Quantum Night

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Makes sense.”

  “Still,” she said, “this could change the world.”

  I looked down the corridor; the sun was setting through a window at the far end. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it could, at that.”

  —

  I left Kayla with her brother; as they spoke of their childhoods and their parents, I really was feeling like a third wheel. Plus, I was starving, and I only knew two other adults in Saskatoon: the optometrist David Swinson who, if I recalled correctly, planned to urinate on my cemetery plot, and Kayla’s research partner, Victoria Chen. I almost didn’t call Vic, assuming she’d be out with her boyfriend, but then figured there was nothing to lose. To my surprise, she was free and happy to meet me for a bite to eat. She suggested the Konga Cafe, which turned out to be a Caribbean place in a little strip mall here in Riversdale. I got there first, and rose when she arrived. She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

  We sat opposite each other, and she said, “So, how are you?”

  “Honestly?” I tilted my head. “Conflicted.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I spent some time with Kayla’s brother Travis today. And, well, up until he came out of his coma, it seems he was a quantum psychopath. I haven’t told Kayla yet—frankly, I don’t know how to tell her.”

  “Are you sure of your diagnosis?”

  I shrugged, conceding that there was some room for doubt. “I grant that the only quantum-superposition testing you did on him was while he was in a coma, so there’s no record of his quantum state prior to that. And, as far as I know, no one had ever done the Hare Checklist on him, and I doubt there’s any video of him from the last century that’s high-enough resolution to show whether he was doing microsaccades then. But all of those things are merely correlates of psychopathy. Actual psychopathy is a state of mind: a complete disregard for others; a lack of reflection and rumination—and that’s what Travis described to me.”

  “Wow,” said Vic. “Are Kayla or Ryan in any danger from him?”

  “No, not now.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll tell Kayla before I leave tomorrow, but . . .” I exhaled noisily. “I bet Kayla would have had an easier childhood if Travis had been a Q1 instead of a Q2.”

  Sadness washed over Vic’s face, and she said slowly, “Speaking of which . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “My boyfriend Ross. My ex-boyfriend, I should say. He . . . he’s a Q1. I tested him on the beamline.”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah.” She shook her head. “It’s . . . difficult, you know? Finding decent guys who are okay with not having kids, that’s hard.”

  “Don’t you want kids?”

  “‘Want’?” she said. “Yes. But I can’t have any. I wish I could, but . . .” She shrugged a little. “Cervical cancer; had a hysterectomy.”

  “I’m sorry, Vic.”

  “Thanks. Ryan’s the closest thing to a child I’ll ever have.”

  “Oh, she’s a doll.”

  “Yeah,” said Vic, looking sad. “Yeah, she is.”

  “Anyway,” I said. “I’m sorry about you and Ross.”

  She lifted her dark eyebrows. “I guess they really are everywhere. Makes you wonder how society can function.”

  “Ross teaches high school, right?”

  “Yes. English.”

  “Well,” I said, spreading my arms, “there’s a curriculum laid down by the Ministry of Education, right? He has to teach these books in this order by that time, and prepare his students for taking this standardized province-wide test. Any number of people could do that; indeed, any number do—there must be thousands of high-school English teachers in Saskatchewan.”

  “A good teacher makes a difference.”

  “Sure, yeah. But there are lots of bad teachers or indifferent ones in the system, too. I don’t say that being a university professor is better—although it pays better—but the requirement to do original research to get a PhD might mean you get fewer p-zeds at that level although I’ve seen lots of trite, paint-by-numbers dissertations in my day. You know what they say: the only word that rhymes with ‘theses’ is ‘feces.’”

  “I guess. It’s just—I mean, I really liked him. And I thought he liked me. But he’s . . . he’s a robot.”

  The server came; I ordered Red Stripe, an imported Jamaican beer; Vic asked for a Pepsi Next.

  “I still don’t get how a society could function with most of its members not being truly conscious,” Vic said.

  “Welllll,” I replied gently, “the majority of Ross’s students would likely be p-zeds, too. And most jobs are repetitive. It’s only the length of the repeat cycle that varies: a few seconds if you work on an assembly line, a few hours if you drive a bus, daily if you manage a restaurant, and yearly if you teach a course. Every September, I trot out the same introductory lectures I gave the year before.”

  “I guess.” She let out a sigh. “I just can’t believe I was fooled by him.”

  I shook my head. “Psychopaths fool people. They deliberately deceive; they get off on it. But p-zeds? They just are. Ross wasn’t trying to hurt you; he wasn’t trying to do anything.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” she said. The server brought our drinks—mine in a bottle, Vic’s in a can—as well as some johnnycakes as an appetizer. “It’s just hard,” she continued, “not knowing who’s . . . who’s real.”

  “Yeah.”

  We sat in silence for a time, then I said, “Anyway, Vic, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I said Travis was a psychopath—but he isn’t, not anymore. He was almost certainly a Q2 before his coma, but the coma knocked him out of superposition—or, I guess, the other way around: he got knocked out of superposition, ending up in the classical-physics state, and that caused him to lose consciousness, right?”

  “That’s the process, yes,” said Vic.

  “But when he came out of the coma, he came out as a Q3—I’d bet money on it. He’s got a conscience for the first time, and, frankly, is gobsmacked by it.”

  “That’s fascinating.”

  “Yeah, but here’s the part I don’t get. I admit that I’m struggling with all this quantum-physics stuff, so maybe you can explain it to me. Travis started as Q2, got knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came back up as a Q3—a higher level than he’d been at originally.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I started out as a Q3—fully conscious with conscience—got knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came back at a lower level, emerging from my own blackout as a Q1 p-zed. Why is that?”

  Vic’s thin lips turned downward. “That is a good question.”

  “He doesn’t remember what happened to him any more than I do, but we were almost certainly both knocked out by the same piece of equipment although admittedly we were revived in different ways. Still, he went up, and I went down.”

  “Well, if I understand what Kayla told me correctly, you came back—to the extent that you initially did come back—almost immediately; Travis was in a coma for nineteen years.”

  “True. And I suppose it might be completely random—a throw of the dice.”

  Vic nodded. “If that’s the case, given the 4:2:1 ratio of the cohorts, maybe you’ve got a four-in-seven chance of coming up as a p-zed, like you did, and a one-in-seven chance of coming up as a quick, like Travis did. But I’m always suspicious of apparent randomness.”

  I took another sip of beer. “Me, too.”

  —

  When I got back to the facility to pick up Kayla, her mother Rebekkah was just leaving—and so I maneuvered her over to a couple of chairs in the lobby.

  “Have you been enjoying Saskatoon?” she asked.

  “Yes. It’s lovely. Such sunny day
s! And no mosquitoes. I’m not looking forward to those back in Winnipeg.”

  Rebekkah was a handsome woman with lively eyes. “Tell me about it. I survived fifty-one summers there.”

  And that was the opening I’d been hoping for. “Speaking of The Peg . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “You raised your kids there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Travis was into sports, even as a kid?”

  “Oh, my, yes. The harder, the better. Not Kayla, though: she was the studious one.” Our orange-upholstered chairs were facing each other, and she leaned closer, conspiratorially. “I never told the kids this, but my father—their grandfather—referred to them as ‘Jock’ and ‘Nerd’ behind their backs.” She smiled. “He meant it with love, but it’s true: they were different as night and day.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Well, look, I’m interested in, you know, nature vs. nurture, and all that. Sometimes sports are displaced aggression. Was Travis, you know, a violent child?”

  “Well, there wasn’t much consciousness of it back then,” Rebekkah said, “but, yeah, he was a bully, frankly. My husband and I weren’t really aware of it too much at the time, but he probably wasn’t the nicest guy to other kids. But all the kids’ parents loved him. That boy had the gift of the gab; I don’t know where he got it.”

  I nodded. Glibness and superficial charm were classic psychopathic traits; so were bullying and pointless cruelty. But I was hoping for something definitive. After all, the notion that people change quantum states upon rebooting from total unconsciousness was huge, and I couldn’t just rely on what Travis had subjectively told me about his own feelings. “Were there a lot of pets on your street? Dogs? Cats?”

  “Oh, yes. Sure.”

  I often floated hypotheticals with my students, who always figured out that they were precisely that. I didn’t like doing so with Rebekkah, but I said, even though no such thing had actually happened in my own neighborhood, “We used to have tons of pets on the street I grew up on.” I put on a puzzled face. “But a lot of them disappeared. We didn’t know what to make of it. Turned out this kid up the street was capturing them and killing them.”

  “God,” said Rebekkah. “We had the same thing. Some creep was stringing up dead cats from trees—including two kittens that belonged to us—and we found others cut into pieces. It was awful . . .” She shook her head. “I tell you, Jim, I didn’t like that my Travis used to beat up other kids, but I wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten his hands on whoever was doing that.”

  —

  Kayla, on the other hand, was another matter; keeping secrets was no way to build a relationship. “I had a long chat with your brother this afternoon,” I said to her, as we lay side by side later that night.

  “He told me. He likes you.” She smiled. “Big-brother stamp of approval.”

  “He’s a good guy,” I said. “Now.”

  “What do you mean, ‘now’?”

  “What was he like as a kid, a teenager?”

  “You’re getting at something,” said Kayla. “What?”

  I took a deep breath, then let it out. “He’s changed,” I said. “Before his coma, he was a psychopath.”

  “You said you didn’t remember Travis from before.”

  “I don’t. But he described his inner life from then to me: consciousness but no conscience, not until now. He used to be a Q2, but, for whatever reason, he booted up again as a Q3.”

  She looked stunned. “No. Really? My God, are you—are you sure?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Jesus. So what does that make me? Debra Fucking Morgan? Too much the loving sister to see what her brother really was?”

  “I’m not—no one is judging. I just thought you should know.” She said nothing, so I went on. “And at least he isn’t one anymore. He genuinely cares about you.”

  “Now,” said Kayla bitterly.

  “And let’s hope he stays that way. But, look, you know the Hare Checklist as well as I do. Did he, y’know, have lots of girlfriends?”

  “You’ve only seen him now, after wasting away for almost twenty years,” she replied, nodding. “I’m his sister, and even I knew how hot he was.”

  “Promiscuity,” I said softly. “Strings of meaningless relationships. And you said he was into extreme sports: that’s need for stimulation. You also said he was a brick when your father was fighting cancer; I’m betting he kept it together even at the funeral, right?”

  “And you’re saying that’s evidence of shallow affect?”

  I couldn’t shrug lying down, but I lifted my eyebrows. “Classic trait.”

  “I—” But she didn’t finish whatever thought she’d started.

  “I’m so sorry, honey. But remember, he’s fine, now.”

  She rolled on her side, facing away from me; I was afraid she was angry, but then she said, “Hold me.”

  I did, nestling into the curve of her back, spooning her tightly. I didn’t know what to say, and so I just held her, and we lay there, waiting for sleep to take us.

  27

  AFTER Jim had returned to Winnipeg, Kayla decided to come clean with the staff at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care. “And so,” she said, “if there are other patients here who have no consciousness at all, I might be able to help them.”

  Nathan Amsterdam, the medical chief of staff, was fifty-something, with blond hair swept back from his forehead, hollow cheeks, and a long, thin face. “It’s incredible,” he said. “But, you know, you really should have told us in advance what you were planning to do. If something had gone wrong . . .”

  “He’s my brother; the court gave me power of attorney ages ago. I authorized it—and it worked.”

  “Still, if it’d had some deleterious effect—”

  “It didn’t. It cured him.”

  He was quiet for a time, then: “Well, what’s done is done.”

  “So far,” said Kayla. “But I want to do it again. Is there anyone else here whose condition is similar to what my brother was in? A score of just three on the Glasgow scale? I want to help, if I can.”

  “I’d have to check with our legal counsel . . .”

  “For pity’s sake, Dr. Amsterdam, you’re not going to bury a miracle in red tape, are you?”

  Amsterdam’s office walls were lined with cherry-wood bookcases; he sat behind a matching desk. “Off the record, we have four—no, five—patients with locked-in syndrome, and a dozen or so in minimally conscious states. But with no signs at all of consciousness or awareness?” He frowned, and the concavities of his cheeks deepened. “There’s one. Been in a coma since a car accident, oh, five or six years ago. Her husband is almost as dutiful as you—comes in every other Wednesday night to sit with her.”

  “Can you put me in touch with him?”

  Amsterdam’s head moved left and right. “No. But I can ask him if he wants to get in touch with you.”

  —

  I was standing before fifty or so students. My ringer was off; I was famous for chastising students when their phones rang while I was trying to teach. But I did have the phone on the lectern, face-up, so I could keep an eye on the time in a way that was less obvious than looking at my watch. There was no clock at the back of the room although there was one behind me: the students got to see the hour evaporate, but the professor didn’t.

  The little tablet vibrated and the display briefly lit up, showing the time—11:14 A.M.—and the automatic notification I’d set, and forgotten, at the beginning of the trial: Google Alert—“Devin Becker verdict.” I violated my own rule, picked up the phone, and looked at my inbox. The headline for the article said: Savannah Prison ringleader sentenced to death. The source beneath it was MSNBC.com, although doubtless if I did a search, there’d be dozens of stories already, and hundreds by the end of the day.

  And then,
I guess, I just stood there, mouth agape, while all those eyes looked at me. I heard someone cough, someone else typing, another person knock a pen to the floor. But I kept staring at the message. I wanted to click through to the report and watch the video, then and there, but—

  “Professor Marchuk?” said a woman from near the front of the hall. I blinked, looked up, but said nothing.

  “Sir?” said the same person. “Are you okay?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for that, and so I just composed myself and pressed on with the lecture. “Watson, you see, was the quintessential behaviorist. He felt that people were simple stimulus-response machines that could be trained any way you wished through reward and punishment. He once said, ‘Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything . . .’”

  —

  Kayla got a call from the husband of the woman in the coma, and she immediately drove the hour out of the city to his farm. Dale Hawkins was perhaps sixty years old, with a shock of graying hair and a full, matching beard. Although he was wearing a plaid work shirt, he had an intricate tattoo of vines and leaves terminating on the back of his left hand; Kayla assumed it was a full sleeve. On one wall of his living room he had three framed photos of his wife. She had a broad face and brown hair.

  “I miss her so much,” Dale said. “I miss her every day.”

  “I know,” said Kayla. There was a rough-hewn wooden coffee table between them, but she reached across it and took his hand. “I know exactly what you’re going through. My brother was in a coma, too, and this technique helped him.” She got her tablet and streamed the video Jim had made of Travis waking up. Dale watched, transfixed.

  “And your brother, he’s all right in the head?” asked Dale, once the video was over. “He’s the same as before?”

  And that was the question she’d been wrestling with. “No,” she said. “Honestly? He’s different. Better, but different. And your wife might come back different, too—and, I have to tell you, not necessarily better.”

  They talked some more while Dale looked at the photos of his wife, and Kayla looked at them, too. She had different expressions in each one: a smile, a look of thoughtful contemplation, her features set in determination. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. The words Kayla had memorized in high school came back to her. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.