Quantum Night

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Travis rotated his chair around so he could look out his window. He’d seen technological miracles aplenty since his revival, but from here, the view of the backyard—grass that needed mowing, powder-blue sky, petunias and portulacas, a weather-beaten picnic table—could have still been 2000, or 1950 for that matter. “I hate that,” he said softly.

  Menno was standing just inside the doorway. “Hate that I’ve felt guilty?”

  “No, no,” said Travis. “Not you. I hate having that feeling myself. Guilt. Remorse. Regrets. Second thoughts. Reliving things over and over again. Agonizing over the past. I hate it.” He looked at Menno. “You want absolution? Fine, sure, what the hell; you’ve got it. Fucking world looks like it’s about to come to an end anyway, right, so why the hell not?”

  47

  IT was killing me being in Saskatoon and not seeing Kayla. Oh, she must have known I was in town—after all, I’d already seen every other Huron—but I had to respect her wishes.

  I knew what it was like to lose half your friends in a divorce—they make you pick a side in the church when you get married, and those lines pretty much stay intact afterward, too, I discovered. And I had no doubt that Victoria knew that Kayla had dumped me, even if Kayla hadn’t yet broken the news to her mother or daughter. I was nervous calling Victoria for personal reasons—I didn’t want to be chewed out—and even more so because everything now hinged on Vic’s cooperation. While Menno was talking to Travis, I went across the hall to the washroom and called her.

  “Jim!” she said by way of hello. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Rebekkah’s place, visiting Travis.”

  “So you’re back here in Saskatoon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not sure Kayla wants to see you.”

  “I know,” I replied, “but”—and this was agonizing to say—“that’s not the most important thing right now.”

  There was a whole world of sadness in her simple reply. “Yeah.”

  “So, about what we were discussing, you know, at Kayla’s place . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve been watching the news, right? You know what’s going on.”

  “It’s awful,” agreed Vic. “They’ve got to be at fucking DEFCON One by now.”

  “And, so, look: using the beamline, shifting one person to shift everyone. Vic, you’ve got to see it, right? It’s the answer.”

  “I told you, pumping that much power into someone’s skull will likely kill—”

  “I have a volunteer with me. Where are you?”

  “Um, at the Light Source. I was finally about to leave.”

  “Stay there. We’ll get there as soon as we can.”

  “No, there’s no point. There’s scheduled maintenance tonight. The system is going to be offline for eight hours; they’ve already initiated the shutdown.”

  “Oh, shit. Okay. Can you sneak the quantum tuning fork out?”

  “Uh . . . sure. Yeah. I guess.”

  “Do so, please. Where can we meet?”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I’ll find a hotel.”

  “Oh, screw that. Come to my place—they say the police have finally cleared the roads. You know where it is?”

  I’d never been inside, but I remembered the approximate location from that night we picked Vic up at the airport and took her home. “More or less. Give me your address; my phone can find it.”

  —

  Victoria Chen’s apartment was in the Central Business District, on the other side of the meandering South Saskatchewan River from the synchrotron. Menno and I got there just before the 11:00 P.M. citywide curfew. There were lots of signs of riot damage from previous nights, but no indications of current violence: white Saskatoon police cars, and black-and-white RCMP ones, were crawling along the streets. Vic met us out front with an overnight parking pass, and then she escorted us up to her eighth-floor unit, which sported parquet floors, rugs and tatami mats, and Chinese silk hanging-scroll paintings.

  We sat in her living room, and I brought Vic up to speed on everything. She was astonished by Menno’s offer—but she was also terrified by what she’d been seeing on the news, and, well, she allowed that my plan did seem to offer at least a glimmer of hope. Still, when Menno asked to use the washroom, and Vic got him safely to it, we spoke privately for a moment. “He’s blind,” she said softly.

  “Yes,” I said, matching her volume.

  “Which means you never could have done your microsaccades test on him, right? You don’t know for sure that he’s not a psychopath.”

  “Not empirically. But I’m a certified Hare assessor; I’m sure he isn’t one.”

  “Which means he’s either a Q1 or a Q3.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” said Vic, “if he’s already a Q1, then we don’t have to—”

  “But he’s not.”

  “How can you be sure? If he is, then he’s already in the state we need him to be in—and if you knock him down, he’ll boot up as a psychopath, and I frankly don’t want one of those here in my apartment.”

  “He’s not a psychopath. He’s riven by guilt. For God’s sakes, he—” I was going to say he tried to kill himself over it—but he didn’t; I tried to kill him. And, damn it all, maybe Vic was right: at least to hear Menno tell it, he had pretty much mindlessly done everything Dominic Adler had suggested all those years ago.

  I tried to think of something like the Turing test that could distinguish between a p-zed and a quick—but so had every philosopher who had ever grappled with David Chalmers’s thought experiment. Of course, with our real p-zeds—philosophical zombies exhibiting differences—there could, in principle, be some way to identify a Q1 as definitively as my microsaccades test can identify a Q2, but we certainly hadn’t worked out any such thing yet. No, there simply was no way to be sure short of plunking Menno down in front of Vic’s beamline. “You can test him when we get to the Light Source,” I said, “but we have to operate on the assumption that he is what he says he is. If Menno isn’t going to revive from being knocked down, we’ll need to find someone else.”

  Vic considered for a few moments, then Menno emerged at the end of the hall, being led toward us by Pax. “Well,” he said when we were all together again, “shall we get started?”

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” I asked.

  “You’re not a religious man, Jim; I am. I know I’ll have to answer for everything I’ve done in this life—and I also know that this life isn’t the end. So, yes, I’m sure.” He crouched, bringing himself to eye level with the German shepherd. “Good girl,” he said, rubbing the top of her head. “You’ve been such a good girl.” Pax licked his face, and he patted her once more, then, with bones that creaked loud enough that I could hear them, he rose. “I’m ready.”

  We led Menno to the living-room couch, which, like all the furniture here, was on the smallish size, but he managed to fit by tucking his knees up toward his belly. I went to my carry-on rolly bag, which I’d brought with me when we’d come up from the car, and got the two transcranial-ultrasound-stimulation pucks; Vic, meanwhile, fetched the quantum tuning fork.

  “Menno . . .” I said, taking his hand.

  “Two small steps for a man,” he said. “Two giant leaps for mankind.” He tightened his grip. “Goodbye, Padawan.”

  And then he let go, removed his dark, dark glasses, folded them carefully, and offered them to me. I took them, put them on a teak table next to the couch, and then looked at his artificial eyes, utterly convincing, even this close, except for their preternatural stillness and lack, at this late hour, of redness.

  During the eight-hour car trip, he’d instructed me on how to activate and position the TUS pucks, and I did just as he’d told me to, sliding the switches on their circumferences, taking one puck in each hand, making sure the emi
tter surfaces were facing out, and pressing them against his temples, and—

  —and Professor Emeritus Menno Warkentin’s head lolled to the side, eyes still open, mouth now agape. I snapped my fingers by one of his ears, but there was no reaction whatsoever.

  “Okay,” I said. “If he doesn’t boot up on his own by the morning, we can try the tuning fork.”

  Vic gestured at two dark-red easy chairs facing each other on the opposite side of the room. I sat in one; she took the other. From outside, despite all the police cruisers we’d seen earlier, we could hear the sounds of breaking glass and gunshots, and, now that “O Canada” was obsolete, the new national anthem: a discordant symphony of car alarms.

  “Thanks for everything, Vic,” I said. “I’m glad you get it. I—I thought Kayla would understand, but . . .” I lifted my shoulders. “But she couldn’t get past her own world, thinking only about Ryan, and—”

  “Me, too,” said Vic, sitting in the other chair.

  “What?” I said.

  “Me, too. I’m thinking about Ryan.”

  “Well, I am, as well, but . . .”

  “But this is the right thing for her,” said Vic. “And for Ross. And for your sister. And for so many more.”

  “But . . . but Kayla said Ryan is a Q3.”

  Vic nodded. “Because I told her that. She had to stand near Ryan, comforting her, when she was on the beamline. And when just one spike came up, well . . .”

  My heart fluttered. I thought back to what Vic had said to me at the Konga Cafe. Ryan’s the closest thing to a child I’ll ever have.

  She’s a doll, I’d said.

  And Vic had replied, Yes. Yes, she is.

  Jesus.

  “Why’d you lie to Kayla?”

  “There was no—how would you put it?—no utility, no increased happiness, in telling her. All Kayla needed to know was that her daughter wasn’t a psychopath, and I told her the truth about that. But as for the rest, I saw, when the test results came up, how my feelings changed for Ryan, just as they changed for Ross—and I wasn’t about to do that to Kayla.”

  —

  Vic set me up on a foldout couch in another room, one with dark-red walls, and she retired to her bedroom. I used my white-noise app to try to drown out the sounds from outside, but, of the three humans in that apartment, I suspect only Menno Warkentin slept well that night.

  —

  I got up by dawn’s early light. Menno was still out cold, Pax asleep on the floor by the foot of the couch. I used my phone and its Bluetooth earpiece to check the news.

  It had gotten worse—so much worse—overnight. The United States had sent a trio of ICBMs soaring into Siberia—provocatively demonstrating that they could get through whatever missile shield the Russians had. It was a dramatic gesture, albeit using only conventional warheads, to try to convince Putin to withdraw before things escalated out of control.

  For his part, Putin’s subs had taken out a Canadian naval icebreaker and another US destroyer; the death toll in the undeclared war was now over seven hundred.

  Vic materialized in the doorway, and, for once, her all-black garb seemed totally appropriate, the perfect thing to wear on doomsday. “Let’s see if we can wake Menno,” she said. We headed to her living room, the Mennonite’s gentle wheezing audible above the background hiss of her air conditioner. He’d voided his bladder, but Vic seemed unperturbed by that. The aluminum case for the quantum tuning fork was on the ledge of the pass-through to her kitchen, next to the green pucks. She opened it, pried the silver instrument from its foam rubber, and moved over to Menno. I noticed the twin tines were now marked with small white labels, one saying “L,” the other, “R.” Vic thumbed the red on switch, pressed the projections against Menno’s lined forehead, and—

  —

  The sound of air-conditioning; face touched by coolness. Muffled traffic sounds.

  A voice, very close, female, concerned. “Professor Warkentin? Are you okay?”

  Another voice, male, from farther away. “Menno? It’s me, it’s Jim.”

  Tokens processed, shuffled, dispatched: “I’m okay. Thank you, Padawan.” More? More. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  —

  Victoria turned off the quantum tuning fork and put it back in its case. I got Menno’s glasses off the teak table. “Here you go,” I said, placing them in his hand. He sat up and perched them on his nose. Pax, who’d gone over to watch the sun come up, padded back across the wooden floor to join him. I looked for any sign that the dog detected something different in him, but although she could hear and smell better than any of us, and probably could detect impending earthquakes or tornadoes in a way we couldn’t, whatever quantum-state shift Menno had just undergone seemed to be as imperceptible to her as it was to me.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s get to the Light Source.”

  “Yes,” said Vic. “Time’s running out.”

  “Oh?”

  “I checked the news on my phone as I was getting up. Putin’s issued a deadline for the American withdrawal—four hours from now.”

  48

  IT tore Kayla apart, knowing that Jim was in town. Oh, she’d had numerous fast-and-furious love affairs in her youth, back when she’d been a Q2, but this one had seemed real—a partnership of peers, much better than her marriage to Ben. She’d known that had been a mistake, known it as she was walking down the aisle. If she’d still been a Q2, she’d have said “fuck this,” spun on her high heels, and headed right out the door, leaving that loser at the altar. But her days of psychopathy were long behind her by then, and with each step she’d taken in her white dress, she’d thought, “But it’ll be embarrassing,” or “But Mom will be heartbroken,” or “But we’ve already booked the honeymoon trip,” or “Maybe it’ll be okay; maybe Ben will change.”

  There’d been none of those second thoughts back in college: Jim Marchuk had been good, solicitous company, bending over backward to do whatever she wanted, until right at the end. And, when they’d reconnected, what a joy it had been to find an intellectual equal and someone who wasn’t needy, didn’t require constant reassurance, wasn’t an emotional vampire, and who was a kind and attentive lover.

  Kayla was following the worsening news, as she imagined every other Q3 in the world was—and she wanted to be with her family today. She didn’t really think the world was going to come to an end in the next few hours, but, still, she’d kept Ryan, whom she’d finally managed to pick up last night, home from day camp, and she’d called in sick to the Light Source, and the two of them had headed back to her mother’s place so they could all be together.

  They made breakfast—eggs, bacon, sausages, all the things Jim would disapprove of—then, as Ryan was helping her grandmother with the dishes, Kayla went down the hall to talk privately with Travis. She sat on the edge of the bed so they’d be at the same eye level.

  “So,” she said, “Jim came by here last night?”

  Travis nodded.

  “And Ryan mentioned a blind man and a dog. I presume that’s Professor Warkentin, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did, um, did he mention me?”

  “He said you were an A student.”

  “Not Warkentin. Jim.”

  “I know.” And Travis smiled the smile with which brothers had teased sisters for millennia. “Sure, he mentioned you. He said he was sad about how things had gone down.” A pause. “And you know what I said? ‘I know how you feel.’ And I do.” He shook his head and looked at her as if he were about to add something more.

  “What?” asked Kayla.

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ve had years of practice now,” she said, “but you’re still learning. Biggest difference, once you start listening to that voice in your head? Q2s are terrific liars; Q3s are lousy ones. What’s going on?”

  Travis
looked—well, like Kayla had never seen him look, at least not when he was younger: like he was at war with himself. And then at last, lifting his arms slightly from the chair’s rests, he said, “You and I, we’re mistakes.”

  “Huh?”

  “We got shifted,” he said. “Displaced.” Then, looking away: “This will fix it.”

  “What will?”

  “What Jim is planning to do.”

  “You mean with the synchrotron? There’s no way. He’d need Vic’s help, and she’d never—”

  “She is. She is helping Jim and Warkentin. Jim called her from here; I overheard.”

  Kayla pushed her palms against the mattress, standing up. “I—no, no. That can’t be.”

  “She agrees with him, with Jim: if something isn’t done, the world’s going to come to an end—if not today, with Putin or Carroway igniting World War III, then next week, or next month, or next year.”

  Kayla ran out. Ryan called out “Mommy!” as she careened through the living room.

  “Stay here!” Kayla said. “I’ll be back.”

  “But—”

  “I love you!”

  And she hurried out the front door into the merciless summer heat.

  —

  Vic got Menno, Pax, and me in through security; she clipped a dosimeter to Pax’s collar. We headed along the first indoor mezzanine-level balcony and came to where it made a left-hand turn into the second one. Vic nodded affably at people who passed us going the other direction. We made another left onto the third balcony, went down its length, and at last came to the stairs, which Pax managed quickly—she knew to get out of the way and wait for Menno at the bottom. He headed down, his left hand on the railing. “Three more steps,” I said. “Two. One.”

  And at last, we were on the experimental floor. But instead of heading out toward the synchrotron, Vic led us down a small side passage, and then, after a final ninja look over her shoulder to see if the coast was clear, she used a keycard to open a doorway and then ducked inside. Pax, Menno, and I followed.