The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Point Machine put a frog in the box.

  And here it was, the stepping-off point – a view into the implicate, where objective and subjective might be experimentally defined.

  I nodded to Satish. “Fire the gun.”

  He hit the switch and the machine hummed. I watched the screen. I closed my eyes, felt my heart beating in my chest. Inside the box, I knew a light had come on for one of the two detectors; I knew the frog had seen it. But when I opened my eyes, the interference pattern still showed on the screen. The frog hadn’t changed it at all.

  “Again,” I told Satish.

  Satish fired the gun again. Again. Again.

  Point Machine looked at me. “Well?”

  “There’s still an interference pattern. The probability wave didn’t collapse.”

  “What does that mean?” Joy asked.

  “It means we try a different frog.”

  We tried six. None changed the result.

  “They’re part of the indeterminate system,” Satish said.

  I was watching the screen closely, and the interference pattern vanished. I was about to shout, but when I looked up, I saw Point Machine peeking into the box.

  “You looked,” I said.

  “I was just making sure the light worked.”

  “I could tell.”

  We tried every frog in his lab. Then we tried the salamanders.

  “Maybe it’s just amphibians,” he said.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “How is it that we affect the system, but frogs and salamanders can’t?”

  “Maybe it’s our eyes,” Point Machine said. “It has to be the eyes – coherence effects in the retinal rod-rhopsin molecules themselves.”

  “Why would that matter?”

  “Our optic nerve cells can only conduct measured information to the visual cortex; eyes are just another detector.”

  “Can I try?” Joy interrupted.

  I nodded. We ran the experiment again, this time with Joy’s empty eyes pointed at the box. Again, nothing.

  The next morning, Point Machine met Satish and me in the parking lot before work. We climbed into my car and drove to the mall.

  We went to a pet store.

  I bought three mice, a canary, a turtle, and a squish-faced Boston terrier puppy. The sales clerk stared at us.

  “You pet lovers, huh?” He looked suspiciously at Satish and Point Machine.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Pets.”

  The drive back was quiet, punctuated only by the occasional whining of the puppy.

  Point Machine broke the silence. “Perhaps it takes a more complex nervous system.”

  “That shouldn’t matter,” Satish said. “Life is life. Real is real.”

  I gripped the steering wheel. “What’s the difference between mind and brain?”

  “Semantics,” said Point Machine. “Different names for the same idea.”

  Satish regarded us. “Brain is hardware,” he said. “Mind is software.”

  The Massachusetts landscape whipped past the car’s windows, a wall of ruined hillside on our right – huge, dark stone like the bones of the earth. A compound fracture of the land. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Back at the lab, we started with the turtle. Then the mice, then the canary, which escaped, and flew to sit atop a filing cabinet. None of them collapsed the wave.

  The Boston terrier looked at us, google-eyed.

  “Are its eyes supposed to look like that?” Satish said. “In different directions?”

  I put the puppy in the box. “It’s the breed, I think. But all it has to do is sense the light. Either eye will do.” I looked down at man’s best friend, our companion through the millennia, and harbored secret hope. This one, I told myself. This species, certainly, of all of them. Because who hasn’t looked into the eyes of a dog and not sensed something looking back.

  The puppy whined in the box. Satish ran the experiment. I watched the screen.

  Nothing. There was no change at all.

  That night I drove to Joy’s. She answered the door. Waited for me to speak.

  “You mentioned coffee?”

  She smiled, and there was another moment when I felt sure she saw me.

  Hours later, in the darkness, I spoke. “It’s time for me to go.”

  She ran a hand along my bare spine.

  “Time,” she whispered. “There is no such beast. Only now. And now.” She put her lips again on my skin. “And now.”

  The next day, I had James come by the lab.

  “You’ve made a finding?” he asked.

  “We have.”

  James watched us run the experiment. He looked in the box. He collapsed the wave function himself.

  Then we put the puppy in the box and ran the experiment again. We showed him the interference pattern.

  “Why didn’t it work?” he asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “But what’s different?”

  “Only one thing. The observer.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “So far, none of the animals we’ve tested have been able to alter the quantum system.”

  He brought his hand to his chin. His brow furrowed. He was silent for a long time, looking at the setup. “Holy shit,” he said finally.

  “Yeah,” Point Machine said.

  I stepped forward. “We want to do more tests. Work our way up through every phylum, class, and order. Primates being of particular interest, because of their evolutionary connection to us.”

  “As much as you want,” he said. “As much funding as you want.”

  It took ten days to arrange. We worked in conjunction with the Boston Zoo.

  Transporting large numbers of animals can be a logistical nightmare, so it was decided that it would be easier to bring the lab to the zoo than to bring the zoo to the lab. Vans were hired. Technicians were assigned. Point Machine put his own research on hold and assigned a technician to feed his amphibians in his absence. Satish’s research also went on hiatus. “It seems suddenly less interesting,” he said.

  James attended the experiment on the first day. We set up in one of the new exhibits under construction – a green, high-ceilinged room that would one day house muntjac. For now, though, it would house scientists. Satish worked the electronics. Point Machine liaisoned with the zoo staff. I built a bigger wooden box.

  The zoo staff didn’t seem particularly inclined to cooperate until the size of Hansen’s charitable donation was explained to them by the zoo superintendent. After that, they were very helpful.

  The following Monday we started the experiment. We worked our way through representatives of several mammal lineages: Marsupialia, Afrotheria, and the last two evolutionary holdouts of Monotremata – the platypus and the echidna. The next day we tested species from Xenarthra, and Laurasiatheria. The fourth day, we tackled Euarchontoglires. None of them collapsed the wave function; none carried the spotlight. On the fifth day, we started on the primates.

  We began with the primates most distantly related to humans.

  We tested lemuriforms and New World monkeys. Then Old World monkeys. Finally, we moved to the anthropoid apes. On the sixth day, we did the chimps.

  “There are actually two species,” Point Machine told us. “Pan paniscus, commonly called the bonobo, and Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee. They’re congruent species, so similar in appearance that by the time scientists caught on in the 1930s, they’d already been hopelessly mixed in captivity.” Zoo staff maneuvered two juveniles into the room, holding them by their hands. “But during World War Two, we found a way to separate them again,” Point Machine continued. “It happened at a zoo outside Hellabrunn, Germany. A bombing leveled most of the town but, by some fluke, left the zoo intact. Or most of it, anyway. When the zookeepers returned, they expected to find their chimps alive and well. Instead, they found dozens of them dead, lying in undamaged cages. Only the common chimps had survived. The Bonobos had all d
ied of fright.”

  We tested both species. The machine hummed. We double-checked the results, then triple-checked, and the interference pattern did not budge. Even chimps didn’t cause wave function collapse.

  “We’re alone,” I said. “Totally alone.”

  Later that night, Point Machine paced the lab. “It’s like tracing any characteristic,” he said. “You look for homology in sister taxa. You organize clades, catalogue synapomorphies, identify the outgroup.”

  “And who is the outgroup?”

  “Who do you think?” Point Machine stopped pacing. “The ability to cause wave function collapse is apparently a derived characteristic that arose uniquely in our species at some point in the last several million years.”

  “And before that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Before that Earth just stood there as so much un-collapsed reality? What, waiting for us to show up?”

  Writing up the paper took several days. I signed Satish and Point Machine as coauthors.

  Species and Quantum Wave function Collapse.

  Eric Argus, Satish Gupta, Mi Chang. Hansen Labs, Boston MA.

  ABSTRACT

  Multiple studies have revealed the default state of all quantum systems to be a superposition of both collapsed and un-collapsed probability wave forms. It has long been known that subjective observation is a primary requirement for wave function collapse. The goal of this study was to identify the higher-order taxa capable of inciting wave function collapse by act of observation and to develop a phylogenetic tree to clarify the relationships between these major animal phyla. Species incapable of wave function collapse can be considered part of the larger indeterminate system. The study was carried out at the Boston Zoo on multiple orders of mammalia. Here we report that humans were the only species tested which proved capable of exerting wave function collapse onto the background superposition of states, and indeed, this ability appears to be a uniquely derived human characteristic. This ability most likely arose sometime in the last six million years after the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

  James read the abstract. He came to my office.

  “But what do the results mean?”

  “They mean whatever you think they mean.”

  Things moved fast after that. The paper was published in The Journal of Quantum Mechanics, and the phone started ringing. There were requests for interviews, peer review, and a dozen labs started replication trials. It was the interpretations that got crazy though. I stayed away from interpretations. I dealt with the facts. I turned down the interviews.

  Satish worked on perfecting the test itself. He worked on downsizing it, minimizing it, digitizing it. Turning it into a product. It became the Hansen double-slit, and when he was done, it was the size of a loaf of bread – with an easy indicator light and small, efficient output. Green for “yes,” and red for “no.” I wonder if he knew then. I wonder if he already suspected what they’d use it for.

  “It doesn’t matter what is known,” he said. He touched the box. “It’s about what is knowable.”

  He abandoned his gate arrays. Above his work station I found a quote taped to the wall, torn from an old book.

  Can animals be just a superior race of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence?

  —Thomas Henry

  Huxley, 1859

  In the spring, a medical doctor named Robbins made his interest in the project known through a series of carefully worded letters.

  The letters turned into phone calls. The voices on the other end belonged to lawyers, the kind that come from deep pockets. Robbins worked for a consortium with a vested interest in determining, once and for all, exactly when consciousness first arises during human fetal development.

  Hansen Labs turned him down flat until the offer grew a seventh figure.

  James came to me. “He wants you there.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Robbins asked for you specifically.”

  “I don’t give a damn. I don’t want any part of it, and you can fire me if you want to.”

  James grew a weary smile. “Fire you? If I fired you, my bosses would fire me. And then hire you back. Probably with a raise.” He sighed. “This guy Robbins is a real prick, do you know that?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen him on TV.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

  “Yeah, I know that, too.”

  Hansen provided technicians for the testing. The week before the tests were going to occur, I got the call. I’d been expecting it. Robbins himself.

  “Are you sure we can’t get you to come?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “If the issue is monetary, I can assure you—”

  “It’s not.”

  There was a pause on the line. “I understand,” he said. “All the same, I wanted to personally thank you. It’s a great thing you’ve accomplished. Your work is going to save a lot of lives.”

  I was silent. “How did you get the mothers?”

  “They’re committed volunteers, each one. Special women. We’re a large, national congregation, and we were able to find several volunteers from each trimester of pregnancy – though I don’t expect we’ll need more than the first one to prove the age at which a baby is ensouled. Our earliest mother is only a few weeks along.”

  I spoke the next words slowly. “You’re fine with them taking the risk?”

  “We have a whole staff of doctors attending, and medical experts have already determined that the procedure carries no more risk than amniocentesis. The diode inserted into the amniotic fluid will be no larger than a needle.”

  “One thing I never understood about this . . . a fetus’s eyes are closed.”

  “I prefer the word baby,” he said, voice gone tight. “A baby’s eyelids are very thin, and the diode is very bright. We have no doubt they’ll be able to sense it. Then we have merely to note wave function collapse, and we’ll finally have the proof we need to change the law and put a stop to the plague of abortions that has swept across this land.”

  I put the phone down. Looked at it. Plague of abortions.

  There were men like him in science, too – ones who had all the answers. Fanaticism, applied to any facet of an issue, has always seemed dangerous to me. I picked up the phone again. “You think it’s as simple as that?”

  “I do. When is a human life a human life? That is always what this particular argument has been about, has it not? Now we’ll finally be able to prove that abortion is murder, and who could argue? I sense that you don’t like me very much.”

  “I like you fine. But there’s an old saying, ‘Never trust a man with only one book.’ ”

  “One book is all a man needs if it’s the right book.”

  “Have you considered what you’ll do if you’re proven wrong?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if wave function collapse doesn’t occur until the ninth month? Or the magical moment of birth? Will you change your mind?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I guess now we find out, don’t we.”

  The night before the experiment, I called Point Machine. It was call or drink. And I didn’t want to drink. Because I knew if I drank again, even a single sip, I’d never stop. Not ever.

  He picked up on the fifth ring. Faraway voice.

  “What’s going to happen tomorrow?” I asked.

  There was a long pause. Long enough that I wondered if he’d heard me. “Not sure,” he said. The voice on the other end was coarse and weary. It was a voice that hadn’t been sleeping well. “Entogeny reflects phylogeny,” he said. “Look early enough in gestation and we’ve got gills, a tail, the roots of the whole animal kingdom. You climb the phylogenetic tree as the fetus develops, and the newer characteristics, the things that make us human, ge
t tacked on last. What Robbins is testing for is only found in humans, so my gut tells me he’s wrong, and wave collapse comes late. Real late.”

  “You think it works that way?”

  “I have no idea how it works.”

  The day of the experiment came and went.

  The first hint that something went wrong came in the form of silence. Silence from the Robbins group. Silence in the media. No press conferences. No TV interviews. Just silence.

  The days turned to weeks.

  Finally, a terse statement was issued by the group which called their results inconclusive. Robbins came out a few days later, saying bluntly that there had been a failure in the mechanism of the tests.

  The truth was something stranger, of course. And of course, that came out later, too.

  The truth was that some of the fetuses did pass the test. Just like Robbins hoped. Some did trigger wave function collapse.

  But others didn’t.

  And gestational age had nothing to do with it.

  Two months later, I received the call in the middle of the night. “We found one in New York.” It was Satish.

  “What?” I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the words.

  “A boy. Nine years old. He didn’t collapse the wave function.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing. He’s normal. Normal vision, normal intelligence. We tested him five times, but the interference pattern didn’t budge.”

  “What happened when you told him?”

  “We didn’t tell him. He stood there staring at us.”

  “Staring?”

  “It was like he already knew. Like he knew the whole time it wouldn’t work.”

  Summer turned to fall. The testing continued.

  Satish traveled the country, searching for that elusive, perfect cross-section and a sample size large enough to prove significance. He collected data points, faxed copies back to the lab for safekeeping.

  In the end, it turned out there were others. Others who couldn’t collapse the wave function – a certain consistent percentage of the population who looked like us, and acted like us, but lacked this fundamental quality of humanity. Though Satish was careful not to use the term “soul” in his late night phone calls, we heard it in the gaps between the words. We heard it in the things he didn’t say.