Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“Yeah.”

I let out a long, whispery sigh, and pretty much simultaneously she did, too.

“Anyway,” I said. “It’s late—here, at least. And I’ve got a 9:00 A.M. class.”

“Okay,” said Kayla, looking out at me from my computer’s screen. “Sleep well, baby.”

“You, too,” I said.

But I doubted either of us was going to sleep at all.

There was a strip mall behind my condo building, running perpendicular to the river. It contained an equal mixture of stores that interested me (Best Buy, Staples) and didn’t (Toys“R”Us, Petland). But there was also a Subway, where I could get a decent vegan sandwich or salad, which is why I walked over there this morning, and a Dollarama, which sold the Winnipeg Free Press; if the line was short there, I often popped in to pick up a copy. Today it was, and I headed home with the paper tucked under one arm and carrying my salad with the other.

Once I was back up in my apartment and had poured myself a Coke Zero, I sat at my little breakfast nook and read as I ate.

The page-one headline, above the fold: 150 Killed in Nairobi Shooting Rampage. Flipping the paper over: Manitoba Chiefs Decry Ottawa Funding Cuts. Next to that: McCharles Calls Dem Opponents “Unpatriotic.”

Inside: 18 Dead in Texas “Cleansing.” Brandon Priest Charged in Sex-Abuse Case. Canada, US, Fall Far Short of Carbon Targets: Report.

The editorial: Despite a Muslim PM, PQ Continues to Push Islamophobic “Charter of Values.” And an op-ed: Canada Needs to Open its Doors to Jews Fleeing Europe.

The business page was no better: Michigan Decertifies All Public-Sector Unions. Euro Plummets as Spanish Debt Crisis Worsens. Apple, Amazon Defend Chinese Work Conditions. Canadian Income Disparity at All-Time High.

I found myself wondering, as I had so many times over the years, What’s wrong with these people? But, unlike those previous occasions, this time I supposed I had an answer. I’d known about the vast numbers of psychopaths for a couple of years now, but even so, there weren’t enough of them to account for all the craziness in the world. But evil needs followers, and, given the 4:2:1 ratio between the cohorts, there were four billion p-zeds out there just waiting to be led.

Of course, those people were entitled to the same moral consideration as any other comparably sophisticated being; I wouldn’t abuse or kill an animal—and I wouldn’t countenance anyone doing that to a p-zed. And yet, Q2s, and, I feared, even many Q3s, if they knew of the prevalence of Q1s, would mistreat them. The most chilling line from the remake of Battlestar Galactica was the edict, “You can’t rape a machine,” uttered when humans were sexually assaulting Cylons, who were physically indistinguishable from humans. Sure, Cylons acted like they were upset at being attacked—but it’s only rape, the humans felt, when done to one of our own.

And the second most chilling line? The show’s oft-repeated mantra of “So say we all!”—fit in or fuck off. Y’know, Admiral Adama, if you wanted to make the case that humans are morally superior to machines, browbeating everyone until they’re all mindlessly chanting “So say we all!” along with you was probably not the best way to do it.

No, I wasn’t going to tell anyone else about the existence of huge quantities of p-zeds. As far as we knew, the three quantum states were uniformly distributed across the general population; there was nothing in Menno’s work or that of Kayla and Vic to suggest anything to the contrary. But if the quantum taxonomy became general knowledge, it wouldn’t be long, I knew, before the accusation that all fill-in-the-blanks were p-zeds would be used to justify not just the horror of rape, but slavery and murder, too. Menno Warkentin had been right to keep secret the existence of people without inner voices, and I intended to do the same.

And then the call I’d been waiting for came.

Dr. Bhavesh Namboothiri, over at the University of Winnipeg, had finally finished mapping out my visual memory index, based on the recent MRI scan I’d had at St. Boniface. In other words, he finally had the key; it was time to open the lock. It was a warm summer day as I drove to his lab—but not warm enough to account for how much I was sweating.

I’d sort of expected to be laid out on a gurney, looking up at the ceiling, but it was much easier for Dr. Namboothiri to probe the top of my head with me sitting in a simple low-to-the-ground bucket seat on a rotating stand. Nor was he wearing the surgical garb I associated with Wilder Penfield. Rather, he had on blue jeans and a loose-fitting dark-red shirt. After all, as he said, he wasn’t going to open my skull—just my mind.

Namboothiri stood next to me, and next to him, on a wheeled tray, was a device about the size of a shoebox. Attached to it were two long cables, each ending in a metal tip, a bit like the probes on an ohmmeter. He placed one of the probes over my left temporal lobe, and the other near the anterior cingulate cortex. There was clearly some sort of readout on the box that he could see but I couldn’t; he kept glancing over at it.

“Okay,” he said. “Do you feel anything?”

“No. Nothing.”

“And what about now?”

“Nothing.”

“And now?”

“My God…” I said. I recognized her at once, of course—and yet had no other recollection of her when she was this young, or of her with 1980s-style big hair.

“What is it?”

“My… my mother. She looks so young, and…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I mean, they told me my nursery had puke-green walls, but I’d had no recollection of that. But… but this must be it.”

He slightly repositioned one of the probes; I felt a twinge of sadness as the vivid image disappeared.

“Okay, and now?”

“A teddy bear, but not one I ever recall seeing before.”

“And here?” Namboothiri moved the probe again, and I tasted something cloyingly sweet.

“Perhaps children’s cough syrup?”

“And here?”

“My dad—with hair!—reading to me.”

“And here?”

I sucked in air.

“What?” said Namboothiri.

“That’s it. That must be it!”

“What are you seeing?”

“Kayla—my girlfriend, as she must have been during my dark period—but…”

“Yes?”

“Younger. And…”

“Yes?”

“Naked.”

Maybe Namboothiri smiled; maybe he didn’t. “All right,” he said. “Definitely the right time period. And—”

I almost stopped him from moving the probe, not because the memory was so pleasant, although it was, but because this was the first bit of that time I’d recalled at all, and I was afraid we’d never get it or any other part of it, back, but—

“A classroom,” I said. “And… perfume. God, yes, I’d completely forgotten: that crazy Eastern European chick who sat in front of me in that science-fiction course; always came to class drenched in perfume. What’s her name…”

“You tell me.”

I scrunched my eyes shut, and it came to me. “Bozena.”

But suddenly her face—and the smell—were gone. Still: “But I don’t understand. I’m remembering smells and sounds, not just visuals.”

“Sure, and you remember those with the verbal indexing system, too, even though they’re not words; elicited memories will be of your full sensorium, no matter how they’re indexed.”

“Ah, okay.”

The next three memories he invoked were clearly of my toddler years, including what I rather suspect, as a Valentine’s baby, was my first time seeing the ground without snow on it. And then it was back to 2001, or, at least, I assumed so; I’d lived in that campus residence for two years, but only memories from my dark period should be indexed here.