Quantum Night

12

“Okay,” I said, looking out at my first-year psych class, “how many of you drive to the university each morning?”

About a third of the students put up hands.

“Keep your hands up. The rest of you: how many of you have had a job you’ve driven to day after day?”

Another third raised hands.

“Okay, now keep your hands up if this has ever happened to you: you arrive at your destination—school, work, whatever—and have no recollection of the actual drive.”

Most of the hands stayed in the air.

“Cool,” I said. “Lower your hands. Now, think about that: you undertook a complex task; you operated a vehicle weighing over a thousand kilos, you negotiated traffic, you avoided collisions, you obeyed signs and the rules of the road—you did all that without high-level conscious attention; that is, you did it while your mind was on other things.

“Let’s try another one: how many of you have ever been reading a book—not one of mine, you understand, but somebody else’s—and gotten to the bottom of a page and realized you had no awareness of what the page said?”

Again, lots of hands went up.

“Okay, you might argue that driving a car is an example of what laypeople call muscle memory, although the technical term is ‘procedural memory’—stuff you do without thinking about it, like returning a serve in tennis or playing a musical instrument. But what about the reading example? Your eyes tracked across each successive line, and, on some level, your brain was presumably recognizing and processing the words. In fact, you can contrive priming tests to demonstrate that the words were noted. If the page referenced, say, a porcupine, and you’re asked, even though your mind wandered off while reading so you say you have no high-level conscious recollection of the page, to name a mammal, chances are you’ll say ‘porcupine.’ So, reading can’t be dismissed as just muscle memory, just your eyes tracking without actually seeing. And yet you can do it, too, without real attention.”

I let that sink in for a moment, then went on. “So, it’s clearly true that you can perform sophisticated acts without your full conscious attention some of the time. And, by logical extension, if you can do those things that way some of the time, then it’s presumably possible there are people who do them that way all of the time. Of course, we’d have no way to tell, would we? When you’re reading but not absorbing, nobody can tell that from the outside. And when you’re driving but not paying attention, again, well, if the police had a way of detecting that by some external sign—your eyeballs rolling up into your skull, say—you can bet they’d pull you over. But there is no external indication.”

I took a sip from the coffee cup on the lectern, then went on. “And that brings us to one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy. Imagine a being who didn’t just drive all the time without paying attention, and who didn’t just read all the time without paying attention, but who in fact did everything all the time without attention. An Australian philosopher, David Chalmers, is the guy most associated with this proposal. He says it’s logically coherent—that is, there are no internal contradictions—to the notion that a whole planet could exist full of such entities: beings for whom the lights are on but nobody’s home, beings who are, quite literally, thoughtless.” Another sip, then: “Anybody got a suggestion for what we should call such creatures?”

I was always happy to set that one up, and my students never disappointed. “Politicians!” called out one. “Football players,” called another.

“Well,” I said, “almost anything would be an improvement over the term we actually use. Such beings are called ‘philosophical zombies’ or ‘philosopher’s zombies.’ It’s a terrible name: they’re not the walking dead, they don’t shamble along. Behaviorally, they’re indistinguishable from the rest of us. Sadly, the phrasing ‘philosophical zombie’ is more common in the literature than ‘philosopher’s zombie,’ but it doesn’t make sense: the one thing such creatures are unlikely to be is philosophical. Oh, they might say things a philosopher would—‘A could well follow from B,’ or ‘Yes, but how can we be sure your experience of red is the same as my experience of red?’ or ‘Would you like fries with that?’—but they’d only be acting like a philosopher. There would in fact be no inner life, no rumination. Me, I mostly avoid the zombie word. In the States, they can’t really abbreviate ‘philosopher’s zombie’ to its initials because it comes out sounding like ‘peasy,’ as in ‘easy-peasy.’ But here we can safely call them p-zeds, so let’s do that from now on.”

One of the students, a muscular guy named Enzo, raised his hand. “Well, then, Professor Marchuk, if all that’s true—if it really is possible—then how do we know you’re not a p-zed?”

“How indeed?” I replied, smiling beatifically at them all.

“We have to try again,” said Dominic firmly, on January 2, 2001.

“Are you insane?” replied Menno. “You saw what happened to that student, Jim Marchuk.”

“Which is precisely why we have to try again. We have exactly one data point now. We can’t draw any conclusions from that.”

“That boy might have died. What if he’d never regained consciousness?”

“But he did. And, really, we don’t even know that our equipment is what caused him to black out.”

“Oh, come on! It happened the moment we activated the helmet. What else could have caused it?”

“Who knows? Correlation is not causation. But, anyway, if the effect was unique to him, we need to know that. I’d hate to cancel a whole program based on one failure.”

“You know who else said that? General Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove—right before the world came to an end.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dominic. “It’ll be fine. We’ll be prepared this time. No fucking Laurel and Hardy carrying the body down the corridor. We’ll belt the next subject into the chair so he can’t fall out—don’t want a concussion! And if he does lose consciousness, well, we’ll just wait patiently. Marchuk revived in a matter of minutes, after all.” He thought for a moment. “Let’s try that business student, the runner. He had an inner monologue, too, and he’s from Winnipeg; he should be around. What was his name?”

“Huron,” Menno said reluctantly. “Travis Huron.”

“Okay, Travis,” said Menno into the intercom. “We want you to just think about the test message, all right? Just that, nothing else. Do you remember it?”

On the other side of the window, the athletic young man nodded. “‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy.’”

“Exactly. Just repeat that subvocally over and over once I say ‘go.’”

Another nod.

Menno had his finger poised over the enter key, but just stood there, unable to bring himself to press it.

After about ten seconds, Dominic, standing next to him, muttered, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” reached over, and stabbed the other enter key on the numeric keypad, and—

—and Travis’s head tipped forward, and his strapped-in body sagged.

“Shit,” said Menno, rushing out the door and into the adjacent lab. He unstrapped the helmet and tossed it across the room to get it out of the way. It was just like with Jim Marchuk. Travis’s pulse was good—Menno had no trouble finding it this time—and his respiration was normal.

Dominic entered, too; Menno had run here, but Dominic must have fucking sauntered to take so long. “Well?” Dom said, as if inquiring about the score in a sporting event he didn’t really care about.

“Unconscious,” said Menno. “Otherwise fine… I guess.”

“It must be the transcranial focused ultrasound that makes them black out,” said Dom, “but I’m not sure why.”

“We shouldn’t have done this,” said Menno, feeling nauseated. He looked at his watch. “Two minutes.”

“It’ll be fine.”

Menno started to pace. “Damn, damn, damn.”

They waited… and waited… and waited, Travis breathing calmly the whole time, although a little drool had started to come out of his half-open mouth.

“There!” said Menno. “It’s been fifteen minutes. That’s got to be at least three times as long as Marchuk was out. We have to call 911.”

Kayla ran up to the nursing station. “What room is Travis Huron in?”

The nurse—a stout, middle-aged woman—pointed to a green chalkboard on the opposite wall. It was a chart of patients, with their room numbers and the names of their attending physicians; Kayla found the line about Travis and hurried down the corridor, low heels clicking against flooring marked with colored stripes.

The door to Travis’s room was open. He had a bed whose front could rise; it was supporting his back at a forty-five-degree angle. His eyes were closed and his hair—dark, like Kayla’s—lay flat against his scalp. Some sort of drip was going into his left arm, and his right index finger had a pulse monitor clipped to it. He was wearing a hospital smock the color of an old woman’s hair rinse.

“Travis,” said Kayla, coming up on his left side.

No response.

A slim and short male doctor in a white lab coat came in. “Hello,” he said. “I am Dr. Mukherjee. And you would be?”

“Kayla Huron. His sister.”

“Ah, yes, good. Thank you for coming. Have you been briefed?”

Kayla shook her head.

“Well, it falls to me, then,” said Mukherjee. “Your brother is in a coma as far as we can tell. There is no sign of trauma or injury. He has had an MRI, and there is no blood clot or tumor.”

“How long will it last?”

Mukherjee lifted his shoulders slightly. “That we do not know. There are varying degrees of being in a coma: we use something called the Glasgow Coma Scale to assess motor response, verbal response, and eye response. Sadly, your brother scores the lowest—the worst—on all three axes. Of course, we will do everything we can. With luck, he will wake up at some point.”

“With luck?” snapped Kayla. “What the hell happened? How did he get here?”

Mukherjee was carrying a clipboard. He looked at it. “He was brought in by ambulance”—a glance at his watch—“five hours ago. Apparently he was found unconscious in an empty classroom at the U of M; a janitor stumbled upon him.”

“What are you doing to help him?”

“We are attending to his physical necessities. But you, young lady, can sit with him. Chat. If he makes any response—speaks, turns his head toward you, or the like—let the nursing station know. Just pull that red cord there, do you see?” He turned and left.

Kayla looked at her watch; Christ, she’d never make it to the club tonight. A chair with orange vinyl padding and a chrome frame was tucked against one wall. She scraped it across the floor. Once it was by Travis’s bed, next to the stand holding the drip bag, she sat on it. “Come on, Trav,” she said. “Wake up, damn it. It’s me, it’s Kayla. Wake up.”

He didn’t react. She looked at him, studying his face, something she hadn’t done for ages. She still thought of him as an angular, geeky kid—but he’d grown into a handsome young man, with clear skin, a high forehead, and…

…and, she knew, piercing blue eyes. But they weren’t visible now: his lids were closed, and the eyeballs beneath were stationary, she could see that. No rapid eye movement, no dreaming.

“Trav, for God’s sake,” Kayla said. “Mom will have a fit. You don’t want me to worry her. Wake up, will you?” She hesitated, then took his hand; it was warm but limp. “Travis?” she said. “Travis, are you there?”

“You really effed up the helmet when you threw it across the room,” said Dom.

“I didn’t throw it,” Menno replied. “I just—”

“Man, you hurled it.”

Maybe he had; he was furious at the fucking thing, and at himself.

“Anyway,” said Dom, “if we’re going to get more work done before classes resume on the eighth, we’ve got to get that first kid who fainted—what’s his name? Jim Marchuk? We’ve got to get him to come in.”

“Why?” Menno asked.

“To recalibrate the equipment. He’s the only one we have previous readings from who’s still around; all of our other experimental subjects have gone home for the holidays.”

“Why on Earth would he agree to put that helmet on again after what it did to him the last time—not to mention what happened to Travis Huron?”

“Surely those things were because of the transcranial focused ultrasound,” said Dominic. “We won’t activate that part; it obviously isn’t working quite right. But if we don’t calibrate the helmet properly, any new subvocalization data we collect will be useless.”

“Jesus, Dom, we should just shelve the whole project.”

“For what reason? Nobody but you or I knows about the subjects fainting.”

“It’s not fainting, damn it. Travis is in a coma, and, unlike Jim Marchuk, he shows no signs of coming out of it.”

“I agree that’s really unfortunate,” said Dom calmly. “But we’ve stumbled onto something huge—huge—and I’m not going to just walk away from it. We need to get Marchuk back in here.”

At last, Menno nodded reluctantly. “I suppose it can’t hurt to ask.”

“Sorry to bother you again during the holidays, Jim,” Dominic said. He was sitting on a lab stool, and Menno was leaning against a wall.

As far as Menno could see, Jim looked no worse for wear despite what had happened last time. He was dressed in tan corduroys and a tattered Calgary Stampede hoodie. “No problem,” said Jim.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” asked Menno.

Jim looked puzzled by the question. “I’m fine, thanks.”

Dominic scowled slightly and took back control. “Good, good. We were hoping you’d be willing to do another stint with the helmet.”

“The new one or the old one? I didn’t much like that new one.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dominic. “We’ve, ah, loosened it up; it, um, won’t be as tight a fit this time.”

“I don’t know,” said Jim.

Of course the boy was going to refuse, Menno thought. But Dominic pressed on. “Please.”

Jim frowned.

“It would really help us out,” Dominic added.

Menno shook his head slightly. It was a waste of—

“Sure,” said Jim, with a shrug. “Why not?”

“Okay, Jim,” said Dom into the intercom mic, looking at the young man through the glass. “Try again.”

“I am trying,” said Jim.

Menno pointed to the oscilloscope. “The phonemes are there, and there, see?”

Dom nodded.

“But there’s nothing else,” said Menno. “Ask him to try another phrase.”

“Jim,” said Dom, “think the words to ‘Humpty Dumpty’—you know, the nursery rhyme.”

Jim nodded, and the oscilloscope dutifully showed little spikes for each syllable.

Dom looked at Menno. “Maybe you damaged the helmet more than I thought.”

“No,” said Menno. “When I put it on myself, just to test, it showed the usual internal noise. But we can’t use me to calibrate because we didn’t save any of my earlier recordings.”

Dom keyed the mic again. “Jim, can you make sure the serial cable coming out of the equipment bank is tight in its socket?”

Jim checked the RS-232C port. “Snug as a bug in a rug,” he said.

The boy fell silent, and Menno’s heart sank as he looked at the flat line on the phosphor screen. “Oh, God,” he said. Fortunately, the intercom was off; Jim was staring blankly into space.

“It’s not our fault,” Dom said quickly.

“The hell it isn’t!” snapped Menno, pointing at the flat horizontal tracing. “We did that to the boy. We shut off his inner voice.”