Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“I guess.” She let out a sigh. “I just can’t believe I was fooled by him.”

I shook my head. “Psychopaths fool people. They deliberately deceive; they get off on it. But p-zeds? They just are. Ross wasn’t trying to hurt you; he wasn’t trying to do anything.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said. The server brought our drinks—mine in a bottle, Vic’s in a can—as well as some johnnycakes as an appetizer. “It’s just hard,” she continued, “not knowing who’s… who’s real.”

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence for a time, then I said, “Anyway, Vic, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Shoot.”

“I said Travis was a psychopath—but he isn’t, not anymore. He was almost certainly a Q2 before his coma, but the coma knocked him out of superposition—or, I guess, the other way around: he got knocked out of superposition, ending up in the classical-physics state, and that caused him to lose consciousness, right?”

“That’s the process, yes,” said Vic.

“But when he came out of the coma, he came out as a Q3—I’d bet money on it. He’s got a conscience for the first time, and, frankly, is gobsmacked by it.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“Yeah, but here’s the part I don’t get. I admit that I’m struggling with all this quantum-physics stuff, so maybe you can explain it to me. Travis started as Q2, got knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came back up as a Q3—a higher level than he’d been at originally.”

“Okay.”

“But I started out as a Q3—fully conscious with conscience—got knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came back at a lower level, emerging from my own blackout as a Q1 p-zed. Why is that?”

Vic’s thin lips turned downward. “That is a good question.”

“He doesn’t remember what happened to him any more than I do, but we were almost certainly both knocked out by the same piece of equipment although admittedly we were revived in different ways. Still, he went up, and I went down.”

“Well, if I understand what Kayla told me correctly, you came back—to the extent that you initially did come back—almost immediately; Travis was in a coma for nineteen years.”

“True. And I suppose it might be completely random—a throw of the dice.”

Vic nodded. “If that’s the case, given the 4:2:1 ratio of the cohorts, maybe you’ve got a four-in-seven chance of coming up as a p-zed, like you did, and a one-in-seven chance of coming up as a quick, like Travis did. But I’m always suspicious of apparent randomness.”

I took another sip of beer. “Me, too.”

When I got back to the facility to pick up Kayla, her mother Rebekkah was just leaving—and so I maneuvered her over to a couple of chairs in the lobby.

“Have you been enjoying Saskatoon?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s lovely. Such sunny days! And no mosquitoes. I’m not looking forward to those back in Winnipeg.”

Rebekkah was a handsome woman with lively eyes. “Tell me about it. I survived fifty-one summers there.”

And that was the opening I’d been hoping for. “Speaking of The Peg…”

“Yes?”

“You raised your kids there, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Travis was into sports, even as a kid?”

“Oh, my, yes. The harder, the better. Not Kayla, though: she was the studious one.” Our orange-upholstered chairs were facing each other, and she leaned closer, conspiratorially. “I never told the kids this, but my father—their grandfather—referred to them as ‘Jock’ and ‘Nerd’ behind their backs.” She smiled. “He meant it with love, but it’s true: they were different as night and day.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “Well, look, I’m interested in, you know, nature vs. nurture, and all that. Sometimes sports are displaced aggression. Was Travis, you know, a violent child?”

“Well, there wasn’t much consciousness of it back then,” Rebekkah said, “but, yeah, he was a bully, frankly. My husband and I weren’t really aware of it too much at the time, but he probably wasn’t the nicest guy to other kids. But all the kids’ parents loved him. That boy had the gift of the gab; I don’t know where he got it.”

I nodded. Glibness and superficial charm were classic psychopathic traits; so were bullying and pointless cruelty. But I was hoping for something definitive. After all, the notion that people change quantum states upon rebooting from total unconsciousness was huge, and I couldn’t just rely on what Travis had subjectively told me about his own feelings. “Were there a lot of pets on your street? Dogs? Cats?”

“Oh, yes. Sure.”

I often floated hypotheticals with my students, who always figured out that they were precisely that. I didn’t like doing so with Rebekkah, but I said, even though no such thing had actually happened in my own neighborhood, “We used to have tons of pets on the street I grew up on.” I put on a puzzled face. “But a lot of them disappeared. We didn’t know what to make of it. Turned out this kid up the street was capturing them and killing them.”

“God,” said Rebekkah. “We had the same thing. Some creep was stringing up dead cats from trees—including two kittens that belonged to us—and we found others cut into pieces. It was awful…” She shook her head. “I tell you, Jim, I didn’t like that my Travis used to beat up other kids, but I wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten his hands on whoever was doing that.”

Kayla, on the other hand, was another matter; keeping secrets was no way to build a relationship. “I had a long chat with your brother this afternoon,” I said to her, as we lay side by side later that night.

“He told me. He likes you.” She smiled. “Big-brother stamp of approval.”

“He’s a good guy,” I said. “Now.”

“What do you mean, ‘now’?”

“What was he like as a kid, a teenager?”

“You’re getting at something,” said Kayla. “What?”

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “He’s changed,” I said. “Before his coma, he was a psychopath.”

“You said you didn’t remember Travis from before.”

“I don’t. But he described his inner life from then to me: consciousness but no conscience, not until now. He used to be a Q2, but, for whatever reason, he booted up again as a Q3.”

She looked stunned. “No. Really? My God, are you—are you sure?”

“Pretty much.”

“Jesus. So what does that make me? Debra Fucking Morgan? Too much the loving sister to see what her brother really was?”

“I’m not—no one is judging. I just thought you should know.” She said nothing, so I went on. “And at least he isn’t one anymore. He genuinely cares about you.”

“Now,” said Kayla bitterly.

“And let’s hope he stays that way. But, look, you know the Hare Checklist as well as I do. Did he, y’know, have lots of girlfriends?”

“You’ve only seen him now, after wasting away for almost twenty years,” she replied, nodding. “I’m his sister, and even I knew how hot he was.”

“Promiscuity,” I said softly. “Strings of meaningless relationships. And you said he was into extreme sports: that’s need for stimulation. You also said he was a brick when your father was fighting cancer; I’m betting he kept it together even at the funeral, right?”

“And you’re saying that’s evidence of shallow affect?”

I couldn’t shrug lying down, but I lifted my eyebrows. “Classic trait.”

“I—” But she didn’t finish whatever thought she’d started.

“I’m so sorry, honey. But remember, he’s fine, now.”