at all. He was just saying something that fit the circumstances, responding to some internal timer or external cue. But the question couldn’t be more apt. Were they done?
Jim must be wrong. Either that, or the equipment was faulty. She loved Ross—and Ross loved her. She knew that. Not just because he said it, but because he showed it, in a hundred—a thousand!—ways.
She moved in, undid the strap, and said, “You can get up.”
And he replied as he always did when she said the words “get up”—the same joke over and over again, the same routine—by looking down briefly, then flashing a lascivious smile, and saying, “That’s easy when you’re around, babe.”
Input.
Output.
Could it be? Could he really be a machine—albeit a biological one—not just in the sack but in everything?
And, if that were true, if Jim Marchuk was right, could she go on dating a . . . a thing, an emptiness, a zombie?
She wasn’t ready to give voice to the thought but, yes, damn it all, they were almost certainly done.
—
What the fuck?
Bright light from overhead; Travis Huron scrunched his eyelids shut. What the hell was he doing lying down?
A man’s voice: “Holy Jesus.”
And a woman’s voice tinged by . . . wonder, perhaps? “Travis?”
Travis reopened his eyes, but it took effort; his lashes were sticking together, interlocking cilia on twin Venus flytraps. The light stung, and he was having trouble focusing. He blinked repeatedly. And then the same as-yet-unseen male he’d heard earlier—Travis assigned its owner the name Master of the Bleeding Obvious: “His eyes are open!”
“Travis?” said the female voice again. He turned his head, feeling a twinge in his neck as he did so, and there, standing next to him, her eyes wide, was . . .
Well, if he’d had to guess, he’d have said it was Mom, except Mom didn’t quite look like that, and was five or six years older. But she was Mom-esque, whoever this was.
“Travis?” the woman said again. “It’s me. It’s Kayla.”
“No,” Travis said, the word barely a whisper.
The woman took one of his hands in hers. “Yes,” she replied, squeezing gently. “You’ve been in a coma.”
Travis felt his heart pounding. “A . . .” He’d wanted to repeat the phrase “a coma” as a question, but throat congestion mired the second word before it got out.
The woman nodded. “For nineteen years. It’s 2020 now.”
His head was swimming. That was an eye-test score, for Christ’s sake, not a year. He tried to speak again: “Twenty . . . ,” then stopped, cleared his throat, and pushed ahead. “Twenty-twenty?”
“Uh-huh,” said Kayla.
Travis swallowed, then coughed a couple of times. Next to—well, yes, he supposed it really was Kayla—was a man about the same age.
About the same age . . .
And if Kayla was in her late thirties, then he—Travis himself—must be . . .
He did the math: in 2020 he would turn—had, perhaps, already turned—forty-one.
“What”—his voice still rough, the words still difficult to expel—“do I . . . look like?”
The man and woman exchanged glances, then the man moved over to a cabinet and picked up something flat and rectangular. He tapped its surface then flipped the device around, holding it out for Travis to see . . .
My God.
Not just a still photograph, but high-resolution live video of a guy whose jaw dropped as Travis felt his own mouth falling open—a man with hair peppered gray retreating from a forehead marked by horizontal creases, a man who looked at least as much like Travis’s father had as Kayla looked like their mother.
Travis couldn’t bear the sight of what he’d become, but he couldn’t turn away, either. “What’s that?”
“That’s you,” replied the Master of the Bleeding Obvious, gently.
“No, no. The . . . that thing?”
“Oh!” A smile across the man’s kind face. “My iPhone—um, my cell phone.”
“No buttons.”
“It’s a touch screen,” said the man, tapping its surface.
“That’s . . . a phone?”
“Not just that; it’s a talking computer.” He turned it to face himself. “Sear E,” he said—whatever that meant—“um, let’s see. Ah, okay, how ’bout this: if the sun wasn’t blotting them out, what planets would be visible right now?”
A silky female voice emanated from the device: “Venus is high in the sky in Taurus, just two degrees west of the sun. Mercury is twenty-one degrees farther west in Gemini, and Jupiter forty-seven degrees east in Aries.”
The future, thought Travis. I’m in the fucking future.
24
EVERYTHING changed for Kayla after that. Travis was suddenly her number-one priority; whatever plans we’d had for my current visit were instantly forgotten. Of course, it wasn’t as if he could just waltz out of the place. His limbs had atrophied, and even his jaw muscles were so weak it wasn’t clear whether he’d be able to chew food. At a minimum, he was facing many months of physiotherapy, and even after that, he might well need a motorized wheelchair for the
rest of his life.
We didn’t know whether Travis’s microtubular electrons were going to stay in superposition for good—yes, I had come up to speed on all this; there was no way I was going to be Penny to Kayla’s Leonard—and so Kayla’s mother Rebekkah was summoned at once so she also could spend time with Travis before, perhaps, he slipped away again.
Kayla had never brought Ryan to see her uncle, and given all the things that Kayla and Rebekkah suddenly had to do on Travis’s behalf, it fell to me to look after her. I spent the next three days doing just that—and I have to say I loved every minute. I took her to the Fun Factory, where we played laser tag, and to the Western Development Museum, which had a re-creation of the Saskatoon boomtown of 1910; the blacksmith let Ryan try out his hammer. We also went to the Children’s Discovery Museum, and to Wendy’s and Dairy Queen. I was curious about how Travis was managing but nonetheless was having the time of my life.
And, as Ryan and I walked along, her little hand in mine, I thought about my son Virgil, and about my life that could have been and wasn’t.
—
Propped up in his bed, Travis looked out the window. The blinds were raised—Kayla had done that for him before she’d stepped out—and, if he needed any further proof that significant time had passed, the summery landscape of green grass and leaf-covered trees provided it; for him, it had been a snowy winter just a few hours ago.
Of course, that January and this June were separated not by just five months but by nineteen years. His sister and mother were elated: his return was a miracle they’d stopped hoping for. But Travis was furious at the loss of all the intervening time, and he was devastated by how his body had wasted away. For Christ’s sake, he was suddenly in his forties! By this point, he’d planned on being a corporate vice president with a half-million-dollar home—or whatever amount a fancy place went for these days. He should’ve had the trophy wife, the 2.1 kids, the red Jaguar. Instead, he had just $347 in his Scotiabank account, plus, he supposed, whatever interest had accrued on it, if monthly service fees hadn’t whittled the damn thing down to nothing.
Quantum Night Page 17
