Quantum Night

50

Lying came so easily now—and that was a good thing. When the bomb squad finally came in to search the synchrotron building, they found me and Vic and Pax, and Menno’s body, which we’d moved from the gurney down onto the cement floor. We told the cops—who were discombobulated by their own quantum-state changes, I’m sure—that Menno had gone into cardiac arrest when the evacuation announcement had come over the P.A., and, of course, we’d bravely stayed behind, trying to resuscitate him. We’d gotten one of the Light Source’s automated external defibrillators out of its emergency case and had deployed it next to his corpse.

Vic stayed at the synchrotron, but I was exhausted from days of negligible sleep, so she had given me her key and told me to go back to her apartment and get some shuteye. I arrived there, went to the kitchen to get a drink—and there they were, exactly where we’d left them on the pass-through, stacked one atop the other, the two green transcranial-ultrasound-stimulation pucks, and, next to them, a rugged aluminum carrying case, its lid hinged open to reveal the precisely cut black foam surrounding the quantum tuning fork.

I looked at the pucks the way Neo had stared at the red pill. I could go back to caring about all of humanity, eating nothing but plants, being a utilitarian, and giving twenty grand a year to starving kids.

But fuck that noise. I’m going to take Vic out for filet mignon tonight, then, when we get back, I’ll show her what a real man, not some bloody p-zed, can do. I smiled, turned, headed back to the en suite bathroom, and ran the shower, its noise filling the air, and—

What the—?

It felt like somebody had boxed my ears. I tried to spin around, tried to see who it was, tried to—

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

I was on Vic’s bathroom floor, flat on my back, looking up at a ceiling light fixture. I didn’t seem to be bruised or banged up; whoever had slapped the TUS pucks on me had apparently lowered me gently to the pink tiles afterward; they’d also turned off the shower.

I’d presumably awoken on my own; otherwise, I’d have seen someone standing over me, quantum tuning fork in hand. As to how long I’d been out—well, glancing at my watch and assuming it was the same day, it was less than three hours.

God damn it. It had been so liberating being a psychopath. But there it was, bubbling up, the attribute that defined being a quick: conscience. The damn thing was reasserting itself, growing stronger, louder, and louder still. Christ, oh Christ, what do you do with your last few seconds of freedom?

You savor them—while you rage, rage against the rising of the light.

I got up, exited the bathroom into Victoria’s bedroom, and there, lying on the bed, fully dressed, an ebook reader in her hand, was—

No, not Vic.

It was Kayla. She looked up as I entered.

“What the hell?” I said.

She smiled. “Hi, Jim.”

“You knocked me out?”

“Uh-huh. Vic told me you were here. I figured I’d give you a chance to wake up on your own; if you hadn’t revived soon, I’d have tried the tuning fork.” She closed her reader’s cover and got up.

“And you—you’re a Q2 now, right?” I asked.

“Yes.” She shrugged a little. “I recognize the feeling.”

“But, then, why’d you knock me out? What’s in it for you, having me boost back to being a Q3?”

“I knew you in 2001, remember. I knew you when you were a paralimbic psychopath, and I know what you did to Menno when you were briefly also a quantum one. So, for my own protection, it’s better for me if you’re a Q3. But watch your step, buddy-boy: I’d be even safer if I knocked you down once more, so you’d be a p-zed again.”

“I’ll be careful.” I looked at her, trying to see if her inner change was in any way mirrored on her face—and maybe it was: the twinkle was gone from her blue eyes; even when she wasn’t staring, there was now something snake-like about her gaze. “Do you know what Vic did—after, I mean?”

“What?” asked Kayla.

“Well, you’re not going to like it, but…”

“What?” she said again.

“She erased her program—the one we used to change everyone’s states. She said it was tempting fate to leave that info lying around; she didn’t want someone else doing to her what we’d done to everybody. She also erased as much of the research about quantum states of consciousness as she could, including your cloud backups.”

“Shit,” said Kayla. But then she smiled, a cold psychopathic rictus. “Oh, well; no point in regrets, is there? What’s done is done.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Your brother wanted to go back to being a Q2, which I presume is what he is now. He said he preferred it. Do you? Do you want to stay a psychopath?” I gestured out the door, in the direction of the living room. “Because, you know, I can do to you what you just did to me: knock you down to the classical-physics state, and then bring you back up as a Q3. Of course, there’s a risk you won’t wake up at all, but…”

“What would you do in my place?” Kayla asked.

I was surprised by the bitterness in my voice. “You deprived me of the right to make that choice.”

“Pot,” said Kayla. “Seven billion kettles. Black.”

I looked away.

“Anyway,” said Kayla, “we’ll see. It’s always an option, isn’t it? But until we’re sure things are going well on the political front, I think I’d rather be like this. Ready for action, y’know?”

I looked at her and thought about us: two ships that had passed in the quantum night.

“Ryan’s a Q3 now,” I said.

“No, she’d have wrapped around like me—”

I shook my head. “Vic lied to you; Ryan was a Q1 when she tested her on the beamline.”

“Oh,” said Kayla. And then, after a moment: “So, what, now she’s going to be all needy? Jesus.”

“Well,” I replied, “if you don’t think you can look after her…”

“What? You want her?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “Yes, I do.”

Kayla’s head rocked left and right for a moment, then she shrugged a little: “Sure, yeah, why not? Make my life easier.”

My heart was beating rapidly. “Okay; good. All right if I take her with me on a road trip to Winnipeg? I want to go see Virgil.”

“Who?” asked Kayla.

Oh, right. I’d never told her his name.

“Virgil,” I said again. “My son.”

Travis was managing well with a walker now, and so, late one night, I drove him far out on the prairie; he didn’t know anything about astronomy, and I’d offered to teach him. The moon, with its yin and yang of the Ocean of Storms and the Sea of Tranquility, had sunk beneath the horizon’s razor edge, and the starry boulevard of the Milky Way cleaved the heavens.

I taught Travis how to use the Big Dipper to find Polaris, Arcturus, and Spica; pointed out the Summer Triangle of Altair, Deneb, and Vega (which, I said, was where vegans like me came from); and showed him the smudge of the Andromeda galaxy, the most distant object one can see with the naked eye, 2.5 million light-years away. That meant, I said, he was looking back in time 2.5 million years: the photons now kissing his retinas had left Andromeda at the same time the first members of the human genus, Homo, had appeared.

“Huh,” he said. “You think there’s anybody else out there?” He was leaning for support against my car’s side panel—the one that had been replaced recently.

I thought again about the silence from the stars, about whether races are doomed to snuffing themselves out. “Maybe ours now has a fighting—or a non-fighting—chance.”

I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the snort. “You think we’re in some sort of utilitarian utopia now? People are people, and quantum physics be damned.”

“It’ll take time,” I replied, as my eyes found kite-shaped Delphinus. “The new crop of quicks has to make sense of the world around them. But no one with conscience can look out at all the suffering, all the poverty, all the unfairness, without aching to do something about it. You had a conscience briefly; you remember what it’s like.”

Perhaps Travis shrugged. “Sort of. I can’t muster the feeling again, but, yeah, it was different.”

“It’s better,” I said firmly.

“Even with the regrets? The second thoughts?”

“Even with.”

Silence for a time. I caught a meteoric streak of white in my peripheral vision, a mote of cosmic dust expiring.

“You know, you’re an unusual person,” Travis said. “Even among Q3s, you’re an aberration. It’s not like there are suddenly four billion James Marchuks out there.”

My gaze dropped to the horizon, the land in front of us a great empty page. “The rioting has stopped,” I said. “American troops are out of Canada, and the McCharles Act has been repealed. Other positive things will happen, too. Give it time.”

“I gave it time once already. I fast-forwarded two decades, remember? Things got worse, not better.”

“This will be different.” Overhead, the constellations of summer blazed, but I flashed back to that confabulated winter sky on New Year’s Eve all those years ago, the mighty hunter Orion rearing up. “Do you know when I was first knocked into a coma? December thirty-first, 2000. I missed the big party.” I sang softly: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind…”

“But at least you were awake for the really big party the year before,” Travis said.

I was about to launch into my “but there was no year zero” bit when it came to me. True, the numbering system had been devised using Roman numerals, which had no zero, but our system does, and this—right now—was the real year zero. All that talk about whether 2000 or 2001 had been the beginning of the new century was irrelevant: this was the dawn of the next millennium, the next era, with four billion people—for the first time in those 2.5 million years, the majority—uplifted from emptiness to full consciousness with conscience; truly the greatest good for the greatest number.

And, yes, there were countless challenges ahead of them; doubtless they weren’t yet sure how to proceed.

But they would think of something.