Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“How long was I out?”

“Maybe five minutes. And a few days later, we tested you again—without the TUS, of course—and, well, your inner voice was gone.”

“And so you decided to interview me on a regular basis to see—”

“To see if there was any difference. I wish we’d done some interviews with you beforehand, but we had no way to know what was going to happen.”

“I didn’t watch the interviews all the way through, but I didn’t notice anything different—”

“There wasn’t anything major,” confirmed Menno. “Your external behavior was much the same as before.”

“Until the final tape,” I said.

“Oh,” Menno said, very softly. “Right.”

“It wasn’t just on that tape. People could tell; Kayla could. I’d changed.”

“Kayla?”

“My girlfriend—at the time, I mean. Kayla Huron, and—”

Menno looked startled. “Huron?”

“She was one of your students. I saw her yesterday, for the first time in almost twenty years. She told me I—I hit her back then. Me!” I shook my head, still struggling with that reality. “And then, my God, the horrible things I said in that last interview. Un-fucking-believable.”

He nodded slowly. “You did change near the end. I don’t know why.”

“You must have some idea! And, for Pete’s sake—why’d I change back to normal?”

“Jim, honestly, I don’t know. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, for almost six months before that change, you were indeed a philosopher’s zombie.” He moved his head left and right—perhaps in negation, perhaps visualizing the hordes that had haunted him for decades. “And you were just as vacant, just as empty, just as dead inside as the countless millions of others surrounding us all the time.”

I walked—or staggered—out of the lobby of Menno’s condo onto Portage Avenue. Here, at lunch-time, there were thousands of people going east, and thousands more going west, and I just stood still, an island in the stream, fighting to keep my balance.

Coming toward me was a man with his head bent and his thumbs typing away on his phone. Behind him were two men wearing earbuds—both, as it happened, with the distinctive white Apple cables. They flowed past, not even glancing at me, just mindlessly navigating around an obstacle.

Mindlessly.

Jesus, could it be?

Three teenage girls were coming toward me now, smoking. The Surgeon General’s report had come out probably before their parents had been born, but still, vapidly, they smoked. This time, I was the one to move out of the way, trying to avoid their exhalations.

And since I was moving, I continued to do so; Newton’s first law, and all that. I passed a homeless man, a cardboard sign next to him saying, “Hungry—Please Help.” In front of him was an empty Campbell’s soup can; some people had tossed coins into it.

I wonder if Canada eliminating pennies from circulation in 2013 had much of an impact on panhandlers. Of course, anyone offering a single penny would have been rightly cursed for it, but, still, there was a lot less small change to go around. On the other hand, Canada had one- and two-dollar coins in wide use, something Americans had never managed; maybe our indigents did better than theirs.

Years ago, I’d read that the introduction of the first credit cards had had a big impact on the incomes of bunnies in Playboy Clubs. Before that, when they’d had to pay cash, men would say “Keep the change,” even if it resulted in exorbitant tips. But once they started filling out charge slips, they did the math and tipped the normal percentage.

Christ, what digressions! But that’s the way my mind works—one thought sparking another, a cascade of notions and connections. And I’d always assumed it was that way for everyone, but…

But if what Menno had found was true, then most of these people weren’t having inner monologues like mine; most of them didn’t have thoughts bouncing around from place to place. No, most of them weren’t thinking at all, at least not in a first-person, self-reflective way; they weren’t having any subjective experiences.

I looked at them as I continued to walk. Hundreds upon hundreds of people wearing blue jeans—a default, an easy choice, a simple rule.

I remember Monty Henderson, who lived on my parents’ street. He’d gone on to join the Calgary Police. He said that on the first day of training the new recruits were told to “fit in or fuck off”—and they all just capitulated.

I was moving mostly against the flow of pedestrians now; for whatever reason, the tide had turned, and the bulk of them were going west. One bumped into me. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and beetled on.

I’d once seen a documentary about flocking behavior in birds. To get the effect we observe, each bird only has to apply three simple rules. The “separation rule” says avoid crowding your neighbors—you gotta give the other birds some room in order to avoid collisions. The “alignment rule” says look at where all the other birds are going and pick a heading for yourself that’s an average of everyone else’s trajectories. And the “cohesion rule” says move toward the average position of all your neighbors, an edict that prevents the flock from dissipating. Computer models that employ these rules produce behavior indistinguishable from real flocking; similar rules control the schooling of fish.

Could the movements of humans be equally simple? Birds almost certainly did this without conscious thought; fish clearly did.

A flock of birds. A school of fish. A crowd of humans.

Were we really all that different?

And were other rules just as simple, and just as mindlessly applied? Choose clothes that are similar to those that others are wearing; adopt phrases you’ve heard others use; lower your gaze when passing someone; try not to bump into people, but if you do, apologize.

So many of the things we do are clearly algorithmic. Did I really think I was the first unathletic kid to fake tripping over a nonexistent stone to explain a pathetic performance in a race? They all do that. The first guy to try the old yawn-becoming-an-arm-around-her-shoulders-at-the-movies bit? They all do that. The first person to…

Maybe it didn’t even take three rules; maybe it took only one.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

The University of Manitoba has an illustrious history in psychology and philosophy, which is why I’d chosen to go there, and why, despite an urge to refer to my students as Sweathogs, I’m happy to still teach there. It’s where pioneering neurophilosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland taught from 1969 to 1984; it’s where Michael Persinger of God-helmet fame got his PhD in 1971; it’s where Bob Altemeyer produced the test for right-wing authoritarianism that was extensively cited in Nixon counsel John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience; and it’s where Menno Warkentin did his pioneering reciprocal-altruism studies. And so, of course, there were faculty here who might be able to help me with my problem, but I wanted somebody who wasn’t closely associated with Menno, and so I looked up memory researchers at other institutions. Soon enough, I settled on Bhavesh Namboothiri, who taught across town at the University of Winnipeg. I’d met him in passing at a few conferences: a husky guy perhaps ten years older than I with a New Delhi accent I occasionally had trouble parsing.

I went to meet him in his office, which was an odd wedge shape, with tomato-soup-colored walls and bookcases so shallow that a couple of centimeters of many volumes stuck out past the shelves; I hoped they were bolted in place.