Quantum Night

44

We finally hauled ourselves upstairs to the bedroom as Sagittarius was setting in the south—you had to stay up awfully damn late in summer to see that.

I’d used the little downstairs washroom, but as I lay in bed, I could hear Kayla in the en suite splashing literal, and, as it turned out, figurative, cold water on her face.

She emerged in the doorway, a toothbrush hanging from her mouth. “But,” she said, “you know, even if we shift everyone now, what about the future? What if the 4:2:1 ratio between superposition states remains constant as new children are born? We’d end up back where we’d started.”

“Eventually, maybe,” I said. “But in the developed world, people live the better part of a century or more now, and that figure just keeps going up. It’s 2020; so, yeah, maybe by the year 2120, left unattended, things might cycle back to p-zeds predominating, assuming we don’t start doing quantum-superposition testing in utero. But that still gets us through the rest of this century. Hell, quantum physics is barely a hundred years old now; who the heck knows what level of control we’ll have over it a hundred years hence? I’m content to solve the problem for the foreseeable future.”

She swiped her brush up and down a few times, then, “Okay, forget about the future. What about the present? What about the people in your own life, Jim?”

“Well,” I said, propping my head up on a bent elbow, “there’s my sister Heather. I’m sure she’s a p-zed now; she’ll go up to being a Q3.”

Kayla did a little more brushing. “That’s fine, but you don’t have any children. I do.” She returned to the washroom, and I heard her expectorate the toothpaste, then a little more running water, and then she came to bed, facing me.

During that short break, I’d taken a deep breath and let it out slowly. It wasn’t that I’d been hiding it from Kayla, but although we’d talked about so many things—ethics and science and culture, movies and music and morality—the right moment for this had never come up.

“Actually,” I said softly, “I do.”

“Do what?” said Kayla, having lost the thread.

“Do have a child. A boy. He’s two.”

Even in the dark, I could see her eyes go wide. “When the hell were you going to tell me that?”

“I never see him.” And then, as if it were exculpatory, “I pay child support. But I never see him. Anna-Lee has sole custody.”

And, if saying I was still with the university I’d done my undergrad at was a red flag for academics, that was a red flag for just about everyone. “Why?”

I rolled on my back. “It’s what Anna-Lee wanted. He has Down syndrome, and…”

I trailed off and looked at the simplicity of the plain square ceiling. But just as I’d refused to be Penny to Kayla’s Leonard, immersing myself in quantum physics so I could keep pace with her, so, too, had Kayla been reading up on utilitarianism. “And if Anna-Lee is about your age, you might well have had prenatal screening, right? So you knew while she was pregnant.”

I said nothing.

Kayla shook her head, a rustling sound against the pillow. “I don’t know. I won’t presume to put myself in your place, or Anna-Lee’s, but… but, damn it, Jim, it’s different. It’s supposed to be different. I’m not just talking about utilitarians; I’m talking about all human beings. When it’s you and yours, all the calculus in the world is supposed to go out the window.”

“I know that,” I said. “And, believe me, I do love my son, and want the very best for him. I’m always wondering how he’s doing, what he’s up to.”

She pointed at the wall, referring to Ryan, asleep across the hall—out of sight, but, for her mother, never out of mind. “I know the Hare Checklist at least as well as you do. You’ve read it, but I’ve lived it; I’ve been a Q2 and I’ve been a Q3, and I can tell the difference better than your goggles or Vic’s beamline can. My daughter is a Q3, and even if every single person on the planet except her would benefit from what you want to do, I would stand in your way. Ryan comes first, and I’m not condemning her to becoming what I was, what her uncle was. No way.”

“Did you have Vic test her on the beamline? Because I’d have bet money my sister was a Q3. That’s the thing about Q1s, right? Almost all of the time, they’re behaviorally indistinguishable from those who are conscious. And if Ryan’s a Q1, this will be a gift to her, the greatest possible gift.”

“Of course we tested her,” Kayla said. “Once we found out that my brother had been a quantum psychopath, too, just like me—well, I had to know, right? But Ryan absolutely is a Q3. But you know what? Maybe quantum states do run in families. I was born a Q2 and so was Travis. But your sister is a Q1, you say? A mindless automaton that follows rules and algorithms? And your grandfather was just a cog in the Nazi machine, you say, doing what he was ordered to do at Sobibor? I don’t know what either of them look like—but you’re the spitting image of them.”

“Kayla, please—”

And now she waved in the direction of her bedroom TV; it was off, but I gathered she was referring to the news we’d seen on the downstairs set earlier. “And you know what the biggest problem with the world today is?” she said “It’s not psychopaths like Putin and Carroway, not directly. There’s only so much damage either of them can do. The problem is the scientists who gleefully make the things psychopaths want them to make; there’d be no nuclear bombs, or Zyklon B gas chambers, or any of that shit, without scientists who were willing to do whatever they were asked to do. But without me or Vic, there’s no way you can shift all of humanity, so that’s that.” She rolled away from me. “Live with it, Jim: the world is what it is.”

I thought about this for a time, and had finally decided to counter with, “Until the bombs start falling”—but I could tell by the sound of her breathing that Kayla was already asleep.

Kayla went to the Light Source again the next morning, and Ryan agreed to go back to day camp once more, but Victoria Chen had been assigned overnight beamtime; she didn’t have to go in again until late that afternoon. And so, figuring if Robert Oppenheimer tells you to get lost, you try your luck with Edward Teller, I called her up and had her come over for coffee. She cheerfully agreed, arriving about forty minutes later; today’s combination was a loose, black silk top and black denim jeans.

Vic was pacing the length of the living room, a process that took her about twice the number of strides it would have taken me. She had her smartphone out, with some scientific-calculator app running. “You’re talking about knocking everyone on Earth unconscious,” she said. “A global blackout, like in that TV show.”

I was seated in the easy chair, fingers interlaced behind my head. “No, no. That’s the last thing we want—and not just because of the carnage it would cause. If everyone blacks out, then the whole entangled collective falls apart, right? You’d have to reboot people individually after that with the quantum tuning fork, if you could reboot them at all—which is a mighty big if since, so far, it’s only worked on Travis. No, no one can lose consciousness; we need all of humanity to remain entangled so that everyone moves in lockstep.”

She paced and calculated for a time, then she said, “Yeah, I could accomplish that.” Having reached the end of the living room, marked by a sliding glass door with vertical blinds, like diffraction grating, she turned and headed the other way, toward a wall with jam-packed bookcases. As she walked, she continued to tap and swipe her calculator. “But you’d have to start with a p-zed on the beamline,” she said—Vic and Kayla had both long ago adopted my shorthand—“because only a Q1 can go up two states.”

“I don’t see—”

“You need to boost someone who can go through two successively greater levels of superposition: someone who currently has only one superpositioned electron, then can be boosted to having two, and then can be boosted once more to having three. You couldn’t start with someone already at a higher state, because any attempt I made with the synchrotron to get them to wrap around would probably cause all their electrons to fall out of superposition, making them exit the entangled collective.”

“Fine, okay,” I said. “A p-zed, then. What about Ross? Your ex-boyfriend? He already agreed to come down to your beamline once before.” Of course, I also immediately thought of my sister back in Winnipeg, but it wasn’t like Ross alone would benefit; if this worked, Heather and every p-zed all over the world would ramp up to full consciousness with conscience.

Vic tapped away some more, then, finally coming to a stop, she shook her head.

“What’s the matter with Ross?” I asked.

“No, no, it’s not that.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but her skin seemed even paler than normal. She held up the phone for me to see.

I leaned in for a look, but the mathematical notation on her screen might as well have been cuneiform. “Yes?”

“I think I can do it,” Vic said. “I think I can use the beamline so that it does cause the—the patient, I guess—to level up to the next quantum state, if…”

“If what?”

“If it doesn’t kill him. And I suspect it probably will.”

I felt myself sag against the upholstery. “Really?”

Vic nodded. “That much energy being pumped in? Putting defibrillator paddles on your forehead would be nothing compared to this. We’re trying to drag seven billion people along for the ride, after all—that’s going to take a lot of juice. The patient might, just maybe, survive the first blast—pushing them up one level—but the second one? Not a chance in hell.”

“You could use two different people, one for the first boost, then one for the second.”

“And who is going to engineer that? After the first boost, you and I and Kayla will suddenly be p-zeds; none of us could be trusted to hold to the planned agenda. When your state changes, your desires—or whatever passes for desires in a p-zed—could change, too. No, the only way to pull this off would be to automate the whole run, so that once it’s begun, it simply executes.” She winced, the double meaning of her final word hitting her. But then she went on: “And, yes, that’s almost certainly what it is: a death sentence for whoever’s on the beamline. Ask Kay to look at the math; she’ll confirm it, I’m sure. There’s no way to do this.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry, Jim. Or down deep, maybe I’m not.” She started pacing again but stopped when she reached the blinds, pulling two of them aside, peering out at a vertical slice of the world. “This whole thing is crazy.”