Lewis Perdue: Perfect killer

Maybe it had been the same with Talmadge's wife and her Alzheimer's. I had certainly made my best case about this to the juries who had considered the charges against Braxton and Talmadge, but doubts still lingered in my mind.

The courts had remanded Talmadge to the high-security wing of Pacific Hills in Malibu so Flowers and I could continue to study him. Braxton's expensive legal team had got him off with a temporary-insanity plea that has allowed him to live as a mostly free man other than for a court-ordered monitoring of his medication.

Talmadge lived longer than anyone expected before the cancer got him.

Harper's notes had been seized by Laura LaHaye's office and made unavailable to us. The Xantaeus fiasco had been embarrassing but not a career killer for her, Greg McGovern, and the nondepleting-neurotrop team at Defense Therapeutics. While the patches had been withdrawn, the research continued because being first to have it was too important to the Pentagon.

Dan Gabriel had gone back to college at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and was studying marine biology. In his spare time, he volunteered for an organization he had founded that warned the public about the dangers of what had become known as "the chemical soldier." I don't think anyone has paid much attention to them, and for that we will suffer one day.

Jack Kilgore got a second star and a desk in the Pentagon, which he quickly found no fun at all. He took his retirement money and bought a river-rafting outfitter on the Rogue River in Oregon. Through some legal maneuvering by Jasmine, which I still do not completely understand, and a few phone calls that Kilgore placed before his retirement, Rex somehow managed to find his way back to a completely legal life, which disappointed him to no end.

The same calls and legal maneuvering led to a quiet shake-up in the Homeland Security administration and a score of courts-martial. Those, along with testimony from people like John Myers and the captured security-camera streams that Tyrone had snagged in Napa got Jasmine and me a boatload of apologies and our total exoneration.

Rex gave up contracting and with his new legitimacy acquired a federal firearms license and opened a wildly profitable shooting range near the Ross Barnett Reservoir, where people come to shoot machine guns of every type. The 20mm electric Gatling cannon is a perennial favorite.

I wear one of his "Why waltz when you can rock and roll" T-shirts every chance I get. Every now and then he manages to arrange for someone to show up with even bigger stuff they use to blow up old cars and trucks. The armed forces recruiters usually show up those days as well. He spends a lot of time denying that he doesn't have a shady past. I still wonder about that and he's never said a word to me.

Rex helped me take care of paying people back for the equipment we stole, for repairing the old helicopter, and with a nice payment to the terrified Hispanic man in the wine delivery truck who eventually accepted my personal apology as well.

The drive up I-55 was always boring, so I thought about all these things until my eyelids closed, inserting me into a recurring dream I always tried to remember. At the beginning, I soared through a jungle of colorful knots and vines racing through a glowing matrix that ebbed, flowed, and danced in time with the movement of each luminescent line. The knots were especially brilliant where they twisted about each other, then grew dimmer as the lines emerged from the knot and hurtled away. Some of the particles made solitary lines; some appeared suddenly; others disappeared. Still others were bound and woven like the great sheaves of a suspension bridge.

I sensed these were the world lines of every quantum ever created. In quantum physics, every particle has a world line in space-time. Even a particle at rest still races through the fourth dimension of time.

Those lines that appeared and disappeared represented the scientifically confirmed phenomenon of particles that winked in and out of existence even in a vacuum.

Then I somehow knew the sheaves were things, objects, animals, where matter held together. Some of the sheaves threw off great skeins of knots that burned brightly and altered the matrix in vast and awesome ways. I looked directly behind me and saw the lines I threw off like a ship's wake, offering turbulent fractal patterns in the matrix.

Scientists working on quantum computers can encode difficult computations by weaving the world lines of quantum particles in a specific way. The trick came from the use of von Neumann algebras in a way described by Berkeley mathematician Vaughn Jones back in 1987. The idea was picked up by string theorist Edward Whitten at Princeton and Microsoft Research fellows Michael Freedman and Alexei Kitaev, who figured out if you braided the world lines of subatomic particles, not only would they work for quantum computation, but they were also incredibly stable, which solved a big problem-decoherence-that required incredibly low, liquid-helium-like temperatures for operation.

The epiphany hit me then and I recognized the knots as thoughts and memories. The glowing matrix was space-time. All of the lines made some change in space-time, but the biggest alterations were the ones made by the knots.

Something shook me.

The lines and the matrix vanished.

I struggled to hold on to the epiphany: the quantum knots and their stability were how brain cells might maintain the quantum coherence necessary for consciousness to exist, and that was how we all connected to space-time. I had it!

Jasmine gently shook me awake. My heart fell as I opened my eyes and the epiphany slipped away. Again.

"What's wrong?" Jasmine read the look on my face.

"The big dream again."

"Do you remember it?"

I shook my head.

"Don't worry, you'll have it again."

Jasmine hugged me as Quincy made the turn into the Itta Bena Cemetery. Ahead of us sat the same old car and the same old preacher who'd helped me bury Mama, I caught sight of the bright artificial flowers I had left atop Mama's grave at my last visit, and for some reason I remembered her more clearly than I had in a long time. Memories had become more important to me as I'd made peace with Camilla's admonition to "make a memory." I had finally come to the deep emotional acceptance that we are the sum of our memories, and when we respect those memories, we respect ourselves and our lives.

Quincy brought the Suburban to a stop on the gravel drive.

Memories obsessed me now I speculated again about Penrose and Hameroff and their theory that consciousness has a permanent effect on space-time. If they are right, perhaps our memories permanently embed themselves there as well.

"It had something to do with memory," I said to Jasmine. "The dream."

What if a perfectly faithful memory of events existed in space-time, something permanent we could reach out to with our imperfect hardware and flawed ability to recall? Perhaps if space-time is the face of God, then the memories we embedded there are heaven, or maybe our souls. Maybe both.

"I've always struggled with why we work so hard to hold on to memories," I said. "But I think they're important. Really important."

"How important?" she asked.

I shook my head slowly. "I haven't a clue. I just believe it. Don't ask me how it plays out right now because I can't find words for what I feel." We got out of the Suburban.

"Memories are part of the meaning of life," I said. "Of what makes our existence significant. I think maybe this is why it's important to make memories and to be faithful to them."

I put on my coat as we walked over to the open grave. The same two guys stood near the same backhoe in the distance, dressed this day in work shirts. Jasmine and I got to the graveside as the preacher began. He took in Jasmine and me in a single glance and offered us a smile.