Quantum Night

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “So you were a Q2 when you . . . when you did those things?”

  “I—no, no, I couldn’t be. As I said, psychopaths clearly do have inner voices; they’re plotting and scheming all the time. But I’ve been consulting with a memory expert at UW. He thinks the reason I can’t remember that entire period—not just the part where I was behaving normally but also the part where I was behaving badly—was because I was a p-zed throughout; no inner voice, so no verbal indexing of the memories.”

  “So there are two kinds of psychopaths?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “One group would be quantum psychopaths—Q2s—with two of the three microtubular electrons in superposition. The other group would be those with paralimbic damage. Oh, sure, there could be some overlap: some Q2s might happen to have paralimbic damage, but so might some Q1s and Q3s. Perhaps the psychological community has been conflating two separate things: Q2s, who are psychopathic at the quantum level, and hapless SOBs who have brain damage that leads them to doing terrible things.”

  “I bet that’s true,” said Kayla. “You know, you, me, Bob Hare, we’ve all run into that problem. Remember Hare’s Snakes in Suits, about psychopaths in the workplace? Try to tell the average Joe that psychopaths are everywhere and he balks, because to him the term exclusively means crazed killers like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The average guy sees a difference not just in degree but in kind between Paul Bernardo and a surgeon who can dispassionately open up somebody’s chest. And he doesn’t see the connection between Jeffrey Dahmer and an avaricious bank president. And yet we keep telling him that they’re the same thing. Well, maybe in this instance, the laypeople are right. Maybe we actually are talking about two distinct phenomena.” I shrugged a little. “It doesn’t help that psychopathy—of either kind, I suppose—can manifest itself in so many different ways, thanks to differing genetics, upbringings, socioeconomic conditions, childhood abuse or lack thereof, and so on. There are twenty traits on the Hare Checklist, right? Each of which can be absent, weakly present, or strongly present, and you need a score of thirty or above to be diagnosed a psychopath. That means there must be thousands of different flavors of psychopathy.”

  “Fourteen million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and fifteen.”

  I looked at her.

  “Math’s my thing,” she said, flashing a radiant smile.

  —

  Two hundred kilometers . . .

  —

  “Okay, but if Q1s are p-zeds, and Q2s are psychopaths,” I said, “what does quantum-superposition state three correspond to?”

  “Us?” said Kayla, throwing out an idea.

  “What do you mean by ‘us’?”

  “A person firing on all cylinders: a normal, fully conscious human being with the ability to reflect upon yourself, to think about whether what you’re doing is right or not. In other words a person with—”

  “A conscience,” I said.

  “Precisely. A conscience.”

  Could it be that simple, I wondered? An additive effect? Stage one, with one of three electrons in superposition: basic functioning, but no awareness.

  Stage two, with two of three electrons in superposition: the same basic functioning as before, but with self-awareness added on.

  And stage three, with all three electrons in superposition: everything from stage one and everything from stage two, plus an extra layer—a degree of thoughtful introspection, a conscience—added on top.

  “Consciousness with conscience . . .” I said.

  I saw Kayla’s profile, illuminated now only by the dashboard lights, nod. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh! And it could be abbreviated C-W-C, right?”

  In the dim light, I pantomimed writing the three letters in the air. “Conscious with conscience. I like that there’s a W in the middle, because there literally is a double you: two yous, the basic consciousness, and then a looking back on that consciousness, a self-reflection.”

  “C-W-C,” she said. “Bit of a mouthful.”

  I was reminded of Douglas Adams’s quip about WWW being the only abbreviation that had three times as many syllables as the thing it stood for. Still: “Only if you spell it out. If you say the initials as a word, C-W-C spells ‘quick.’ You know, like in bright or mentally agile: a quick mind, a quick wit . . .”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “It’s like the Norm MacDonald bit about the Fantastic Four.”

  She shot me a glance.

  “Reed Richards is giving them their new names: ‘Sue, you’ll be The Invisible Woman. And Johnny, how cool is this? You’ll be The Human Torch. And, me, let’s call me Mr. Fantastic—yeah, that’s it. Oh, and Ben, you’ll be The Thing.’ Old Ben wasn’t too happy about that. ‘You get Mr. Fantastic and I get The Thing?’”

  “Well,” said Kayla, “the p-zeds quite literally won’t care that we got a better name.”

  “And the psychos?”

  “Don’t tell them,” said Kayla. “Don’t make them angry. You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.”

  “Continued Marvel motif for the win,” I said, my heart beating faster.

  —

  Three hundred kilometers . . .

  —

  “But come on,” said Kayla. “I mean really. How could it possibly be true? How could most of the population be philosopher’s zombies?”

  “Well, it’s like the Neanderthals, right?” I said. “They had bigger brains than us. But they were nothing but p-zeds. They made no art. They didn’t bury their dead with grave goods—implying they had no concept of an afterlife. They didn’t go in for bodily adornment: no makeup or jewelry, except near the end of their reign, and then that might well have been simple mimicry of us.”

  “They made tools,” Kayla said.

  “So do chimps and crows. Doesn’t mean there’s anyone inside having an interior monologue. And remember, the Neanderthals made essentially the same tools for 200,000 years: the Mousterian industry. They chipped stone choppers exactly the same way, with no innovation, no improvement. Never once, as far as we can tell, when a flint nodule broke in an odd way that might have been better did a Neanderthal tilt his head to one side and say, ‘Hmmm . . . isn’t that interesting? And what if I did this . . .’ Instead, he discarded any such nodule and just kept doing the same old thing without really being awake.”

  “Caught knapping, so to speak.”

  I’d heard it as “Caught napping,” and she must have realized that. She took her hands off the steering wheel long enough to act out whacking two stones together. “You know, knapping—with a k.”

  “I can see why I fell for you all those years ago,” I said, grinning, as the headlamp from an approaching car bathed our faces in light . . .

  —

  Four hundred kilometers . . .

  —

  “The problem with leaving philosophical zombies to the philosophers is that they take things to the extreme,” I said. “Camp A—David Chalmers is in it—proposes a creature that is quark-for-quark identical to a normal person but, despite being precisely the same physically, has no consciousness, and yet somehow behaves indistinguishably from an entity that is conscious. It’s an argument designed to show that consciousness is something non-physical.

  “Camp B—Daniel Dennett is in it—says Chalmers and others who say zombie behavior would be indistinguishable from normal behavior are simply wrong in asserting that consciousness is something that can be separated out like that. Dennett would say consciousness is not a single thing, but a combination of capacities.”

  “Right,” said Kayla.

  “And Chalmers postulates one world entirely filled with fully conscious beings, and another, completely separate world entirely filled with zombies—‘Zombieworld,’ as he calls it.”

/>   “Okay.”

  “But I’m with Dennett; I’ve always had a problem with the Zombieworld postulate. For a thought experiment in a classroom, it’s fine. But in real life? In actuality? I just don’t see how you can get a viable society as complex as our own that consists solely of nonconscious entities. Without at least some conscious beings for the nonconscious ones to emulate, you’d get—well, you’d get Neanderthals: a stagnant civilization, with nothing changing. No, you need some truly conscious people; you need quicks. We Q3s come up with new ideas, and they’re emulated over and over by the Q1s.”

  “But if the Q1s are behaviorally different like that—however subtly—then they aren’t really philosopher’s zombies, not in the sense Chalmers means.”

  “Yeah, okay. So let’s make p-zed a full acronym to distinguish our zombies from his. P-Z-E-D: ‘philosophical zombies exhibiting differences.’ And ours really are philosophical, right? ‘Philosophy’ means ‘lover of wisdom,’ and our p-zeds do love wisdom, in the sense of being attracted to it because they don’t have any of their own. But when an idea comes along—”

  “You’re talking about memes,” said Kayla.

  I nodded. “I guess I am: ideas that propagate through society. It’s funny that the phrase ‘going viral’ has become synonymous with ‘meme.’ P-zeds of the kind we’re talking about have no conscious defense against ideas, no matter how stupid they are, and so are easily infected by them.”

  Kayla nodded. “That would explain the polling-credibility gap. You know how you constantly hear poll results that seem to imply that you are an outlier? You don’t know anyone who believes in creationism, yet the polls say the majority of Americans, at least, do. You don’t know anyone who believes in alien abductions, but the polls say most people do. Maybe those are cases of memes taking over and spreading through the p-zed population. Yes, there may be a little spillover into the Q2 or Q3 levels, but by definition it’s mostly Q1s that are susceptible to that sort of unthinking acceptance.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It’s the whole p-zed playbook: just say or do whatever the guy next to you is saying or doing. And, well, if a Q2 or a Q3 can plant a notion, no matter how abhorrent, it can spread.”

  I couldn’t see if Kayla was frowning, but it sounded like she was. “It still seems . . . I don’t know, a bit pat?”

  “Not really,” I said. “René Girard had it right. He argued that humans are basically imitative creatures. We don’t think for ourselves; rather, we just copy what others are doing. He was decades ahead of modern neuroscience. Long before mirror neurons were discovered, he intuited—from his studies of existing cultures and from reading ancient texts—that most of our behavior is imitative—‘psychological mimesis,’ he called it.”

  “Wasn’t Girard the guy who talked about societies always finding scapegoats?”

  “Exactly, which is more piling-on behavior, everybody converging on the same thought.” I looked out the side window at the flat, dark prairie under a sliver of moon. “We’re all hominidae; we’re all apes. Well, what’s the thing that apes have in common? It’s right there in the name we give to them—to us. Apes? We ape each other; we copy each other. Monkey see, monkey do. Great apes? Damn straight. We excel at imitation.”

  Kayla replied, “And we—or the p-zeds, at any rate—copy indiscriminately, without reflection. And if the person they’re copying is a psychopath, then their behavior ends up being de facto psychopathic, too.”

  “Exactly what happened in Nazi Germany,” I said. “The average—well, I was going to say the average Joe, but I suppose it was the average Hans over there—wasn’t a bad guy. But he and his fellow countrymen were great at aping, and the people they saw, assholes like Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels and Goering, people who were psychopathic monsters, became, quite literally, their role models. They copied their attitudes, their speech, their practices. Think of the Nuremberg rallies: all the p-zeds falling in line . . .”

  “Just like . . .”

  She trailed off, but I knew what she’d been about to say, and so I said it for her: “Just like my grandfather.” Of course, if he really had been Ernst the Enforcer, I suppose he was more likely a Q2—one of the hubs, like Devin Becker, around whom p-zeds clustered, the carcinogen that caused a mob of Q1s to metastasize.

  I stared through the windshield, the lights of Regina smoldering ahead.

  —

  Five hundred kilometers . . .

  18

  WE hit Regina around 10:30 P.M. By that point, we were exhausted, and I think we both looked wistfully at the motels flashing past as we entered the city. But Kayla had to be at work the next day, and so, after a brief stop for coffee and donuts to keep our blood sugar up, I took over the driving and got us the rest of the way to Saskatoon. Kayla’s daughter, Ryan, was staying over at Kayla’s mother’s place, and—

  And it was late, and, despite all our progress, Kayla did seem skittish being alone in her house with me, and so I said, “The couch looks great,” and I stretched out on it, put on the white-noise app on my iPhone, and was asleep within minutes.

  But, for once, I had very nice dreams.

  —

  Kayla and I made it to the Canadian Light Source a little after 9:00 A.M. I was amused to note that its street address, on the University of Saskatchewan campus, was 44 Innovation Boulevard; I suspect the other occupants of that street were hard-pressed to match the sort of things Kayla described as she gave me a tour. “A synchrotron,” she said as we walked along, “is an amazingly versatile tool; it’s the Swiss Army knife of particle accelerators. You can tune its output to do almost anything, adjusting energy range, wavelength, resolution, photon brightness, and beam size. The researchers here do work in fundamental physics, archeology, geology, botany, new fuel sources, materials science—you name it.”

  “And you said you tested your brother here? Was that unusual—a human subject?”

  “It used to be, but now we often treat people here. One of the beamlines is called BMIT—that stands for Biomedical Imaging and Therapy.”

  The synchrotron’s giant storage ring was in a vast square pit, surrounded on three sides by indoor balconies. The inner side of each balcony looked down on the ring; the outer side had doors leading into offices and labs. As we walked along, Kayla pointed out the various beamlines—straight projections at oblique angles coming off the ring. She must be used to the constant mechanical roar coming from below, but it was giving me a headache.

  “Hey, Kayla,” said a sandy-haired man approaching us; he was wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. “Welcome back.”

  She smiled warmly. “Hi, Jeff.”

  “How was Manitoba?”

  She glanced at me. “Enlightening.”

  Jeff looked amused. “Don’t forget those budget reports, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Kayla replied.

  “Who’s that?” I said, after he’d walked on.

  “Oh, sorry. That’s Jeff Cutler; he’s the acting director.”

  “Like Clint Eastwood?”

  “What? Oh. Ha-ha.”

  “He always dress like that?”

  “Actually, yes.” Kayla pointed across the great expanse of the synchrotron to the balcony on the opposite side. “People have to find him all the time; the Hawaiian shirts make him easy to spot. Vic has her own variation on that; she always wears black, head to toe, and—see! That’s her, over on the other side.”

  “You spotted her; how can she spot you?”

  “Easy,” said Kayla. “I’m the one who always has a cute guy in tow.” She winked, and we headed around two more sides of the square. Victoria was walking and texting; we got quite close before she looked up. “Hey, Kay,” she said, smiling.

  “Vic, this is Jim Marchuk.” Vic traded a look with Kayla—a suppressed grin. Evidently there’d been some discussion about whether Kayla would look up her old
boyfriend when she went to Winnipeg. “And Jim, this is Dr. Victoria Chen.”

  “Hello, Jim,” Vic said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  I gave the automatic “All good, I hope” response, and saw, in a quirking of Vic’s mouth, that it in fact hadn’t all been good; of course Kayla had told her friend about how it’d gone south all those years ago.

  “You guys all ready?” Vic said. “We’re lucky today; I get the beamline while the sun’s still up.” She glanced at the phone she was holding. “My beamtime starts in four minutes.”

  “Great,” said Kayla. Victoria turned around and began walking briskly. I was amused to see that she was using her hexagonal dosimeter as a hair clip to hold her long black hair in place. Kayla fell in beside her, and they chatted physics as we went along. I kept looking down at the bustling activity in the pit; it reminded me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

  When the last balcony came to an end, we headed down a staircase onto the synchrotron floor. There were other researchers here, some in lab coats, and Vic and Kayla greeted each one we passed.

  We quickly came to the SusyQ beamline, which had a gurney parked in front of it. Victoria had already received ethics approval and experimental permits for her ongoing work with humans here, but she still needed me to sign a waiver; I did so without bothering to read it. And then I lay down on my back, and, as Vic loomed in, I couldn’t help but notice that she was quite lovely. She put a strap—thick, off-white, the kind of material seat belts were made of—over my forehead to hold my head still. And then, with Kayla’s help, she rolled the gurney to the end of her beamline, a series of tubes that terminated in a conical emitter.

  I looked up at the ceiling, far above. Conduits and pipes hung from it, and there was a yellow crane unit depending from tracks that apparently allowed it to move backward and forward as well as left and right.

  Victoria said, “Okay.”