Triggers

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “I dunno,” said Kadeem. “It be cool, in a way. I never got to go to college. But now I got a college-level education, kinda: whatever you remember of your classes, I can remember. Don’t think geography would have been my choice of major, but I know things now I’d never have known.”

  “I guess,” said Susan. “Anyway, what can I do for you, Kadeem?”

  “Ma’am,” he said, “I got a favor to ask.”

  She tilted her head slightly, apparently noting that he’d dropped the overly familiar “Sue.”

  “Yes?”

  “The president, he’s just downstairs, right?”

  She looked for a moment like she was going to deny it—a reflex security concern—but there was no point; it had been mentioned on newscasts that he was on the second floor. She nodded.

  “I’d like to see him. Meet him. Y’know? Something to tell my grandkids about someday.”

  Kadeem had no doubt that Susan, or one of her associates, had already been through his service record in minute detail. They’d know it was exemplary, and that he even had a degree of security clearance because of the weapon systems he’d worked with. There was no reason at all to think he presented a risk.

  “He’s still quite weak. He’s in intensive care.”

  “I know, ma’am. And I know you’ve gotten to see him every day for years. But for a guy like me, I’ll never get another…” He stopped himself; saying “shot at this” would hardly be the right phrasing just now. “…chance. Would mean the world to me.”

  Agent Dawson didn’t reply at once, and so, Kadeem added, smiling as nicely as he could, “Please, ma’am.”

  He suspected she was weighing the new reality: that he’d know whether or not she actually tried to get him an audience; that she couldn’t get away with just saying she’d asked, but someone higher up had denied his request. Finally, she nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  SETH Jerrison had been fascinated by codes ever since he’d stumbled across Herbert S. Zim’s classic Codes and Secret Writing in his school library when he was ten. Zim had outlined all sorts of ways to conceal written communication: everything from language tricks such as Pig Latin and Oppish to making invisible ink with lemon juice. He’d also demonstrated lots of substitution-cipher systems; the tic-tac-toe code had long been one of Seth’s favorites.

  Shortly after reading the book, Seth had invented his own encryption system that he called the “13 Code.” He used it to share secret messages with his fourth-grade friend Duncan Ellerslie about Brenda Jackson, who they both agreed was the cutest girl in their class. One message he remembered sending looked like this:

  3-6-4

  ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

  Zim had recommended clustering letters into groups of five, lest word lengths provide clues to their meaning; he also suggested using all capitals, so that proper nouns or the pronoun I couldn’t be easily detected.

  The key to the 13 Code was to pick any three numbers that added up to 13, and put them at the beginning of the message. The recipient would then write down the letters of the alphabet in three paired columns, the lengths of which corresponded to the three numbers given. For the key of 3-6-4, the recipient would produce a decryption table that looked like this:

  And then he’d use that table to substitute the appropriate letters to yield the plain text of the message. Thus:

  ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

  would become:

  BREND ALIKE SMEBE TTERT HANYO U!

  or, with word spacing corrected and normal capitalization:

  Brenda likes me better than you!

  Hah! A perfect “Take that!” delivered by secret code! Seth had loved sending messages that only he and Duncan could read.

  But that was then. Now there were no secrets; there was no privacy. He couldn’t encrypt his thoughts and—

  Well, yes, he supposed they were encrypted, sort of, in the way he’d heard Singh talk about. Only bits and pieces were stored. In fact, it was sort of like the 13 Code: even after decoding the message, the recipient had to rebuild it by adding to it: guessing at where to put in the spaces, converting characters to lowercase except where it seemed sensible to retain the capitals. Whatever the person reading his memories would recall would be filtered through his or her own experiences, conjuring up something not quite the same as what Seth himself would—but it would be close enough to do damage.

  And the damage could be considerable. Whoever was sharing his memories knew what legislation he was planning to veto, what campaign promises he intended to break, what he really thought of the Speaker of the House.

  And yet those things were small, in so many ways. But if news about Operation Counterpunch got out early, there might be enormous American casualties. He shifted his head slightly—it was painful to do so—and looked at the large windows. The ever-present nurse was seated by them, and beyond her, through the glass—which he’d now been told had been reinforced with a bulletproof layer—he saw a plume of gray smoke. That smoke contained the ashes of his clothes, his books, all his wife’s things, and priceless mementos of US history: the Resolute desk, centuries-old oil paintings, the artifacts in the Lincoln bedroom, and more.

  He wasn’t a monster; none of those who had put Counterpunch together were. They were just people—husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters—who had had enough. Even before today’s terrorist attack, they’d had enough.

  He remembered a joke that had gone around the Internet in the fall of 2001: “What’s the difference between Osama bin Laden and Santa Claus?” And the answer, which had seemed so funny back then when people had been forwarding the joke endlessly: “Come Christmas, Santa Claus will still be here.”

  But bin Laden had survived an entire decade. Indeed, as today’s events had proved, it was easier to put a bullet in the president of the United States than it was to take out a religious zealot, especially when he had powerful allies.

  Seth had taught history for twenty years. The US had had a chance—a brief window—during which it could have pre-emptively struck the Soviet Union, wiping it from the map. The governments of the day—JFK’s regime, and then Johnson’s—hadn’t had the balls. And so the US had instead endured decades of living in fear of the Soviets’ attacking first, and had spent trillions—trillions!—stockpiling weapons.

  And it was the same damn thing again.

  San Francisco.

  Philadelphia.

  Chicago.

  And now Washington.

  A whole nation—a whole planet—living in fear.

  He watched the smoke rise and swirl.

  CHAPTER 18

  SUSAN finished another interview, speaking with Dora Hennessey, the woman who’d come here to give her father a kidney. Sue took a bathroom break, then stopped by Singh’s lab, which is where he was conducting his interviews. A squat white man was leaving just as Susan arrived. “Any thoughts about how to sever the links?” she asked Singh.

  “I don’t even know what caused them,” the Canadian replied. “I mean, memory is chemical. It’s based on molecules squirting across the synaptic cleft from one neuron to the next. How a memory could leap many meters is beyond me.” He shook his head. “That’s why most people with scientific training think claims of telepathy must be junk: there’s nothing your brain puts out that can be read at a distance.”

  “What about brain waves?” asked Susan, sitting on the experimental chair next to the articulated stand holding up the geodesic sphere.

  “There aren’t any brain waves in the sense you’re thinking,” Singh said. “The brain doesn’t radiate electromagnetic signals the way, say, a Wi-Fi source or radio broadcaster does. And, even if it did, the signals would be weak, and get weaker, as all signals do, over distance—usually according to the inverse-square law. By the time a signal has traveled three times as far away, it’s only got one-ninth the power. Before you knew it, any signal would be lost in the background noise of all the other signal
s.”

  “Then what are EEGs recording, if not brain waves?”

  “Well, they are recording brain waves—but, like I said, the name gives the wrong idea. See, the brain contains billions of neurons. When one neuron gets a signal from a neighbor, it can respond by releasing ions—which are charged atoms, right?”

  Susan nodded.

  Singh went on. “Ions with like charges repel each other, and when a bunch of neighboring neurons release a bunch of similarly charged ions, they all push each other away, creating a physical wave—an undulation—in the material of the brain, which has the consistency of pudding. EEGs measure those actual waves bumping against the skull.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, you see, there’s no way to read brain waves across a large spatial gap.”

  “Your mother’s name is Gurneet and your father’s is Manveer.”

  Singh tipped his head in a small sign of concession. “I admit I have no explanation for your knowing that.”

  “So, I’m what, six feet from you?”

  “About two meters, yes.”

  “And this square-inverse law you mentioned—”

  “Inverse-square.”

  “If I went to the far end of the building, the signal should drop off to almost nothing, right?”

  “The building is—I don’t know—a hundred meters on its longest side perhaps. So, yes, if we were as far apart as we could get in this building, the signal strength would be one over one hundred squared, or one one-ten-thousandth as strong, assuming there is a signal, and assuming it is broadcast in all directions.”

  “What if it isn’t? What if the linkage is just that—a link, like, you know, a line drawn between you and me?”

  Singh stood up and spun in a circle. “And did the link maintain itself during that? What mechanism would there be to keep a beam focused from my head to yours, or from yours to Private Adams’s? It’s inconceivable.”

  “All right. Still, let’s test it. I’m going to go as far from you as I can without leaving the building, and we’ll see if the signal, um…attenuates? Is that the right word?”

  “Yes.”

  Susan left the lab and headed down the long corridor, passing patients on gurneys, doctors, nurses, and other people—several of whom tried to question her about how much longer the lockdown was going to last. She made it to the far end of the building as quickly as she could—and then, for good measure, she entered the stairwell and headed up to the sixth floor, which was the highest level.

  She found a janitor there in a blue uniform, pushing a mop. “You!” Susan said, pointing at him. “Name a topic.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A topic—something, anything—to think about.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Oh, come on, man! It’s not that hard a question. Any topic.”

  “Umm, like, um, baseball, do you mean?”

  “Baseball! Fine. Thank you!” And then she turned her back on the no-doubt-bewildered man, closed her eyes, and concentrated on the first time she’d ever seen a baseball game live, and…

  And a memory of her father taking her to Dodger Stadium came to her. She’d spilled her Pepsi all over him, and he’d laughed it off and squirted water at her. She shook her head, clearing her own memory, and tried to summon another, and—

  And she was watching the Toronto Blue Jays play, and from a private box, something she herself had never done.

  More details: others in the booth. Sikhs, remembered not because they were Sikhs but because the colors of their individual turbans had been noted; Sue had previously had no idea that such choices were individual fashion statements. A party, a celebration of…of…

  Ah, yes. Of Ranjip’s brother’s eighteenth birthday, which—yes—had actually been the day before, but there’d been no game that day. A wonderful memory, a happy memory—and no sense at all that it was more difficult to access or recall than Singh’s memories had been when they’d been much closer together. She didn’t have to strain, didn’t have to cock an ear as if listening to something faint, didn’t have to do anything differently. It just came to her when she thought about it, as easily as when she’d been right next to Singh.

  She headed along the sixth-floor corridor until she got to the stairwell near the elevator station, then went down to three.

  Professor Singh was still in his lab. “The first baseball game you saw live was in Toronto, wasn’t it?” asked Susan. “For your brother’s eighteenth birthday? Your dad rented a private box at the SkyDome.”

  Singh nodded. “Although they don’t call it that anymore. It’s the Rogers Centre now.”

  “You remember it as the SkyDome.”

  “No doubt.” He blinked. “So you had no trouble reading my memories, even from far away?”

  “None.”

  “I don’t understand that. There should have been attenuation, unless…”

  “Yes?”

  He swiveled his chair, turning his back on his computer. “It’s…no. No, it can’t be that.”

  “What?”

  Singh thought for a moment, then, seemingly out of the blue, said, “Do you ever watch Saturday Night Live?”

  “Not since I was a teenager.”

  “Remember when Mike Myers used to be on? He’d play a Jewish woman named Linda Richman, who had a call-in talk show. When she got emotional, she’d put her hand on her chest, and say, ‘I’m all verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic.’ And then she’d say something like, ‘The Civil War was neither civil nor a war—discuss.’”

  “No, I don’t remember that. Oh, wait—um, yes, now I do.”

  Singh smiled. “Exactly.”

  “I think the one when the character said, ‘The peanut is neither a pea nor a nut’ was funnier.”

  Singh nodded slightly. “Perhaps. But the point is, if I tell you to remember something that you don’t actually have memories of, but I do, you remember it, too. So, let me give you a topic—but don’t discuss it. Think about it; recall it. Okay?”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “Quantum entanglement,” he said.

  Her first impulse was to pull a Linda Richman and say, “…is neither quantum nor entangled,” but she didn’t even know if that made sense, and—

  And it didn’t make sense. Quantum entanglement was a property of quantum mechanics, and it did involve entangling things, and—

  And it was weird. She’d never heard of anything like it. When pairs of particles are created simultaneously under the right circumstances, they can become linked in such a way that they continue to be connected no matter how far apart they become.

  “Wow,” said Susan.

  “Wow indeed,” said Ranjip. “Okay. Another topic—well, not really; it’s the same topic, but a different way of looking at it. Ready?”

  Susan nodded.

  “Spooky action at a distance,” Ranjip said.

  Susan was startled that she knew this was something Einstein had said. And, yes, it was spooky. Change the spin of one entangled particle, and the spin of the other changes instantaneously; they are bound together in an almost magical way—again, no matter how far apart they get from each other.

  “Got it,” said Susan, and then she surprised herself by asking a question. “But if it’s quantum entanglement, why aren’t the linkages symmetrical? I mean, if A can read B, why can’t B read A?”

  “The linkages probably are symmetrical,” Singh replied. “That is, either A or B could change any specific shared memory for both of them—the shared memories are entangled, and changes to them at one location would change them at both. But symmetry doesn’t imply reciprocity. A and B have symmetrically shared memories that happen to have originally belonged to A. Meanwhile, B and C have symmetrically shared memories that happened to originally belong to B. And so on.”

  “Ah,” said Susan. “I guess.”

  “Okay,” said Singh. “New topic, sort of: Penrose and Hameroff.”

  And that ca
me to her, too: physicist Roger Penrose—a sometimes-collaborator with Stephen Hawking—and the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff had proposed that human consciousness was quantum mechanical in nature.

  It was astonishing: to know something so complex and yet never have even heard of it before. It wasn’t like university lectures were running through her head at high speed, and it wasn’t like playing Trivial Pursuit, where she had to dig deeply to find the answers; these were things that Singh knew well, and so she knew them well, too, and they came effortlessly to mind as soon as he said the trigger words.

  “Got it,” she said again.

  “Okay, new topic: the design of my apparatus.”

  And she now knew all about that, too: a device that used tuned lasers—which emitted photons, which were a type of particle that could indeed be entangled—to selectively excite neurons. His design actually displaced the photons that were already there and substituted new ones.

  Then…

  “Cytoskeleton.”

  And:

  “Microtubule.”

  And:

  “Bose-Einstein condensate.”

  She shook her head, as if somehow that would get the pieces to sift out of the swirling jumble they were in and fall into place. And, after a moment, they did. “And this is legit?” Susan said at last.

  “Well, it’s a legitimate theory,” replied Singh. “Penrose and Hameroff say the actual seat of consciousness, which, of course, must somehow interact with memory, is not in the chemical synapses but rather in quantum effects in the microtubules of the cytoskeleton—the internal scaffolding—of brain cells. Their theory has its passionate advocates—and passionate detractors. But if we are dealing with quantum entanglement, that could explain why the linkages don’t weaken over distance.”

  “And does it suggest how to break them?” asked Susan.

  “Well, um, no—no, I don’t have a clue how to do that. Entanglement is a tricky thing, and normally it’s quite fragile. But I’ll keep trying to find the answer.”

  “Do that,” Susan said.