Quantum Night

  “But at the end of June, Menno knocked me out again, and I came back as a Q2 psychopath—a real psychopath—and then, I . . . I . . .”

  “What?”

  “I gouged out Menno’s eyes.”

  She was quiet for a time, then, finally, she said simply, “Oh.”

  “God knows what else I would have done, but he managed to knock me out again, and when I woke up from that, I was back to my old Q3 self, I guess, but confabulating memories to trowel over the missing time.”

  “So, wait, wait, you’re saying you were knocked down into a coma three times?” She sounded excited, as if this all confirmed something for her. “Once—what, New Year’s Eve 2000, right? Then twice more at the end of June 2001? And you changed your quantum state each time you rebooted?”

  “I guess, yes.”

  “Coma, coma, coma, chameleon,” Kayla said.

  I was clearly having an effect on her.

  “I’m here all week,” she added, but her grin was way wider than her joke deserved. She started toward her study down the hall. “Come with me.”

  —

  “Look,” Kayla said, gesturing at her large desktop monitor. “That’s the simulation Victoria and I have been developing.” She had taken the seat in front of the computer, and I was crouching next to her.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “See? It’s looping.”

  I thought that was a bad thing, from the handful of Word macros I’d tried to debug over the years; I was proud all out of proportion to the actual achievement of my one that turned MLA citations into APA format. “You mean it doesn’t terminate? It just keeps running?”

  “No, no, no, the simulation stops just fine whenever we want it to. It’s not the program that’s looping; it’s the output.”

  “What?”

  She hit some keys, and a chart appeared on her screen. “Okay, look. These are the three possible quantum-superposition states: Q1, Q2, and Q3.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, Vic and I have been trying to solve that problem you discussed with her: you said my brother Travis started as a Q2—a quantum psychopath—got knocked down into a coma, and then came back up as a Q3 quick, right?”

  “Right. He leveled up.”

  “Exactly. But you started as a Q3, and, after being knocked into a coma back on New Year’s Eve 2000, you revived as a Q1—you leveled down, in other words; the exact opposite of Travis, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And I couldn’t square what the simulation was showing with the reality you’d reported. I had thought you’d gone Q3 to Q1 then bounced straight back to Q3—but you just told me that wasn’t what happened. You actually went Q3 to Q1, then to Q2, and then to Q3, one step at a time. And that’s exactly what the simulation predicts. See, what happened to you isn’t the opposite of what happened to Travis, it’s the same thing: each time you go down to the classical-physics state, you reboot, if you reboot at all, one level higher up—but the levels wrap around!” She pointed at her screen. “The math proves it: the change vector is a modulus, an absolute value. It statistically prefers being positive but, if that’s not possible, a negative delta occurs.”

  “Um, so if you started as a Q1—”

  “If you started as Q1, you’d come back from a coma as a Q2; if you were a Q2, like Travis, you’d come back as a Q3; and if you were originally a Q3, like you, you’d wrap around to being a Q1!”

  “That’s—wow.”

  “Wow indeed. But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother and to . . .” She trailed off.

  “That’s fabulous, baby! You’re a genius.”

  “Thanks,” she said, but she was frowning. “There’s still one problem, though. Somehow, while Trav was in a coma, the value of his previous superposition state had to be stored for nineteen years. For him to revive as a Q3, somewhere the fact that he’d previously been a Q2 had to be retained even when he was no longer in superposition.”

  I’d been trying to come up to speed on all this. “Don’t almost all cells in the body have microtubular scaffolding? Not just brain cells? The ones in neurons are the ones Penrose and Hameroff implicated in consciousness, but maybe regular body cells might retain a degree of superposition even when neuronal tissue doesn’t. Kind of like muscle memory.”

  I meant that last bit as a pun, but she nodded as if I were more clever than I really felt just then. “Maybe, maybe.” She shrugged a little. “Who knows? The bottom line is, whatever the mechanism, there clearly is such a memory.”

  “Cool,” I said. “But, so are you saying this happens to anyone who completely loses consciousness? If they revive, they come up at one level higher than they were at before—or, if a Q3, wrap around to being a Q1, as I did?”

  “Yes, I think so. But they have to actually have their brain drop into the classical-physics state. That doesn’t happen during sleep; sleeping is a conscious condition, which is why you dream and why external stimuli can wake you up.”

  “True,” I said. “And, I’ve heard tons of stories about people who have temporarily lost consciousness through a coma, general anesthesia, or a near-death experience. Those who know them best often say they were changed by the experience. Family and friends say some people who have had NDEs are more mellow afterward—and, in many cases, they would be. If you were a psychopathic Q2 beforehand, you’d come back as a thoughtful, reflective Q3. And if you were a Q3 beforehand, you’d wrap around to being a Q1 p-zed, literally without a care in the world. Of course, that doesn’t happen with every case of general anesthesia, but—”

  “Welllll,” said Kayla, “not to freak you out or anything, but a lot of the drugs we use in operations aren’t really anesthetics; that is, they don’t actually put you out cold. Rather, they’re paralytics that also inhibit memory formation. They keep you from moving during surgery, and they keep you from remembering all the pain, but they don’t actually put you out in the quantum-mechanical sense.”

  “Holy shit. Really?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Wow. Well, thanks heaps. Something new to have nightmares about.”

  She smiled contritely. “But there are groups that do suffer total knockouts disproportionately: boxers, football players, and so on. Most of the time it’s just—just!—a concussion. But every once in a while, one of them really is knocked out cold. And, you know, most of them probably started out as nice-enough guys. But everyone’s read those stories about some of them eventually turning into psychopaths, beating their spouses and so on.”

  I nodded. One of the Green Bay Packers was in court just last week over having assaulted his wife.

  “Anyway, that’s it!” said Kayla triumphantly. “That’s the pattern! Once you realize that the states wrap around, it’s simple. It’s elegant.”

  —

  I was asleep next to Kayla, but even when exhausted, I always dozed lightly, and a small change in the illumination filtering through my eyelids woke me up. Next to me, Kayla, naked, was thumb-typing on her phone.

  “Texting your other lover?” I said; I was naked, too.

  “No, no.” She continued typing furiously. “I’m sending myself a note. I thought of another mathematical proof that the states do in fact wrap around; I don’t want to forget it.” She tapped a little longer, then decisively banged the screen with her index finger and turned to me, illuminated by the phone, a satisfied smirk on her beautiful face.

  I gently pulled her back down, so that she was facing me. I stroked her hair, its copper color undetectable in the darkness; stroked her shoulder, the skin smooth; worked my way toward her breast, perfect, round, soft, my palm moving in light circles over her nipple, which hardened; and then, sliding lower down her torso, touching the ridge that marked the leading edge of one of the wings on her blue butterfly tattoo.

&n
bsp; The ridge; her scar.

  I had one of my own, of course, on the left side of my chest, where that crazed addict’s knife—

  No, no. It hadn’t been heart surgery; it had been the removal of a tumor in my breast. Above my sternum. No need to saw through bone.

  And so no need—yes, yes: that was what Cassandra Cheung had told me over the phone from Calgary: “Says here they cut it out under a local anesthetic.”

  Meaning I hadn’t had my consciousness shut off. I wasn’t knocked down to the classical-physics state then, back in February 2001—and so nothing had changed: I was a p-zed before the surgery and a p-zed afterward.

  But Kayla—

  “Wow, indeed,” she’d said earlier tonight. “But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother and to . . .”

  And to whom?

  But no . . . that was crazy.

  And, yet, when I’d started to tell her what I’d done to Menno, she deflected it, saying, “It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters is who we are now.”

  Once were. Are now.

  Jesus.

  Could it be? Could she—

  Kayla must have felt my spine stiffen because she said, softly, “What?”

  My heart beat a few times, then. “Your tattoo . . .”

  “I thought you liked it?”

  “You had an appendectomy.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Abdominal surgery.”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “When I was twenty-two.”

  “So, 2003?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “And they put you under, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  I found myself pulling slightly away from her. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” But it was obvious from her tone that she knew what I meant.

  “Tell me that you’d been a psychopath when we were dating. If you’re a Q3 now, you were a Q2 before the operation.”

  “If,” Kayla said firmly, “the anesthetic had actually caused decoherence, had actually put me out cold, hadn’t just been an amnesia-inducing paralytic, hadn’t—”

  My voice was a mere whisper. “Oh, Kayla . . .”

  She was quiet for a time, then, at last: “You’re right. I should have told you.” She exhaled noisily. “But, yeah, I am another data point: you, me, and Travis, we all changed states, shifting up or down exactly as the model predicts.”

  “Why not tell me? If anyone could have understood, I—”

  “It wasn’t the same thing. You have no idea what it’s been like all these years. You, at least, don’t remember the bad things you did in the past—or you didn’t until just now, thanks to the spelunking you did with that memory expert, what’s-his-name . . .”

  “Namboothiri.”

  “But me? I remembered it all. Torturing animals as a kid. Being so cruel to a girl in junior high that she tried to kill herself. I couldn’t tell you about all that; you’d never look at me the same way again.”

  “That’s not so.”

  “But then I woke up in a hospital bed one day and realized that I’d changed. I told you that it had been Menno’s class that got me interested in consciousness, but that’s not true, and—I’m so sorry—I said it was what you had done all those years ago that got me interested in psychopathy. But that’s not true, either. It was the advent of my own conscience the summer after I finished my bachelor’s degree that did it. That’s why I’ve devoted my career to this. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could have done the things I did, and why I no longer had uncontrollable urges to do similar things.”

  She reached over, took the hand I’d withdrawn, and placed it over her tattoo again. “A butterfly, see? In honor of my metamorphosis.”

  40

  IT would have been nice if, after Kayla had shared the truth of her transformation with me, we had been able to fall asleep holding each other, accepting that who we are now mattered more than who we’d been then. But a peaceful sleep was not to be: we were immediately interrupted by a tentative knocking on the bedroom door, followed by a plaintive voice calling, “Mommy?”

  Kayla found the bedspread, which I knew to be sea green although it looked slate gray in the darkness, and pulled it up to cover both of us to our shoulders.

  “What is it, sweetheart?” Kayla asked.

  Ryan took that as leave to enter, and I heard the knob working and a small squeak from the hinges. She was revealed, sufficiently illuminated by light spilling through her own open bedroom door on the opposite side of the corridor that I could see her eyes go wide. Apparently whatever she’d assumed normally happened after she’d been tucked in for the night did not include me joining her mother naked in bed. But that shock was quickly set aside, and Ryan said, “I’m frightened by the noises.”

  I could see on Kayla’s face that she was about to ask, “What noises?” But she checked herself: with doors open on both sides of the hallway now, she could hear them, too. Kayla’s bedroom faced the backyard; Ryan’s, the street—and it was from the street that the growing sounds of a raucous mob were coming.

  Kayla got out of her bed—apparently this was a household where the parent was routinely seen naked by the child—and she quickly put on a robe and led Ryan from the room to investigate. That gave me a moment to retrieve my pants and shirt, strewn on the floor. I then hustled over to join them.

  Kayla had wisely turned out the light in Ryan’s room by the time I got there. Up the street, under the sodium lamps, a knot of six or eight teenagers was moving along, hurtling rocks at windows. The riots here had previously been confined to the downtown core; this was the first I’d heard of them spreading to the suburbs. Of course, in a smallish city like Saskatoon, that wasn’t a particularly far journey—but still.

  There was no phone in Ryan’s room, so Kayla nipped back across the hall to call the police from there. In the yellow light, Ryan moved closer to me and reached up and took my hand. The mob was passing a small hatchback parked by the side of the road. A crowbar rang against its side panel, and the horn started honking, one blast per second, an android’s heartbeat.

  Kayla returned. “I tried three times,” she said. “Busy! Fucking 911 is busy.”

  The mob rocked the hatchback, but it was too wide and squat for them to flip over, I guess, since they were soon moving forward, passing the house next to Kayla’s. We couldn’t see that building from this vantage point, but we could hear a booming male voice shouting from what I presumed was its open front door: “Get the hell away from here! Go on now! Get lost!”

  That would not have been the tack I’d have taken, and indeed, it caused the seven teenagers—I’d managed to get a head count finally—to start moving onto his front lawn. Something caught my eye, and I looked for a second in the opposite direction. Another cluster of what must also be Q1s or Q2s was approaching—it was beginning to look like, by dumb geographic luck, Kayla’s house was where the two groups would meet, assuming the ones on her neighbor’s lawn didn’t tarry long there, and—

  Boom! Boom, boom!

  The glass in front of us reverberated. Ryan let go of my hand and clutched her ears. I’d thought Kayla’s next-door neighbor had opened fire from his stoop; the reports were echoing, their source difficult to locate. But after a second I realized that the guy who lived across the street from Kayla had come out into the night, brandishing what, to my untrained eye, looked like a hunting rifle.

  I couldn’t see the results of the first two shots—but the third one had hit one of the teenagers, who was closer to the road, in the back, and he’d gone face-first into a lawn that this time of night must have been slick with dew.

  The flock dispersed, the four I could see running—two heading down the street, two more g
oing up, unthinkingly heading for the second mob.

  Boom!

  Another shot ruptured the night, and I saw a runner briefly splay all four limbs like a crippled starfish, then tumble forward to the asphalt. Kayla and Ryan had dropped below the windowsill, and they were scuttling out of the room, toward the relative safety of the back of the house. But I stood transfixed, stunned by it all. “Jim!” Kayla whisper-shouted. “Get down!”

  I dropped to the floor just as the rifle erupted again. A second car alarm went off, a harsh counterpoint to the one already wailing. I kept hoping for the sound of sirens, too—police swooping in to serve and protect—but all we heard the rest of that long night was honking horns, breaking glass, gunshots, and screams.

  —

  The cacophony finally abated by dawn. Kayla’s bedroom faced east, and the sun bloodied the horizon early this time of year. Ryan had joined us in bed.

  As we got up, Ryan announced emphatically that she didn’t want to go to day camp, which was good, actually: leaving here would have meant taking her by the dead bodies. A quick check out her bedroom window showed no sign of the cops or an ambulance having made it here yet; Kayla had finally gotten through to 911, but the harried operator had simply said the police would get there as soon as they could.

  And although an email from Jeff Cutler reported that no bomb had actually been found at the Light Source, I didn’t want Kayla returning to it. In the end, we decided to simply hole up in the house. Kayla called to make sure her mom and brother were all right (they were), and she phoned Victoria, who was likewise fine; Vic lived in an apartment building and had looked down on the roiling violence in her own neighborhood from the comparative safety of her eighth-floor balcony. She didn’t have beamtime until late today, and so said she’d come on over and work with Kayla from here if the roads were passable.

  I’d known Kayla was the woman for me when I first saw that she had bookcases in her dining room. She also had books on the top of toilets—I’d once had to move volumes by Feynman, Bohr, Rutherford, and Penrose when I’d needed to take the top off the tank after her downstairs one didn’t flush properly. But, in addition to books everywhere, she also had TV monitors in each room. I tuned the one in the kitchen to the CBC News Network as Ryan and I busied ourselves making breakfast while Kayla had a shower. I wasn’t going to make bacon or eggs, but toast with jam, bananas (yay!), and yogurt would do the trick.