Vic stayed at the synchrotron, but I was exhausted from days of negligible sleep, so she had given me her key and told me to go back to her apartment and get some shuteye. I arrived there, went to the kitchen to get a drink—and there they were, exactly where we’d left them on the pass-through, stacked one atop the other, the two green transcranial-ultrasound-stimulation pucks, and, next to them, a rugged aluminum carrying case, its lid hinged open to reveal the precisely cut black foam surrounding the quantum tuning fork.
I looked at the pucks the way Neo had stared at the red pill. I could go back to caring about all of humanity, eating nothing but plants, being a utilitarian, and giving twenty grand a year to starving kids.
But fuck that noise. I’m going to take Vic out for filet mignon tonight, then, when we get back, I’ll show her what a real man, not some bloody p-zed, can do. I smiled, turned, headed back to the en suite bathroom, and ran the shower, its noise filling the air, and—
What the—?
It felt like somebody had boxed my ears. I tried to spin around, tried to see who it was, tried to—
—
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
I was on Vic’s bathroom floor, flat on my back, looking up at a ceiling light fixture. I didn’t seem to be bruised or banged up; whoever had slapped the TUS pucks on me had apparently lowered me gently to the pink tiles afterward; they’d also turned off the shower.
I’d presumably awoken on my own; otherwise, I’d have seen someone standing over me, quantum tuning fork in hand. As to how long I’d been out—well, glancing at my watch and assuming it was the same day, it was less than three hours.
God damn it. It had been so liberating being a psychopath. But there it was, bubbling up, the attribute that defined being a quick: conscience. The damn thing was reasserting itself, growing stronger, louder, and louder still. Christ, oh Christ, what do you do with your last few seconds of freedom?
You savor them—while you rage, rage against the rising of the light.
—
I got up, exited the bathroom into Victoria’s bedroom, and there, lying on the bed, fully dressed, an ebook reader in her hand, was—
No, not Vic.
It was Kayla. She looked up as I entered.
“What the hell?” I said.
She smiled. “Hi, Jim.”
“You knocked me out?”
“Uh-huh. Vic told me you were here. I figured I’d give you a chance to wake up on your own; if you hadn’t revived soon, I’d have tried the tuning fork.” She closed her reader’s cover and got up.
“And you—you’re a Q2 now, right?” I asked.
“Yes.” She shrugged a little. “I recognize the feeling.”
“But, then, why’d you knock me out? What’s in it for you, having me boost back to being a Q3?”
“I knew you in 2001, remember. I knew you when you were a paralimbic psychopath, and I know what you did to Menno when you were briefly also a quantum one. So, for my own protection, it’s better for me if you’re a Q3. But watch your step, buddy-boy: I’d be even safer if I knocked you down once more, so you’d be a p-zed again.”
“I’ll be careful.” I looked at her, trying to see if her inner change was in any way mirrored on her face—and maybe it was: the twinkle was gone from her blue eyes; even when she wasn’t staring, there was now something snake-like about her gaze. “Do you know what Vic did—after, I mean?”
“What?” asked Kayla.
“Well, you’re not going to like it, but . . .”
“What?” she said again.
“She erased her program—the one we used to change everyone’s states. She said it was tempting fate to leave that info lying around; she didn’t want someone else doing to her what we’d done to everybody. She also erased as much of the research about quantum states of consciousness as she could, including your cloud backups.”
“Shit,” said Kayla. But then she smiled, a cold psychopathic rictus. “Oh, well; no point in regrets, is there? What’s done is done.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Your brother wanted to go back to being a Q2, which I presume is what he is now. He said he preferred it. Do you? Do you want to stay a psychopath?” I gestured out the door, in the direction of the living room. “Because, you know, I can do to you what you just did to me: knock you down to the classical-physics state, and then bring you back up as a Q3. Of course, there’s a risk you won’t wake up at all, but . . .”
“What would you do in my place?” Kayla asked.
I was surprised by the bitterness in my voice. “You deprived me of the right to make that choice.”
“Pot,” said Kayla. “Seven billion kettles. Black.”
I looked away.
“Anyway,” said Kayla, “we’ll see. It’s always an option, isn’t it? But until we’re sure things are going well on the political front, I think I’d rather be like this. Ready for action, y’know?”
I looked at her and thought about us: two ships that had passed in the quantum night.
“Ryan’s a Q3 now,” I said.
“No, she’d have wrapped around like me—”
I shook my head. “Vic lied to you; Ryan was a Q1 when she tested her on the beamline.”
“Oh,” said Kayla. And then, after a moment: “So, what, now she’s going to be all needy? Jesus.”
“Well,” I replied, “if you don’t think you can look after her . . .”
“What? You want her?”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “Yes, I do.”
Kayla’s head rocked left and right for a moment, then she shrugged a little: “Sure, yeah, why not? Make my life easier.”
My heart was beating rapidly. “Okay; good. All right if I take her with me on a road trip to Winnipeg? I want to go see Virgil.”
“Who?” asked Kayla.
Oh, right. I’d never told her his name.
“Virgil,” I said again. “My son.”
—
Travis was managing well with a walker now, and so, late one night, I drove him far out on the prairie; he didn’t know anything about astronomy, and I’d offered to teach him. The moon, with its yin and yang of the Ocean of Storms and the Sea of Tranquility, had sunk beneath the horizon’s razor edge, and the starry boulevard of the Milky Way cleaved the heavens.
I taught Travis how to use the Big Dipper to find Polaris, Arcturus, and Spica; pointed out the Summer Triangle of Altair, Deneb, and Vega (which, I said, was where vegans like me came from); and showed him the smudge of the Andromeda galaxy, the most distant object one can see with the naked eye, 2.5 million light-years away. That meant, I said, he was looking back in time 2.5 million years: the photons now kissing his retinas had left Andromeda at the same time the first members of the human genus, Homo, had appeared.
“Huh,” he said. “You think there’s anybody else out there?” He was leaning for support against my car’s side panel—the one that had been replaced recently.
I thought again about the silence from the stars, about whether races are doomed to snuffing themselves out. “Maybe ours now has a fighting—or a non-fighting—chance.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the snort. “You think we’re in some sort of utilitarian utopia now? People are people, and quantum physics be damned.”
“It’ll take time,” I replied, as my eyes found kite-shaped Delphinus. “The new crop of quicks has to make sense of the world around them. But no one with conscience can look out at all the suffering, all the poverty, all the unfairness, without aching to do something about it. You had a conscience briefly; you remember what it’s like.”
Perhaps Travis shrugged. “Sort of. I can’t muster the feeling again, but, yeah, it was different.”
“It’s better,” I said firmly.
“Even with the regrets? The second thoughts?”
<
br /> “Even with.”
Silence for a time. I caught a meteoric streak of white in my peripheral vision, a mote of cosmic dust expiring.
“You know, you’re an unusual person,” Travis said. “Even among Q3s, you’re an aberration. It’s not like there are suddenly four billion James Marchuks out there.”
My gaze dropped to the horizon, the land in front of us a great empty page. “The rioting has stopped,” I said. “American troops are out of Canada, and the McCharles Act has been repealed. Other positive things will happen, too. Give it time.”
“I gave it time once already. I fast-forwarded two decades, remember? Things got worse, not better.”
“This will be different.” Overhead, the constellations of summer blazed, but I flashed back to that confabulated winter sky on New Year’s Eve all those years ago, the mighty hunter Orion rearing up. “Do you know when I was first knocked into a coma? December thirty-first, 2000. I missed the big party.” I sang softly: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind . . .”
“But at least you were awake for the really big party the year before,” Travis said.
I was about to launch into my “but there was no year zero” bit when it came to me. True, the numbering system had been devised using Roman numerals, which had no zero, but our system does, and this—right now—was the real year zero. All that talk about whether 2000 or 2001 had been the beginning of the new century was irrelevant: this was the dawn of the next millennium, the next era, with four billion people—for the first time in those 2.5 million years, the majority—uplifted from emptiness to full consciousness with conscience; truly the greatest good for the greatest number.
And, yes, there were countless challenges ahead of them; doubtless they weren’t yet sure how to proceed.
But they would think of something.
FURTHER READING
AS the quote from David Chalmers at the front of this novel (taken from an interview with him in the Summer 1998 issue of the excellent magazine Philosophy Now) says, “It may be a requirement for a theory of consciousness that it contains at least one crazy idea.” Throughout this book I put forward a theory that, at first blush, might seem to contain rather substantially more than just the requisite one crazy idea, so let me share this list of some of the nonfiction reading that informed my thinking. (Please note that the commentary below contains spoilers for this novel.)
First and foremost, this novel hinges on the notion that consciousness is fundamentally quantum mechanical in nature. The seed for this comes from two books by Sir Roger Penrose:
Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Penrose, Roger. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
The first one outlines Penrose’s logic (based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem) for why human consciousness has to be quantum mechanical. When Penrose first put that idea forward, he had no idea where the quantum-mechanical processes might be taking place. But anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff had the notion that they were occurring in the hydrophobic pockets of microtubules; Penrose elaborates on that thought in the second book, and the two of them have collaborated on several papers since. A recent one that provides a good overview is:
Hameroff, Stuart, and Roger Penrose. “Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory.” Physics of Life Reviews 11 (2014) 39–78.
And for a recent update on the whole notion of quantum processes in biological systems, see:
McFadden, Johnjoe, and Jim Al-Khalili. Life on the Edge: The Coming Age of Quantum Biology. New York: Crown Publishing, 2015.
My novel also hinges on the notion of the philosopher’s zombie, an idea most associated with Australian philosopher David Chalmers, who discusses it many places, including in these excellent books:
Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Chalmers, David J. The Character of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
(I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know both Stuart Hameroff and David Chalmers. Stuart and David long co-chaired the biennial Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference, and, when I gave a keynote address there in 2010, it was Dave who introduced me to the audience.)
Although I’m sure he wouldn’t frame it this way, if you want empirical evidence that there really are multitudes of p-zeds mindlessly following authority figures, check out the work of Bob Altemeyer, a now-retired professor of psychology coincidentally at the University of Manitoba (where my character Jim Marchuk teaches). His free PDF ebook available at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey is compelling:
Altemeyer, Bob. The Authoritarians. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2006.
The audio version, with a comprehensive introduction written by former Nixon White House counsel John Dean and updates and reflections added by Altemeyer, is even better; you can get it at Audible.com.
For ways in which our complex behavior could be the result of things other than self-aware consciousness, see:
Duhigg, Charles. Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012.
Gigerenzer, Gerd. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007.
Hood, Bruce. The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Koch, Christof. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012.
Lieberman, Matthew D. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. New York: Crown, 2013.
Miller, Peter. The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done. New York: Avery, 2010.
Morse, Eric Robert. Psychonomics: How Modern Science Aims to Conquer the Mind and How the Mind Prevails. Austin: Code Publishing, 2014.
Pagel, Mark. Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Pentland, Alex. Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Smart, Andrew. Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing. New York: OR Books, 2013.
Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books, 2005.
Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright, 2012.
I mention mirror neurons as one of the mechanisms supporting the notion of mindless behavior. For a good introduction to them by one of their discoverers, see:
Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
For an opposing view see:
Hickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Unlike Chalmers’s thought-experiment zombie world, where no one has real consciousness, I posit a three-state model, with each level showing progressively more complex consciousness in successively smaller cohorts. So, cheek by jowl with my p-zeds are legions of psychopaths—and there’s an enormous amount of nonfiction written about them. The seminal texts are:
Cleckley, Hervey. The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality. Various publishers; five editions from 1941 to 1984.
Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Atria, 1993.
One of Hare’s last graduate students has a fascinating (and more recent) book, from which I drew the notion of damage to the paralimbic system being a correlate of psychopathy:
Kiehl, Kent. The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience. New York: Crown, 2014.
Meanwhi
le, Jon Ronson looks into Hare’s famed Psychopathy Checklist—Revised in this popular account:
Ronson, Jon. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. New York: Riverhead, 2011.
As I make clear in my novel, psychopathy doesn’t necessarily lead to crazed killing sprees. Hare and his collaborator have documented the existence of psychopaths in the workplace:
Babiak, Paul, and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperBusiness, 2006.
Also on the topic of hidden psychopaths (“sociopath,” as I explain in the novel, being an essentially synonymous term):
Stout, Martha. The Sociopath Next Door. New York: Broadway Books, 2005.
And Kevin Dutton—whom I consulted with in creating this novel—contends that psychopathic traits can even be beneficial:
Dutton, Kevin. The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
When I was already well into the writing of my novel, James Fallon published a book about a real-life discovery that echoed some of what my character Jim Marchuk faces:
Fallon, James. The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. New York: Current, 2013.
And a book about the relationships between psychopathic men and nonpsychopathic women:
Brown, Sandra L. Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of Inevitable Harm with Psychopaths, Sociopaths, and Narcissists. Minneapolis: Book Printing Revolution, 2009.
The character of Menno Warkentin in this novel is an experimental psychologist. I’ve often said that science fiction is a laboratory for thought experiments about the human condition that it would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life—but, in the days before informed consent, there were some doozies that put my fictional Project Lucidity to shame.
Most famous of all—and, as I argue in this novel, pretty clear evidence of philosopher’s zombies in our midst—is the Milgram shock-machine obedience-to-authority study from 1961. Milgram himself recounts it here:
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