Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“What’s the matter with Ross?” I asked.

“No, no, it’s not that.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but her skin seemed even paler than normal. She held up the phone for me to see.

I leaned in for a look, but the mathematical notation on her screen might as well have been cuneiform. “Yes?”

“I think I can do it,” Vic said. “I think I can use the beamline so that it does cause the—the patient, I guess—to level up to the next quantum state, if…”

“If what?”

“If it doesn’t kill him. And I suspect it probably will.”

I felt myself sag against the upholstery. “Really?”

Vic nodded. “That much energy being pumped in? Putting defibrillator paddles on your forehead would be nothing compared to this. We’re trying to drag seven billion people along for the ride, after all—that’s going to take a lot of juice. The patient might, just maybe, survive the first blast—pushing them up one level—but the second one? Not a chance in hell.”

“You could use two different people, one for the first boost, then one for the second.”

“And who is going to engineer that? After the first boost, you and I and Kayla will suddenly be p-zeds; none of us could be trusted to hold to the planned agenda. When your state changes, your desires—or whatever passes for desires in a p-zed—could change, too. No, the only way to pull this off would be to automate the whole run, so that once it’s begun, it simply executes.” She winced, the double meaning of her final word hitting her. But then she went on: “And, yes, that’s almost certainly what it is: a death sentence for whoever’s on the beamline. Ask Kay to look at the math; she’ll confirm it, I’m sure. There’s no way to do this.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry, Jim. Or down deep, maybe I’m not.” She started pacing again but stopped when she reached the blinds, pulling two of them aside, peering out at a vertical slice of the world. “This whole thing is crazy.”

Well, I fucked that up.

Of course, when Vic got to the Light Source later that day—her scheduled time there overlapping by a couple of hours with Kayla’s—she told Kayla that I’d approached her with the idea of doing a massive shift.

And when Kayla got home—she’d left Ryan at her mother’s so the two of us could talk privately—she hit the proverbial roof. “You asked Vic to help you?” she said. I was seated on the living-room couch, but she was standing, glaring at me.

“Well, you weren’t interested—”

“I told you not to try this. I told you what would happen to my daughter, for God’s sake. And you’re still pursuing it?”

“Just, you know, hypothetically.”

“Jesus,” said Kayla. “Jesus Christ.”

“Did you hear the news today?” I asked. “More rioting, not just here in Canada but all across Europe, the US, and now in Asia, too. And things are really heating up between the Americans and the Russians. One of the Russian subs has made it all the way into Hudson Bay, for God’s sake. Carroway has demanded that Putin withdraw; for his part, Putin is claiming the Russians are coming to liberate us.” I tipped my head toward the TV set. “Fox News, which doesn’t know the difference between Canadian socialism and Russian communism, is spewing that Nenshi’s election was the work of a fifth column, paving the way for the Soviets—yes, they called them Soviets today!—to seize everything north of the US border.”

“I don’t care about any of that,” said Kayla.

I spread my arms. “But we—you and I, us and Vic—we can destabilize the situation. We can deactivate the psychopaths, before they start lobbing nukes at each other.”

“You’ve got to leave,” Kayla said.

“But I just want what’s best—”

“Get out, Jim. Get your stuff and get out.”

“Kayla, please.” My eyes were stinging. “I just…”

“Get out.”

I didn’t remember the first time Kayla and I had broken up—all I knew about it was what was in that ancient email. But this time, well, I couldn’t imagine the memory would ever fade. It hurt like the way I’d imagined that knife to the heart had hurt, but going on and on, twisting, slicing. I would have almost welcomed becoming a p-zed; there’s something to be said for not really feeling.

But right now I was still capable of feeling, of thinking. What had started as an abstraction—a thought experiment about maximizing the total potential happiness on this ball of dust—had transitioned, it seemed to me, into the game changer that might save everybody. For whatever reason, the tipping point had now come, just as it had in Europe in 1939. But there was one way in which the comparison was not apt: World War II had ended with nuclear weapons being used; World War III would begin with them. Talk about tumbling into the abyss; talk about following Lucifer into the very fires of hell.

But Kayla couldn’t see that. She never looked up, never contemplated the stars. Hers was the realm of the minuscule; mine, the cosmologically vast. Why couldn’t she widen her perspective? As Bogart said in Casablanca, crisply making the utilitarian case, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” But where I had to go, Kayla couldn’t follow; what I had to do, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be any part of.

No, I needed somebody who understood, who really understood. I needed Menno Warkentin.

I could have phoned him, but what I wanted to discuss amounted to overthrowing the current government; if US tanks were on Canadian soil, you could be sure as hell that the NSA was monitoring Canadian telephone calls. And so, a little after 6:00 P.M., I walked out Kayla’s front door for what was probably the last time, got in my repaired car, put the pedal to the metal, and began the long drive to Winnipeg.

It took a couple of hours to get to Regina. Being the Saskatchewan provincial capital, it had been secured from rioting by US forces, and I managed to pass through that city without incident. Still, once I was on the other side of it, I found my heart racing as I continued along the highway—flashing back to when I’d recently been run off the road here, to the attack, to killing that p-zed. My palms were slick with sweat on the steering wheel, and I felt nauseous. I turned on the radio to drown out the voice in my head.

The CBC was used to defying the government in Ottawa and seemed no more cowed now by the one in Washington; Carol Off was on a tear about what she was calling “Carroway’s Anschluss.” No doubt some asswipe—maybe Jonah Bratt, the Carleton psych prof—was commenting right now on the CBC website that Godwin’s law meant she was wrong, but Carol’s words rang true to me. When Hitler had annexed Austria in 1938, it had been, in part, to unify all the German-speaking people of Europe under one government. With the toxin of the McCharles Act already having spilled beyond Texas, perhaps Carroway likewise had been motivated by a desire to pull all of English Canada into the Union while simultaneously letting the mob purge Latinos in the lower forty-eight, the distinction between ones illegally in the US and those legally there having already fallen by the wayside. The six million French Canadians, if they impinged upon the president’s consciousness at all, were doubtless merely an irritation; Washington would surely give Quebec none of the special treatment it was used to receiving from Ottawa.

If, that is, there was a Washington, or an Ottawa, or any damn city at all left. The news came on next, and it was not good.