Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

But Kayla—

“Wow, indeed,” she’d said earlier tonight. “But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother and to…”

And to whom?

But no… that was crazy.

And, yet, when I’d started to tell her what I’d done to Menno, she deflected it, saying, “It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters is who we are now.”

Once were. Are now.

Jesus.

Could it be? Could she—

Kayla must have felt my spine stiffen because she said, softly, “What?”

My heart beat a few times, then. “Your tattoo…”

“I thought you liked it?”

“You had an appendectomy.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Abdominal surgery.”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“When I was twenty-two.”

“So, 2003?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And they put you under, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

I found myself pulling slightly away from her. “When were you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?” But it was obvious from her tone that she knew what I meant.

“Tell me that you’d been a psychopath when we were dating. If you’re a Q3 now, you were a Q2 before the operation.”

“If,” Kayla said firmly, “the anesthetic had actually caused decoherence, had actually put me out cold, hadn’t just been an amnesia-inducing paralytic, hadn’t—”

My voice was a mere whisper. “Oh, Kayla…”

She was quiet for a time, then, at last: “You’re right. I should have told you.” She exhaled noisily. “But, yeah, I am another data point: you, me, and Travis, we all changed states, shifting up or down exactly as the model predicts.”

“Why not tell me? If anyone could have understood, I—”

“It wasn’t the same thing. You have no idea what it’s been like all these years. You, at least, don’t remember the bad things you did in the past—or you didn’t until just now, thanks to the spelunking you did with that memory expert, what’s-his-name…”

“Namboothiri.”

“But me? I remembered it all. Torturing animals as a kid. Being so cruel to a girl in junior high that she tried to kill herself. I couldn’t tell you about all that; you’d never look at me the same way again.”

“That’s not so.”

“But then I woke up in a hospital bed one day and realized that I’d changed. I told you that it had been Menno’s class that got me interested in consciousness, but that’s not true, and—I’m so sorry—I said it was what you had done all those years ago that got me interested in psychopathy. But that’s not true, either. It was the advent of my own conscience the summer after I finished my bachelor’s degree that did it. That’s why I’ve devoted my career to this. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could have done the things I did, and why I no longer had uncontrollable urges to do similar things.”

She reached over, took the hand I’d withdrawn, and placed it over her tattoo again. “A butterfly, see? In honor of my metamorphosis.”

It would have been nice if, after Kayla had shared the truth of her transformation with me, we had been able to fall asleep holding each other, accepting that who we are now mattered more than who we’d been then. But a peaceful sleep was not to be: we were immediately interrupted by a tentative knocking on the bedroom door, followed by a plaintive voice calling, “Mommy?”

Kayla found the bedspread, which I knew to be sea green although it looked slate gray in the darkness, and pulled it up to cover both of us to our shoulders.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Kayla asked.

Ryan took that as leave to enter, and I heard the knob working and a small squeak from the hinges. She was revealed, sufficiently illuminated by light spilling through her own open bedroom door on the opposite side of the corridor that I could see her eyes go wide. Apparently whatever she’d assumed normally happened after she’d been tucked in for the night did not include me joining her mother naked in bed. But that shock was quickly set aside, and Ryan said, “I’m frightened by the noises.”

I could see on Kayla’s face that she was about to ask, “What noises?” But she checked herself: with doors open on both sides of the hallway now, she could hear them, too. Kayla’s bedroom faced the backyard; Ryan’s, the street—and it was from the street that the growing sounds of a raucous mob were coming.

Kayla got out of her bed—apparently this was a household where the parent was routinely seen naked by the child—and she quickly put on a robe and led Ryan from the room to investigate. That gave me a moment to retrieve my pants and shirt, strewn on the floor. I then hustled over to join them.

Kayla had wisely turned out the light in Ryan’s room by the time I got there. Up the street, under the sodium lamps, a knot of six or eight teenagers was moving along, hurtling rocks at windows. The riots here had previously been confined to the downtown core; this was the first I’d heard of them spreading to the suburbs. Of course, in a smallish city like Saskatoon, that wasn’t a particularly far journey—but still.

There was no phone in Ryan’s room, so Kayla nipped back across the hall to call the police from there. In the yellow light, Ryan moved closer to me and reached up and took my hand. The mob was passing a small hatchback parked by the side of the road. A crowbar rang against its side panel, and the horn started honking, one blast per second, an android’s heartbeat.

Kayla returned. “I tried three times,” she said. “Busy! Fucking 911 is busy. ”

The mob rocked the hatchback, but it was too wide and squat for them to flip over, I guess, since they were soon moving forward, passing the house next to Kayla’s. We couldn’t see that building from this vantage point, but we could hear a booming male voice shouting from what I presumed was its open front door: “Get the hell away from here! Go on now! Get lost!”

That would not have been the tack I’d have taken, and indeed, it caused the seven teenagers—I’d managed to get a head count finally—to start moving onto his front lawn. Something caught my eye, and I looked for a second in the opposite direction. Another cluster of what must also be Q1s or Q2s was approaching—it was beginning to look like, by dumb geographic luck, Kayla’s house was where the two groups would meet, assuming the ones on her neighbor’s lawn didn’t tarry long there, and—

Boom! Boom, boom!

The glass in front of us reverberated. Ryan let go of my hand and clutched her ears. I’d thought Kayla’s next-door neighbor had opened fire from his stoop; the reports were echoing, their source difficult to locate. But after a second I realized that the guy who lived across the street from Kayla had come out into the night, brandishing what, to my untrained eye, looked like a hunting rifle.

I couldn’t see the results of the first two shots—but the third one had hit one of the teenagers, who was closer to the road, in the back, and he’d gone face-first into a lawn that this time of night must have been slick with dew.

The flock dispersed, the four I could see running—two heading down the street, two more going up, unthinkingly heading for the second mob.

Boom!

Another shot ruptured the night, and I saw a runner briefly splay all four limbs like a crippled starfish, then tumble forward to the asphalt. Kayla and Ryan had dropped below the windowsill, and they were scuttling out of the room, toward the relative safety of the back of the house. But I stood transfixed, stunned by it all. “Jim!” Kayla whisper-shouted. “Get down!”