Quantum Night (29 page)

K
AYLA
and I stayed up late, trying to make sense of it all. We talked about politics, and what being Canadian meant to us, about whether Canada had already really been nothing more than an American appendage anyway, about whether this was of a piece with previous American foreign policy or something wholly new and unprecedented. But, really, in the end, the fact that there were now American boots tamping down Canadian soil mattered much less than that the Russians and the Americans, each led by a psychopath, were flinging invective at each other today and might be hurling missiles across Canada tomorrow.

My grandfather, while doing what he’d done at Sobibor, had seen a world war up close; my father had often spoken of the fear of nuclear apocalypse that had put a pall over everything in the 1950s and 1960s. Ghosts were not resting easily tonight.

“Okay,” I said to Kayla, facing her on the couch, “here’s a question: why can’t we just have someone surge in with the quantum tuning fork and give President Carroway a boost from his current state as a psychopathic Q2 into a quick? Give him a conscience; problem solved.”

She frowned. “Because the tuning fork doesn’t work on already
conscious individuals; it only works on totally unconscious people who are in the classical-physics state. You know that.”

“Right. But why?”

“I told you why. Because the aggregate mass of humanity—all the Q1s, all the Q2s, and all the Q3s—are quantally entangled; they collectively form one quantum system.”

“Yes. So?”

She sounded pissed at what she took to be me being deliberately obtuse. “So the entanglement inertia keeps things from changing. The tuning fork tries to alter the mind of a specific person, but that person has to move in lockstep with seven billion others.”

“And the tuning fork is
puny,
right?” I said. “It doesn’t put out enough juice against all that. Oh, sure, the fork can put someone
into
superposition if they aren’t there already. But to change someone who is currently in quantum superposition would require changing
everyone’s
state, right?”

“Yes, that’s what the simulations show. And there’s no way the tuning fork could do that. Damn thing runs on double-A batteries, for crying out loud.”

“Exactly. But if you had a more powerful tuning fork?”

“Well, you’d need a hell of a—oh.” She lifted her eyebrows. “The synchrotron?”

“Yes,” I said. “The synchrotron. The Canadian Light Source. How powerful is it again?”

“Almost three gigaelectronvolts.”

“Which is, like, a lot, right?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“And what did you call it? ‘The Swiss Army knife of particle accelerators,’ with all those parameters you can adjust, right? Could it do what the quantum tuning fork does, but on a scale—what?—eight orders of magnitude larger? Affecting billions of people instead of just one?”

“Nine,” said Kayla automatically, but then she frowned, considering this—and, at last, she nodded. “Yes, yes, I think it could. Vic would know for sure—she’s the synchrotron specialist, not me—but from what she told me about how the quantum tuning fork works, yeah, you
could emulate it with the synchrotron, and, yes, I guess you
could
scale it up to that level.”

“There!” I said, triumphantly. “You could engineer a massive shift.”

She snorted. “Well, you’d certainly get ‘Capgras syndrome’ trending on Twitter.” Capgras was a rare psychological condition in which people became convinced that some of their closest friends or family members had been replaced by soulless duplicates.

“I’m serious,” I said. “We could shift
everyone.”

She narrowed her gaze. “But why?”

“What have I been saying all along? Utilitarianism. The greatest good for the greatest number. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few—or the one.”

“Christ’s sake, this is no time for
Star Trek.”

I looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “It’s no time for crappy
Star Trek,”
I replied.
“Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,
that was a piece of shit. Kirk says in it, ‘The needs of the one’—by which he means Spock—‘outweigh the needs of the many.’ But
The Wrath of Khan
—or, as we philosophers like to call it,
The Wrath of Kant
—is a classic. And it got the utilitarian formulation exactly right: the needs of the many
do
outweigh the needs of the few.”

“Jim, I know you really believe that, but—”

“Sam Harris says morality is about the flourishing of conscious beings. And the fact is that, right now, four billion human beings
aren’t
conscious, not in the way you and I understand the term; Q1s have
no
inner lives. Only the Q2s and Q3s do, and together they make up only three out of seven billion people. But imagine if we used the synchrotron to actually boost someone one state—in the process dragging the rest of humanity along with him or her. Those four billion Q1s would be goosed up to being Q2s, and the two billion people who were Q2s—including Carroway and Putin—would rise up to being Q3.”

Kayla looked aghast. “Are you out of your mind?”

“We’d be
doubling
the total number of conscious humans—from three billion to six.”

“By doubling the number of psychopaths!”

“Partially, but we’d also be doubling the number of quicks, from one billion to two.”

Kayla shook her head in disbelief. “You think turning the majority of the human race into
psychopaths
is the way to solve the world’s problems?”

“Well . . . yes.”

“By knocking you, me, and everyone else who’s currently a quick down to being a p-zed?”

“That would be a side effect, yes, because the states wrap around, and—”

“And that doesn’t bother you? That you’d go from—from philosopher to philosopher’s zombie?”

“A utilitarian can’t put his own interest preferentially ahead of someone else’s. And this would result in the greatest happiness for—”

“Damn it, Jim, the four billion p-zeds who exist now aren’t unhappy; they’re
incapable
of being unhappy. They literally don’t know what they’re missing.”

“But
we
know what they’re missing—and we can give it to them.”

“By making them all into psychopaths?”

As I’d observed before, it was almost unheard of for a psychopath to suffer from depression or take his or her own life. “Psychopaths are usually happy; they enjoy their lives.” And then, admittedly hitting below the belt, I added, “Remember?”

She sucked in air but didn’t deny it. Still, she said: “Your opinion is . . . atypical. You defend psychopaths. Literally. In courtrooms.”

“That’s because they’re people, too; they’re conscious beings.”

“Yes, and a couple of those conscious beings—one in Washington and another in Moscow—are about to get the world blown straight to hell.”

“Yes, but, as I said, if we shift everyone, Carroway and Putin—not to mention Governor McCharles in Texas—will suddenly get a conscience, just like you did; just like Travis did. Russia and the US might be on the brink of war now, but they won’t be able to go through with it; they’ll stand down. We save the world
and
we double the number of
conscious entities while we’re at it.” I spoke to her—and to myself. “This isn’t supererogation; this isn’t more than is necessary. It’s the bare minimum that we can do. It’s a moral imperative.”

Kayla was shaking her head slowly back and forth, left and right. “No,” she said. “That’s not the answer.”

I folded my arms. “Do you have a better idea?”

She looked right at me. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I do.”

—

We adjourned to Kayla’s office, next to the dining room; it was well after midnight, we were both punchy, and it seemed useful to have a computer in front of us.

“Okay,” said Kayla, bringing up a chart she’d used before, “there are three quantum cohorts, right? Each with half the number of people in it as the one before—a 4:2:1 ratio. Call the cohorts alpha, beta, and gamma, in descending order of size. Round numbers, there are four billion people in alpha, the current crop of Q1 p-zeds; two billion in beta, the Q2 psychopaths; and one billion in gamma, the Q3 quicks, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you want to boost them all one state, right? The four billion people in cohort alpha go up to being Q2 psychopaths; the two billion in cohort beta go up to being Q3 quicks, and the one billion in cohort gamma—the cohort you were born into and I’m now part of—wrap around to being Q1 p-zeds.” She moved things around with her mouse until her chart reflected those shifts.

“Exactly. The greatest—”

“No, it’s not.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s not the greatest good for the greatest number, at least not by any normal person’s reckoning—no offense.”

“Um, none taken.”

“The right answer,” Kayla said, “isn’t to boost everybody up one state—it’s to boost them
two
states. Push all of cohort alpha—the largest group—from Q1 right up to Q3, giving them both consciousness
and
conscience. You end up with the largest number of quicks possible: for the first time ever, the majority of the human race will finally be firing on all cylinders.”

“My God, yes! And then—”

“And everyone’s moving in quantum lockstep, right? So if cohort alpha goes up two states, so does beta: all the current psychopaths—Quinton Carroway, Vladimir Putin, and all the other assholes who are ruining it for the rest of us—shift two levels, as well, right? They go up to being Q3s then wrap around, ending up as Q1s. That essentially
deactivates
them, turning every last quantum psychopath into a p-zed.” She lifted a hand. “We can’t go back in time and assassinate Hitler, but we
can
stop every despotic leader, every heartless banker, every evil person on the planet.”

She paused, then: “Now, yes, there do have to be
some
psychopaths. But think about it: cohort gamma will move by two steps, too, wrapping around first to Q1 p-zeditude and then settling in at Q2 psychopathy. Since gamma is the
smallest
cohort, you end up with the fewest psychopaths possible.”

She was in a swivel chair; I was in a regular one—but I leaned it back, balancing on its two hind legs, and thought. I had no desire to be a quantum psychopath, which is what I’d become if I shifted twice, but yeah, Kayla’s plan would cut the number of psychopaths in half, while quadrupling the number of quicks. “And,” I said, it suddenly coming to me, “as Namboothiri explained it to me, most Q2s and Q3s index their memories verbally, so at least this smaller crop of newly minted psychopaths
will
remember having had a conscience, remember what it was like to have given a damn about others. Hopefully, that’ll take some of their edge off.”

“Hopefully,” Kayla said.

She sounded dubious, but I seized on the word. “Exactly!” I was giddy now, the way one can be when past the point of exhaustion.
“Literally.
Full of hope. True, the new Q2s perhaps won’t be, but think about all those new Q3s! For the first time since we stood erect on the savanna, there will be billions and billions of humans full of hope.”

I’d hoped Kayla would match my grin, but she didn’t; her eyebrows
came together and her mouth turned down. “But,” she said, harshing the buzz, “even if it were technically possible—even if we
could
do this, I mean . . .”

“Yes?”

“I mean, come on, Jim, do we have the right to do it? We’d be playing God.”

I leaned forward again. “The role of God has gone unfilled for too long,” I said. “It’s high time someone got the part.”

W
E
finally hauled ourselves upstairs to the bedroom as Sagittarius was setting in the south—you had to stay up awfully damn late in summer to see that.

I’d used the little downstairs washroom, but as I lay in bed, I could hear Kayla in the
en suite
splashing literal, and, as it turned out, figurative, cold water on her face.

She emerged in the doorway, a toothbrush hanging from her mouth. “But,” she said, “you know, even if we shift everyone now, what about the future? What if the 4:2:1 ratio between superposition states remains constant as new children are born? We’d end up back where we’d started.”

“Eventually, maybe,” I said. “But in the developed world, people live the better part of a century or more now, and that figure just keeps going up. It’s 2020; so, yeah, maybe by the year 2120, left unattended, things might cycle back to p-zeds predominating, assuming we don’t start doing quantum-superposition testing
in utero.
But that still gets us through the rest of this century. Hell, quantum physics is barely a hundred years old now; who the heck knows what level of control we’ll have over it a hundred years hence? I’m content to solve the problem for the foreseeable future.”

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?”

“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.”