Quantum Night

38

I’d been half-prepared, I supposed, for there to have been something traumatic in my past—but, really, what could have been more shocking than being knifed in the heart, my pericardium slit open, my left atrium pierced, my lifeblood spilling out? More disturbing than being left to die on an icy sidewalk on a cold winter’s night? Surely when you’d come that close to death, no horror you could have survived would be any worse.

But no. I had to keep telling myself that that had never happened. This—the things I recalled now—was reality. And almost being killed paled to having actually killed.

“But why don’t I remember doing that?” I said, looking up at Namboothiri from the little swivel chair.

“Well,” he said, lifting his unibrow, “if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it was because you didn’t sleep prior to Warkentin knocking you into a coma the second and third times. It’s during sleep that the day’s memories are sorted and the salient ones encoded for long-term storage.”

“But people put under for an operation remember both going down and coming back up.”

“True. But you also had paralimbic damage. I’m not surprised it took a little while for verbal memory encoding to start working properly again. I suspect if we shifted over to probing your verbal index, we’d find you immediately started confabulating stuff to fill in your dark period. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the mind wants a continuous narrative—even if it has to make one up.”

“Hmmm. And—hmmm.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve had a recurring nightmare for years: a monster I needed to destroy, and me holding a wooden torch, but with dark, frozen flames. That’s got to be the splintered baseball bat.”

“Ah, then you did at least partially encode what happened during that brief period.”

“Lucky me,” I said softly. And then I got up and headed toward the door.

“Where are you going?” asked Namboothiri.

“To see Menno Warkentin.”

Menno was waiting at the entrance to his apartment as I came off the elevator, Pax in a sitting posture next to him. “Padawan,” he said, moving aside to let me in.

The spacious living room, with its silver-and-cyan furniture, hadn’t changed since the last time I’d been here. Menno headed past the twin totem poles into the kitchen, Pax following dutifully behind; I’d seen the dog lead the way when they were in unfamiliar territory, but she understood Menno needed no guidance in his own home. “Coffee?” he called out. “Tea?”

“Nothing,” I said.

He emerged holding a red coffee mug for himself.

I sat on the couch. “You know Bhavesh Namboothiri?”

“Psychology prof at U of W? Met him once or twice.”

“He’s been helping me recover the memories from my dark period.”

A long pause; even Pax turned to face her master. “Oh,” Menno said at last. “And?”

“I know what happened to Dom. And what I did to you.”

“So long ago,” said Menno. “Another lifetime.”

“How come there was no follow-up? No criminal investigation?”

Menno sat down opposite me. “Somebody helped me dispose of Dom’s body.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I never saw her. I tried to track her down afterward, but no luck. She took some cash, though, and my cards—ran up some big bills. But I never heard from her again.”

“Weren’t there questions about Dom? About what had happened to him?”

“He’d been fairly loose-lipped about doing consulting for the DoD, so I told everyone he’d moved to Washington and had taken a job with them. It sounded plausible; no one questioned it. And the DoD was happy to help cover things up; national security and all that. I think they’re still cashing his U of M pension checks down there.” He lifted his shoulders. “It’s like he isn’t even really dead.”

“But he is. And… and I’m the one who killed him.”

“Yeah.”

“I killed a man… violently, in cold blood. You’re a Mennonite, a pacifist. How could you look at me after that?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Menno said softly. “I didn’t have to.”

A flash of memory: my thumb digging into Menno’s face. I shook my head violently, but there were no adequate words.

Menno lifted his shoulders. “I was angry. Furious. But, well, nineteen years is a long time.”

“Still, it must have been awful, having to work side by side with me all this time.”

He was quiet for a moment. Perhaps he blinked behind his glasses. “Jim, I’m the reason you’re at U of M.”

“I know, but—”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m the reason. I was department head back then, remember? You’d applied to teach at three other schools. A few phones calls, a few favors called in, twisting the dean’s arm to get you tenure-tracked, and—” He shrugged affably. “Well, the names haven’t all changed since you hung around.” And then he sang, off-key, the final verse of the old TV theme song, “Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back…”

“Jesus,” I said. “Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?”

“You’re not my enemy. You’re my…”

“Subject?” I said, at last getting it.

“I may have stopped recording them, but those long discussions in my office we’ve always had… It was fascinating, what had happened to you, and how you built up a coherent history of your missing period pretty much out of nothing.”

“But, still, after what I’d done, why’d you keep it secret? Why didn’t you turn me over to the police?”

Menno’s silver eyebrows climbed above the frames of his glasses, and he spread his arms. “How could I? You know what would have happened if any of this had gone public? Milgram and Zimbardo—that was the Wild West, before informed consent; hell, it’s because of them that informed-consent rules were put in place at universities across the world. Even with tenure, my career was at risk—flagrant violations of the campus ethical guidelines—and the whole department was at risk, too. U of M could have been decertified by the American and Canadian Psychological Associations. And—you don’t know how big a deal this is, but trust me, it’s huge for a Mennonite: working for the military? I’d have never been able to show my face at my church again. Plus, Jesus God, the legal consequences! If you had decided to sue or press criminal charges for the lost six months, or for the brain damage I’d caused with the lasers, I’d be in ruins, or in jail, or both. Same thing if Travis Huron’s family had sued: that boy has been in a coma for almost twenty years, and it was my fault.”

“He’s not in a coma anymore.”

Menno’s jaw dropped, and he said, very softly, “Oh.” And then, after a moment, “When did he pass?”

“He’s not dead,” I said. “But he’s out of the coma; he’s awake.”

“God, really?”

“He doesn’t remember what you did to him.”

“Are you going to tell him?” Menno asked anxiously.

“He has a right to know.”

“Prisoner’s dilemma, Padawan. Don’t defect.”

“What?”

“You tell Travis what we did to him, and I will tell the police what you did to Dominic Adler. There’s a statute of limitations on malpractice; there’s none on murder. The only win-win scenario is for both of us to continue to keep quiet.”

I didn’t like being pushed. “I’ll get off,” I said. “I had a pre-existing condition, thanks to you.”

The obsidian convexities of Menno’s lenses faced me. “The way Devin Becker got off?”

I blew out air.

“Listen, Padawan, listen! You know the stakes are higher than either of us. If people start digging—if the truth of what Dom and I discovered all those years ago comes out…”

“Yes?”

“Slavery, human trafficking, cannon fodder, experimental test subjects, even Soylent-fucking-Green, for Christ’s sake—that’s just the beginning of the things that’ll happen if the world learns that there are countless philosopher’s zombies out there who don’t actually have feelings.”

He was right. Four billion p-zeds, two billion psychopaths, and just a billion quicks. It was a recipe for massive exploitation.

“I have to know,” I said. “Did Dominic Adler have an inner voice?”

“See!” Menno crowed triumphantly. “Even you’re doing it! If he didn’t have an inner voice, you’re off the hook, right? Yeah, you—you terminated him, but it’s not like that matters, right?” He let that sink in. “Anyway, sorry, but there’s no get-out-of-jail-free card for you: Dom had an inner voice; I saw it on the oscilloscope when we were testing our equipment.” A pause, a beat, then a softening of my old mentor’s tone: “As to whether he had a conscience to go with it, though…”

“Yes?”

“What do you think? He got me to push ahead with the experiments even after you’d lost consciousness. He didn’t seem to give a damn about what had happened to either you or Travis Huron.”

“A psychopath,” I said. Menno was right: I probably could have lived with having killed another p-zed, but even a psychopath was fully conscious: all the reasons why Devin Becker shouldn’t receive capital punishment applied equally to Dominic Adler.

But, nonetheless, I’d snapped Dom’s neck.

Judge.

Jury.

And executioner.

Of course, I’d been a psychopath when I’d done it, albeit a paralimbic one, not a quantum one, until…

Until Menno had hockey-pucked me into a brief coma and I’d fallen to the laboratory floor, only to reboot—

—to reboot, like Travis Huron eventually did, not at my previous state but—

—but at the next level up.

I’d come back as the worst-possible combination: a Q2 with amygdalar lesions; a quantum psychopath and a paralimbic psychopath all rolled into one, suddenly conscious after six months of zombiehood. Fuck yeah, such a beast might gouge somebody’s eyes out. And after that, it might—

But there was no after that, not for the quantum psychopath. Menno almost immediately knocked me back into a coma again, and when I emerged, on July 2, 2001, I had leveled up once more, becoming fully conscious with conscience—and that conscience, that inner voice, had managed to override whatever the paralimbic damage might have been urging me to do.

Just like it was overriding my urge right now to strangle the life out of Menno Warkentin for what he’d done to me—and for what that damage had led me to do.