Quantum Night

23

Victoria Chen had to know for sure.

She was waiting for Ross in the Light Source’s glassed-in entryway. She became even more nervous than she already was when 11:00 A.M. passed and there was still no sign of him; another researcher had the beamline at 11:30. But at ten after, he finally arrived. Vic got him signed in, had him clip on a dosimeter, and took him on the long walk down to the SusyQ beamline.

“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked as she fussed with her equipment.

Ross was his usual amiable self. “No, of course not. I’d do anything for you, my love. You know that.”

She tapped a series of commands on her keyboard. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a good man. Now, if you’ll just lie down here…” She indicated the gurney.

Ross smiled. “Fancy a nooner?”

“Not today, dear,” she said, making a show of waggling her eyebrows, “but there’s always tonight.”

“Indeed there is,” he said, and he lay down on his back. That was either supine or prone—she could never remember which was which—but, either way, his lean form, in dark-blue cotton slacks and a light-blue dress shirt, looked fine. He really was a good boyfriend: attentive to her but low-maintenance himself; even-tempered; and an absolute machine in the sack.

“Thanks for doing this, hon,” she said as she affixed the head strap. “I think there’s a really good paper in it.”

“My pleasure.”

“Just relax. As the doctors like to say, this won’t hurt a bit.” She used her mouse to click an on-screen button, and the process began. Initially, her monitor showed a plain horizontal line—no superposition—but it did that for everyone; it took about ten seconds to gather the data, and—

Ah, and there it came. The line undulated and then a huge peak appeared at the left side, showing a single superimposed electron. She waited anxiously for the second peak to appear, and then the third one, and—

And she waited and waited and waited. Oh, the usual wobbly horizontal line appeared up high, but the spike down below gained no companions.

Ross shifted on the gurney. She moved over to the beam emitter, which was centered on the crown of his head, and, after a moment, she did the only thing she could think of doing: she flicked her finger against its side, the way one does with electronics that might have a loose connection. But the emitter was solid-state, she knew, and the display remained exactly the same.

One, and only one, superposition. Vic felt her mouth drop open. That was crazy. That was nuts. She knew Ross… it was the right word: she knew him intimately. She knew everything about him. He couldn’t be… there was just no effing way he could be, but…

She found herself backing away, and her derrière bumped against the edge of a desk. She looked at him, and he shifted his eyes to look at her. “Are we done?” he asked.

He meant the experiment, of course, but—no, no, he didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t thinking about the experiment, not if what Jim Marchuk had told Kayla was right. He wasn’t thinking about anything at all. He was just saying something that fit the circumstances, responding to some internal timer or external cue. But the question couldn’t be more apt. Were they done?

Jim must be wrong. Either that, or the equipment was faulty. She loved Ross—and Ross loved her. She knew that. Not just because he said it, but because he showed it, in a hundred—a thousand!—ways.

She moved in, undid the strap, and said, “You can get up.”

And he replied as he always did when she said the words “get up”—the same joke over and over again, the same routine—by looking down briefly, then flashing a lascivious smile, and saying, “That’s easy when you’re around, babe.”

Input.

Output.

Could it be? Could he really be a machine—albeit a biological one—not just in the sack but in everything?

And, if that were true, if Jim Marchuk was right, could she go on dating a… a thing, an emptiness, a zombie?

She wasn’t ready to give voice to the thought but, yes, damn it all, they were almost certainly done.

What the fuck?

Bright light from overhead; Travis Huron scrunched his eyelids shut. What the hell was he doing lying down?

A man’s voice: “Holy Jesus.”

And a woman’s voice tinged by… wonder, perhaps? “Travis?”

Travis reopened his eyes, but it took effort; his lashes were sticking together, interlocking cilia on twin Venus flytraps. The light stung, and he was having trouble focusing. He blinked repeatedly. And then the same as-yet-unseen male he’d heard earlier—Travis assigned its owner the name Master of the Bleeding Obvious: “His eyes are open!”

“Travis?” said the female voice again. He turned his head, feeling a twinge in his neck as he did so, and there, standing next to him, her eyes wide, was…

Well, if he’d had to guess, he’d have said it was Mom, except Mom didn’t quite look like that, and was five or six years older. But she was Mom-esque, whoever this was.

“Travis?” the woman said again. “It’s me. It’s Kayla.”

“No,” Travis said, the word barely a whisper.

The woman took one of his hands in hers. “Yes,” she replied, squeezing gently. “You’ve been in a coma.”

Travis felt his heart pounding. “A…” He’d wanted to repeat the phrase “a coma” as a question, but throat congestion mired the second word before it got out.

The woman nodded. “For nineteen years. It’s 2020 now.”

His head was swimming. That was an eye-test score, for Christ’s sake, not a year. He tried to speak again: “Twenty… ,” then stopped, cleared his throat, and pushed ahead. “Twenty-twenty?”

“Uh-huh,” said Kayla.

Travis swallowed, then coughed a couple of times. Next to—well, yes, he supposed it really was Kayla—was a man about the same age.

About the same age…

And if Kayla was in her late thirties, then he—Travis himself—must be…

He did the math: in 2020 he would turn—had, perhaps, already turned—forty-one.

“What”—his voice still rough, the words still difficult to expel—“do I… look like?”

The man and woman exchanged glances, then the man moved over to a cabinet and picked up something flat and rectangular. He tapped its surface then flipped the device around, holding it out for Travis to see…

My God.

Not just a still photograph, but high-resolution live video of a guy whose jaw dropped as Travis felt his own mouth falling open—a man with hair peppered gray retreating from a forehead marked by horizontal creases, a man who looked at least as much like Travis’s father had as Kayla looked like their mother.

Travis couldn’t bear the sight of what he’d become, but he couldn’t turn away, either. “What’s that?”

“That’s you,” replied the Master of the Bleeding Obvious, gently.

“No, no. The… that thing?”

“Oh!” A smile across the man’s kind face. “My iPhone—um, my cell phone.”

“No buttons.”

“It’s a touch screen,” said the man, tapping its surface.

“That’s… a phone?”

“Not just that; it’s a talking computer.” He turned it to face himself. “Sear E,” he said—whatever that meant—“um, let’s see. Ah, okay, how ’bout this: if the sun wasn’t blotting them out, what planets would be visible right now?”

A silky female voice emanated from the device: “Venus is high in the sky in Taurus, just two degrees west of the sun. Mercury is twenty-one degrees farther west in Gemini, and Jupiter forty-seven degrees east in Aries.”

The future, thought Travis. I’m in the fucking future.