Quantum Night

43

Kayla and I stayed up late, trying to make sense of it all. We talked about politics, and what being Canadian meant to us, about whether Canada had already really been nothing more than an American appendage anyway, about whether this was of a piece with previous American foreign policy or something wholly new and unprecedented. But, really, in the end, the fact that there were now American boots tamping down Canadian soil mattered much less than that the Russians and the Americans, each led by a psychopath, were flinging invective at each other today and might be hurling missiles across Canada tomorrow.

My grandfather, while doing what he’d done at Sobibor, had seen a world war up close; my father had often spoken of the fear of nuclear apocalypse that had put a pall over everything in the 1950s and 1960s. Ghosts were not resting easily tonight.

“Okay,” I said to Kayla, facing her on the couch, “here’s a question: why can’t we just have someone surge in with the quantum tuning fork and give President Carroway a boost from his current state as a psychopathic Q2 into a quick? Give him a conscience; problem solved.”

She frowned. “Because the tuning fork doesn’t work on already conscious individuals; it only works on totally unconscious people who are in the classical-physics state. You know that.”

“Right. But why?”

“I told you why. Because the aggregate mass of humanity—all the Q1s, all the Q2s, and all the Q3s—are quantally entangled; they collectively form one quantum system.”

“Yes. So?”

She sounded pissed at what she took to be me being deliberately obtuse. “So the entanglement inertia keeps things from changing. The tuning fork tries to alter the mind of a specific person, but that person has to move in lockstep with seven billion others.”

“And the tuning fork is puny, right?” I said. “It doesn’t put out enough juice against all that. Oh, sure, the fork can put someone into superposition if they aren’t there already. But to change someone who is currently in quantum superposition would require changing everyone’s state, right?”

“Yes, that’s what the simulations show. And there’s no way the tuning fork could do that. Damn thing runs on double-A batteries, for crying out loud.”

“Exactly. But if you had a more powerful tuning fork?”

“Well, you’d need a hell of a—oh.” She lifted her eyebrows. “The synchrotron?”

“Yes,” I said. “The synchrotron. The Canadian Light Source. How powerful is it again?”

“Almost three gigaelectronvolts.”

“Which is, like, a lot, right?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“And what did you call it? ‘The Swiss Army knife of particle accelerators,’ with all those parameters you can adjust, right? Could it do what the quantum tuning fork does, but on a scale—what?—eight orders of magnitude larger? Affecting billions of people instead of just one?”

“Nine,” said Kayla automatically, but then she frowned, considering this—and, at last, she nodded. “Yes, yes, I think it could. Vic would know for sure—she’s the synchrotron specialist, not me—but from what she told me about how the quantum tuning fork works, yeah, you could emulate it with the synchrotron, and, yes, I guess you could scale it up to that level.”

“There!” I said, triumphantly. “You could engineer a massive shift.”

She snorted. “Well, you’d certainly get ‘Capgras syndrome’ trending on Twitter.” Capgras was a rare psychological condition in which people became convinced that some of their closest friends or family members had been replaced by soulless duplicates.

“I’m serious,” I said. “We could shift everyone.”

She narrowed her gaze. “But why?”

“What have I been saying all along? Utilitarianism. The greatest good for the greatest number. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few—or the one.”

“Christ’s sake, this is no time for Star Trek.”

I looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “It’s no time for crappy Star Trek,” I replied. “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, that was a piece of shit. Kirk says in it, ‘The needs of the one’—by which he means Spock—‘outweigh the needs of the many.’ But The Wrath of Khan—or, as we philosophers like to call it, The Wrath of Kant—is a classic. And it got the utilitarian formulation exactly right: the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few.”

“Jim, I know you really believe that, but—”

“Sam Harris says morality is about the flourishing of conscious beings. And the fact is that, right now, four billion human beings aren’t conscious, not in the way you and I understand the term; Q1s have no inner lives. Only the Q2s and Q3s do, and together they make up only three out of seven billion people. But imagine if we used the synchrotron to actually boost someone one state—in the process dragging the rest of humanity along with him or her. Those four billion Q1s would be goosed up to being Q2s, and the two billion people who were Q2s—including Carroway and Putin—would rise up to being Q3.”

Kayla looked aghast. “Are you out of your mind?”

“We’d be doubling the total number of conscious humans—from three billion to six.”

“By doubling the number of psychopaths!”

“Partially, but we’d also be doubling the number of quicks, from one billion to two.”

Kayla shook her head in disbelief. “You think turning the majority of the human race into psychopaths is the way to solve the world’s problems?”

“Well… yes.”

“By knocking you, me, and everyone else who’s currently a quick down to being a p-zed?”

“That would be a side effect, yes, because the states wrap around, and—”

“And that doesn’t bother you? That you’d go from—from philosopher to philosopher’s zombie?”

“A utilitarian can’t put his own interest preferentially ahead of someone else’s. And this would result in the greatest happiness for—”

“Damn it, Jim, the four billion p-zeds who exist now aren’t unhappy; they’re incapable of being unhappy. They literally don’t know what they’re missing.”

“But we know what they’re missing—and we can give it to them.”

“By making them all into psychopaths?”

As I’d observed before, it was almost unheard of for a psychopath to suffer from depression or take his or her own life. “Psychopaths are usually happy; they enjoy their lives.” And then, admittedly hitting below the belt, I added, “Remember?”

She sucked in air but didn’t deny it. Still, she said: “Your opinion is… atypical. You defend psychopaths. Literally. In courtrooms.”

“That’s because they’re people, too; they’re conscious beings.”

“Yes, and a couple of those conscious beings—one in Washington and another in Moscow—are about to get the world blown straight to hell.”

“Yes, but, as I said, if we shift everyone, Carroway and Putin—not to mention Governor McCharles in Texas—will suddenly get a conscience, just like you did; just like Travis did. Russia and the US might be on the brink of war now, but they won’t be able to go through with it; they’ll stand down. We save the world and we double the number of conscious entities while we’re at it.” I spoke to her—and to myself. “This isn’t supererogation; this isn’t more than is necessary. It’s the bare minimum that we can do. It’s a moral imperative.”

Kayla was shaking her head slowly back and forth, left and right. “No,” she said. “That’s not the answer.”

I folded my arms. “Do you have a better idea?”

She looked right at me. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I do.”

We adjourned to Kayla’s office, next to the dining room; it was well after midnight, we were both punchy, and it seemed useful to have a computer in front of us.

“Okay,” said Kayla, bringing up a chart she’d used before, “there are three quantum cohorts, right? Each with half the number of people in it as the one before—a 4:2:1 ratio. Call the cohorts alpha, beta, and gamma, in descending order of size. Round numbers, there are four billion people in alpha, the current crop of Q1 p-zeds; two billion in beta, the Q2 psychopaths; and one billion in gamma, the Q3 quicks, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you want to boost them all one state, right? The four billion people in cohort alpha go up to being Q2 psychopaths; the two billion in cohort beta go up to being Q3 quicks, and the one billion in cohort gamma—the cohort you were born into and I’m now part of—wrap around to being Q1 p-zeds.” She moved things around with her mouse until her chart reflected those shifts.

“Exactly. The greatest—”

“No, it’s not.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s not the greatest good for the greatest number, at least not by any normal person’s reckoning—no offense.”

“Um, none taken.”

“The right answer,” Kayla said, “isn’t to boost everybody up one state—it’s to boost them two states. Push all of cohort alpha—the largest group—from Q1 right up to Q3, giving them both consciousness and conscience. You end up with the largest number of quicks possible: for the first time ever, the majority of the human race will finally be firing on all cylinders.”

“My God, yes! And then—”

“And everyone’s moving in quantum lockstep, right? So if cohort alpha goes up two states, so does beta: all the current psychopaths—Quinton Carroway, Vladimir Putin, and all the other assholes who are ruining it for the rest of us—shift two levels, as well, right? They go up to being Q3s then wrap around, ending up as Q1s. That essentially deactivates them, turning every last quantum psychopath into a p-zed.” She lifted a hand. “We can’t go back in time and assassinate Hitler, but we can stop every despotic leader, every heartless banker, every evil person on the planet.”

She paused, then: “Now, yes, there do have to be some psychopaths. But think about it: cohort gamma will move by two steps, too, wrapping around first to Q1 p-zeditude and then settling in at Q2 psychopathy. Since gamma is the smallest cohort, you end up with the fewest psychopaths possible.”

She was in a swivel chair; I was in a regular one—but I leaned it back, balancing on its two hind legs, and thought. I had no desire to be a quantum psychopath, which is what I’d become if I shifted twice, but yeah, Kayla’s plan would cut the number of psychopaths in half, while quadrupling the number of quicks. “And,” I said, it suddenly coming to me, “as Namboothiri explained it to me, most Q2s and Q3s index their memories verbally, so at least this smaller crop of newly minted psychopaths will remember having had a conscience, remember what it was like to have given a damn about others. Hopefully, that’ll take some of their edge off.”

“Hopefully,” Kayla said.

She sounded dubious, but I seized on the word. “Exactly!” I was giddy now, the way one can be when past the point of exhaustion. “Literally. Full of hope. True, the new Q2s perhaps won’t be, but think about all those new Q3s! For the first time since we stood erect on the savanna, there will be billions and billions of humans full of hope.”

I’d hoped Kayla would match my grin, but she didn’t; her eyebrows came together and her mouth turned down. “But,” she said, harshing the buzz, “even if it were technically possible—even if we could do this, I mean…”

“Yes?”

“I mean, come on, Jim, do we have the right to do it? We’d be playing God.”

I leaned forward again. “The role of God has gone unfilled for too long,” I said. “It’s high time someone got the part.”