Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“So?” said Victoria anxiously. “Is he or isn’t he?”

“Just a sec,” I said, switching over to the pupillary-deviation graph. Nothing greater than one minute of arc—the kind of jiggle caused by the body’s own pulsing blood; microsaccades were at least two arc minutes and could range up to a hundred and twenty.

“Bingo,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “There’s no doubt about it: the president of the United States is a psychopath.”

Starting late in our afternoon, there were reports of riots in Cologne, Rome, and Budapest, and that night, there was more rioting all across Canada, but, thankfully, no more along Kayla’s tree-lined street—although border cities such as Seattle, Detroit, and Buffalo were showing signs of similar lawlessness.

“I don’t get it,” Kayla said, sitting next to me on her living-room couch after we turned off the news. “What’s the trigger?”

I shook my head. “There isn’t one.”

“But the rioting is spreading.”

“And so are fashion styles, and Internet memes, and conspiracy theories, as always. And Boko Haram is conducting raids, like every day, and antisemitism is expanding like a poison puddle across Europe again. And idealistic kids are being radicalized, like every other day. And people are joining cults and reading their horoscopes, like every other damn day. Wars are raging in the Middle East and Africa, as usual; climate change is being ignored, evolution denied, sexism and racism perpetuated, all as per usual. Sure, most memes that take hold are reasonably benign, but malignant ones can spread just as easily, whether you call them the KKK or National Socialism or the Troubles in Northern Ireland or a decade or more of missing and murdered Native women in Canada.”

“But something must have caused them to spread.”

“Sure, but it was doubtless something small. Losing a hockey game in Winnipeg; other picayune catalysts elsewhere. You don’t need a complex explanation—some particle-physics or neuroscience mumbo jumbo—for something that’s happened over and over and over again throughout history.” I glanced down at the spot where her blouse was concealing her tattoo. “Butterflies don’t just symbolize metamorphosis; they symbolize small changes having big effects.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

She leaned in and kissed me, then went off to put Ryan to bed. When we retired for the evening, Kayla fell asleep before I did, and I lay in the dark, listening to the susurration of her breath, waves lapping a beach.

It should have come as no particular surprise, I supposed, that President Carroway was a psychopath. Such people were ideally suited to politics, each one a heaping plateful of traits selected from a smorgasbord that included pathological lying, charisma, glibness, skillful manipulation, and promiscuity—literally and figuratively getting into bed with whoever served the needs of the moment. Working my way through the presidents I knew anything about, I suspected several others had also been psychopaths, including some Democrats (surely Lyndon Johnson and almost as certainly Bill Clinton) and some Republicans (doubtless Richard Nixon and maybe George W. Bush, although I’d go even money that Dubya was a p-zed in the thrall of Dick Cheney).

But holding suspicions and actually knowing were two different things. And as I lay there, a sickle moon hanging low out the window, I wondered what the Leader of the Free World was going to do next.

I did not have to wait long to find out. The next morning, President Carroway’s latest speech was all over the media. Kayla and I, and Ryan, sensing the solemnity of what was going on even if she didn’t understand it, watched it, the three of us sitting slack-jawed in front of the living-room TV. Carroway began by striding to the podium and uttering four words that would doubtless become a meme in their own right: “My fellow North Americans…”

My heart thundered. The president went on in the adamantine baritone I’d previously heard admonishing those passing through airports: “On my order, beginning at 9:00 A.M. Eastern time, US Customs and Border Protection agents closed the border between the United States and Canada, locking down all vehicular crossings and all US Customs stations at Canadian airports. At the same time, United States Air Force jets scrambled from McChord Air Force Base in Washington State, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland; these jets have now secured Canadian airspace.”

“My God…” Kayla said softly.

Carroway’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. “At 9:17 A.M., our ambassador to Canada, Schuyler Grayson, accompanied by a United States Marine Corps honor guard, presented himself at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, the home of the Canadian prime minister, to urge Prime Minister Naheed Nenshi to finally accept our aid in quelling the ongoing rioting that has begun to spill over the border into this country.”

I wasn’t sure which of us initiated it, but Kayla’s left hand and my right found each other.

“Prime Minister Nenshi once again refused our assistance in containing the situation. This has left us with no choice; America’s interests must be protected throughout the world. And so, on my orders, US troops are now moving into Ottawa, into all provincial capitals, and into other Canadian cities with populations in excess of one million; government buildings and essential infrastructure in each will be secured by nightfall. The Governor General of Canada, who serves as Commander in Chief of the Canadian Forces, has seen the wisdom of asking her troops to stand down, and we expect a smooth transition.”

Gimlet eyes bored into the camera, a cold, reptilian glare: “God bless the United States—including our northern provinces and territories, now fully under American protection.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said softly. “We’ve been annexed.”

And then things got worse.

In a brave attempt at thinking life would go on pretty much as normal, Ryan had relented and gone back to day camp, and Kayla had returned to the Light Source. I’d intended to work on the third edition of Utilitarian Ethics of Everyday Life, which I’d been putting off far too long, but I found myself transfixed by what was happening. Rarely, if ever, was Canada the lead “International News” story on any site, and I hadn’t realized until just now how comforting that actually was. But suddenly everyone—the BBC, NHK, Al-Jazeera, both the American and Australian ABC, and more—was talking about the True North, not so strong and something less than free.

Actually, as the day wore on, the coverage shifted from what was happening in Canada to how others were reacting to it: outrage from London, which still took a paternal interest in its erstwhile colony; Pope Francis decrying this return to imperialism; a gathering of Iraqi imams denouncing what they called the transparent Islamophobia behind this flagrant violation of international norms; some Americans claiming Carroway had manufactured “the Canadian crisis” to distract from the culling of illegals within the United States; a government official in Mexico fretting that his country was bound to be taken next.

By three in the afternoon—which, CTV Saskatoon informed me, was 6:00 A.M. in Moscow—it had become clear that the Russians, who’d as yet made no public announcement, were reacting very negatively. Three Akula -class nuclear submarines had been tracked moving boldly into Canadian Arctic waters. According to the pundits, the Kremlin was viewing Carroway’s incursion as if it were the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse: with Canada suddenly a de facto part of the United States, America was now head-butting the Siberian frontier. As a woman from Harvard observed, except for Alaska and the Chukotka Peninsula, which had been locked in a staring contest across the Bering Strait since the end of the last ice age, the two superpowers had been kept safely apart by the vast granite hulk of Canada—until now.