Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

A little after 5:00 P.M., Kayla Huron removed her dosimeter and put it on the rack by CLS’s glass-fronted entrance. Victoria Chen was heading out at the same time, and she unclipped her dosimeter, too, letting her long black hair fall around her shoulders. They walked toward their cars together, the sun still high in the western sky. Saskatoon was known as the sunshine capital of Canada—a city of light; just one of the reasons that it had beaten out London, Ontario, to be the home of the nation’s synchrotron-research facility.

“Any plans for this evening?” Kayla asked Vic as they made their way across the asphalt.

“Just a quiet night at home reading. You?”

“After I pick up Ryan from my mom’s, just dinner and TV. Oh, and Skyping with Jim.”

Vic looked at her. “How’s that going?”

“Honestly? The whole greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thing begins to irritate after a while. I mean, yeah, I get it, but…”

“Yeah. But, you know, at least he walks the walk.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s totally serious about it.”

“For sure,” said Vic. “And the world would be a better place if everyone thought like him.”

“True.”

“But really,” Vic said, “the world would be a better place if everyone thought, period.”

Ever since my divorce—ever since I’d gone back to living alone—I had reverted a bit to my student ways. Not completely, of course: I liked craft beers; Kraft Dinner, not so much. But I did have a fondness for the convenience of microwave popcorn, and I heated up a bag. I took it over to the couch, positioned my laptop on top of the footstool to properly face me, and opened Skype. It was still two minutes until 8:00 P.M., our agreed-upon time to chat this particular night. Kayla was showing as offline. I idly looked at my other contacts: lawyer Juan Garcia was online, presumably in California; my ex Anna-Lee was online, too—and I wistfully imagined Virgil was playing somewhere near her. My little boy. I took a deep breath and let it out, a slow, sad exhalation.

The clock in my taskbar changed to 8:00, with still no sign of Kayla; she normally had the scientist’s obsession with punctuality. I nibbled some popcorn, and checked Facebook and Twitter while I waited for her, but, when 8:10 rolled around, I was reaching to shut my laptop’s lid when I noticed her status change from offline to online. I selected “Video Call,” straightened up, listened to Skype’s jaunty ringing for a few seconds, and then, as often happened, I heard Kayla before I saw her.

“Jim?” she said, sounding anxious. “Thank God you’re still online.”

I began to say, “Are you—” when the picture finally popped in. At first it was dark—the background brighter than her—but then her webcam adjusted itself, and there she was, the left half of her face bloodied, red hair askew.

“God!” I said, my heart suddenly thundering. “What happened? Are you okay?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll be all right. Just scared to death.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“It’s crazy out there. I stopped at a traffic light, and punks swarmed in and started rocking my car back and forth.”

“Christ. Why?”

“I don’t know. But they’re rioting here, too, just like Winnipeg last night.”

“Over a hockey game?”

“God knows,” she said. “I got away from them, but my car slammed into another vehicle. Somebody cut in front of me, trying to get away from some other assholes.”

“Holy shit.”

“Look, I gotta get this cleaned up.” I thought she was going to terminate the call, but instead she said, “Here…” and the image went wild as she picked up her MacBook. I saw flashes of her walls and ceiling, and then, after a moment, she’d clearly perched the machine on her bathroom counter. I watched from the side and looking up as she leaned into the mirror and used a tan washcloth to daub a cut on her forehead; the cloth came away crimson.

“Should you see a doctor?”

“The tow-truck guy said if you’re ambulatory, they’re saying don’t come in tonight; they’re full in the emergency rooms right across the city.” She ran some water—sounding quite loud to me—then washed her face. “There,” she said. “Not too bad. No need for stitches.”

“Let me see.”

She moved closer to the camera and I had a look at the cut; she was right that it would probably heal on its own although the area around it had turned visibly more purple since she’d first logged on. “God,” I said. “I wish I was there.”

She moved back. “So do I, baby.” She looked off camera, in the direction, I knew, of her bathroom’s little frosted window. “The night’s just begun, and I suspect we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.”

Kayla and I talked for a while longer, then she had to go comfort Ryan, who was distressed by what had become a constant background wailing of sirens and alarms punctuated by the sound of gunshots.

I didn’t hear anything untoward in my own neighborhood that night, and so I wasn’t aware until I turned on the TV that rioting was going on again in downtown Winnipeg as well as in Saskatoon, and, as I saw unfolding on the screen, in Vancouver and Edmonton and Toronto and Montreal, too. Although in some of the footage you could see people making halfhearted attempts to pretend this was still about hockey—wearing jerseys, brandishing sticks like clubs—it was clear, to me at least, that for the most part it was just looting coupled with mayhem for the sake of mayhem. The current catalyst happened to have been a hockey game; in San Francisco in 2019, new traffic ordinances; in Ferguson in 2015, the anniversary of an unconscionable jury verdict; in Knoxville in 2010, college football coach Lane Kiffin defecting to a rival team. The spark didn’t matter; a similar conflagration could ignite anytime anywhere.

Of course, there were times when it had gone the other way. In a single week in 2015—the first week of summer, as it happened—the US Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right, and the Confederate flag started coming down across the South as Amazon, eBay, Sears, and Walmart all stopped selling merchandise depicting it. Facebook was a sea of rainbows and high-fives. People who’d been hoping and praying for those very things said they couldn’t believe how quickly the tide had turned. That time, the light side of the Force had caught the wave; tonight, sadly, it was the dark side.

I saw Prime Minister Nenshi urging calm, and interviews with various mayors and chiefs of police exhorting people to stay indoors. Even the US channels were covering the Toronto riots, which looked to be running all along Yonge Street from Harbourfront to Bloor; it was an hour later there, meaning it had ticked past midnight, so that, as a commentator observed, this was technically the third day of rioting in Canada.

Eventually, I got up off the couch, taking my popcorn bag, a few unpopped kernels still rattling around in it, to the kitchen, and tossing it in the trash. And then slowly, sadly, I headed off to bed, hoping against hope that at some point soon reason would prevail.

The mayor of Winnipeg urged people to remain indoors the next night. No official curfew had been imposed, but I did stay in, watching TV news and surfing on my tablet.

By now, the violence was overwhelming local police everywhere. Canadian Forces personnel had been deployed to aid with riot control and to protect provincial legislatures as well as Parliament Hill in Ottawa; that city, as well as Calgary, had erupted in violence on this third night. The only thing that seemed to be keeping it from being a total coast-to-coast bloodbath was that so few Canadians owned handguns or automatic weapons. Still, the death count was into three figures here in Winnipeg, where it had all begun, and it was at least a dozen in every other city that had rioting.