Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

Darius trailed off, and I smiled encouragingly. “Yes?”

He lifted his shoulders. “Now I know what it feels like to be white.”

“Pardon?” I said. And, to my surprise, Nick chimed in with, “Say what?”

“If you’re black, you can’t walk into a law office, or a government office, or anything like that in DC without people looking at you like you’re there to rob the place. You have no idea what it’s like with people always expecting the worst from you.” He spread his arms. “But here I was welcomed, made to feel right at home. Nobody looked alarmed or scared when I came in. Everybody was like, ‘Good afternoon, sir. May I take your coat?’”

“Welcome to friendly Manitoba,” Nick said.

It was an empty response; “Friendly Manitoba” was the slogan on our license plates. Most Indigenous Canadians would tell a very different story about visiting highfalutin places here.

“I guess,” said Darius.

Nick was protracting his vowels now. “Really,” he said. “It’s totally normal here.”

Darius narrowed his eyes. “Are you making fun of me?”

Just then, a woman who must have been Latisha joined us; she slipped an arm around Darius’s waist, and I took the opportunity to maneuver Nick toward the bar.

“What’s wrong with him?” Nick asked, glancing back at Darius.

“You were imitating him,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“You’re saying ‘pardon’ now, but you said ‘say what’ back there.”

“Did I?”

“And you were totally copying his posture and accent.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Why would I—”

“Everybody does it to one degree or another. ‘Unconscious mimicry,’ it’s called.

“Oh,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

I looked at him, my heart pounding, as I wondered if that were literally true.

Across the lobby, I spotted Kayla emerging from the ladies’ room. I told Nick I’d catch him later and hurried over to her, feeling apprehensive as I maneuvered around people. Normally I was fine in crowds, but I found myself wondering how many Nicks—how many p-zeds—were flocking about me.

The route we’d planned from Winnipeg to Saskatoon was pig-simple: a straight line 570 kilometers due west on the Trans-Canada to Regina, then north for 260 kilometers on Saskatchewan Highway 11 up to Saskatoon—the perfect sort of trip to be executed without much conscious thought. Despite our late start, we were determined to make the first, longer leg without a stop, then, after a quick bite, pressing on the rest of the way.

We put the radio on briefly to get a traffic report, but first caught the tail end of a newscast: “The bodies of six more dead migrant workers have been found today in Texas. State governor Dylan McCharles denies any correlation between this and the passing of the McCharles Act…”

Later, after we’d gotten the word to avoid Confusion Corner—which pretty much went without saying here in The Peg—Kayla turned off the radio, and I said, “I went to see Menno Warkentin this afternoon.”

“Oh, wow!” she replied. “How’s he doing?”

“Fine, I guess. But he knew all about my lost time, and—”

And I faltered. I’d intended to immediately tell Kayla about the big psychological discovery, about how the whole world was filled with p-zeds, but looking at her profile, outlined by the light of the setting sun, that didn’t seem the most important thing. No, what I wanted—what I needed—was for this brilliant, beautiful woman to understand what had happened all those years ago; her wariness at lunch made perfect sense in retrospect, but I couldn’t stand having her continuing to be worried. “He explained it all to me,” I said. “About those horrible things I did. He’d tried something back in June 2001, an experimental technique, and it damaged my limbic system.”

She briefly faced me. “My God, really?”

“Yes. Fortunately, the damage was along two very narrow paths. You know Phineas Gage?”

“The guy who got a metal rod blown through his head?”

“Exactly. Left a nine-centimeter-diameter hole, but he survived for twelve years. It changed him, though—permanently in his case; made him pretty much psychopathic. Well, what Menno did to me was similar to what happened to Phineas Gage—um, but at a narrower gauge, so to speak; the damage was microns wide instead of centimeters. My brain rerouted around it.”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I wasn’t sure at first, but it’s been obvious over these last couple of days that you’re back to your old self,” she said. “Hell, I wouldn’t be alone with you here in the middle of nowhere if I didn’t think you were.”

“Thanks.”

“And, y’know, I’ve read your blog; I’ve read your books. There’s no way a psychopath could have written them.”

“Hitler was fond of animals and children.”

“You’re not helping your case,” she said, but I could hear the mirth in her voice.

“Sorry.”

“But I don’t understand. Why was Menno experimenting on you like that?”

“Well, see, a couple of months before you’d met me, he’d done something that caused me to lose my inner voice…”

One hundred kilometers…

“And Menno believes most of the human race has no inner monologue?” asked Kayla.

“That’s right. Something like sixty percent, he thinks.”

“Hmmm. That’s roughly the same percentage Victoria and I found are in the Q1 state.”

“I wonder if it’s the same sixty percent,” I said. “If those in the Q1 state, with one electron in superposition, all have just the minimum level of mental functioning, well, their lights could indeed be on with nobody being home.”

“Philosopher’s zombies,” said Kayla, still getting used to the notion.

“Right. Who the hell knows what IQ tests really measure, but a Q1 might do just fine on them; pattern recognition and spatial translations could be entirely autonomic, after all.”

“True.”

“And you’ve already shown that Q2s are psychopaths—who surely have an inner voice, an inner life, but literally think only about themselves; they have no empathy.”

“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.”