Quantum Night

34

The next morning, Kayla entered the office she shared with Victoria, who today was wearing a black turtleneck and black leather pants; the combo probably wouldn’t work on anyone else, but she rocked it. Vic was staring intently at an image on a forty-inch monitor.

“What’s that?” asked Kayla, standing behind her and bending over to have a look.

“The scan I made of Ross on the beamline,” replied Victoria.

Kayla put a hand on Vic’s shoulder. “When I want to creep on an ex, I look at their Facebook wall or OKCupid profile.”

“It’s not that,” said Vic. She pointed at one part of the display. “See here? That’s the spike showing he’s got one electron in superposition—making him a Q1, a p-zed.”

“Yes.”

“But look here,” said Vic. She pointed at a serpentine line high up on the Y-axis, which was marked with a logarithmic scale.

Kayla nodded. “The background stuff.”

“Exactly. The entanglement we’ve observed before.”

“Right.”

“And, so far, it’s never changed, right?”

“Right,” said Kayla. “If it would do something, maybe we could figure out what it represented.”

“Exactly—but look! It has changed, see? Right here.” Vic pointed at where the whole line jumped a small amount.

“It increased,” said Kayla, surprised.

“Exactly. It suddenly went up, and it stayed up.”

“Huh.”

“I ran a test on myself yesterday.” Vic did something with her mouse, and a split-screen display came up showing two graphs that looked almost identical. “Both of these are me.” Her triple-superposition Q3 status showed as three distinct spikes on each of the graphs. “But see?” She pointed first to the left-hand display, then the right. “The entanglement level at the top is up from my previous reading, too; that’s never happened before.”

Kayla frowned. “Go back to Ross’s display.”

More mouse movements, and the screen changed again.

“You had Ross in here on Sunday the ninth?”

“Yep. Jeff okayed it.”

“Sure, no problem.” Kayla leaned in, looking at the times marked on the bottom of the graph. “And the entanglement level on his chart went up at 11:19 A.M.?”

“And twenty-two seconds,” said Vic, pointing at the figure. “And it stayed up, right through to the end of the run I did with him.”

“Wow,” said Kayla softly.

“What?”

“Do you know where I was then?”

“A Sunday morning? Well, we can rule out High Mass.”

“I was at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care.”

“Oh, my God! Right! That’s the day you revived your brother!”

“Jim recorded it on video. It’s in our Dropbox.” Kayla gestured for Vic to get up, and she took her place at the keyboard. Kayla opened a browser and banged away for a few moments until she had the shared folder on-screen—and discovered that Vic had her computer set to show large thumbnails; playing-card-sized images of Kayla and Jim making love popped up on the monitor.

“Umm,” said Kayla.

“NSFW,” said Vic, grinning from ear to ear. She reached over and took the mouse, using it to change the view to a plain directory listing, and then she stepped back and let Kayla find the file she was looking for. A couple of clicks later, and the video Jim had shot started playing.

“My God…” said Vic, as Travis’s eyes opened for the first time in almost two decades.

Kayla backed up to the precise moment at which Travis visibly regained consciousness. The little slider at the bottom of the screen showed they were one minute and forty-three seconds into the video. She then flipped back to the file listing, which showed the time at which Jim had begun making the recording, then did the math in her head: the creation-time stamp of the video file plus an additional one minute and forty-three seconds was… 11:19:25 A.M. She said the figure aloud.

Vic let out a low whistle. “That’s really close…”

“Too close to be a coincidence,” said Kayla. “And when I used the quantum tuning fork on him the second time—it didn’t work until I flipped it upside down—it was a few seconds before his eyes opened. So, the increase in entanglement you recorded here on Ross occurred at just about the moment Travis woke up. Want to bet that your own level increased at that exact moment, too?”

“Meaning me, my ex-boyfriend, and your brother were—are—linked?” said Vic. “The three of us are quantally entangled? But why on Earth would that be the case? I mean, Travis and Ross have never even met.”

“That’s an excellent point,” said Kayla, peering in puzzlement at the screen.

Kayla had invited Victoria over for dinner, and the four of us, including Ryan, were still sitting at the square table, although I’d pushed back so I could turn my chair sideways and cross my legs; tomorrow, we’d go to Rebekkah’s place to have dinner with her and Travis.

The ladies had had pot roast while I’d picked my way through a ginormous salad. During dinner, Ryan had told us at length about how her day-camp counselor had tried to explain the awful goings-on. Although Ryan was still frightened, it sounded to my psychologist’s ear like the counselor had taken the right approach: not sugarcoating things, but not being alarmist, either.

The conversation segued to how I would deal in my summer classes with the dark turn current events had taken—and that somehow led to psychologists who got spooked by their own research.

“It can take a lot out of you,” I said. “Look at Phil Zimbardo. His Stanford Prison Guard experiment was in 1971, but he was still wrestling with what happened to his students, and to himself, thirty-odd years later, when he published his book The Lucifer Effect, about how good people turn evil. I have it on one of my required-reading lists.”

“What about the shock-machine guy?” asked Victoria.

“Stanley Milgram,” I said, nodding. “He went the other way after that experiment. He hated that it had become this giant thing, with everyone questioning his ethics, so he retreated into studies that no one could consider controversial. He pioneered the ‘lost-letter’ technique, which tests if people will take the trouble to put stamped envelopes they find on the ground into a mailbox. Turns out most people will, if the letter has a neutral or positive addressee, such as a respected charity, but won’t if it’s addressed to ‘Friends of the Nazi Party,’ or something like that.”

“Still exploring good and evil,” Kayla noted.

“True,” I said, “but in a way that couldn’t hurt anybody. And he spent even more time on something completely benign. Milgram called it the small-world problem, and he was one of the first people to really study it—but it’s better known now as Six Degrees of Separation, or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Milgram showed that any two people are connected by a very small chain, and—”

Victoria sat up straight. “Like Travis and Ross!”

“Pardon?” said Jim.

“Travis—Kayla’s brother—he’s connected to my ex-boyfriend Ross, right, in that very way. Travis to Kayla to me to Ross; hell, that’s only three degrees of separation!”

Suddenly Kayla seemed excited, too. “My God, that could be it!”

“Do you have a computer here with Maple on it?” asked Vic.

Kayla nodded. “Yes, yes! In my study.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

Kayla replied hurriedly: “There seems to be entanglement between Travis, Ross, and Vic, and we’ve been trying to puzzle that out.” I knew that entanglement was a quantum connection—entities intertwined so that no matter how far apart they were physically, what happened to one instantly affected the other.

Kayla’s excitement was palpable. “At the moment Travis gained consciousness, the background entanglement reading ratcheted up a notch for Ross, and we think for Vic, too. And it can’t be that Vic’s reading went up just because a random new person gained consciousness, right? I mean, people are born and die all the time, yet we’ve never seen that sort of boost.”

Vic was already on her feet, and Kayla rose while continuing to speak: “But if the spike is proportional to the degree of separation, then someone as close on the small-world network as Travis is to Ross—even though they’ve never actually met—would register, at least a little, while the constant distant background churn of total strangers coming in and out of existence would be too insignificant to be seen.”

The two women hustled off to Kayla’s study, talking animatedly. I turned to Ryan. “Let’s load the dishwasher, then watch some TV.”

“Netflix has Inspector Gadget!”

“You got it, Ginger Ale.”

I ended up putting Ryan to bed on my own; Victoria and Kayla were still working away furiously in the study. When I came back downstairs, I used the living-room TV to look at more news: six dead migrant workers in Texas, a dead eleven-year-old Cree girl in Manitoba, a synagogue bombed in Paris, a mosque bombed near London, another Boko Haram raid. Worse and worse.

About an hour later, the two women emerged—I’d have been delighted to see them under any circumstances, but the pair of ecstatic faces were particularly welcome just then.

“Well?” I said, turning off the TV.

“It all fits,” said Victoria, triumphantly. “We’ll run more tests tomorrow, but it looks like a solid model.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Okay,” said Kayla, coming to sit next to me on the couch. “We already knew that all the microtubules in individual brains are quantally entangled. That’s why they’re all in the same superposition state for any given person, right? Either all of their tubulin dimers have one electron in superposition, or they all have two, or they have all three.”

“Or none,” I offered.

“Yes, yes, if they’re out cold, they have none. Right. Now, we don’t know what consciousness is exactly, but that’s its physical correlate: the collectively entangled all-in-the-same-state quantum field within a given person’s brain. That’s the physical thing that gives rise to whatever level of consciousness a person might be experiencing: the emptiness of a p-zed, the cunning of a psychopath, or the conscience of a quick.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But not only is each human brain an entangled system, every human brain is an entangled system.”

I frowned. “I don’t see the distinction.”

Vic took it up: “The sum total of human consciousness—all 7.7 billion people, regardless of what quantum state they individually might be in—forms one single entangled system, connected by small-world networking. It’s the collective quantum inertia of that system that keeps people from changing states. That’s the reason we can’t take a p-zed, say, and boost him up to being at a higher state: you can’t change the quantum state of one individual without affecting all the others, which is why the quantum tuning fork doesn’t have an effect on an already awake individual. The inertia of the totality of humanity prevents any shift.”

“But that can’t be right,” I said. “People get put out for surgery all the time. But only the patient is affected.”

“Yes,” said Vic. “That’s a special case, because it involves decoherence. When you are put totally under by anesthesia, you cease to be in quantum superposition and drop back to the classical-physics state—Penrose and Hameroff proved that—and so, by definition, if only classical physics pertains, you cease to be subject to entanglement.”

“And,” I said, “that means…?”

“It means,” said Kayla, “that you exit the collective if you truly lose all consciousness.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But,” continued Kayla, “everybody within the collective—all seven billion Q1s, Q2s, and Q3s; everyone who is not in the classical-physics state—could only conceivably change quantum state in lockstep, shifting en masse.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Kayla said. “It’s one for all, and all for one.”

“Homo sapiens—one big happy family,” Vic added.

Not so happy of late, of course, but I wasn’t going to ruin their moment of triumph. Still, I looked back at the TV screen. Funny: no monitor made since I was a kid had any sort of burn-in problem, and yet, as I gazed at the black rectangle, I could see the ghostly afterimage of the atrocities it had just shown me.