Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

But it was for psychopaths. They didn’t ruminate and they didn’t get depressed; it was almost unheard of for a psychopath to become suicidally despondent. “What about your feelings toward, say, Kayla?”

“That’s weird, too! I mean, she’s my sister, right? Always has been, always will be. And I was a good big brother, you know? Wouldn’t let anyone mess with her. But, well, now that I…”

“Think about it?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Now that I think about it, that was really about me, right? Making sure people respected me? I didn’t—sounds shitty to say this, I know—but I didn’t really care about her. I didn’t understand that, not at the time—but now I keep wondering how she’s doing. And I want her to be happy.”

My pulse was racing. There was too much physics and psychology involved to quickly explain this to Travis just now, but I felt sure in my bones that I was right. Yes, the quantum tuning fork—a device almost as cool as The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver—had restored superposition to Travis Huron’s brain, but it had done an even better job than we’d thought. Prior to his falling into the coma, he must have had two of the three electrons in each of his tubulin thingamajigs in superposition, making him a quantum psychopath. But, assuming he had returned to Menno’s lab, just as I had, the transcranial ultrasound stimulation provided by the Mark II helmet must have caused those electrons to all decohere, falling back en masse to the classical-physics state, making him lose consciousness.

But when Kayla had goosed his brain, instead of just two, all three of the electrons in each pocket had gone into superposition. Prior to 2001, he’d been a card-carrying psychopath, and now, apparently for the first time in his life, Travis Huron was what I had been for most of my life: fully conscious with conscience, a CWC, a quick.

“It’s depressing,” Travis said, after a moment, “having all these… these regrets… running around in my head.”

I nodded slowly. “Welcome to the club.”

Kayla returned around 7:00 P.M., and I went out into the corridor to chat with her again. “How’s he doing?” she asked.

I didn’t know what to tell her—and, anyway, it was probably better to have the conversation about Travis’s change in mental state when we were going to have a longer time to talk. “He’s okay.”

Kayla looked down the corridor with its hard, scuffed flooring, doors alternating left and right, each leading into a room containing one or more patients. “I want to help the other people here,” she said, “if any of the rest of them are in deep, total comas. See who I can wake up, but…”

“Yes?” It sounded like a good idea to me.

“But we can’t just pull an Awakenings on them all,” she said. “Many of these people have been abandoned for years, decades. Some have no family, and for those who do have families, surely they should be present when they wake up. Plus, frankly, I want to be sure that Travis’s superposition is holding before we get anyone else’s hopes up.”

“Makes sense.”

“Still,” she said, “this could change the world.”

I looked down the corridor; the sun was setting through a window at the far end. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it could, at that.”

I left Kayla with her brother; as they spoke of their childhoods and their parents, I really was feeling like a third wheel. Plus, I was starving, and I only knew two other adults in Saskatoon: the optometrist David Swinson who, if I recalled correctly, planned to urinate on my cemetery plot, and Kayla’s research partner, Victoria Chen. I almost didn’t call Vic, assuming she’d be out with her boyfriend, but then figured there was nothing to lose. To my surprise, she was free and happy to meet me for a bite to eat. She suggested the Konga Cafe, which turned out to be a Caribbean place in a little strip mall here in Riversdale. I got there first, and rose when she arrived. She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

We sat opposite each other, and she said, “So, how are you?”

“Honestly?” I tilted my head. “Conflicted.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I spent some time with Kayla’s brother Travis today. And, well, up until he came out of his coma, it seems he was a quantum psychopath. I haven’t told Kayla yet—frankly, I don’t know how to tell her.”

“Are you sure of your diagnosis?”

I shrugged, conceding that there was some room for doubt. “I grant that the only quantum-superposition testing you did on him was while he was in a coma, so there’s no record of his quantum state prior to that. And, as far as I know, no one had ever done the Hare Checklist on him, and I doubt there’s any video of him from the last century that’s high-enough resolution to show whether he was doing microsaccades then. But all of those things are merely correlates of psychopathy. Actual psychopathy is a state of mind: a complete disregard for others; a lack of reflection and rumination—and that’s what Travis described to me.”

“Wow,” said Vic. “Are Kayla or Ryan in any danger from him?”

“No, not now.”

“Good.”

“I’ll tell Kayla before I leave tomorrow, but…” I exhaled noisily. “I bet Kayla would have had an easier childhood if Travis had been a Q1 instead of a Q2.”

Sadness washed over Vic’s face, and she said slowly, “Speaking of which…”

“Yes?”

“My boyfriend Ross. My ex-boyfriend, I should say. He… he’s a Q1. I tested him on the beamline.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head. “It’s… difficult, you know? Finding decent guys who are okay with not having kids, that’s hard.”

“Don’t you want kids?”

“‘Want’?” she said. “Yes. But I can’t have any. I wish I could, but…” She shrugged a little. “Cervical cancer; had a hysterectomy.”

“I’m sorry, Vic.”

“Thanks. Ryan’s the closest thing to a child I’ll ever have.”

“Oh, she’s a doll.”

“Yeah,” said Vic, looking sad. “Yeah, she is.”

“Anyway,” I said. “I’m sorry about you and Ross.”

She lifted her dark eyebrows. “I guess they really are everywhere. Makes you wonder how society can function.”

“Ross teaches high school, right?”

“Yes. English.”

“Well,” I said, spreading my arms, “there’s a curriculum laid down by the Ministry of Education, right? He has to teach these books in this order by that time, and prepare his students for taking this standardized province-wide test. Any number of people could do that; indeed, any number do —there must be thousands of high-school English teachers in Saskatchewan.”

“A good teacher makes a difference.”

“Sure, yeah. But there are lots of bad teachers or indifferent ones in the system, too. I don’t say that being a university professor is better —although it pays better—but the requirement to do original research to get a PhD might mean you get fewer p-zeds at that level although I’ve seen lots of trite, paint-by-numbers dissertations in my day. You know what they say: the only word that rhymes with ‘theses’ is ‘feces.’”

“I guess. It’s just—I mean, I really liked him. And I thought he liked me. But he’s… he’s a robot.”

The server came; I ordered Red Stripe, an imported Jamaican beer; Vic asked for a Pepsi Next.

“I still don’t get how a society could function with most of its members not being truly conscious,” Vic said.

“Welllll,” I replied gently, “the majority of Ross’s students would likely be p-zeds, too. And most jobs are repetitive. It’s only the length of the repeat cycle that varies: a few seconds if you work on an assembly line, a few hours if you drive a bus, daily if you manage a restaurant, and yearly if you teach a course. Every September, I trot out the same introductory lectures I gave the year before.”