Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

My hand went to my bruised cheek. I’m all in favor of telling kids the truth—there’s no Santa Claus; your parents leave the money under the pillow when you lose a tooth; babies come from sex; when you die, that’s it, there’s nothing more—but deciding whether to say “Mommy’s boyfriend just killed a man” was above my pay grade; I’d let Kayla make the call on what her daughter should know. “I was in a car accident,” I said, which at least wasn’t wholly untrue.

“Wow,” Ryan said. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” I said, and that was certainly the truth.

“I gotta go pee,” Ryan announced, which was just as well; I needed a minute—or a lifetime—to pull myself together. I exchanged a few remarks with Rebekkah, then she left, and I went to the kitchen. There was a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge; I poured two glasses and took them over to the dining room with its bookcases. Ryan joined me when she was done in the washroom. “How was day camp?” I asked.

“Good.” She looked at me and scrunched up her mouth, thinking.

“What?” I said.

“Can I ask you a question, Jiminy?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going to marry Mommy?”

“We haven’t talked about it.”

“But are you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

She looked down at the floor. “Oh.”

“We’ll just have to see how things go, okay?”

She nodded, then, looking up at me again: “Have you been married before?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

I lifted my hands slightly. “She left me.”

“Why?”

“We disagreed about what we wanted.”

“Oh. What did you want?”

“The greatest good for the greatest number.”

“And what’s the greatest number?”

I thought about that, long and hard, thought about this wonderful young lady, thought about my boy Virgil, thought about everything, and, at last I drew Ryan into another warm hug. “Two-point-nine.”

The next morning, Kayla entered the office she shared with Victoria, who today was wearing a black turtleneck and black leather pants; the combo probably wouldn’t work on anyone else, but she rocked it. Vic was staring intently at an image on a forty-inch monitor.

“What’s that?” asked Kayla, standing behind her and bending over to have a look.

“The scan I made of Ross on the beamline,” replied Victoria.

Kayla put a hand on Vic’s shoulder. “When I want to creep on an ex, I look at their Facebook wall or OKCupid profile.”

“It’s not that,” said Vic. She pointed at one part of the display. “See here? That’s the spike showing he’s got one electron in superposition—making him a Q1, a p-zed.”

“Yes.”

“But look here,” said Vic. She pointed at a serpentine line high up on the Y-axis, which was marked with a logarithmic scale.

Kayla nodded. “The background stuff.”

“Exactly. The entanglement we’ve observed before.”

“Right.”

“And, so far, it’s never changed, right?”

“Right,” said Kayla. “If it would do something, maybe we could figure out what it represented.”

“Exactly—but look! It has changed, see? Right here.” Vic pointed at where the whole line jumped a small amount.

“It increased,” said Kayla, surprised.

“Exactly. It suddenly went up, and it stayed up.”

“Huh.”

“I ran a test on myself yesterday.” Vic did something with her mouse, and a split-screen display came up showing two graphs that looked almost identical. “Both of these are me.” Her triple-superposition Q3 status showed as three distinct spikes on each of the graphs. “But see?” She pointed first to the left-hand display, then the right. “The entanglement level at the top is up from my previous reading, too; that’s never happened before.”

Kayla frowned. “Go back to Ross’s display.”

More mouse movements, and the screen changed again.

“You had Ross in here on Sunday the ninth?”

“Yep. Jeff okayed it.”

“Sure, no problem.” Kayla leaned in, looking at the times marked on the bottom of the graph. “And the entanglement level on his chart went up at 11:19 A.M.?”

“And twenty-two seconds,” said Vic, pointing at the figure. “And it stayed up, right through to the end of the run I did with him.”

“Wow,” said Kayla softly.

“What?”

“Do you know where I was then?”

“A Sunday morning? Well, we can rule out High Mass.”

“I was at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care.”

“Oh, my God! Right! That’s the day you revived your brother!”

“Jim recorded it on video. It’s in our Dropbox.” Kayla gestured for Vic to get up, and she took her place at the keyboard. Kayla opened a browser and banged away for a few moments until she had the shared folder on-screen—and discovered that Vic had her computer set to show large thumbnails; playing-card-sized images of Kayla and Jim making love popped up on the monitor.

“Umm,” said Kayla.

“NSFW,” said Vic, grinning from ear to ear. She reached over and took the mouse, using it to change the view to a plain directory listing, and then she stepped back and let Kayla find the file she was looking for. A couple of clicks later, and the video Jim had shot started playing.

“My God…” said Vic, as Travis’s eyes opened for the first time in almost two decades.

Kayla backed up to the precise moment at which Travis visibly regained consciousness. The little slider at the bottom of the screen showed they were one minute and forty-three seconds into the video. She then flipped back to the file listing, which showed the time at which Jim had begun making the recording, then did the math in her head: the creation-time stamp of the video file plus an additional one minute and forty-three seconds was… 11:19:25 A.M. She said the figure aloud.

Vic let out a low whistle. “That’s really close…”

“Too close to be a coincidence,” said Kayla. “And when I used the quantum tuning fork on him the second time—it didn’t work until I flipped it upside down—it was a few seconds before his eyes opened. So, the increase in entanglement you recorded here on Ross occurred at just about the moment Travis woke up. Want to bet that your own level increased at that exact moment, too?”

“Meaning me, my ex-boyfriend, and your brother were— are —linked?” said Vic. “The three of us are quantally entangled? But why on Earth would that be the case? I mean, Travis and Ross have never even met.”

“That’s an excellent point,” said Kayla, peering in puzzlement at the screen.

Kayla had invited Victoria over for dinner, and the four of us, including Ryan, were still sitting at the square table, although I’d pushed back so I could turn my chair sideways and cross my legs; tomorrow, we’d go to Rebekkah’s place to have dinner with her and Travis.

The ladies had had pot roast while I’d picked my way through a ginormous salad. During dinner, Ryan had told us at length about how her day-camp counselor had tried to explain the awful goings-on. Although Ryan was still frightened, it sounded to my psychologist’s ear like the counselor had taken the right approach: not sugarcoating things, but not being alarmist, either.

The conversation segued to how I would deal in my summer classes with the dark turn current events had taken—and that somehow led to psychologists who got spooked by their own research.

“It can take a lot out of you,” I said. “Look at Phil Zimbardo. His Stanford Prison Guard experiment was in 1971, but he was still wrestling with what happened to his students, and to himself, thirty-odd years later, when he published his book The Lucifer Effect, about how good people turn evil. I have it on one of my required-reading lists.”