Quantum Night

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The conversation segued to how I would deal in my summer classes with the dark turn current events had taken—and that somehow led to psychologists who got spooked by their own research.

  “It can take a lot out of you,” I said. “Look at Phil Zimbardo. His Stanford Prison Guard experiment was in 1971, but he was still wrestling with what happened to his students, and to himself, thirty-odd years later, when he published his book The Lucifer Effect, about how good people turn evil. I have it on one of my required-reading lists.”

  “What about the shock-machine guy?” asked Victoria.

  “Stanley Milgram,” I said, nodding. “He went the other way after that experiment. He hated that it had become this giant thing, with everyone questioning his ethics, so he retreated into studies that no one could consider controversial. He pioneered the ‘lost-letter’ technique, which tests if people will take the trouble to put stamped envelopes they find on the ground into a mailbox. Turns out most people will, if the letter has a neutral or positive addressee, such as a respected charity, but won’t if it’s addressed to ‘Friends of the Nazi Party,’ or something like that.”

  “Still exploring good and evil,” Kayla noted.

  “True,” I said, “but in a way that couldn’t hurt anybody. And he spent even more time on something completely benign. Milgram called it the small-world problem, and he was one of the first people to really study it—but it’s better known now as Six Degrees of Separation, or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Milgram showed that any two people are connected by a very small chain, and—”

  Victoria sat up straight. “Like Travis and Ross!”

  “Pardon?” said Jim.

  “Travis—Kayla’s brother—he’s connected to my ex-boyfriend Ross, right, in that very way. Travis to Kayla to me to Ross; hell, that’s only three degrees of separation!”

  Suddenly Kayla seemed excited, too. “My God, that could be it!”

  “Do you have a computer here with Maple on it?” asked Vic.

  Kayla nodded. “Yes, yes! In my study.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Kayla replied hurriedly: “There seems to be entanglement between Travis, Ross, and Vic, and we’ve been trying to puzzle that out.” I knew that entanglement was a quantum connection—entities intertwined so that no matter how far apart they were physically, what happened to one instantly affected the other.

  Kayla’s excitement was palpable. “At the moment Travis gained consciousness, the background entanglement reading ratcheted up a notch for Ross, and we think for Vic, too. And it can’t be that Vic’s reading went up just because a random new person gained consciousness, right? I mean, people are born and die all the time, yet we’ve never seen that sort of boost.”

  Vic was already on her feet, and Kayla rose while continuing to speak: “But if the spike is proportional to the degree of separation, then someone as close on the small-world network as Travis is to Ross—even though they’ve never actually met—would register, at least a little, while the constant distant background churn of total strangers coming in and out of existence would be too insignificant to be seen.”

  The two women hustled off to Kayla’s study, talking animatedly. I turned to Ryan. “Let’s load the dishwasher, then watch some TV.”

  “Netflix has Inspector Gadget!”

  “You got it, Ginger Ale.”

  —

  I ended up putting Ryan to bed on my own; Victoria and Kayla were still working away furiously in the study. When I came back downstairs, I used the living-room TV to look at more news: six dead migrant workers in Texas, a dead eleven-year-old Cree girl in Manitoba, a synagogue bombed in Paris, a mosque bombed near London, another Boko Haram raid. Worse and worse.

  About an hour later, the two women emerged—I’d have been delighted to see them under any circumstances, but the pair of ecstatic faces were particularly welcome just then.

  “Well?” I said, turning off the TV.

  “It all fits,” said Victoria, triumphantly. “We’ll run more tests tomorrow, but it looks like a solid model.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Okay,” said Kayla, coming to sit next to me on the couch. “We already knew that all the microtubules in individual brains are quantally entangled. That’s why they’re all in the same superposition state for any given person, right? Either all of their tubulin dimers have one electron in superposition, or they all have two, or they have all three.”

  “Or none,” I offered.

  “Yes, yes, if they’re out cold, they have none. Right. Now, we don’t know what consciousness is exactly, but that’s its physical correlate: the collectively entangled all-in-the-same-state quantum field within a given person’s brain. That’s the physical thing that gives rise to whatever level of consciousness a person might be experiencing: the emptiness of a p-zed, the cunning of a psychopath, or the conscience of a quick.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But not only is each human brain an entangled system, every human brain is an entangled system.”

  I frowned. “I don’t see the distinction.”

  Vic took it up: “The sum total of human consciousness—all 7.7 billion people, regardless of what quantum state they individually might be in—forms one single entangled system, connected by small-world networking. It’s the collective quantum inertia of that system that keeps people from changing states. That’s the reason we can’t take a p-zed, say, and boost him up to being at a higher state: you can’t change the quantum state of one individual without affecting all the others, which is why the quantum tuning fork doesn’t have an effect on an already awake individual. The inertia of the totality of humanity prevents any shift.”

  “But that can’t be right,” I said. “People get put out for surgery all the time. But only the patient is affected.”

  “Yes,” said Vic. “That’s a special case, because it involves decoherence. When you are put totally under by anesthesia, you cease to be in quantum superposition and drop back to the classical-physics state—Penrose and Hameroff proved that—and so, by definition, if only classical physics pertains, you cease to be subject to entanglement.”

  “And,” I said, “that means . . . ?”

  “It means,” said Kayla, “that you exit the collective if you truly lose all consciousness.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But,” continued Kayla, “everybody within the collective—all seven billion Q1s, Q2s, and Q3s; everyone who is not in the classical-physics state—could only conceivably change quantum state in lockstep, shifting en masse.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” Kayla said. “It’s one for all, and all for one.”

  “Homo sapiens—one big happy family,” Vic added.

  Not so happy of late, of course, but I wasn’t going to ruin their moment of triumph. Still, I looked back at the TV screen. Funny: no monitor made since I was a kid had any sort of burn-in problem, and yet, as I gazed at the black rectangle, I could see the ghostly afterimage of the atrocities it had just shown me.

  35

  “Professor Marchuk?”

  It was Veronica, in the third row, her hair in long cornrows. “Yes?”

  “I get it. I mean, I really do. I get how all this utilitarian thinking can be a good thing. But, well . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it just seems so cold, is all. So calculating.”

  I looked out at the students. Veronica appeared genuinely conflicted, but Boris had a smug expression, and his arms were crossed in front of his chest, as if his classmate had just detonated a nuke on my pet philosophy. He looked positively disappointed when I said, “You’re right, Veronica.”

  And, for her part, Veronica looked surprised. “I am?”

  “Yes, certainly. On the surface, being a utilitarian appears to mean embracing your inner psychopa
th.” I paused. “Do you guys know the Trolley Problem?”

  A few nods, including Boris, but mostly blank faces.

  “Well,” I said, “imagine a streetcar is barreling along the tracks, out of control. There’s a split in the tracks: one fork leads to where five people are standing and the other leads to where one person is standing. The trolley will hit and kill the five unless you throw a switch and divert it onto the other track, in which case it’ll only hit and kill one person. Do you throw the switch? Boris?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Exactly right, comrade. One dead instead of five; pure utilitarianism. But what if there’s only one track, and no switch, and instead it’s you and that exact same one guy, but the two of you are standing on a footbridge over the tracks, and you, you’re a little guy, but he’s a big fellow—so big, he’ll stop the streetcar for sure if you push him off the bridge so that he lands in front of it before it plows into the other five people. Do you push him off? Same utilitarian equation, isn’t it? One person dead instead of five? Veronica, do you push him off?”

  “No.”

  I smiled. “Nor would most people. In fact, when Bartels and Pizarro studied that scenario, they found it was mostly psychopaths who said they’d do the supposedly utilitarian thing and shove the big guy off the bridge; normal people couldn’t bring themselves to do it.”

  “See,” said Boris, “you have to be a psychopath to follow strict utilitarianism.”

  “That’s Doctor Psychopath to you, comrade.” A few laughs. “But, no, you’re missing the point. Pushing the guy off the bridge is an easy answer for a psychopath because psychopaths don’t give a damn. And not giving a damn is the opposite of utilitarianism.

  “In the two-tracks scenario, there’s no room for second thought: I’m killing one guy instead of five. In the footbridge scenario, there’s lots to dither over: how do you know that the heavy guy will be big enough to stop the streetcar; yeah, someone told you that he will be, but do you believe that? Are you sure? And are you sure there isn’t a touch of prejudice here? How’d that guy get so fat, anyway? Is his life worth less than someone else’s? Oh, but what if his obesity is due to a glandular condition or genetics? And is it really true that jumping yourself wouldn’t be enough to stop the train? Who says so?

  “If it turned out that pushing the fat guy didn’t actually stop the streetcar, so now six people died instead of five, a psychopath would shrug, and say, ‘Live and learn.’ But a utilitarian would be devastated by it. Having a conscience means agonizing over things, it means doing the right thing because you’ve weighed all the factors, it means caring so much it hurts. And that’s a feeling no psychopath will ever know.”

  IT was going to take another two days to fix my car, damn it all, and I needed to get back to Winnipeg. Although it would have been nice to have Star Trek’s transporter at my disposal, at least Captain Kirk was able to help me out: I got a bargain last-minute airfare from Priceline.com, and so was now at Diefenbaker, waiting for my plane.

  Often when flying in Canada, I ran into people I knew at airports; Canada has only a handful of major cities, and academics travel a lot to conferences. So, I wasn’t really surprised to see Jonah Bratt arrive at the same gate I was at. The flight from here to Winnipeg continues on to Ottawa, and Jonah teaches psychology at Carleton—poorly, according to RateMyProfessors.com.

  “Hey, Jonah,” I said, standing up to shake his hand. He was tall and cadaverously thin, with pockmarked skin and graying hair.

  “Marchuk,” he said. His grip was almost nonexistent. “What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting a friend. You?”

  “Attending a colloquium on Jung at U of S.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  It was a small gate area, and he sat down close to me, with one empty seat between us—leaving the space required by flocking rules, or just being a prick and making it awkward for someone else as the waiting area filled, I couldn’t say.

  He pulled out a tablet and began to read what looked like a journal article. My attention was caught by the big TV hanging from the ceiling, which was showing CTV News Channel. “More on the horrific news out of Corpus Christi, Texas,” said the anchor, Dan Matheson. The image cut to what looked like a large natural sinkhole in the ground, and in it were human bodies, most clad in jeans and T-shirts, overlapping like jackstraws.

  The anchor went on: “Work continues on the mass grave found here yesterday, about 350 kilometers south of Houston. Police are now removing the bodies and so far four of them have been identified by their next of kin: Miguel dos Santos, twenty-four; his brother José dos Santos, nineteen; Carlos Lobos, twenty-eight; and Juan Rameriz, twenty-two. Our Ben Pryce has more. Ben?”

  The picture showed a man holding a microphone standing at the lip of the sinkhole, Texas State Troopers milling about on the far side.

  “Dan, this open-pit grave was located by a couple of hikers early yesterday morning. As you can see, we’re off the beaten path here. The four identified bodies were all migrant farm workers apparently illegally in this country, and I’ve been told, off the record, that the other fifteen bodies—ten men and five women—all appear to be Latino or Latina. Cause of death in most cases seems to have been a single bullet to the head, in what I overheard one police officer call ‘execution-style.’”

  The picture changed again, showing a large wooden board on which two words had been painted in ragged brushstrokes.

  “Dan, images of this sign, which I’m told was found on top of the bodies, have already gone viral online. As you can see, it reads, ‘As requested.’”

  “Like Nazi Germany,” I said, shaking my head.

  Bratt looked up. “You lose.”

  “What?”

  “You lose. Godwin’s Law.”

  What he actually meant was a corollary to Godwin’s Law: the implication that any argument has gone irretrievably off the rails when someone trots out a comparison to the Nazis or Hitler. “Because the Holocaust was—what?” I said. “Sui generis? Something that could never happen again?” I motioned toward the TV set. “It’s happening right now.”

  “It’s just a blip.”

  “It’s accelerating—and it’s going to get even worse. Hitler at least had to set up huge government infrastructure to pull off his killings. Fucking McCharles has crowdsourced his genocide.”

  “There’s just no evidence that—”

  I pointed at the screen. “The evidence is right there! Why—”

  But we were interrupted by the Air Canada gate clerk calling our flight. Apparently Bratt’s Altitude status made him eligible for pre-boarding, as he immediately rose from his chair, and, without a word of goodbye, shambled toward the Jetway.

  —

  The next day, after my classes were done, I headed over to meet Bhavesh Namboothiri, who finally was able to see me again. I took a bus, which gave me plenty of opportunity to observe the damage that had been done during the riots. In many places, windows were boarded up with plywood, fences were still down, and there were scorch marks on the asphalt where cars had been set ablaze.

  Namboothiri managed to elicit a couple more childhood memories—which were certainly fascinating to experience, and, under other circumstances, would have been worth the price of admission. But they were just pyrite; we were after nuggets of gold.

  And, soon enough, he was turning up those, too: one of Menno’s lectures; then, as Namboothiri repositioned the probes, another by Professor Jenkins—sadly, apparently not the one during which I’d told an orangutan joke; another shifting of the probes brought back memories of me indeed having a tumor removed from my left breast in Calgary; one more repositioning, and Kayla and I were playing strip Trivial Pursuit, in which instead of getting a wedge each time you answered a question correctly, your opponent lost one of their six pieces of clothing; and then—

  Oh.
>
  Oh.

  So that’s what I’d done to David Swinson.

  I’d remained in Winnipeg that summer, having taken a data-entry job in the registrar’s office on the assumption that my relationship with Kayla would continue. David, who’d had the dorm room next to mine during the preceding academic year, had once eaten what was left in my bucket of KFC without permission. And so, near the end of June 2001, I’d gone onto the registration computer and dropped him from every course he’d selected for that coming September—and, for good measure, had him give up his place in the dorm, as well. When he returned to Winnipeg from his summer back home, he discovered he wasn’t registered and had no place to stay. Somehow—perhaps we’d find that memory later—he must have eventually realized I was responsible.

  I shuddered, feeling horrible that I could ever have done such a nasty thing—and was grateful when Namboothiri moved on.

  Next up were innocuous memories: a few more from my toddler days; going to see the movie version of Josie and the Pussycats—something that probably was best forgotten; Heather coming for a weekend visit, and—

  “Move the fucking probes!”

  Namboothiri eased off and the images melted from my consciousness, but I was gasping and my pulse was racing.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “We can stop for the day if—”

  I lifted a hand. “No. No, I’ll be all right. Just . . .” My arm was shaking; I lowered it. “Just give me a moment.” Another memory came to me, but not because the doctor was eliciting it; this one was from my verbal index, and relatively recent: Menno Warkentin talking to me in his office, trying to dissuade me from digging into my past. “Sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie,” he’d said. But I’d replied, “No, I can’t do that.”

  And I couldn’t.

  I had to forge ahead.

  I gripped the arms of the chair tightly, forcing the blood from my knuckles, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. I’m ready.”