Perfect killer

EPILOGUE

A score of postdoctoral and medical school students jammed themselves around a long, elliptical plastic-laminate table, took notes, and sipped coffee when I paused and listened to me with an embarrassing degree of intensity as I shuffled my way toward the last pages of my notes.

Around the perimeter of the windowless room stood a collection of people who would be my classroom students in the fall, and a sprinkling of faculty members I vaguely recognized but whose names I could not recall.

"I realize its a big shock for many, but the theoretical and practical successes of quantum theory expose classical physics as a primitive tool. For the purposes of studying consciousness, it's like using a muzzle-loading cannon when you really need a particle accelerator. Regardless, the classically misled consciousness establishment remains mired in the seventeenth century wearing Sir Isaac Newton about their necks like an albatross." I glanced hopefully at the door for an instant, then back to my notes. "This stubborn refusal to relinquish obsolete ideas has damaged our ability to understand consciousness and to examine and discuss the existence of free will."

I turned to the big white board at the front of the room, erased my previous notes dealing with the technological verifications of quantum theory-semiconductors, nuclear bombs, GPS satellites.

"Quantum physics and superstring theory invalidate classical physics as follows: First, classical physics says any action must be caused by current, local, and totally mechanical circumstances." I wrote as I spoke, turning back to make eye contact between each point. "Second, classical physics holds there is matter and there is energy, sometimes equal but always separate. But as we have seen, quantum entanglement and superposition destroy the first proposition. The second crumbles because matter and energy are manifestations of the same thing, and neither exists as a simple either-or dichotomy.

"Furthermore, the universe is far weirder than we think because everything we know about matter and energy totally ignores ninety-six percent of everything."

A coherent wall of blank stares greeted this.

"Think for a moment about the studies from NASA and others in 2003 that proved that ordinary atoms-the stuff we're made of-comprise a mere four percent of the entire universe." I held up four fingers. "On the other hand, dark matter makes up twenty-three percent, and the rest, a whopping seventy-three percent, is dark energy.

"And we know virtually nothing about dark matter and energy! I have no doubt that this missing ninety-six percent of the universe affects our consciousness. When we learn more I believe we will lose our bifurcated outlook on matter versus energy and find a third way that will invalidate much of the truth we hold dear."

A hand shot up.

"Yes?"

"Professor, why are you talking about cosmology in a biology lecture?"

"Because quantum physics, superstring theory, cosmology, and particle physics bring us to a point where the infinitely small intersects with the infinitely large. I believe all the hard questions in consciousness lie at the same intersection."

"Like how?"

"Like the incredible nonexistence of matter and energy," I said. "As we look at these on a smaller and smaller scale, matter and energy first seem to be the same thing, then appear to be some sort of ghost particle or a string if you like, produced by spacetime itself. Look at your finger." Everyone in the class looked at his or her fingers. "Now, think about a keratin molecule, any molecule. Okay, now fix on a carbon atom. Then visualize a neutron. Then visualize the quarks making up the neutron. Think about one quark, any quark. It has no mass we can measure, only energy and we have no way to determine where it is at any given point. Indeed, some variants of superstring theory postulate it's a vibration resonance emanating from space-time itself."

I watched most of the eyes in the room close.

"Now, imagine every other molecule and atom in your body at the same time. Visualize yourself as a collection of vibrating space-time clouds, none of which have any mass, but which you perceive as the solid, living, breathing you.

"There is also some very good evidence from work done by Penrose and Hameroff indicating that quantum-based processes underlie our consciousness, maybe through some connection to space-time-the fabric of reality and existence-and that our thoughts alter space-time permanently. Proving this experimentally, establishing it as fact rather than a good theory, will take time."

"So how does dark energy come into this?"

"Obviously dark energy and matter have to be part of space-time," I said. "And therefore part of how consciousness works."

"If Penrose and Hameroff are right," the student challenged. "And a lot of prominent people think they're dead wrong."

"A lot of prominent people thought Copernicus and Galileo were dead wrong too," I said.

I looked at my watch, then at the back of the room. Jasmine stood inside the door, leaning against the far wall. I caught a deep breath and tried to keep my tongue from stumbling. Her hair framed her face like a halo; the emerald studs I had bought her to celebrate Darryl Talmadge's successful defense dazzled on her ears. She wore a simple black dress and carried a suitably conservative leather handbag.

"As you probably know from the media reports, Darryl Talmadge died in his sleep two days ago. I need to go change now for the funeral up in Itta Bena or we'll be late. If you'd like to know more about dark energy, my notes are at ConsciousnessStudies. org. Also, if you're interested in the free will issues concerning Talmadge and Braxton, a transcript of the television interview Ms. Thompson and I did is on the Web site, as well as on Ms. Thompson's site, Mississippilustice. Org. Thank you for coming," I said as I headed for the door and Jasmine's welcoming smile.

The heels of Jasmine's black dress pumps tapped on the polished linoleum as we hurried toward my office.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I lost track of the time." I rechecked my watch. "Oh, man, I really, really hate being late."

Jasmine gave me one of her trademark mysterious smiles. After all these months, I had learned to read her smiles better and realized she still had as many ways of smiling as Sonia did for saying "Oy!" We rounded the corner and spotted Sonia toward the end of the corridor. She stood in the doorway of my new office at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine.

As we drew close to Sonia, I saw the bright, happy look on her face as her eyes connected my expression with the fond look in Jasmine's eyes. "You are going to be late, Dr. Stone," she said, trying to sound reproachful and not quite making it. "Quincy's waiting."

"Yes, Ma'am," I told her as I hurried into the reception area.

"Sorry," I apologized to Quincy.

"We'll make it," he said easily. "Be cool."

I gave him a smile, then hurried into my office and pulled on the same suit I had worn at Vanessa's funeral. Quincy and I had grown close since the night we both had too much to drink and he'd pulled out a worn, brown, expandable folder full of legal documents proving he was my half-uncle via the Judge and Vanessa's mother. The Judge's financial support to Quincy's mother had allowed them a far more decent life than the average resident of Balance Due. The Judge had also secretly arranged financial aid that had put Vanessa and Quincy through college.

I had not been as surprised to learn all this as Jasmine was.

"Vanessa and your grandmother and I decided there was no reason to saddle you with the ugly details," Quincy had told her, but I had seen a look of betrayal on her face and a realization that the specter of the black woman and the white planter from the big house had struck closer to home than she had imagined.

The revelations that had brought me closer to Quincy had wedged themselves between Jasmine and me for months.

Quincy still taught at Mississippi Valley State University, but came down to Jackson often, as did Jasmine. I had arranged my classes, clinical appointments, and lectures into a schedule allowing me to spend about half my time in Greenwood. I bought an old building off Cotton Street and loved to spend time renovating it. It was only a couple of minutes away from the hospital where Tyrone had resumed his work and I volunteered.

"Who's driving?" I said as I rushed out of my office, coat and tie in hand.

"I've got the Suburban," Quincy said. "Remember, we're giving Rex and Anita a ride."

Quincy picked up Anita and Rex at their home in Madison, then headed north on I55. We rode in silence, watching the colors of spring race past the windows. The dogwoods filled the roadside forests with explosions of pink-tinted white. The emerging new leaves frosted the rest of the woods with bright green, full of hope and promise.

I still had not reconciled myself with Camilla, the way she had died and my memories of her I reflected on my lecture from that morning and whether the Camilla I had known and loved had been trapped in her damaged brain all along, the same software and memories and person she had always been, but the damaged hardware failing to let her out.

Maybe it had been the same with Talmadge's wife and her Alzheimer's. I had certainly made my best case about this to the juries who had considered the charges against Braxton and Talmadge, but doubts still lingered in my mind.

The courts had remanded Talmadge to the high-security wing of Pacific Hills in Malibu so Flowers and I could continue to study him. Braxton's expensive legal team had got him off with a temporary-insanity plea that has allowed him to live as a mostly free man other than for a court-ordered monitoring of his medication.

Talmadge lived longer than anyone expected before the cancer got him.

Harper's notes had been seized by Laura LaHaye's office and made unavailable to us. The Xantaeus fiasco had been embarrassing but not a career killer for her, Greg McGovern, and the nondepleting-neurotrop team at Defense Therapeutics. While the patches had been withdrawn, the research continued because being first to have it was too important to the Pentagon.

Dan Gabriel had gone back to college at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and was studying marine biology. In his spare time, he volunteered for an organization he had founded that warned the public about the dangers of what had become known as "the chemical soldier." I don't think anyone has paid much attention to them, and for that we will suffer one day.

Jack Kilgore got a second star and a desk in the Pentagon, which he quickly found no fun at all. He took his retirement money and bought a river-rafting outfitter on the Rogue River in Oregon. Through some legal maneuvering by Jasmine, which I still do not completely understand, and a few phone calls that Kilgore placed before his retirement, Rex somehow managed to find his way back to a completely legal life, which disappointed him to no end.

The same calls and legal maneuvering led to a quiet shake-up in the Homeland Security administration and a score of courts-martial. Those, along with testimony from people like John Myers and the captured security-camera streams that Tyrone had snagged in Napa got Jasmine and me a boatload of apologies and our total exoneration.

Rex gave up contracting and with his new legitimacy acquired a federal firearms license and opened a wildly profitable shooting range near the Ross Barnett Reservoir, where people come to shoot machine guns of every type. The 20mm electric Gatling cannon is a perennial favorite.

I wear one of his "Why waltz when you can rock and roll" T-shirts every chance I get. Every now and then he manages to arrange for someone to show up with even bigger stuff they use to blow up old cars and trucks. The armed forces recruiters usually show up those days as well. He spends a lot of time denying that he doesn't have a shady past. I still wonder about that and he's never said a word to me.

Rex helped me take care of paying people back for the equipment we stole, for repairing the old helicopter, and with a nice payment to the terrified Hispanic man in the wine delivery truck who eventually accepted my personal apology as well.

The drive up I-55 was always boring, so I thought about all these things until my eyelids closed, inserting me into a recurring dream I always tried to remember. At the beginning, I soared through a jungle of colorful knots and vines racing through a glowing matrix that ebbed, flowed, and danced in time with the movement of each luminescent line. The knots were especially brilliant where they twisted about each other, then grew dimmer as the lines emerged from the knot and hurtled away. Some of the particles made solitary lines; some appeared suddenly; others disappeared. Still others were bound and woven like the great sheaves of a suspension bridge.

I sensed these were the world lines of every quantum ever created. In quantum physics, every particle has a world line in space-time. Even a particle at rest still races through the fourth dimension of time.

Those lines that appeared and disappeared represented the scientifically confirmed phenomenon of particles that winked in and out of existence even in a vacuum.

Then I somehow knew the sheaves were things, objects, animals, where matter held together. Some of the sheaves threw off great skeins of knots that burned brightly and altered the matrix in vast and awesome ways. I looked directly behind me and saw the lines I threw off like a ship's wake, offering turbulent fractal patterns in the matrix.

Scientists working on quantum computers can encode difficult computations by weaving the world lines of quantum particles in a specific way. The trick came from the use of von Neumann algebras in a way described by Berkeley mathematician Vaughn Jones back in 1987. The idea was picked up by string theorist Edward Whitten at Princeton and Microsoft Research fellows Michael Freedman and Alexei Kitaev, who figured out if you braided the world lines of subatomic particles, not only would they work for quantum computation, but they were also incredibly stable, which solved a big problem-decoherence-that required incredibly low, liquid-helium-like temperatures for operation.

The epiphany hit me then and I recognized the knots as thoughts and memories. The glowing matrix was space-time. All of the lines made some change in space-time, but the biggest alterations were the ones made by the knots.

Something shook me.

The lines and the matrix vanished.

I struggled to hold on to the epiphany: the quantum knots and their stability were how brain cells might maintain the quantum coherence necessary for consciousness to exist, and that was how we all connected to space-time. I had it!

Jasmine gently shook me awake. My heart fell as I opened my eyes and the epiphany slipped away. Again.

"What's wrong?" Jasmine read the look on my face.

"The big dream again."

"Do you remember it?"

I shook my head.

"Don't worry, you'll have it again."

Jasmine hugged me as Quincy made the turn into the Itta Bena Cemetery. Ahead of us sat the same old car and the same old preacher who'd helped me bury Mama, I caught sight of the bright artificial flowers I had left atop Mama's grave at my last visit, and for some reason I remembered her more clearly than I had in a long time. Memories had become more important to me as I'd made peace with Camilla's admonition to "make a memory." I had finally come to the deep emotional acceptance that we are the sum of our memories, and when we respect those memories, we respect ourselves and our lives.

Quincy brought the Suburban to a stop on the gravel drive.

Memories obsessed me now I speculated again about Penrose and Hameroff and their theory that consciousness has a permanent effect on space-time. If they are right, perhaps our memories permanently embed themselves there as well.

"It had something to do with memory," I said to Jasmine. "The dream."

What if a perfectly faithful memory of events existed in space-time, something permanent we could reach out to with our imperfect hardware and flawed ability to recall? Perhaps if space-time is the face of God, then the memories we embedded there are heaven, or maybe our souls. Maybe both.

"I've always struggled with why we work so hard to hold on to memories," I said. "But I think they're important. Really important."

"How important?" she asked.

I shook my head slowly. "I haven't a clue. I just believe it. Don't ask me how it plays out right now because I can't find words for what I feel." We got out of the Suburban.

"Memories are part of the meaning of life," I said. "Of what makes our existence significant. I think maybe this is why it's important to make memories and to be faithful to them."

I put on my coat as we walked over to the open grave. The same two guys stood near the same backhoe in the distance, dressed this day in work shirts. Jasmine and I got to the graveside as the preacher began. He took in Jasmine and me in a single glance and offered us a smile.

"I want to begin first with a saying from Helen Keller," the old preacher said I was relieved to see he had been to a much better dermatologist and was no longer covered with precancerous lesions.

"Ms. Thompson"-he nodded toward Jasmine-"was kind enough to bring this quote to my attention." He blinked his watery eyes at an index card that trembled in his hands.

"The quote, which I believe I will use every chance I get, goes like this: 'What once we enjoyed and deeply loved, we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us."'

I said, "Amen," and did not fight my tears.