Quantum Night

25

When he’d been fifteen—which was seven subjective and twenty-six objective years ago—Travis’s hand had gotten sliced open. He’d walked into a plate-glass window at a shopping mall that he’d thought was an open door. It should have been made out of safety glass but wasn’t, and the damn thing broke into giant slabs. As he lifted his arm to shield his face, one of the huge sections dropped from the top of the frame and smashed into the back of his right hand, cutting it down to the bone. The tendons were severed, the wound gaped, and he was rushed to the emergency department.

All of the surgical beds were in use, and so they put him in something like a dentist’s chair, with his hand supported on a little tray, and the reconstructive surgeon, called in from a concert he’d been at, sat on a stool next to him and carefully sutured up the tendons, which looked like gray fettuccine noodles. They’d only used a local anesthetic, and Travis had watched, fascinated, examining the inner workings of his hand.

The scar, Travis was pleased to see, had faded greatly over the last two decades, doubtless the only part of him that had improved with age. Still, this was a bit like that: for the first time, he realized, he was reflecting on the inner workings of his own mind. And, like that—like seeing the tendons, the bone, the whole mechanical infrastructure of his metacarpus—it was interesting for a time, and something he was glad to have experienced, but not anything he needed to do again, and certainly not something he wanted to be subjected to all the time.

Kayla had been sitting with him for the last couple of hours, presenting a compressed version of twenty-first-century history to date: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a second space shuttle blowing up, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the election of the first black American president, Canada being dragged far to the right and then snapping back to the left with—holy crap!—the recent election of a Muslim prime minister, same-sex marriage being legalized across Canada and a decade later across the US, the polar ice caps shrinking, and so much more. It was overwhelming.

But around 6:00 P.M., Kayla’s boyfriend Jim showed up to let Kayla take a break. They disappeared into the corridor for a couple of minutes, and Travis looked out the window. The trees were swaying—it had become quite a blustery day. An eagle flew by, passing just above a pole with a tattered, faded Canadian flag.

Jim re-entered and took the seat Kayla had been using. Travis regarded him. This guy was presentable enough, but his sister, even having aged, was better-looking. Travis said, “How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine,” replied Jim.

Travis shook his head. “Last birthday I remember, I turned twenty-two. Now, I’m forty-one.”

“Tempus fugit,” Jim said, and Travis found himself immediately liking the guy. He didn’t follow the phrase with raised eyebrows, which, Travis knew, would have been literally—yes, literally, not figuratively—supercilious; he didn’t shoot Travis a “That’s Latin” or a “Do you get it?” look. He just calmly assumed that whomever he was talking to was as bright as he himself was.

“Yeah,” said Travis.

“So, listen,” said Jim, “I asked Kayla, and she said it was okay to talk to you about this. I was at U of M, too, when you were, but I can’t remember things from back then, and, well, I thought maybe you could help me fill in some blanks about my past.”

Travis considered for a moment. Previously, words like those would have been seductive music: You know something I don’t; you’ve got something you can hold against me. But he didn’t feel any urge to… to use this poor sap. He…

He wanted to help the guy out.

Christ, Travis thought, what’s wrong with me?

I looked at Travis Huron, and he looked back at me. Travis was Kayla’s brother, but I felt in a small way like he was my brother, too. After all, he was the only other guy my age I knew who also had no memory of the first half of 2001. Yes, he’d lost so much more than that, but I could qualitatively, if not quantitatively, understand what he was going through. And even if I could somehow recover my memories of my dark period, they would presumably be old memories, faded, unreliable, like anyone’s of that long ago. But Travis remembered things from back then as if they’d just occurred.

Except…

Damn it, something was niggling at my consciousness. And, yes, consciousness was the heart of the matter. Menno Warkentin said I blacked out after trying on his Lucidity helmet. If that contraption did more than render me unconscious—if it really was what put an end to my self-awareness for the next six months—then I could sort of understand why I didn’t remember anything from the period following my blacking out, until, for whatever reason, I ceased being a p-zed.

But why didn’t I remember putting on the helmet? Why didn’t I remember going to Menno’s lab on New Year’s Eve? Hell, why don’t I remember going to McNally Robinson and buying that sci-fi paperback earlier the same day? Surely I should at least vaguely recall that stuff, but I couldn’t dredge up anything from the day I became a p-zed.

But Travis hadn’t been subjected to Menno’s lasers. He presumably had no paralimbic damage promoting confabulation; his memories should be accurate. And so, after he asked me how old I was, and he lamented how old he himself had become, I simply asked him: “Did you take part in an experiment at the university run by Professor Warkentin and Professor Adler?”

Travis managed a rueful smile. “Yup. I remember it like it was yesterday. Those guys still around?”

“Warkentin, yeah; he’s emeritus at U of M. Adler’s in Washington now. So, you remember the Lucidity helmet?”

“I don’t think I ever heard them call it that, but you mean the football helmet with all the doodads attached? Sure. I came in on December fifteenth, they put it on me, and I did some tests, thinking words without saying them.”

“Exactly. Yes. And then they had you come back again, right?”

An odd look passed over Travis’s face, as if he was surprised at how important this seemed to me. “No.”

“They didn’t?”

“No. I came in once, got my twenty bucks, and that was it.”

“What about the day you blacked out? I’d assumed you’d come in again to do an experiment. They found you on campus, and classes didn’t resume until the eighth.”

“Not that I recall.”

Damn. I’d been so sure Warkentin was responsible for what had happened to Travis. “You don’t remember the day you fell into the coma?”

“Not a thing. I remember going to bed the night before, which was January first. I’d gotten a paperback of this new thriller, Angels & Demons, for Christmas, and I started reading that—in fact, that’s just about the last thing I remember.”

There was an obvious joke to be made about Dan Brown novels; I resisted. “But you don’t recall anything at all from the next day? Anything after you woke up?”

He shook his head. “As far as I remember, the next time I woke up, I was right here—with you and my sister standing over me.”

“Huh,” I said, baffled. If Travis had been knocked down into a coma by the same mechanism as me, why didn’t either of us remember putting on the helmet? I could understand losing memories after the botched stimulation with transcranial focused ultrasound, but why would we lose ones from before that?

“You’re a shrink, right?” asked Travis, looking quizzically at me now.

“I’ve got a PhD in psychology,” I replied, “but I don’t have a clinical practice.”

He waved that away. “But you’re trained in this shit, and—funny, I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but I need somebody to talk to.”

I leaned forward in the chair. “I’m all ears.”

“I feel different now,” Travis said. “Different from the way I did before. I’m fighting it, but…”

“What’s different?”

“It’s hard to describe. But I keep thinking about… well, about what I’m thinking about. I was always a charge-ahead kind of guy. Never look back, no second thoughts. You know? Just do it.”

“Like Nike,” I said.

“Yeah, exactly. Hey, they still use that slogan?”

“Yup.”

“Anyway, that’s the way I used to be. But now, I keep going over in my mind things I’ve done.”

I frowned. “You never did that before?”

“Never.”

“What about planning for the future? Thinking about things you haven’t yet done?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve always done that: considering alternatives, figuring the angles. But that’s different; there’s a point to that. You can change the future, right? You can’t change the past—so why…”

“Obsess about it?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, I guess that is the right word.”

“And you’ve only been doing this since…”

“Since Kayla woke me up.”

“Are you sure? Did you ever keep a diary?”

“No.”

“A journal? A blog?”

“A what?”

“A web blog; a public online journal.”

“Christ, no. Why would anyone do that?”

“Is it making you unhappy, this ruminating?”

“Yeah. It’s… I’ve got these… I don’t know what to call them, but…”

“Regrets?” I proffered.

Travis repeated the word, as if trying it on, seeing if it fit: “Regrets…” And then at last he nodded. “Things I might’ve done differently—maybe should have done differently, and…”

“And you’re not used to thinking in terms of ‘should.’”

He seemed to consider this, too, then: “Yeah.” He shook his head. “It’s just… weird.”

It wasn’t weird, not for Q3s, but…

But it was for psychopaths. They didn’t ruminate and they didn’t get depressed; it was almost unheard of for a psychopath to become suicidally despondent. “What about your feelings toward, say, Kayla?”

“That’s weird, too! I mean, she’s my sister, right? Always has been, always will be. And I was a good big brother, you know? Wouldn’t let anyone mess with her. But, well, now that I…”

“Think about it?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Now that I think about it, that was really about me, right? Making sure people respected me? I didn’t—sounds shitty to say this, I know—but I didn’t really care about her. I didn’t understand that, not at the time—but now I keep wondering how she’s doing. And I want her to be happy.”

My pulse was racing. There was too much physics and psychology involved to quickly explain this to Travis just now, but I felt sure in my bones that I was right. Yes, the quantum tuning fork—a device almost as cool as The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver—had restored superposition to Travis Huron’s brain, but it had done an even better job than we’d thought. Prior to his falling into the coma, he must have had two of the three electrons in each of his tubulin thingamajigs in superposition, making him a quantum psychopath. But, assuming he had returned to Menno’s lab, just as I had, the transcranial ultrasound stimulation provided by the Mark II helmet must have caused those electrons to all decohere, falling back en masse to the classical-physics state, making him lose consciousness.

But when Kayla had goosed his brain, instead of just two, all three of the electrons in each pocket had gone into superposition. Prior to 2001, he’d been a card-carrying psychopath, and now, apparently for the first time in his life, Travis Huron was what I had been for most of my life: fully conscious with conscience, a CWC, a quick.

“It’s depressing,” Travis said, after a moment, “having all these… these regrets… running around in my head.”

I nodded slowly. “Welcome to the club.”