Quantum Night (31 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Yes,” Menno said, “you do.”

I looked away from the blind man. “Twenty-something.”

“Twenty thousand dollars. Which charities?”

“Mostly ones combating third-world poverty.”

“Because?”

I shrugged a little. “Because they need the money more than I do. The utility it gives people in Africa is way greater than the utility it gives me, so I . . .”

“So you
have
to give it away, right?” Menno shook his head. “The world doesn’t need a hypocrite like me; it needs more people like you.”

“Menno . . .” I said, as if his name, the same as that of the founder of his religion, was an exoneration.

He was quiet for a time, then: “You said you needed someone to put on the—what did you call it? The beamline?”

“Well, yeah, but that person probably won’t survive.”

“Use me,” said Menno.

“What?”

“I’m old; use me.”

“That’s—wow, well, that’s . . . that’s very decent of you, but we need someone we can boost up two states. That means starting with a Q1.”

“Who, by definition, can’t give informed consent. But I can.”

“Yes. But you’re not a p-zed.”

Menno got up. “Follow me,” he commanded. I did so, and so did Pax; he led us back into his den. “It’s been years,” he said. “I’m not sure which of these cupboards they’re in, but . . .” He gestured his permission for me to open them, and I did so. The first was filled with piles of old
tractor-feed computer printouts, and I told him that. “Try the next one,” he said.

I did—and there they were.

Two green hockey pucks.

“You kept them?” I asked.

“You said you needed a p-zed. Make me one.”

My heart was pounding. “But what if you don’t wake up?”

“Do what you did to Travis Huron. Use that gizmo . . .”

“The quantum tuning fork. But it doesn’t always work.”

“I’m willing to have you try.”

“Menno, for God’s sake, I can’t—”

He held up a hand. “Padawan, who taught you about the trolley problem? Look at me.
I’m
the fat guy—and there are seven billion people on the tracks who might well be killed if the Russians and Americans go to war.”

M
ENNO
and I had briefly considered flying to Saskatoon, but trying to figure out how to get Pax there—finding a doggy crate, and so on—would have taken as much time as flying would have saved, and so all three of us clambered into my Mazda. After we’d been on the highway for a couple of hours, Menno surprised me by saying, “It really is a boring landscape, isn’t it?”

So much had been turned upside down in my world of late, I don’t think I’d have been surprised if he’d pulled off his dark glasses to reveal a perfectly normal pair of functioning baby blues.

“It is,” I said, “but, um, how can you tell?”

“The road. It’s perfectly flat. We haven’t gone up or down a hill for ages.”

Pax was in the back seat. I’d let her ride with her head sticking out the rear window, a common pleasure for dogs whose owners could drive but a rare treat, apparently, for her. After a while, though, she’d stretched out, her head on my side of the car, which was where the sun was pouring in.

Since we were planning to do it all without stopping for a meal, and so I could avoid the stretch of highway on which I’d previously been
attacked, we were taking the Yellowhead Highway, bypassing Regina. As we came to the sign marking the provincial border, I announced, “We’re leaving Manitoba.”

Menno nodded. “Did you hear about that American couple? They got hopelessly lost, see? So they pull into a gas station, and the husband goes inside. ‘Where are we?’ he asks the man behind the cash desk. ‘Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,’ the man replies. The husband leaves, and, as he re-enters the car, his wife says, ‘So? What did he say?’ ‘I don’t know,’ the husband replies. ‘He didn’t speak English.’”

It was worth a smile at best, but I figured the polite thing to do was to make an audible laugh, and I did so. Satisfied, Menno turned in his seat as much as his bulk would allow, and he leaned his head against a scrunched-up sweater he’d placed against the side window. Soon enough I heard the guttural wheeze of his snoring. As we sped along, I wondered if he closed his eyes when he slept or if they just stared out, unmoving.

—

One disadvantage of the Yellowhead was that amenities were few and far between. But, just when my bladder was about to go supernova, a rest stop presented itself. Menno and I took turns in the outhouse, and Pax relieved herself on the grass. When we were back on the road again, I broached a difficult subject. “You know who lives in Saskatoon now?”

“Kayla Huron,” Menno replied. “You told me.”

“Not just Kayla,” I said. “Her brother, too. Travis.”

Very softly: “Oh.”

“Kayla finally told him the truth: that he’d been a Q2, and that he’d been knocked down into a coma by an external force, and then she’d managed to bring him out of it as a Q3.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, and—oh, you’ll like this—when Kayla said he’d been a quantum psychopath, Travis replied, ‘Well, I always knew I was a little bit crazy.’”

“What?” said Menno. Then, getting it: “Oh! Clever lad.”

“He is—although not so much a lad anymore. But she didn’t tell him what had caused him to lose consciousness, not specifically.”

“Good, good.” A pause. “How is he doing?”

“Better every day. Still mostly uses a motorized wheelchair, but the physio is going well. He’s back on normal food, and his jaw muscles are getting stronger. Got to eat a steak for the first time last week. Even I was cheering.”

“Ah, well, I’m . . . I’m glad he’s making progress.”

“Yeah.” I let another kilometer roll by, then: “Look, I know what you said about the prisoner’s dilemma, but . . .”

“But there’s a good chance I’m going to meet my maker soon, isn’t there?”

“Well . . . yeah. And so, you know, I was wondering, would you like to see Travis?” And, as soon as that awkward sentence was out, I began to kick myself for saying “see” to the man I’d blinded.

But Menno nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, if he’s willing. The Christian thing to do is ask forgiveness, and this is my last chance for that, isn’t it?”

—

And so we pulled over again, and I called Rebekkah’s house. She answered, and greeted me warmly; there was nothing to indicate that her daughter had yet told her that she’d broken up with me. I explained to Rebekkah that I was on my way to Saskatoon, accompanied by someone who had known Travis back in 2000 and early 2001, and asked if it would be all right if we stopped in to say hello? She took the cordless handset to Travis, I explained what was happening to him, and his exact words were, “No shit? Warkentin? Yeah, sure. Bring him by.”

—

We still had a long drive ahead of us—and the time had come, the Warkentin said, to talk of many things. He filled me in on the details of the Lucidity experiments, and I told him even more about what Kayla and Victoria had discovered about the quantum states of consciousness. But every hour, at the top of the clock, I put on the CBC for five minutes. As we were entering Saskatoon, the female newsreader grimly shared
this:
“Open hostilities now exist between Russia and the United States. The Russian submarine
Petrozavodsk,
in Canadian waters in the Beaufort Sea north of Tuktoyaktuk, this afternoon reportedly torpedoed and sank a US Navy destroyer, the USS
Paul Hamilton,
which had a crew complement of two hundred and eighty . . .”

After that, Menno and I drove the rest of the way in silence; I took him directly to Rebekkah’s house. It hadn’t dawned on me that Ryan might be there, too—but she was; Kayla had been stuck in traffic for hours, thanks to gridlock caused by yet more rioting. As we entered, Ryan squealed in delight at the sight of the German shepherd. “Oooh! What’s his name?”

“Her
name,” said Menno. “Pax.”

Rebekkah, who was meticulous about her housekeeping, was scowling, and I realized I should have told her in advance that Menno would be accompanied by a dog.

“Can I pet her?” asked Ryan.

“She’s a very special dog,” Menno said. “She won’t be happy until she gets me to where I’m going. But when I’m settled in, I’ll take off her harness. That tells her she’s off-duty, and then, yes, she’d enjoy being petted.”

Ryan seemed fascinated by these revelations, but Rebekkah said, “It
is
getting on, and Travis still tires easily.”

There were three steps up to the main floor of Rebekkah’s house—the reason Travis hadn’t yet joined us. We climbed them, Ryan bounding ahead. A short corridor came off the living room, with a washroom on one side, and, on the other, what had once been Rebekkah’s graphics studio but had become Travis’s room.

“Give me a second with him,” I said. I went in on my own, closing the white-painted door behind me. “Travis,” I said, “Professor Warkentin is here. I just wanted to prepare you. He’s blind.”

He looked up at me. Solid food was doing wonders; his face had filled out since I’d last seen him.

“Oh,” he replied, his tone flat. But then he nodded. “Okay, send him in. There’s something I have to tell him.” He rolled his motorized chair half a meter forward and added, “Alone.”

—

The drama Travis had been hoping for wasn’t going to occur. He’d wanted a “Look at me!” moment; he’d wanted Menno’s jaw to drop in shock at what he’d reduced a once-great athlete to. But Menno just stood there, the mountain come to Mohammed.

“Hello, Professor,” Travis said.

“Please, call me Menno.”

Travis had his own agenda, but one thing he remembered from his Q2 days was to always let the other guy show his hand first. “Jim said you had something you wanted to say.”

“Yes.” Menno’s features worked, as if he were trying to come up with the right words, then, with a little shrug, he said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Well, see, you were knocked into a coma by an experiment that Dominic Adler and I were doing, and you—”

“I remember,” said Travis.

Menno tilted his head. “But Jim said you couldn’t recall the day we knocked you out.”

“I lied,” said Travis, and he gave a little shrug of his own, then operated the control to roll the wheelchair back a little. “Old habits die hard.”

“But—”

“It was kind of my first impulse for so long, you know? Are you up to speed on all this Q1-Q2-Q3 shit?”

“Yes.”

“And what did Jim tell you about me?”

“You started as a Q2, then rebooted as a Q3.”

“Yeah, exactly. And about himself?”

“He started as a Q3, and then rebooted the first time as a Q1.”

“Right, right. And has he told you about memories and stuff? The indexing schemes?”

Menno nodded.

“So, my sister explained it all to me. When Jim changed quantum states, he also changed indexing schemes: he went from verbal to visual.
But I didn’t; adult Q2s and Q3s index memories verbally, unless they have a certain kind of autism, right? So, no change for me. I didn’t have any trouble remembering coming to your lab, putting on that damn helmet. I knew you were responsible.”

Astonishment was plain on Menno’s face. “Then why didn’t you tell Jim?”

“I’d just woken up. Playing things close to the vest had always served me well before; never let your opponent—and, man, I’d thought
everyone
was my opponent—know what you know.”

“Ah,” said Menno. He spread his arms. “Anyway, look, I’m old, I’m diabetic, I’m blind, and they’ve more or less put me out to pasture at the university. And, well, before I go, I just wanted to say I’m sorry—so, so sorry—for what I did to you. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. You have no idea how it’s eaten at me all these years. Not a day has gone by when it hasn’t haunted me; not an hour.”

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?”

I
T
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 emitter 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.”