She swiped her brush up and down a few times, then, “Okay, forget about the future. What about the present? What about the people in your own life, Jim?”
“Well,” I said, propping my head up on a bent elbow, “there’s my sister Heather. I’m sure she’s a p-zed now; she’ll go up to being a Q3.”
Kayla did a little more brushing. “That’s fine, but you don’t have any children. I do.” She returned to the washroom, and I heard her expectorate the toothpaste, then a little more running water, and then she came to bed, facing me.
During that short break, I’d taken a deep breath and let it out slowly. It wasn’t that I’d been hiding it from Kayla, but although we’d talked about so many things—ethics and science and culture, movies and music and morality—the right moment for this had never come up.
“Actually,” I said softly, “I do.”
“Do what?” said Kayla, having lost the thread.
“Do have a child. A boy. He’s two.”
Even in the dark, I could see her eyes go wide. “When the hell were you going to tell me that?”
“I never see him.” And then, as if it were exculpatory, “I pay child support. But I never see him. Anna-Lee has sole custody.”
And, if saying I was still with the university I’d done my undergrad at was a red flag for academics, that was a red flag for just about everyone. “Why?”
I rolled on my back. “It’s what Anna-Lee wanted. He has Down syndrome, and . . .”
I trailed off and looked at the simplicity of the plain square ceiling. But just as I’d refused to be Penny to Kayla’s Leonard, immersing myself in quantum physics so I could keep pace with her, so, too, had Kayla been reading up on utilitarianism. “And if Anna-Lee is about your age, you might well have had prenatal screening, right? So you knew while she was pregnant.”
I said nothing.
Kayla shook her head, a rustling sound against the pillow. “I don’t know. I won’t presume to put myself in your place, or Anna-Lee’s, but . . . but, damn it, Jim, it’s different. It’s supposed to be different. I’m not just talking about utilitarians; I’m talking about all human beings. When it’s you and yours, all the calculus in the world is supposed to go out the window.”
“I know that,” I said. “And, believe me, I do love my son, and want the very best for him. I’m always wondering how he’s doing, what he’s up to.”
She pointed at the wall, referring to Ryan, asleep across the hall—out of sight, but, for her mother, never out of mind. “I know the Hare Checklist at least as well as you do. You’ve read it, but I’ve lived it; I’ve been a Q2 and I’ve been a Q3, and I can tell the difference better than your goggles or Vic’s beamline can. My daughter is a Q3, and even if every single person on the planet except her would benefit from what you want to do, I would stand in your way. Ryan comes first, and I’m not condemning her to becoming what I was, what her uncle was. No way.”
“Did you have Vic test her on the beamline? Because I’d have bet money my sister was a Q3. That’s the thing about Q1s, right? Almost all of the time, they’re behaviorally indistinguishable from those who are conscious. And if Ryan’s a Q1, this will be a gift to her, the greatest possible gift.”
“Of course we tested her,” Kayla said. “Once we found out that my brother had been a quantum psychopath, too, just like me—well, I had to know, right? But Ryan absolutely is a Q3. But you know what? Maybe quantum states do run in families. I was born a Q2 and so was Travis. But your sister is a Q1, you say? A mindless automaton that follows rules and algorithms? And your grandfather was just a cog in the Nazi machine, you say, doing what he was ordered to do at Sobibor? I don’t know what either of them look like—but you’re the spitting image of them.”
“Kayla, please—”
And now she waved in the direction of her bedroom TV; it was off, but I gathered she was referring to the news we’d seen on the downstairs set earlier. “And you know what the biggest problem with the world today is?” she said “It’s not psychopaths like Putin and Carroway, not directly. There’s only so much damage either of them can do. The problem is the scientists who gleefully make the things psychopaths want them to make; there’d be no nuclear bombs, or Zyklon B gas chambers, or any of that shit, without scientists who were willing to do whatever they were asked to do. But without me or Vic, there’s no way you can shift all of humanity, so that’s that.” She rolled away from me. “Live with it, Jim: the world is what it is.”
I thought about this for a time, and had finally decided to counter with, “Until the bombs start falling”—but I could tell by the sound of her breathing that Kayla was already asleep.
—
Kayla went to the Light Source again the next morning, and Ryan agreed to go back to day camp once more, but Victoria Chen had been assigned overnight beamtime; she didn’t have to go in again until late that afternoon. And so, figuring if Robert Oppenheimer tells you to get lost, you try your luck with Edward Teller, I called her up and had her come over for coffee. She cheerfully agreed, arriving about forty minutes later; today’s combination was a loose, black silk top and black denim jeans.
Vic was pacing the length of the living room, a process that took her about twice the number of strides it would have taken me. She had her smartphone out, with some scientific-calculator app running. “You’re talking about knocking everyone on Earth unconscious,” she said. “A global blackout, like in that TV show.”
I was seated in the easy chair, fingers interlaced behind my head. “No, no. That’s the last thing we want—and not just because of the carnage it would cause. If everyone blacks out, then the whole entangled collective falls apart, right? You’d have to reboot people individually after that with the quantum tuning fork, if you could reboot them at all—which is a mighty big if since, so far, it’s only worked on Travis. No, no one can lose consciousness; we need all of humanity to remain entangled so that everyone moves in lockstep.”
She paced and calculated for a time, then she said, “Yeah, I could accomplish that.” Having reached the end of the living room, marked by a sliding glass door with vertical blinds, like diffraction grating, she turned and headed the other way, toward a wall with jam-packed bookcases. As she walked, she continued to tap and swipe her calculator. “But you’d have to start with a p-zed on the beamline,” she said—Vic and Kayla had both long ago adopted my shorthand—“because only a Q1 can go up two states.”
“I don’t see—”
“You need to boost someone who can go through two successively greater levels of superposition: someone who currently has only one superpositioned electron, then can be boosted to having two, and then can be boosted once more to having three. You couldn’t start with someone already at a higher state, because any attempt I made with the synchrotron to get them to wrap around would probably cause all their electrons to fall out of superposition, making them exit the entangled collective.”
“Fine, okay,” I said. “A p-zed, then. What about Ross? Your ex-boyfriend? He already agreed to come down to your beamline once before.” Of course, I also immediately thought of my sister back in Winnipeg, but it wasn’t like Ross alone would benefit; if this worked, Heather and every p-zed all over the world would ramp up to full consciousness with conscience.
Vic tapped away some more, then, finally coming to a stop, she shook her head.
“What’s the matter with Ross?” I asked.
“No, no, it’s not that.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but her skin seemed even paler than normal. She held up the phone for me to see.
I leaned in for a look, but the mathematical notation on her screen might as well have been cuneiform. “Yes?”
“I think I can do it,” Vic said. “I think I can use the beamline so that it does cause the—the patient, I guess—to level up to the next quantum state, if . . .”
“If what?”<
br />
“If it doesn’t kill him. And I suspect it probably will.”
I felt myself sag against the upholstery. “Really?”
Vic nodded. “That much energy being pumped in? Putting defibrillator paddles on your forehead would be nothing compared to this. We’re trying to drag seven billion people along for the ride, after all—that’s going to take a lot of juice. The patient might, just maybe, survive the first blast—pushing them up one level—but the second one? Not a chance in hell.”
“You could use two different people, one for the first boost, then one for the second.”
“And who is going to engineer that? After the first boost, you and I and Kayla will suddenly be p-zeds; none of us could be trusted to hold to the planned agenda. When your state changes, your desires—or whatever passes for desires in a p-zed—could change, too. No, the only way to pull this off would be to automate the whole run, so that once it’s begun, it simply executes.” She winced, the double meaning of her final word hitting her. But then she went on: “And, yes, that’s almost certainly what it is: a death sentence for whoever’s on the beamline. Ask Kay to look at the math; she’ll confirm it, I’m sure. There’s no way to do this.”
“But—”
“I’m sorry, Jim. Or down deep, maybe I’m not.” She started pacing again but stopped when she reached the blinds, pulling two of them aside, peering out at a vertical slice of the world. “This whole thing is crazy.”
45
WELL, I fucked that up.
Of course, when Vic got to the Light Source later that day—her scheduled time there overlapping by a couple of hours with Kayla’s—she told Kayla that I’d approached her with the idea of doing a massive shift.
And when Kayla got home—she’d left Ryan at her mother’s so the two of us could talk privately—she hit the proverbial roof. “You asked Vic to help you?” she said. I was seated on the living-room couch, but she was standing, glaring at me.
“Well, you weren’t interested—”
“I told you not to try this. I told you what would happen to my daughter, for God’s sake. And you’re still pursuing it?”
“Just, you know, hypothetically.”
“Jesus,” said Kayla. “Jesus Christ.”
“Did you hear the news today?” I asked. “More rioting, not just here in Canada but all across Europe, the US, and now in Asia, too. And things are really heating up between the Americans and the Russians. One of the Russian subs has made it all the way into Hudson Bay, for God’s sake. Carroway has demanded that Putin withdraw; for his part, Putin is claiming the Russians are coming to liberate us.” I tipped my head toward the TV set. “Fox News, which doesn’t know the difference between Canadian socialism and Russian communism, is spewing that Nenshi’s election was the work of a fifth column, paving the way for the Soviets—yes, they called them Soviets today!—to seize everything north of the US border.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” said Kayla.
I spread my arms. “But we—you and I, us and Vic—we can destabilize the situation. We can deactivate the psychopaths, before they start lobbing nukes at each other.”
“You’ve got to leave,” Kayla said.
“But I just want what’s best—”
“Get out, Jim. Get your stuff and get out.”
“Kayla, please.” My eyes were stinging. “I just . . .”
“Get out.”
—
I didn’t remember the first time Kayla and I had broken up—all I knew about it was what was in that ancient email. But this time, well, I couldn’t imagine the memory would ever fade. It hurt like the way I’d imagined that knife to the heart had hurt, but going on and on, twisting, slicing. I would have almost welcomed becoming a p-zed; there’s something to be said for not really feeling.
But right now I was still capable of feeling, of thinking. What had started as an abstraction—a thought experiment about maximizing the total potential happiness on this ball of dust—had transitioned, it seemed to me, into the game changer that might save everybody. For whatever reason, the tipping point had now come, just as it had in Europe in 1939. But there was one way in which the comparison was not apt: World War II had ended with nuclear weapons being used; World War III would begin with them. Talk about tumbling into the abyss; talk about following Lucifer into the very fires of hell.
But Kayla couldn’t see that. She never looked up, never contemplated the stars. Hers was the realm of the minuscule; mine, the cosmologically vast. Why couldn’t she widen her perspective? As Bogart said in Casablanca, crisply making the utilitarian case, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” But where I had to go, Kayla couldn’t follow; what I had to do, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be any part of.
No, I needed somebody who understood, who really understood. I needed Menno Warkentin.
I could have phoned him, but what I wanted to discuss amounted to overthrowing the current government; if US tanks were on Canadian soil, you could be sure as hell that the NSA was monitoring Canadian telephone calls. And so, a little after 6:00 P.M., I walked out Kayla’s front door for what was probably the last time, got in my repaired car, put the pedal to the metal, and began the long drive to Winnipeg.
It took a couple of hours to get to Regina. Being the Saskatchewan provincial capital, it had been secured from rioting by US forces, and I managed to pass through that city without incident. Still, once I was on the other side of it, I found my heart racing as I continued along the highway—flashing back to when I’d recently been run off the road here, to the attack, to killing that p-zed. My palms were slick with sweat on the steering wheel, and I felt nauseous. I turned on the radio to drown out the voice in my head.
The CBC was used to defying the government in Ottawa and seemed no more cowed now by the one in Washington; Carol Off was on a tear about what she was calling “Carroway’s Anschluss.” No doubt some asswipe—maybe Jonah Bratt, the Carleton psych prof—was commenting right now on the CBC website that Godwin’s law meant she was wrong, but Carol’s words rang true to me. When Hitler had annexed Austria in 1938, it had been, in part, to unify all the German-speaking people of Europe under one government. With the toxin of the McCharles Act already having spilled beyond Texas, perhaps Carroway likewise had been motivated by a desire to pull all of English Canada into the Union while simultaneously letting the mob purge Latinos in the lower forty-eight, the distinction between ones illegally in the US and those legally there having already fallen by the wayside. The six million French Canadians, if they impinged upon the president’s consciousness at all, were doubtless merely an irritation; Washington would surely give Quebec none of the special treatment it was used to receiving from Ottawa.
If, that is, there was a Washington, or an Ottawa, or any damn city at all left. The news came on next, and it was not good.
“Although the White House has issued no confirmation, sources close to the Pentagon contend that Russian President Vladimir Putin today issued an ultimatum directly via the hotline to American President Quinton Carroway, insisting that US troops immediately withdraw from what Putin called ‘Occupied Canada’ . . .”
As I drove on, the sun—the one and only thermonuclear blaze I ever wanted to see—dropped down in my rearview mirror, and soon darkness was gathering.
—
I called Menno when I made a pit stop. He had a 9:00 A.M. appointment tomorrow with his diabetes specialist, so we agreed I’d come by his place at eleven. That meant I’d have a little time to kill first thing in the morning, and so I arranged to meet Dr. Namboothiri. I didn’t think I could handle unlocking any more of my old memories, but I did desperately need his advice.
—
“Hello, Bhavesh. Thank you for making time for me on such short notice.” I’d gotten to Winnipeg about 2:00
A.M. and was now operating on only five hours’ sleep.
Namboothiri ushered me into his strange, wedge-shaped office. “No problem. You said it was urgent.”
“It is. When I first came to see you, you knew what I was talking about when I mentioned philosopher’s zombies.”
He sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Sure; of course.”
“Welllll,” I said, the syllable drawing out as I thought about how to phrase this. “Let me ask you a, y’know, a hypothetical. Suppose a bunch of people who had been philosopher’s zombies since birth were to wake up, what do you imagine they’d be thinking? If they’ve never been conscious before, not really, what would be going on now between their ears?”
“You tell me,” said Namboothiri.
I couldn’t help smiling as I sat down. His academic technique was similar to my own.
“Well, I’m assuming it would be the same thing that happened to me after being a p-zed. I’d started confabulating memories, making shit up, filling in the blanks. Presumably they’d do the same thing, too, and, as they compared notes, I presume they’d converge on a consensus reality, right? Homo narrans: Man the Storyteller. And they’d have Wikipedia and the rest of the World Wide Web to tell them what’s gone down before.”
“God help us,” said Namboothiri with a grin. But then he shook his head. “But, you know, it wouldn’t be like that. You lost your memories of being a philosophical zombie because you switched indexing schemes. But someone who had always been a zombie and only woke up as an adult can’t switch indexing schemes, because there’s nothing to switch to. They don’t have a verbal index; they only have a visual one. Oh, they might initialize a verbal index, I suppose—and certainly any kids around three or four years old who suddenly cease being zombies probably will, since that’s the normal developmental step at that age. But older people? Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. But if they did, they’d switch over gradually, just as young people do.”
Quantum Night Page 30
