Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“Although the White House has issued no confirmation, sources close to the Pentagon contend that Russian President Vladimir Putin today issued an ultimatum directly via the hotline to American President Quinton Carroway, insisting that US troops immediately withdraw from what Putin called ‘Occupied Canada’…”

As I drove on, the sun—the one and only thermonuclear blaze I ever wanted to see—dropped down in my rearview mirror, and soon darkness was gathering.

I called Menno when I made a pit stop. He had a 9:00 A.M. appointment tomorrow with his diabetes specialist, so we agreed I’d come by his place at eleven. That meant I’d have a little time to kill first thing in the morning, and so I arranged to meet Dr. Namboothiri. I didn’t think I could handle unlocking any more of my old memories, but I did desperately need his advice.

“Hello, Bhavesh. Thank you for making time for me on such short notice.” I’d gotten to Winnipeg about 2:00 A.M. and was now operating on only five hours’ sleep.

Namboothiri ushered me into his strange, wedge-shaped office. “No problem. You said it was urgent.”

“It is. When I first came to see you, you knew what I was talking about when I mentioned philosopher’s zombies.”

He sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Sure; of course.”

“Welllll,” I said, the syllable drawing out as I thought about how to phrase this. “Let me ask you a, y’know, a hypothetical. Suppose a bunch of people who had been philosopher’s zombies since birth were to wake up, what do you imagine they’d be thinking? If they’ve never been conscious before, not really, what would be going on now between their ears?”

“You tell me,” said Namboothiri.

I couldn’t help smiling as I sat down. His academic technique was similar to my own.

“Well, I’m assuming it would be the same thing that happened to me after being a p-zed. I’d started confabulating memories, making shit up, filling in the blanks. Presumably they’d do the same thing, too, and, as they compared notes, I presume they’d converge on a consensus reality, right? Homo narrans: Man the Storyteller. And they’d have Wikipedia and the rest of the World Wide Web to tell them what’s gone down before.”

“God help us,” said Namboothiri with a grin. But then he shook his head. “But, you know, it wouldn’t be like that. You lost your memories of being a philosophical zombie because you switched indexing schemes. But someone who had always been a zombie and only woke up as an adult can’t switch indexing schemes, because there’s nothing to switch to. They don’t have a verbal index; they only have a visual one. Oh, they might initialize a verbal index, I suppose—and certainly any kids around three or four years old who suddenly cease being zombies probably will, since that’s the normal developmental step at that age. But older people? Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. But if they did, they’d switch over gradually, just as young people do.”

“And if they continued to index visually, would that make them all autistic?”

“I doubt it,” Namboothiri said. “Visual memory is a correlate of, but not, I suspect, the cause of, autism. It’s certainly possible to have a visual memory but nonetheless compose thoughts in words; otherwise, Temple Grandin wouldn’t have been able to write her books.”

“Okay, thanks. Umm, one more question?”

“Shoot.”

“You’ve seen my MRIs—the new one, and the old one with the paralimbic damage.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think I’ve recovered from that?”

“Nothing in the sessions we’ve had has given me any indication that you’re any kind of crazed psychopath, Jim—at least, not anymore.”

“Okay, thanks.” I got up to leave.

“That’s it? You said it was urgent.”

“It is,” I said, heading for the door.

As was his habit, Menno stood with the door to his apartment open, waiting for me. I saw Pax nudge him in the thigh to let him know I was approaching. “Good morning, Padawan. Won’t you come in?”

“Thanks.” I entered, the silver-and-cyan furniture looking gold and green in the sunlight.

While Menno got us coffee—it was fascinating watching him do so by touch—I explained the Q1-Q2-Q3 taxonomy to him, told him about the quantum tuning fork and how it had rebooted Travis Huron, told him what Vic and Kayla had discovered about the collective entanglement of humanity, and told him how if we could shift one person, then everybody else would also level up or down. I also told him what Vic had discovered: we could do it, perhaps, but not without likely frying the brain of the person we used as the subject. It took three cups apiece to get through it all, with Menno asking the kinds of thoughtful, probing questions I knew he would.

“So?” I said when I was done.

“Let me read you something,” he said. He went into the back and brought out a piece of stiff caramel-colored paper. I was wondering how he was going to read it, but when he set it on the glass-topped table in front of him, I saw the Braille bumps. “This is what Stanley Milgram said about his obedience-to-authority experiments. I printed it out years ago, in the aftermath of Project Lucidity.” He ran an index finger across the paper. “‘Several of these experiments, it seems to me, are just about on the borderline of what ethically can and cannot be done with human subjects. Some critics may feel at times they go beyond acceptable limits. These are matters that only the community’—by which he meant the psychology community—‘can decide on, and if a ballot were held, I am not altogether certain which way I would cast my vote.’”

“Message, Spock?” I said, folding my arms in front of my chest.

“One that at least one of us is conscious of,” Menno replied.

“But,” I said, “we can make the world a better place.” Menno was quiet. Pax watched him patiently. I watched him, too, but without her equanimity. “Damn it, Menno,” I said at last. “You know this is the right thing to do.”

He began slowly, doling out words with care. “It’s been hard sometimes being your friend and colleague, all these years. At first I thought it was just anger over what you’d done to me and Dom, or the fact that you were the one reminder of what I knew about the hordes who lacked inner voices, since you were the only person from Project Lucidity still in my face after all these years. But it wasn’t anything as grandiose as that.”

He paused and took a sip of coffee. “Who taught you about utilitarianism? Who introduced you—figuratively and literally—to Peter Singer? I did. I said, ‘Here, Jim, read this, I think you’ll like it.’ And you did. You embraced it. I talked the talk, but you walked the walk. Remember the first time you came here and confronted me about the interview videos? You know what I was thinking? Not that the jig is up, not the cat is out of the bag, not even that finally I had someone to talk to about the findings Dom and I had made. No, nothing like that. My first thought was, oh, shit, it’s Jim. And he’s judging me. He knows how much I make, he knows how much I can afford to give to charity, but instead I’m living in a million-dollar apartment, and I’m blind, for Christ’s sake, and still hanging expensive art on my walls.”

“The Emily Carr prints, you mean?”

“They’re not prints.”

My gaze went to them: Post-Impressionist oil paintings of coastal rain forests in British Columbia. “Oh.”

“The four of them together cost $42,000, back in 1996.” He gestured toward his kitchen. “And you don’t want to know how much the totem poles cost. I’ve been blind for twenty years—I get zero direct pleasure out of the paintings—but I like having them. I know the calculations Peter Singer has done as well as you do. Less than a thousand dollars will make sure a starving African child lives to adulthood: food, vaccinations, basic health care, even a primary education—just a thousand bucks. I could have saved over forty kids for the money I spent on those paintings. And you know what I told myself? Well, the paintings are appreciating in value, right? And I don’t have any kids; I can leave my whole estate to charity, so when I’m gone, they’ll be sold, and think of all the children that can be saved then! Yup, I was planning for there to be needy children decades down the road as a way of assuaging my conscience about doing nothing to help the ones who exist now. But you! How much did you give to charity last year?”