Quantum Night

  “And if they continued to index visually, would that make them all autistic?”

  “I doubt it,” Namboothiri said. “Visual memory is a correlate of, but not, I suspect, the cause of, autism. It’s certainly possible to have a visual memory but nonetheless compose thoughts in words; otherwise, Temple Grandin wouldn’t have been able to write her books.”

  “Okay, thanks. Umm, one more question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You’ve seen my MRIs—the new one, and the old one with the paralimbic damage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think I’ve recovered from that?”

  “Nothing in the sessions we’ve had has given me any indication that you’re any kind of crazed psychopath, Jim—at least, not anymore.”

  “Okay, thanks.” I got up to leave.

  “That’s it? You said it was urgent.”

  “It is,” I said, heading for the door.

  —

  As was his habit, Menno stood with the door to his apartment open, waiting for me. I saw Pax nudge him in the thigh to let him know I was approaching. “Good morning, Padawan. Won’t you come in?”

  “Thanks.” I entered, the silver-and-cyan furniture looking gold and green in the sunlight.

  While Menno got us coffee—it was fascinating watching him do so by touch—I explained the Q1-Q2-Q3 taxonomy to him, told him about the quantum tuning fork and how it had rebooted Travis Huron, told him what Vic and Kayla had discovered about the collective entanglement of humanity, and told him how if we could shift one person, then everybody else would also level up or down. I also told him what Vic had discovered: we could do it, perhaps, but not without likely frying the brain of the person we used as the subject. It took three cups apiece to get through it all, with Menno asking the kinds of thoughtful, probing questions I knew he would.

  “So?” I said when I was done.

  “Let me read you something,” he said. He went into the back and brought out a piece of stiff caramel-colored paper. I was wondering how he was going to read it, but when he set it on the glass-topped table in front of him, I saw the Braille bumps. “This is what Stanley Milgram said about his obedience-to-authority experiments. I printed it out years ago, in the aftermath of Project Lucidity.” He ran an index finger across the paper. “‘Several of these experiments, it seems to me, are just about on the borderline of what ethically can and cannot be done with human subjects. Some critics may feel at times they go beyond acceptable limits. These are matters that only the community’—by which he meant the psychology community—‘can decide on, and if a ballot were held, I am not altogether certain which way I would cast my vote.’”

  “Message, Spock?” I said, folding my arms in front of my chest.

  “One that at least one of us is conscious of,” Menno replied.

  “But,” I said, “we can make the world a better place.” Menno was quiet. Pax watched him patiently. I watched him, too, but without her equanimity. “Damn it, Menno,” I said at last. “You know this is the right thing to do.”

  He began slowly, doling out words with care. “It’s been hard sometimes being your friend and colleague, all these years. At first I thought it was just anger over what you’d done to me and Dom, or the fact that you were the one reminder of what I knew about the hordes who lacked inner voices, since you were the only person from Project Lucidity still in my face after all these years. But it wasn’t anything as grandiose as that.”

  He paused and took a sip of coffee. “Who taught you about utilitarianism? Who introduced you—figuratively and literally—to Peter Singer? I did. I said, ‘Here, Jim, read this, I think you’ll like it.’ And you did. You embraced it. I talked the talk, but you walked the walk. Remember the first time you came here and confronted me about the interview videos? You know what I was thinking? Not that the jig is up, not the cat is out of the bag, not even that finally I had someone to talk to about the findings Dom and I had made. No, nothing like that. My first thought was, oh, shit, it’s Jim. And he’s judging me. He knows how much I make, he knows how much I can afford to give to charity, but instead I’m living in a million-dollar apartment, and I’m blind, for Christ’s sake, and still hanging expensive art on my walls.”

  “The Emily Carr prints, you mean?”

  “They’re not prints.”

  My gaze went to them: Post-Impressionist oil paintings of coastal rain forests in British Columbia. “Oh.”

  “The four of them together cost $42,000, back in 1996.” He gestured toward his kitchen. “And you don’t want to know how much the totem poles cost. I’ve been blind for twenty years—I get zero direct pleasure out of the paintings—but I like having them. I know the calculations Peter Singer has done as well as you do. Less than a thousand dollars will make sure a starving African child lives to adulthood: food, vaccinations, basic health care, even a primary education—just a thousand bucks. I could have saved over forty kids for the money I spent on those paintings. And you know what I told myself? Well, the paintings are appreciating in value, right? And I don’t have any kids; I can leave my whole estate to charity, so when I’m gone, they’ll be sold, and think of all the children that can be saved then! Yup, I was planning for there to be needy children decades down the road as a way of assuaging my conscience about doing nothing to help the ones who exist now. But you! How much did you give to charity last year?”

  “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.”

  46

  MENNO 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.”