Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

I blew out air.

“Listen, Padawan, listen! You know the stakes are higher than either of us. If people start digging—if the truth of what Dom and I discovered all those years ago comes out…”

“Yes?”

“Slavery, human trafficking, cannon fodder, experimental test subjects, even Soylent-fucking-Green, for Christ’s sake—that’s just the beginning of the things that’ll happen if the world learns that there are countless philosopher’s zombies out there who don’t actually have feelings.”

He was right. Four billion p-zeds, two billion psychopaths, and just a billion quicks. It was a recipe for massive exploitation.

“I have to know,” I said. “Did Dominic Adler have an inner voice?”

“See!” Menno crowed triumphantly. “Even you’re doing it! If he didn’t have an inner voice, you’re off the hook, right? Yeah, you—you terminated him, but it’s not like that matters, right?” He let that sink in. “Anyway, sorry, but there’s no get-out-of-jail-free card for you: Dom had an inner voice; I saw it on the oscilloscope when we were testing our equipment.” A pause, a beat, then a softening of my old mentor’s tone: “As to whether he had a conscience to go with it, though…”

“Yes?”

“What do you think? He got me to push ahead with the experiments even after you’d lost consciousness. He didn’t seem to give a damn about what had happened to either you or Travis Huron.”

“A psychopath,” I said. Menno was right: I probably could have lived with having killed another p-zed, but even a psychopath was fully conscious: all the reasons why Devin Becker shouldn’t receive capital punishment applied equally to Dominic Adler.

But, nonetheless, I’d snapped Dom’s neck.

Judge.

Jury.

And executioner.

Of course, I’d been a psychopath when I’d done it, albeit a paralimbic one, not a quantum one, until…

Until Menno had hockey-pucked me into a brief coma and I’d fallen to the laboratory floor, only to reboot—

—to reboot, like Travis Huron eventually did, not at my previous state but—

—but at the next level up.

I’d come back as the worst-possible combination: a Q2 with amygdalar lesions; a quantum psychopath and a paralimbic psychopath all rolled into one, suddenly conscious after six months of zombiehood. Fuck yeah, such a beast might gouge somebody’s eyes out. And after that, it might—

But there was no after that, not for the quantum psychopath. Menno almost immediately knocked me back into a coma again, and when I emerged, on July 2, 2001, I had leveled up once more, becoming fully conscious with conscience—and that conscience, that inner voice, had managed to override whatever the paralimbic damage might have been urging me to do.

Just like it was overriding my urge right now to strangle the life out of Menno Warkentin for what he’d done to me—and for what that damage had led me to do.

I hadn’t planned to return to Saskatoon for several more days, but I needed to see Kayla, so I had my teaching assistant take my Wednesday and Thursday classes for me.

My car, finally repaired, was now at Kayla’s place; she’d picked it up from the body shop for me. That meant flying was my best option to get to Saskatoon, and, to my delight—the only good news I’d had in days—I was able to get a one-way ticket for only $300; I’d expected much more of a gouge for a same-day flight.

I called Kayla to let her know I was coming. The trip was brief enough that I didn’t have to use the john, which was good because I’d gotten stuck with a window seat and I hated asking someone to move just so I could get out. Kayla was still at work when I arrived, but, since it was after normal business hours, I didn’t feel guilty about going straight to the synchrotron; Ryan was at Rebekkah and Travis’s place, and the last thing I needed was to be on my own in an empty house.

The cab turned onto Innovation Boulevard and headed toward the glass-fronted building that housed the Light Source, but the driver came to a stop a hundred meters shy of the circular driveway. Four Saskatoon police cars, their roof lights blinking, were blocking the way. I told the cabbie to wait and got out. A uniformed officer approached me.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “No one gets in.”

It was only then that I became conscious of a helicopter overhead. “My girlfriend is in there. What’s happening?”

“No one’s in there,” corrected the officer. “The building’s been evacuated.”

“What? Why?”

“Bomb threat.”

I pulled out my phone—and saw that it was still in airplane mode. I turned that off, and I hit the speed dial for Kayla.

“Jim, thank God,” she said. “I tried calling you, but—” Her next few words were bleeped out by the sound of my voice-mail indicator going off. “—about forty minutes ago.”

“Are you safe? Where are you?”

“At home.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, hurrying back to the taxi. As we drove out, we passed the bomb-disposal van lumbering its way in.

I’d come to Saskatoon because I needed comforting after what Namboothiri had uncovered. But the moment I saw Kayla, I wanted instead to comfort her. I held her tightly in the entryway for a time, then she led me into the kitchen, where she had a drink—amber liquid over rocks—going. She took a gulp, winced, then waved the glass vaguely at the liquor cabinet by way of offering me something. Instead, I opened the fridge and took out a can of beer.

“Why the bomb threat?” I asked as I pulled the tab, a small geyser going up from the opening.

“We’ve been having a lot of protests lately.”

“Why?”

“Remember when people were picketing the Large Hadron Collider because they thought it was going to create a black hole? Some mindless jerks got it into their head that the same thing could happen here.”

“Ah,” I said, shaking my head.

“Anyway, how are you? You came all this way; what’s wrong?”

I took a swig of beer. “I know I did some horrible things to you in 2001, and to Dave Swinson—the guy who became an optometrist. But I found out today that I’d done even worse things. The memory-specialist I’ve been working with helped me recall them.”

I’d expected her to ask, “What things?” Certainly that would’ve been my first question. But she didn’t. She simply swirled her glass, the ice cubes clinking, and said, looking only generally in my direction, “We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of. It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters is who we are now.”

“Yes, but—”

“You literally weren’t yourself back then. You weren’t anybody. Just a philosopher’s zombie.”

“I was for most of it, but…”

“Yes?”

“But at the end of June, Menno knocked me out again, and I came back as a Q2 psychopath—a real psychopath—and then, I… I…”

“What?”

“I gouged out Menno’s eyes.”

She was quiet for a time, then, finally, she said simply, “Oh.”

“God knows what else I would have done, but he managed to knock me out again, and when I woke up from that, I was back to my old Q3 self, I guess, but confabulating memories to trowel over the missing time.”

“So, wait, wait, you’re saying you were knocked down into a coma three times?” She sounded excited, as if this all confirmed something for her. “Once—what, New Year’s Eve 2000, right? Then twice more at the end of June 2001? And you changed your quantum state each time you rebooted?”

“I guess, yes.”

“Coma, coma, coma, chameleon,” Kayla said.