Quantum Night

Robert J. Sawyer. 1

Several of my colleagues in the University of Manitoba’s

psychology department considered teaching to be a nuisance

—“the ineluctable evil,” as Menno Warkentin used to call it,

resenting the time it took away from his research—but I loved it. Oh, maybe not as much as I loved bananas, or binge-watching old

episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Arrested Development, or

photographing globular clusters with my telescope, but as far as

things that people would actually pay me to do are concerned, it

was right up there. Granted, teaching rst-year classes could be overwhelming:

vast halls lled with stagnant air and row after row of angst-

soaked teenagers. Although my own freshman year had been two

decades ago, I vividly remembered signing up to take introductory

psych in hopes of making sense of the bewildering mélange of

anxiety and longing that swirled then—and pretty much now, too

—within me. Cogito ergo sum?

More like sollicito ergo sum—I

fret, therefore I am. But on this gray morning, I was teaching The Neuroscience of

Morality, a third-year class with fewer students than February had

days—and that allowed for not just lecturing but dialog. Last session, we’d had a spirited discussion about Watson and

Skinner, focusing on their notion that humans were nothing more

than stimulus-response machines whose black-box brains simply

spit out predictable reactions to inputs. But today, instead of

continuing to demolish behaviorism, I felt compelled to take a

dark detour, using the ceiling-mounted projector to show the

Savannah Prison photos WikiLeaks had made public over the

weekend. Some were individual frames from security-camera video, the

guards caught unawares from on high. Although what those

depicted was brutal, they weren’t the most disturbing images. No,

the really disquieting ones—the ones that knotted your stomach,

that made you avert your eyes, that you just couldn’t fucking

believe—were the posed photos: the picture of the of cer with her

boot on a prisoner’s back while she gave a jaunty thumbs-up to

whatever asshole was holding the iPhone; the still of the two

uniformed men tossing a naked, emaciated prisoner so hard

against the ceiling that his skull, as x-rays would later show, had

fractured in three places; the snapshot of the mustachioed sergeant

straddling a downed man while defecating on his chest, one hand

clamped over the inmate’s mouth, the other ashing a peace sign,

the image then having been run through Instagram to make it

look like an old-fashioned Polaroid, white frame and all. My stomach roiled as I stepped through the slides, one atrocity

giving way to the next. It was now sixteen years after Abu Ghraib,

for God’s sake, and a half century since Philip Zimbardo’s

Stanford Prison experiment. Not only were guards supposed to be

trained about situational pressures and how to avoid succumbing

to them, but two of those shown in the photos were studying to

be wardens. They knew about Zimbardo; they were aware of

Stanley Milgram’s shock-machine obedience-to-authority

experiments; they’d read summaries of the Taguba Report on the

Abu Ghraib atrocities. And yet, despite being speci cally taught to recognize and

avoid the pitfalls—a word that at rst seemed innocuous but, if

one re ected upon it, suggested tumbling into the abyss, following

Lucifer into the very res of hell—each of these men and women

had dehumanized the perceived enemy, and, in the process, had

lost their own humanity. T“All right,” I said to the shocked faces of my students. “What

can we take from all this?

Anyone?”

The rst hand that went up belonged to Ashton, who still had

acne and hadn’t yet learned that it was permissible to trim a

beard. I pointed at him. “Yes?”

He spread his arms as if the truth were self-evident. “Simple,”

he said, and he icked his head toward the screen behind me,

which I’d left on the last slide, the one showing a gangly guard

named Devin Becker killing a naked prisoner by holding his head

under water in a jail-cell sink. “You can’t change human nature.”

HE call had come just about a year ago. “Hello?” I’d said into the

black handset of my of ce phone. “Professor James Marchuk?”

I swung my feet up on my reddish-brown desk and leaned back. “Speaking.”

“My name is Juan Garcia. I’m part of the defense team for Devin

Becker, one of the Savannah Prison guards.”

I thought about saying, “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you,”

but instead simply prodded him to go on. “Yes?”

“My rm would like to engage you as an expert witness in Mr. Becker’s trial. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty. We’re likely

to lose on the facts—the security-camera video is damning as hell—but

we can at least keep Becker from being executed if we get the jury to

agree that he couldn’t help himself.”

I frowned. “And you think he couldn’t because…?”

“Because he’s a psychopath. You said it in your blog entry on

Leopold and Loeb: you can’t execute someone for being who they are.”

I nodded although Garcia couldn’t see it. In 1924, two wealthy

university students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, had killed a boy

just for kicks. Leopold considered himself and Loeb to be exemplars of

Nietzsche’s Übermenschen and thus exempt from laws governing

ordinary men. Supermen they weren’t, but psychopaths they surely were. Their parents engaged none other than Clarence Darrow to represent

them. In a stunning twelve-hour-long closing argument, Darrow made

the same defense Garcia was apparently now contemplating: claiming

Becker couldn’t be executed for doing what his nature dictated he do. I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward. “And is Becker a

psychopath?” I asked. “That’s the problem, Professor Marchuk,” said Garcia. “The D. A. had

a Hare assessment done, which scored Becker at seventeen—way below

what’s required for psychopathy. But we think their assessor is wrong;

our guy squeaks him into psychopathy with a score of thirty-one. And,

well, with your new procedure, we can prove to the jury that our score is

the right one.”

“You know my test has never been accepted in a court of law?”

“I’m aware of that, Professor. I’m also aware that no one has even

tried to introduce it into evidence yet. But I’ve got your paper in Nature

Neuroscience right here. That it was published in such a prestigious,

peer-reviewed journal gets our foot in the door; Georgia follows the

Daubert standard for admissibility. But we need you—you personally, the

lead author on the paper—to use your technique on Becker and testify

about the results if we’ve got any chance of having the court accept the

evidence.”

“What if I show that Becker isn’t a psychopath?”

“Then we’ll still pay you for your time.”

“And bury the results?”

“Professor, we’re con dent of the outcome.”

It sounded worthwhile—but so was what I did here. “I have a busy

teaching schedule, and—”

“I know you do, Professor. In fact, I’m looking at it right now on

your university’s website. But the trial probably won’t come up until

you’re on summer break, and, frankly, this is a chance to make a

difference. I’ve read your Reasonably Moral blog. You’re against the

death penalty; well, here’s a chance to help prevent someone from being

executed.”

My computer happened to be displaying the lesson plan for that

afternoon’s moral-psych class, in which I was planning to cite the study

of Princeton seminary students who, while rushing to give a presentation

on the parable of the Good Samaritan, passed by a man slumped over in

an alleyway, ignoring him because they were in a hurry. Practice what you teach, I always say. “All right. Count me in.”

Shortly after I came off the Jetway into the international terminal at

Harts eld-Jackson Airport, I went into a little shop to buy a bottle of

Coke Zero—here, in Atlanta, headquarters of Coca-Cola, there was no

sign of Pepsi anywhere. Without thinking, I handed the woman at the

cash register a Canadian ve. “What’s this?” she said, taking it. “Oh!

Sorry.” I dug into my wallet—I always have to carefully look at

US bills to make sure of the denomination, since they’re all the same

color—and found one with Abe Lincoln’s face on it. There was no one else waiting to buy anything, and the woman

seemed intrigued by the blue polymer banknote I’d handed her. After

examining it carefully, she looked up at me, and said, “There’s no

mention of God. Ain’t you a God-fearing country up there?”

“Um, well, ah, we believe in the separation of church and state.”

She handed the bill back to me. “Honey,” she said, “there ain’t no

such thing.” She frowned, as if recalling something. “Y’all are socialists

up there, right?”

Actually, until recently, Canada had had a much more conservative

leader than the United States did. When Stephen Harper came to of ce in

2006, George W. Bush had been in the White House and, to liberal

Canadian sensibilities—the kind found on university campuses—he

seemed the lesser of two evils. But once Barack Obama was elected,

Canada had by far the more right-wing leader. Harper managed to hold

on to power for almost a decade, but Canada was now ruled by a

minority coalition between the Liberal Party and the socialist New

Democratic Party. “Kind of,” I said, although I suspected her understanding of the term

“socialism” was different from mine. I handed her the American ve, got

my Canadian bill back plus my change, and took my pop, or soda, or

whatever it was here. This was my rst time ying in the States since Quinton Carroway

had been sworn in as president, and I was surprised to hear that the

constant warnings about terrorist threats over the public-address system

were back; they’d disappeared under Obama but had returned with a

vengeance. The old wording had invariably been, “The Homeland

Security threat level is orange”—wh ich was only semi-effective

propaganda because you had to have memorized the code to know that

orange was the new black—the thing white folk were supposed to fear

most—being one step shy of an imminent attack. The new message,

which played every three minutes or so, was much more direct, and,

unless I missed my guess, the voice was the president’s own distinctive

baritone: “Be on guard!

A terrorist attack can occur at any time.”

And speaking of propaganda, despite Atlanta also being home to

CNN, Fox News was on the big-screen TV hanging down like a steam-

shovel scoop from the ceiling as I arrived at baggage claim. Orwell had

been right that mind-controlling messages would be pumped twenty-four

hours a day through telescreens, and he’d have recognized the ones in the

airport with no way to turn them off. What would have astounded him is

that many millions of people would voluntarily tune into them in their

own homes, often for hours on end. I recognized Megyn Kelly although I usually only saw her in

un attering clips on The Daily Show. “Look,” she said, “it is a fact that

this guy was in our country illegally.”

“And for that he should have died?” said a man—clearly the day’s

sacri cial liberal lamb. “I’m not saying that,” said Kelly. “Obviously, what these three men

did was not the way to handle it.”

“No?” said the man. “What they did was exactly what Governor

McCharles intended, isn’t it?”

“Oh, come on!” snapped the other woman on the panel. “The Texas

governor simply meant—”

“The whole point of the McCharles Act,” said the man, “was to

provoke attacks like this. Rede ning homicide as the killing of a legal

resident!

What is that, except a wink-and-a-nod to every yahoo out there

that the cops will look the other way if an undocumented immigrant

turns up dead?”

“The point,” said the same woman, “was merely that these illegal

aliens can’t out the law and then expect to be protected by it.”

“For God’s sake!” said the man, who was getting red in the face. “McCharles is setting things up for a pogrom!”

I grabbed my bag, then headed off to nd a taxi, grateful to be

leaving the arguing panelists behind. I beheld the monster. One of them, anyway. There were six according to the indictments;

nine, if you believed the Huf ngton Post, which argued that three other

corrections of cers who should also have been charged had gotten off

scot-free. But this one, everyone agreed, had been the ringleader: Devin

Becker was the man who had incited the other guards—and he was the

only one who had actually killed somebody. “Thirty minutes,” said a burly sergeant, as Becker folded his lanky

form onto the metal seat. The irony wasn’t lost on me: Becker himself

was now in the care of a prison guard. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who indeed watches the watchers?

Becker had high cheekbones, and the weight he’d lost since the

notorious video had been recorded made them even more prominent. That the skin pulled taut across them was bone white only added to the

ghastly appearance; put a black hood over his head, and he could have

played chess for a man’s soul. “Who are you?” he asked, a slight drawl

protracting his words. “Jim Marchuk. I’m a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, in

Winnipeg.”

Becker curled his upper lip. “I don’t wanna be part of any damn

experiment.”

I thought about saying, “You already have been.” I thought about

saying, “The experiment has been done time and again, and this is just

another pointless replication.” I even thought about saying, “If only this

were an experiment, we could pull the plug on it, just like Zimbardo

nally did at Stanford.” But what I actually said was, “I’m not here to

conduct an experiment. I’m going to be an expert witness at your trial.”

“For the defense or the prosecution?”

“The defense.”

Becker relaxed somewhat, but his tone was suspicious. “I can’t afford

fancy experts.”

“Your father is paying, I’m told.”

“My father.” He sneered the words. “What?”

“If he really cared, it’d be him, not you, sitting there.”

“He hasn’t come to see you?”

Becker shook his head. “Has any of your family?”

“My sis. Once.”

“Ah,” I said. “They’re ashamed.”

Those words hung in the air for a moment. The New York Times

front-page article about the Savannah Prison guards had been headlined

“America’s Shame.”

“Well,” I said gently, “perhaps we can convince them not to be.”

“With psychological bullshit?” He made a “pffft!” sound through

thin lips. “With the truth.”

“The truth is my own lawyer says I’m a psychopath. Norman

Fucking Bates.” He shook his head. “What the hell kind of defense is

that, anyway?

Y’all must be out of your minds.”

I didn’t have much sympathy for this guy; what he’d done was

horri c. But I am a teacher: ask me a question, and I’m compelled to

answer—that’s my nature. “You killed someone in cold blood, and the

court would normally call that rst-degree murder, right?

But suppose an

MRI showed you had a brain tumor that affected your behavior. The

jury might be inclined to say you couldn’t help yourself and let you off. You don’t have a tumor, but my research shows that psychopathy is just

as much a clear-cut physical condition and should likewise mitigate

responsibility.”

“Huh,” he said. “And do you think I’m a psycho?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I replied, placing my briefcase on the

wooden table and snapping the clasps open. “So let’s nd out.”

“Professor Marchuk, were you present when my learned opponent, the

District Attorney, introduced one of her expert witnesses, psychiatrist

Samantha Goldsmith?”

I tried to sound calm but, man, this was nerve-wracking. Oh, sure, I

was used to the Socratic method in academic settings, but here, in this

sweltering courtroom, a person’s life was on the line. I leaned forward. “Yes, I was.”

Juan Garcia’s chin jutted like the cattle catcher on a locomotive. “Sitting there, in the third row, weren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you recall Dr. Goldsmith giving a clinical opinion of the

defendant, Devin Becker?”

“I do.”

“And what was her diagnosis?”

“She contended that Mr. Becker is not a psychopath.”

“And did Dr. Goldsmith explain the technique by which she arrived

at that conclusion?”

I nodded. “Yes, she did.”

“Are you familiar with the technique she used?”

“Intimately. I’m certi ed in administering it myself.”

Juan had a way of moving his head that reminded me of a hawk,

pivoting instantly from looking this way to that way; he was now

regarding the jury. “Perhaps you can refresh the memories of these good

men and women, then. What technique did Dr. Goldsmith employ?”

“The Hare Psychopathy Checklist, Revised,” I said. “Commonly called ‘the Hare Checklist,’ or ‘the PCL-R,’ correct?”

“That’s right.”

A quick pivot back toward me. “And, before we go further, again, just

to remind us, a psychopath is…?”

“An individual devoid of empathy and conscience, a person who

doesn’t feel for other people—someone who only cares about his or her

own self-interest.”

“And the Hare Checklist?

Refresh the jury on that, please.”

“Robert Hare identi ed twenty characteristics that de ne a

psychopath—everything from glibness and super cial charm to

promiscuity and lack of remorse.”

“And, again, remind us: to be a psychopath, do you need to exhibit

all twenty of the traits he identi ed?”

I shook my head. “No. There’s a numerical scoring system.”

“The subject lls out a form?”

“No, no. A person specially trained in Professor Hare’s technique

conducts an interview with the subject and also reviews police records,

psychiatric reports, employment history, education, and so on. The expert

then scores the subject on each of the twenty traits, assigning a zero if a

given trait—pathological lying, say—is not present; a one if it matches to

a certain extent—perhaps they lie all the time in personal relationships

but never in business dealings, or vice versa; and a two if there’s a

reasonably good match for the trait in most aspects of the person’s life.”

“And the average total score on the twenty items is?”

“For normal people?

Very low: four out of a possible maximum of

forty.”

“And what score do you need to be a psychopath?”

“Thirty or above.”

“And do you recall the score Dr. Goldsmith assigned to the defendant

Mr. Becker?”

“I do. She gave him a seventeen.”

“Professor Marchuk, were you also here in this courtroom when we

—the defense—presented an expert witness, another psychologist, prior

to bringing you to the stand?”

I nodded again. “I was.”

“That psychologist, Dr. Gabor Bagi, testi ed that he, too,

administered the same psychopathy test to Devin Becker. Do you recall

that?”

“Yes.”

“And did Dr. Bagi come up with the same score as Dr. Goldsmith?”

“No. He gave Mr. Becker a score of thirty-one.”

Juan did a good job of sounding astonished. “Thirty-one out of forty?

Whereas Dr. Goldsmith came up with seventeen?”

“Correct.”

His head snapped toward the jury. “How do you account for the

discrepancy?”

“Well, although Professor Hare’s checklist is supposed to be as

objective as possible, his test is prone to some inter-rater disagreement in

non-research clinical settings. But a difference of fourteen points?” I

shrugged my shoulders beneath my blue suit. “I can’t account for that.”

Snapping back to me: “Still, our score of thirty-one puts Mr. Becker

over the legal line into psychopathy with room to spare, while the score

Dr. Goldsmith obtained leaves Mr. Becker far away from being a

psychopath, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And, given that the State is seeking the death penalty, the question of

whether or not Mr. Becker is a clinical psychopath—wh ether or not he

had any volition in his behavior—is crucial in determining his sentence,

which puts the good men and women of the jury in the unenviable, but

regrettably common, position of having to choose between con icting

expert testimonies, isn’t that so?”

“No,” I said. “I beg your pardon, Professor Marchuk?”

My heart was pounding, but I managed to keep my tone absolutely

level. “No. Dr. Goldsmith is dead wrong, and Dr. Bagi is right. Devin

Becker is a psychopath, and I can prove it—prove it beyond a shadow of

a doubt.”

“A2

simple yes-or-no test for psychopathy?” Heather said as she

looked across the restaurant table at me. “Surely that’s not

possible.”

“Oh, but it is. And I’ve discovered it.”

My sister was one of my favorite people, and I was one of hers; I

think we’d have been friends even if we hadn’t been related. She was

forty-two, almost exactly three years older than I, and worked as a

corporate litigator in Calgary. Every now and then her work brought her

here to Winnipeg, and whenever it did, we hung out together. “Oh, come on,” she said. “Surely there’s a spectrum for psychopathy.”

I shook my head. “Everyone wants everything to be on a spectrum

these days. Autism is the classic example: ‘autism spectrum disorder.’ We

have this desire for things to be analog, to have in nite gradations. But

humans fundamentally aren’t analog; life isn’t analog. It’s digital. Granted, it’s not base-two binary; it’s base-four. Literally base-four: the

four bases—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—that make up the

genetic code. There’s nothing analog about that, and there’s nothing

analog about most of the human condition: you’re either alive or dead;

you either do or don’t have the genes for Alzheimer’s; and you either are

or aren’t a psychopath.”

“Okay, ne. So how do you know?

What’s the binary test for

psychopathy?”

“You ever see The Silence of the Lambs?”

She nodded, honey-colored hair touching her shoulders as she did so. “Sure. Read the book, too.”

I was curious as to whether she’d picked it up after she’d started

dating Gustav. “When?” I asked offhandedly. “The movie?

When I was in law school. The book?

Mayb e ten years

ago.”

I resisted shaking my head. Gustav had only been on the scene for six

months now, but I was sure he was a psychopath. Not the violent sort

that Thomas Harris had depicted in his novel—psychopathy was indeed

binary, but it manifested itself in different ways; in Gustav’s case, that

meant narcissistic, manipulative, and sel sh behavior. A self-styled actor

—IMDb had no entry for him—he apparently lived off a succession of

professional women; my ever-kindhearted sister, so sharp in legal

matters, seemed utterly oblivious to this. Or maybe not: I’d attempted to

broach the topic a couple of times before, but she’d always shut me

down, saying she was happy, all right?, and I should let her be. “Well,” I said, “in the movie The Silence of the Lambs, remember the

rst interview between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter?

Anthony

Hopkins absolutely nails one aspect of psychopaths—at least as much as

someone who actually isn’t one can. He looks right at Clarice and

says”—and here I did my best impersonation of Hopkins’s cultured hiss

—“‘First principles, Clarice. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in

itself?

What is its nature?’ And then, the most memorable part, as his

eyes drill into her and he says, ‘What does he do, this…man…you…

seek?’ Remember that?”

Heather shuddered a little. “Oh, yes.”

“Jodie Foster’s response—‘He kills women’—is supposed to be the

chilling part, but it isn’t. It’s Lecter’s stare, the way he looks right at

Clarice, unblinking, un inching. I’ve seen that stare in the esh, from real

psychopaths in jails. It’s the most unnerving thing about them.”

“I bet,” said Heather. She’d ordered mozzarella sticks as an appetizer;

I’d been out with her and Gustav and seen him veto her choices of

anything fattening. She took one of the sticks now and dipped it in

marinara sauce. “But, you know,” I said, “good as he is, Anthony Hopkins is only

simulating the psychopathic stare. He can’t do it quite right.”

“How do you mean?”

“A real psychopath looks at you not just without blinking much—

although that certainly adds to the reptilian effect—but also without

performing microsaccades.”

Heather had heard me talk about them before. Microsaccades are

involuntary jerks as the eyeball rotates two degrees or less; they occur

spontaneously whenever you stare at something for several seconds. Their purpose is debated although the most common theory is that they

cause the neurons perceiving an object to refresh so that the image

doesn’t fade. Heather’s eyebrows rose above her wire-frame glasses. “Really?”

I nodded. “Yup. The paper’s coming up in Nature Neuroscience.”

“Way to go!” But then she frowned. “Why would that be, though?

What have microsaccades got to do with psychopathy?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted, “but I’ve demonstrated the lack in forty-

eight out of fty test subjects, all of whom had scored thirty-two or

above on the PCL-R.”

“What about the other two?”

“Not psychopaths; I’m convinced of it. And that’s the problem with

the PCL-R: it’s not de nitive. Bob Hare got pissed several years ago when

a pop-sci book called The Psychopath Test came out. It implied anyone

could properly assess whether their neighbors or bosses or even casual

acquaintances were psychopaths. As Hare said, it takes a week of

intensive training to be able to score his twenty variables properly, and

that’s on top of formal psychological or psychiatric education. But his

test can have false positives if a clinician miscategorizes something, or

assigns a score of two when only a one is really warran ted—or if the

psychopath is good at evading detection.”

“Ah,” said Heather. “But, um, how do you know Anthony Hopkins

isn’t a psychopath?” Her tone was light. “I mean, think of the parts he’s

played—not just Hannibal Lecter but also Alfred Hitchcock, a guy who

was obsessed with making a movie about a psycho and who had a lot of

callous traits himself. Maybe it’s typecasting.”

“I actually thought about that. Hopkins also played Nixon and

Captain Bligh, after all—arguably a couple of other psychopaths.”

“True.”

“So I got the 4K Ultra disc of Silence of the Lambs. That lm was

shot in thirty- ve millimeter, and 4K scanning is suf cient to capture all

the resolution of the original lm stock; it was sharp enough in the close-

ups when he’s staring at Clarice to check. His eyes were indeed

performing microsaccades.”

Heather smiled. “So much for Method acting.”

Her mozzarella sticks looked yummy, but I couldn’t have one. “Yeah. Still, Hitler had an unnerving stare, too. He’d lock his eyes on people and

hold the gaze much longer than normal. There’s no footage of him clear

enough to show whether or not he was doing microsaccades, but I’m

sure he wasn’t.”

“But I still don’t get the why of it,” said Heather. “What has the lack

of microsaccades got to do with being a psychopath?

I mean, okay, I can

see how it could account for the stare…”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “You know, a lot of the world’s most-

cutting-edge work in psychopathy has been done here in Canada…wh ich

says something, I’m sure. Not only is Bob Hare Canadian—he’s emeritus

now at UBC—but so is Angela Book. She published a study in 2009

called ‘Psychopathic Traits and the Perception of Victim Vulnerability.’

That study and subsequent ones have shown that psychopaths have an

almost preternatural ability to target already wounded people. “In one of my own experiments, I made high-resolution videos of a

group of female volunteers, some of whom had been assaulted in the past

and some of whom hadn’t, milling about in a room with some male grad

students. I then showed the footage to a group of men, asking them to

pick out which females had been previously assau lted. For normal men,

the success rate was no better than chance: they simply couldn’t tell and

so just guessed. But the psychopaths averaged eighty percent correct. “When I asked the psychopaths how they could tell, their answers

ranged from the not-very-helpful ‘it’s obvious’ to the signi cant ‘I can see

it in their faces.’ And apparently they could. Human faces are in

constant, subtle motion, exhibiting eeting microexpressions that last

between a twenty- fth and a fteenth of a second. When a psychopath

turns on the psychopathic stare, free of microsaccades, he can clearly see

the microexpressions. In the case of the previously abused women, an

ever-so-brief look of fear might pass over their faces when a man looks at

them, and not only do the psychopaths notice it, but they gravitate

toward those exhibiting such things.”

“Holy shit,” said Heather. “Yeah.”

The server arrived with Heather’s Cobb salad. “Go ahead,” I said. She took a forkful. “What about sociopaths as opposed to

psychopaths?”

“Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. Although some clinicians—mostly

Americans, come to think of it—still try to distinguish between the two,

the DSM-5 lumps them together. You know, much of the dialog in the

movie version of The Silence of the Lambs comes straight out of the

novel, but in the book, Lecter is described as ‘a pure sociopath,’ whereas

in the lm, they changed it to ‘a pure psychopath.’ The distinction, if

there is one, either comes down to etiology—t hose like me who prefer

the term ‘psychopathy’ think the cause is mostly a difference in the brain;

those who prefer ‘sociopathy’ think society must have shaped the person

—or down to how the condition manifests itself. Some say the classic

glib and charming but totally heartless guy—that’s a psychopath; if it’s

more of a regular schlub who just happens to lack conscience and

empathy, he’s a sociopath. Regardless, my technique detects them both. Still…”

She looked at me expectantly. “Yeah?”

“You know the difference between a psychopath and a homeopath?”

She shook her head. “Some psychopaths do no harm.”

“Ha!” She ate a forkful of salad, then, “So, how precisely does your

method work?

How do you conduct the test?”

“Well, microsaccades are a xational eye movement—they occur only

when your gaze is xed on something. And to get a really solid, really

good track, I don’t normally use lm. Rather, I use a modi ed set of

ophthalmologist’s vision-testing goggles. I get the suspected psychopath

to wear them and simply ask him or her to stare for ten seconds at a dot

displayed by the goggles. Sensors check to see if the eyes stay rock-steady

or if they jerk a bit. If the former, the guy’s a psychopath, I guarantee it. If the latter—if the subject is performing microsaccades—he isn’t. You

can’t fake microsaccades; the smallest volitional eye shift anyone can do

is much bigger. As long as the person doesn’t have an eye-movement

disorder, such as congenital or acquired nystagmus, which would be

obvious before you did the test, with my technique, there are no false

positives. If I say you’re a psychopath, you bloody well are.”

“Wow,” said Heather. “Can I borrow them?”

Maybe I’d underestimated her; perhaps she was onto Gustav after all. “No,” I said, “but invite me for Christmas, and I’ll bring them along.”

“Deal,” she said, spearing a cherry tomato. “A3

ND so, Professor Marchuk, in summary, is it your testimony

that the defendant, Devin Becker, is indeed a psychopath?”

Juan Sanchez had rehearsed my direct examination repeatedly. He

wanted to ensure that not only the judge, who had heard psychological

testimony in many previous cases, could follow me, but also that the

seven men and ve women in the jury dock, none of whom had ever

taken a psych course, couldn’t help but see the logic of it all. Juan had told me to make eye contact with the jurors. Sadly, juror

four (the heavyset black woman) and juror nine (the white guy with the

comb-over) were both looking down. But I did connect brie y with each

of the others although three averted their gazes as soon as they felt my

eyes land on them. I turned back to him and nodded decisively. “Yes, exactly. There is no

question whatsoever.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Juan looked questioningly at Judge

Kawasaki. The best way to use an expert defense witness, he’d told me,

was to present direct examination immediately before a recess so the

argument would have time to take root before the prosecution attacked

it; he’d timed my testimony to nish just before noon. But either

Kawasaki was oblivious to the time or he was onto Juan’s strategy since

he turned to the D. A. and said the words Juan himself had failed to utter. “Your witness, Miss Dickerson.”

Juan shot me a disappointed glance, then moved over and sat down

next to Devin Becker, who, as always, had a scowl on his thin face. I shifted nervously in my seat. We’d rehearsed this part, too, trying to

predict what questions Belinda Dickerson would re off in an attempt to

discredit my microsaccades technique. But as Moltke the Elder famously

said, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Dickerson was forty-eight, tall, lithe, with a long, pale face and short

black hair; if the pole holding the Georgia ag at the side of the room

ever broke, she could stand in as its replacement. “Mr. Marchuk,” she

said, in a voice that was stronger than one might have expected from her

build, “we heard a great deal about your quali cations when my

opponent called you to the stand.”

It didn’t seem to be a question, so I said nothing. Perhaps she

expected me to make some modest noise, and, in a social situation, I

might have done just that. But here, in this court, with the hot dry air—

not to mention an annoying y buzzing around the light hanging over

my head—I simply nodded as she went on: “Degrees, postdocs, clinical

certi cations, academic appointments.”

Again, not a question. I had been generally nervous about being

cross-examined, but I now relaxed slightly. If she wanted to go over my

CV with forensic glee, that was ne by me; I’d embellished nothing. “But now, sir,” Dickerson continued, “I’d like to explore some parts

of your background that weren’t brought forth by Mr. Sanchez.”

I looked at Juan, whose head did an avian snap toward the jury, then

ricocheted back to facing me. “Yes?” I said to her. “Where is your family from?”

“I was born in Calgary, Alberta.”

“Yes, yes. But your family, your people: where are they from?”

Like everyone, I’ve been asked this question before, and I usually

made a joke of my reply, the kind only an academic could get away with. “My ancestors,” I’d say, “came from Olduvai Gorge.” I glanced at the

jury box and also at the dour, wrinkled countenance of Judge Kawasaki. There was no point in uttering a joke you knew was going to bomb. “My

heritage, you mean?

It’s Ukrainian.”

“So your mother, she was Ukrainian?”

“Yes. Well, Ukrainian-Canadian.”

She made a dismissive gesture, as if I were muddying the waters with

pointless cavils. “And your maternal grandfather, was he Ukrainian,

too?”

“Yes.”

“Your grandfather emigrated to Canada at some point?”

“The 1950s. I don’t know precisely when.”

“But he lived in Ukraine prior to that?”

“Actually, I think the last place he lived in Europe was Poland.”

Dickerson took a turn looking at the jury. She raised her eyebrows as

if astonished by my answer. “Where in Poland?”

It took me a second to come up with the name, and I doubt I did

justice to the pronunciation. “Gdenska.”

“Which is where?”

I frowned. “As I said, in Poland.”

“Yes, yes. But where in Poland?

What’s it close to?”

“It’s north of Warsaw, I think.”

“I believe that’s correct, yes, but is it close to any…an y site, shall we

say…of historical signi cance?”

Juan Sanchez rose, jaw jutting even more than usual. “Objection,

Your Honor. This travelogue can be of no relevance to the matter at

hand.”

“Overruled,” said Kawasaki. “But you are trying my patience, Miss

Dickerson.”

She apparently took that as license to ask a leading question. “Mr. Marchuk, sir, let me put it bluntly: isn’t that village of yours, Gdenska,

isn’t it just ten miles from Sobibor?”

Her consistent refusal to use one of the honori cs I was entitled to

was, of course, an attempt to undermine me in front of the jury. “I don’t

know,” I said. “I have no idea.”

“Fine, ne. But it’s near Sobibor, isn’t it?

Only a few minutes by car,

no?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Or by train?” She let that sink in for a beat, then: “What did your

grandfather do during World War II?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

I felt my eyebrows going up. “No.”

“That surprises me, sir. It surprises me a great deal.”

“Why?”

“You actually don’t get to ask questions, sir; that’s not the way this

works. Now, is it really your testimony here, under oath, that you don’t

know what your mother’s father did during World War II?”

“That’s right,” I said, utterly perplexed. “I don’t know.”

Dickerson turned to the jury and lifted her hands in an “I gave him a

chance” sort of way. She then walked to her desk, and her young female

assistant passed her a sheet of paper. “Your Honor, I’d like to introduce

this notarized scan of an article from the Winnipeg Free Press of March

twenty-third, 2001.”

Kawasaki gestured for Dickerson to come forward, and she handed

him the piece of paper. He gave it a perfunctory glance, then passed it to

the clerk. “So ordered,” he said. “Mark as People’s one-four-six.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” she said, retrieving the sheet. “Now, Mr. Marchuk, would you be so kind as to read us the rst indicated

passage?”

She handed me the page, which had two separate paragraphs

highlighted in blue. I couldn’t make out what they said without my

reading glasses, and so I reached into my suit jacket—and saw the guard

at the far end of the room move to draw his revolver. I slowly removed

my cheaters, perched them on my nose, and began reading aloud: “‘More

startling revelations were made this week as papers from the former

Soviet Union continued to be made public. The newly disclosed

documents have a Canadian connection. Ernst Kulyk…’” I faltered, and

my throat went dry as I skimmed ahead. “Continue, please, sir,” said Dickerson. I swallowed, then: “‘Ernst Kulyk, the father of Patricia Marchuk, a

prominent Calgary attorney, has been revealed to have been a guard at

the Nazi Sobibor death camp, implicated in the deaths of thousands, if

not tens of thousands, of Polish Jews.’”

I looked up. The paper uttered in my hands. “Thank you, sir. Now, who is Patricia Marc huk?”

“My mother.”

“And, just to be clear, she’s your biological mother—and Ernst Kulyk

was her biological father, correct?

Neither you nor your mother were

adopted?”

“That’s right.”

“Is your maternal grandfather still alive?”

“No. He died sometime in the 1970s.”

“And you were born in 1982, correct?

So you never met him, right?”

“Never.”

“And your mother, is she still alive?”

“No. She passed fteen years ago.”

“In 2005?”

“Yes.”

“Were you estranged from her?”

“No.”

“And yet it’s your testimony before this court that you didn’t know

what her father—your grandfather—did during World War II?”

My heart was pounding. “I—honestly, I had no idea.”

“Where did you live in March 2001, when this article was

published?”

“In Winnipeg. I was in second-year university then.”

“A sophomore?”

“We don’t use that term in Canada, but yes.”

“And the Winnipeg Free Press, correct me if I’m wrong, is now and

was then the largest-circulation daily newspaper in that city, right?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“So surely someone must have mentioned this article to you, no?”

“Never.”

“Seriously?

Didn’t your mother say anything to you about this

revelation?”

Acid was splashing at the back of my throat. “Not that I recall.”

“Not that you recall,” she repeated. “There’s a second highlighted

passage on that page. Would you read it, please?”

I looked down and did so. “‘Ernst Kulyk was a local, living near

Sobibor. Historian Howard Green at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los

Angeles says Marchuk ts the physical description of Ernst the Enforcer,

a guard notorious for his brutality.’”

“And your work, Professor, as we’ve heard here in this courtroom, is

designed to exonerate those accused of heinous crimes, is it not?”

“Not at all. I—”

“Please, sir. Surely the defense would not have engaged your services

if they hadn’t thought your testimony could be used to convince the

honest men and women of this jury that some people just happen to be

psychopaths, that God made them that way, that they can’t help

themselves, that they shouldn’t be held accountable to the highest

standard of the law, isn’t that so?”

“Objection!” said Juan. “Argumentative.”

“Sustained. Careful, Miss Dickerson.”

“Mr. Marchuk, sir, how would you characterize the relationship

between your family history and your area of research?

Isn’t it true that

the one inspired the other?”

“I told you I didn’t know about my grandfather.”

“Come now, sir. I can understand wanting to put your family’s shame

—Canada’s shame—behind you, but, really, isn’t it true that you, in fact,

had made up your mind in this case before you ever met Devin Becker?

For to nd Devin Becker accountable, to insist he answer for his crimes,

his perversions, his cruelty, would require you to demand the same of

your grandfather. Isn’t that so?”

“Even if I’d known about my grandfather,” I said, feeling dizzy now,

“the cases are vastly different, separated by decades and thousands of

miles.”

“Trivialities,” said Dickerson. “Isn’t it true that you’ve been called ‘an

apologist for atrocities’ in print?”

“Never in a peer-reviewed journal.”

“True,” said Dickerson. “I allude to Canada’s National Post. But the

fact of the matter remains: is it not true that every aspect of your

testimony here today is colored by your desire to see your grandfather as

a blameless victim of circumstances?”

“My research is widely cited,” I said, feeling as though the wooden

oor of the witness dock was splintering beneath me, “and it, in turn,

cites such classics as the work of Cleckley and Milgram.”

“But, unlike them, you come at this with an agenda, do you not?”

It seemed utterly pointless to protest that Stanley Milgram’s family

had been Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust—his work was all about

trying to make sense of the senseless, to fathom the inexplicable, to

comprehend how sane, normal people could have done those things to

other thinking, feeling beings. “That would not be my position,” I said, trying to keep my voice

steady. “No,” responded Belinda Dickerson, looking once more at the men

and women in the jury dock, all of whom were sitting up in rapt

attention. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be.”

Judge Kawasaki nally called the recess, and I exited the Atlanta

courtroom, my heart pounding again, which, given my history, is a

feeling I hated. Juan Sanchez was going to have lunch with Devin Becker,

but I doubted they wanted me to join them. I headed out into the

afternoon heat, air shimmering above the parking lot’s asphalt, used a

shaking hand to put my Bluetooth receiver in my ear, and called my sister

in Calgary. The phone rang, then a woman said, “Morrell, Thompson,

Chandler, and Marchuk.”

“Heather Marchuk, please.” My sister’s marriage had fallen apart

long ago—way before mine had—but she’d always used her maiden

name professionally. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“It’s her brother Jim.”

“Oh, Mr. Marchuk, hi. Are you in town?”

I’m usually pretty good with names, and I suspect if I wasn’t so

distraught, I would have come up with the receptionist’s. I could picture

her, though—blond, petite, round glasses. “No. Is Heather in?”

“Let me put you through.”

I saw a husky man looking at me—probably a reporter hoping for a

quote. I turned and walked briskly away. My sister and I talked a couple of times a month—the maximum

Gustav would allow—but it was always in the evenings; she was clearly

surprised to be getting a call from me during the workday. “Jim, is

everything okay?

Where are you?”

I couldn’t answer the rst question in a reassuring way, so I skipped

to the second. “Atlanta.”

Heather knew me too well. “Something is wrong. What?”

“Do you know what Grandpa Kulyk did in World War II?”

Silence for a moment. Off in the distance—here or there, I wasn’t sure

which—a siren was wailing. “What the hell, Jim.”

“Sorry?” A question, not an apology. “What the hell,” she said again. “Excuse me?”

“Jim, if this is some kind of joke…”

“I’m not joking.”

“You know full well what he did in the war, at that camp.”

“Well, I know now,” I said. “I found out today. I’m here giving expert

testimony in that trial I told you about. The D. A. blindsided me with the

news.”

“It’s not news, for Christ’s sake,” said Heather. “It came out ages

ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Are you nuts?

We all knew about it.”

My head was swimming. “I don’t remember that.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Jim, look, I’ve got a client meeting in—we ll, damn, I should be

doing it now. I don’t know what to say, but get some help, okay?”

I4

’D have been happy to go home after the morning’s evisceration, but

when the judge had called the recess, Miss Dickerson indicated she

wasn’t through with me. After failing to nd a vegan entrée in the

courthouse cafeteria, I’d settled for a packaged salad and a cup of black

coffee. The reworks began again as soon as court resumed. “Objection!”

said Juan, rising in response to Dickerson asking me once more about my

personal history. “This shing expedition has no bearing on the

sentencing of Devin Becker.”

Dickerson spread her arms as she turned toward the brooding judge. “Your Honor, this is the rst time Mr. Marc huk’s technique has been

introduced in a court of law. With the court’s permission, it seems only

appropriate to delve into any biases or prejudices—even ones that he

himself might not be aware of—that might have tainted his results.”

“Very well; objection overruled—but don’t wander too far a eld.”

“Of course not, Your Honor.” She turned back to me. “Mr. Marchuk,

sir, what’s your stance on capital punishment?” I saw Juan clenching his

wide jaw. “I’m against it.”

Dickerson nodded, as if this was only to be expected. “Earlier you

told us you were Canadian, and our friends to the north don’t have

capital punishment. Is your objection simply something that goes with

your citizenship, like a fondness for hockey and maple syrup?”

“I object to capital punishment on a philosophical basis.”

“Ah, yes. When Mr. Sanchez was introducing you, he made mention

of the fact that in addition to your three degrees in psychology you also

have a master’s degree in philosophy, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, given this sentencing trial is precisely about whether Mr. Becker will receive the death penalty, perhaps you could brie y enlighten

us as to your philosophical objections to it?”

I took a deep breath. I’d often debated the issue in classrooms, but

the palpable disapproval of the jurors was throwing me off my game; the

D. A. hadn’t allowed anyone who was morally opposed to capital

punishment to be impanelled for this case. “They aren’t just my

objections,” I said. “I’m a utilitarian philosopher. Utilitarians believe the

greatest good is maximizing happiness for the greatest number. And one

of utilitarianism’s founders, Jeremy Bentham, back in 1775, articulated

several compelling arguments against the death penalty, arguments that

still make sense.”

I let my butter ies settle for a moment, then: “First, he said—and I

agree—that it’s unpro table. That is, it costs more to society to execute

people than it does to keep them alive. That was true in Bentham’s day,

and is even more true today: the extended legal proceedings, including

this very one that we’re all part of right now, plus the inevitable appeals,

make it far more expensive to execute a criminal than it is to imprison

him or her for life. “And, just as important, Bentham said—and, again, I agree—the

death penalty is irremissible. That is, there’s no way to undo an error. Of

course, the unhappiness that results from a wrongful execution is huge

for the death-row inmate. More than that, though, if a society executes

an innocent man, and that fact is subsequently revealed when, for

instance, the real killer is caught, then everyone in that society feels—or,

at least, should feel—great remorse at the horrible thing done in the

name of all of us. And then—”

“Thank you, sir. We get the idea. Now, then, what about abortion?

If

your argument is that punishing the innocent with the ultimate sanction

is debilitating for society, then I’m sure the men and women seated here,

in the wake of our Supreme Court having recently overturned Roe v. Wade, will be grati ed to hear that you’re pro-life.”

“I’m not. I’m pro-choice.” I heard a hiss-like intake of breath from

one of the jurors, and saw another one, the bearded white man, shake his

head slowly back and forth. Belinda Dickerson returned to her desk, and her assistant took a

book out of a briefcase and handed it to her—and, like every author, I

have the ability to recognize one of my own books at just about any

distance, even when it’s partially obscured. “Your Honor, I’d like to

introduce this copy of Utilitarian Ethics of Everyday Life, by our current

witness, James K. Marchuk.”

Judge Kawasaki nodded. “Mark as People’s one-four-seven.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Just to con rm, sir, you are the author of

this book, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“As you can see, I’ve marked two pages with Post-it ags. Would you

be so kind as to turn to the rst one and read the highlighted passage?”

Post-it ags come in many colors; I use them all the time myself. She’d no doubt deliberately chosen red ones; she wanted the jury to be

thinking about blood. I ipped to the rst indicated page, carefully took out my reading

glasses, and said: “‘As in all utilitarian thinking, one cannot put one’s

own desires or happiness ahead of another’s simply because they are

one’s own, but in the case of a genetically defective fetus which, if

brought to term, will live an unhappy, pain- lled life, terminating the

fetus is clearly the path that will most increase the world’s net happiness,

for, as we have observed, there are only two ways to add to the world’s

total joy. The rst, obviously, is to make the people who already exist

happier. The second is to actually increase the number of people in the

world through childbirth, provided they will likely live happy lives.’”

Italics, as the saying goes, in the original. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat then went on. “‘The corollary to

this is that the world’s total happiness is decreased by either making

existing people less happy—as raising a disabled child with its attendant

emotional and nancial costs would doubtless do for the parents—or by

allowing more people to come into existence who will be unhappy, as a

child born to a life of pain and suffering will be. In such a case, therefore,

abortion is perhaps morally obligatory.’”

The argument was more complex than that, and I dealt with all the

objections one might raise in the subsequent paragraphs, but I stopped

when the blue highlighting came to an end, closed the book, and looked

up. You could hear a safety pin drop in that courtroom. The jurors were

all staring at me, some with mouths agape, and the color had gone out of

Juan’s face. Only Devin Becker looked unperturbed. Dickerson let the silence grow for as long as she felt she could get

away with, then: “Thank you. Now, the next passage , please.”

I nervously opened the book again and ipped to the second marked

page. At the top of it was a double-indented quotation from

utilitarianism’s other founder, John Stuart Mill; I knew it by heart:

Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the

lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s

pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool,

no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling

and conscience would be sel sh and base, even though they

should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better

satis ed with his lot than they are with theirs. It is better to be a human being dissatis ed than a pig satis ed;

better to be Socrates dissatis ed than a fool satis ed. And if the

fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only

know their own side of the question. The other party to the

comparison knows both sides. But Dickerson hadn’t highlighted that. Instead, the blue marking

began immediately afterward; I swallowed, then started reading aloud:

“‘Mill’s key point is that we reasonably and correctly value the lives

of a human more greatly than we do that of a chimpanzee, for the

chimp, while perhaps enjoying the moment, cannot anticipate future

happiness as well as we can—and that act of anticipation is in itself a

pleasure.’

“‘Likewise, we value a chimp—to the extent in many jurisdictions of

outlawing their use in laboratory experiments—more than we value a

mouse, a being of demonstrably lesser intellectual capacity. But to be fair,

and to avoid a charge of speciesism, we must apply the same standards

to our own kind.’

“‘Yes, an embryo, from the moment of conception, is genetically fully

Homo sapiens, but it has no complex cognition, no ability to plan or

anticipate, and little if any joy. As it develops, these faculties will accrue

gradually, but they clearly do not exist in anything approaching their full

form until several years after birth. On the bases previously discussed, a

utilitarian should support abortion when a prenatal diagnosis has been

made that is strongly indicative of an unhappy, painful life; it is on this

current basis—the lack of a fully developed mind for years to come—that

a utilitarian can additionally embrace not just abortion but also a

merciful release when a severe defect is not apparent until after

parturition.’”

“‘Parturition,’” said Dickerson. “A right fancy word, that.” She

glanced at the jury. “For those of us more accustomed to plainer

speaking, what is ‘parturition’?”

“Childbirth.”

“In other words, Mr. Marchuk, sir, you believe abortion is okay. You

believe—and I nd this almost impossible to say aloud, but it is what the

indicated passage said, isn’t it?

You even believe infanticide can be okay. But you don’t believe in capital punishment.”

“Well, as Peter Singer would argue…”

“Please, sir, it’s a yes-or-no question. Are you against capital

punishment in all circumstances?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in favor of abortion?”

“I’m in favor of increasing utility, in maximizing happiness, so—”

“Please, sir, again: yes or no?

In the vast majority of circumstances in

which a woman might desire an abortion, are you in favor of letting her

have it?”

“Yes.”

“And are there even times when infanticide, when killing an already-

born child, is, in your view, the right thing to do?”

“On the basis that—”

“Yes or no?”

“Well, yes.”

“And your goal here is to convince the good men and women of this

jury that it would be morally wrong to execute the defendant?”

I spread my arms. “I have no goal other than to explain the screening

technique I developed, but—”

“No, buts, sir. And no more questions. Your Honor, I’m very grateful

to be through with this witness.”

I5

said it didn’t bother me if people examined my résumé, and that’s true

—with one exception. When other academics look at it, they shake

their heads when they see I did my undergrad at the same institution I

teach at now; that’s always considered shy. Although I love the

University of Toronto’s “Prof or Hobo?” web quiz, which asks you to

identify by their photos whether a person is a vagrant or a faculty

member, we tenure-track types are supposed to be more like male

chimpanzees: once we reach maturity, and have proven ourselves

intractably irascible, we’re expected to leave our native community, never

to return. Welcome Back, Kotter was a bad-enough scenario for a high-

school teacher; it was anathema to those of us in academe. But my own career had brought me from doing my bachelor’s degree

here at the University of Manitoba—m y ight had gotten in last night—

back to being a tenured professor at the same institution. When asked

why, I cite several reasons. “A fondness for bitter cold,” I’d quip, or “An

abiding love of mosquitoes.” But the real reason was Menno Warkentin. When I started at U of M, in 1999, Menno was teaching the same

rst-year introductory-psych course that I myself taught now. Back then,

I was eighteen, and Menno was fty- ve. He was now seventy-four and

had emeritus status, which meant he was retired but, unlike some of the

gurative if not literal bums who were eventually shown the door, was

always welcome in his department, and, although drawing only a

pension and not a salary, could still do research, supervise grad students,

and so on. And, for all those years, he’d been my friend and mentor—I’d

lost track of the hours we’d spent in his of ce or mine, shooting the

breeze, talking about our work and our lives. More than just his age and professorial status had changed since I’d

started being his student; he’d also lost his sight. Although he happened

to be diabetic, and blindness was a common side effect of that condition,

that wasn’t the reason. Rather, he’d been in a car accident in 2001, and

while the airbag had kept him from being killed, its impact had shattered

his beloved antique glasses, and shards had been thrust into his eyeballs. I’d once or twice seen him without the dark glasses he now wore. His

arti cial blue eyes were lifelike but didn’t track. They just stared blankly

forward from beneath silver eyebrows. I found Menno sitting in his of ce with his headset on, listening to his

screen reader. His guide dog, a German shepherd named Pax, was curled

contentedly at his feet. Menno’s of ce had an L-shaped dark-brown

shelving-and-counter unit against the back and side walls, but he had

everything out of the way, up high or pushed to the back, so he couldn’t

accidentally knock things over. And whereas I always had stacks of

printouts and le folders on my own of ce oor, he had nothing that he

might trip on. His of ce had a large window that looked not outside but

into the corridor, and the white vertical blinds were closed, I guess on the

principle that if he couldn’t see out, no one should be able to see in. Today, though, in the summer heat, his door was open, and as I

entered, Pax stood and poked her muzzle into Menno’s thigh to alert him

that someone had arrived. He took off the headset and swung around,

my face re ecting back at me from his obsidian-dark lenses. “Hello?”

“Menno, it’s Jim.”

“Padawan!”—his nickname for me since my student days. “How was

your trip?”

I took a chair, and Pax settled in again at Menno’s feet. “The D. A. really worked at discrediting me.”

“Well, that’s his job,” Menno said. “Her job. But yeah.”

“Ah.”

“And she brought up some stuff about my past.”

Menno was sitting on a reddish-brown executive-style chair. He

leaned back, his belly like a beach ball. “Oh?”

“Stuff that I myself didn’t recall.”

“Like what?”

“Do you remember 2001?”

“Sure. Saw it in a theater when it rst came out.”

“Not the movie,” I said. “The year.”

“Oh.” He made a how-could-I-forget-it gesture at his face. “Yes.”

“Jean Chrétien was prime minister then, right?

And George W. Bush

was sworn in as president.”

“Umm, yeah. That’s right.”

“And what were the biggest news stories of 2001?”

“Well, 9/11, obviously. Beyond that, off the top of my head, I don’t

remember.”

“But you would,” I said. “What?”

“You would remember others if you gave it some thought, right?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“The D. A. surprised me with an article about my grandfather from

the Winnipeg Free Press. I went to the DaFoe Library this morning, and

they pulled the micro lm of that edition. I started looking at other

headlines from that day, but none of them stirred any memories, and

neither did the front pages of the Free Press from other days around

then. So I went online and looked at the covers of Time and Maclean’s

from 2001.

I didn’t recognize any of the stories until the summer. Two

thousand, no problem. The second half of 2001, yeah, it all came back to

me. But the initial six months of 2001 are a blank. The rst thing I can

pin down from that year is the day after Canada Day. July rst fell on a

Sunday that year, so people got July second off work. I remembered

being pissed that I’d tried to go to the post of ce on that Monday to pick

up a parcel, only to nd it closed for the holiday.” I spread my arms. “I’ve

lost half a year of my life.”

“You’re sure?”

“As far as I can tell, yes. I mean, I remember being disgusted when the

US Supreme Court handed down the decision in Bush v. Gore—but that

was in December of 2000.

I don’t remember Bush’s actual inauguration

although there had to have been protests, right?”

“I imagine so.”

“And in June of that year, Carroll O’Connor passed away—A rchie

Bunker himself!

You know how much I love All in the Family. I simply

couldn’t have missed that bit of news, but somehow I did. Until today, I’d

always assumed he was still alive in retirement somewhere.”

“And you just realized you had this gap?”

“Well, it was nineteen years ago, right?

How often do we think about

stuff from that far back?

I do remember 9/11.

I remember being right

here, on campus, when I heard about the planes hitting the World Trade

Center; I’d just started my third year. But other things from that long

ago?

How often would they come up?”

Menno shifted his bulky form in his chair. “Any idea why you can’t

remember those six months?”

“Yes,” I said, but then fell silent. Menno had known me back then,

but I’d never told him about this. “And?” he prompted, reaching down to stroke Pax’s head. I took a deep breath, then: “I died when I was nineteen. Legally dead. Heart stopped, breathing stopped. The whole nine yards.”

Menno halted in mid-stroke. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?” he asked, leaning back again. I pulled my chair closer to his desk. “I’d gone back home to Calgary

for the Christmas break. My sister was off in Europe, and my parents

were on a cruise—but I wanted to see my friends. I remember New Year’s

Eve, of course. Yes, the whole world had celebrated big-time a year

before, on December thirty- rst, 1999, but you know me: I held out for

the real beginning of the twenty- rst century, which was January rst,

2001, right?

Not 2000.”

“Because there was no year zero,” supplied Menno. “Exactly!

Anyway, I’d attended a party at the house of one of my

high-school friends, and that night—that is, like 2:00 A. M. on the

morning of January rst, 2001—wh en I was heading home, I was

attacked by a guy with a knife. It was a cold, clear night. I remember the

stars: Orion standing tall, Betelgeuse like a drop of blood, Jupiter and

Saturn near the Pleiades.”

“You and the stars,” he said, smiling; I’m secretary of the Winnipeg

Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. “Exactly, but it’s relevant, see?

I was doing what I always do. Cold

night, I’ve forgotten my mitts so my hands are shoved into my jacket

pockets, toque pulled down over my ears, and I’m walking along looking

up—not ahead of me, but up, nding the ecliptic, looking for planets,

hoping to maybe see a meteor streak across the sky. Sure, I’d checked for

traf c before crossing the street, but that’s all I did. I wasn’t looking to

see what was happening on the other side. Oh, I probably registered that

there were a couple of people there, but I wasn’t paying any damn

attention to them. And so I crossed diagonally because I was heading in

that direction, right?

And when I got to the other side, suddenly this guy

wheels around, and he’s got this pinched, narrow face and teeth that are

sharp and pointy and all askew, and his eyes, man, his eyes are wild. Wide open, whites all around. And he shoves me with one hand, palm

against my chest, and he snarls—really, it was a total snarl, his breath

coming out in clouds—and says ‘What the fuck do you want?’

“I look over at the other guy, and, Christ, he’s covered in blood. It

seems black in the yellow light from the streetlamp, but that’s what it’s

got to be, blood all over his nylon jacket. That guy’s been stabbed; I’ve

walked into a drug deal gone bad. I stammer, ‘I’m just heading to the C-

Train.’

“But it’s no good. The guy is crazy or high or both, and he’s got a

knife. The other guy takes the opportunity to try to get away: he starts

running—staggering, really—onto the street. But he’s badly hurt, and I

see now that he’d been standing in a puddle of his own blood, a puddle

that’s freezing over. “But the guy with the knife is looking at me, not him, and he lunges

at me. And I’m me, right?

I don’t know jack about street ghting. I don’t

know how to de ect a blow or anything like that. I feel the knife going in

sideways, and I know, I just know, it’s going in between my ribs, just off

the centerline of my chest. It doesn’t hurt—not yet—but it’s going deep. “And then it pierces my heart; I know that’s what’s happening. And

he pulls the knife out and I stagger a half-pace backward, away from the

road, clutching my chest, feeling the blood pouring out, and it’s hot, it’s

like scalding hot compared to the chilled air, but it’s not ebbing and

owing, it’s not pumping. It’s just draining out onto the sidewalk. I fall

backward, and I’m looking up at the sky, but it’s too bright here, the

streetlamp is washing everything out, and I’m thinking, God damn it, I

wanted to see the stars. “And then—nothing. None of that tunnel bullshit, no bright light

except the sodium one from the lamp; none of it. I’m just gone.”

Menno had switched to leaning forward, and about halfway through,

he’d steepled his ngers in front of his wide face. They were still there. “And then what?” he said. “And then I was dead.”

“For how long?”

I shrugged. “No one knows. It can’t have been too long. Man, if the

word ‘lucky’ can be applied to that sort of situation, I was lucky. I’d

fallen right by that streetlamp, so I was in plain view, and it was bitterly

cold. A medical student coming home from a different party stumbled

upon me, called 911, plugged the hole in my torso, and did chest

compressions until the ambulance got there.”

“My God,” said Menno. “Yeah. But, given the timing, it has to be what’s affecting my

memory.”

Silence again, then, at last: “There was doubtless oxygen deprivation. You likely did suffer some brain damage, preventing the formation of

long-term memories for a time.”

“You’d think—but there should be more evidence of it. During my

missing six months, if I wasn’t laying down new memories, I’d have had

enormous dif culty functioning. I was in your class then. Do you

remember me behaving strangely?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Sure, but I also was one of your test subjects in that research

project, right?”

He frowned. “Which one?”

“Something about…microphones?”

“Oh, that one. Yeah, I guess you were.”

“You had a cool name for it, um…”

“Project Lucidity.”

“Right!

Anyway, I was helping you with that before the kni ng, and

—well, I don’t know: that’s the whole point. Maybe I was part of your

study afterwards, too?”

“I honestly don’t remember,” said Menno. “Of course. But could you check your les, see if you have stuff about

me going that far back?

I’m looking for anything that might jog my

memory.”

“Sure, I’ll have a look.”

“I must have been laying down long-term memories during my…my

‘dark period.’ I mean, how else could I have functioned?”

“I suppose, yeah.”

“And I did a half-year course in science ction then, one semester,

January to April. It was required that I take an English course, and that

seemed less painful than CanLit.”

“Ha.”

“Anyway, I found the reading list from it still online. Apparently, we

all read this novel about a biomedical engineer who discovers scienti c

proof for the existence of the human soul—but I don’t remember ever

reading it; I only know that’s what it’s about because I looked up the title

on Amazon today.”

“Well, there were more than a few assigned books I never got around

to reading during my undergraduate days.”

“Yeah, but I did an essay on this book. I found the WordPerfect le

for it still on my hard drive.”

“Could you, y’know, have bought the essay?

From one of those

services?”

I raised my hand palm out to forestall any more of this. “Sure, sure,

you can explain away any one of these examples. But all of them?

Six

months with no new memories laid down and yet me apparently

functioning normally?

There’s no way to explain that.”

“All right,” said Menno. “But, you know, Jim, if the barrier to your

remembering that period is psychological rather than physical—we ll…”

“What?”

“If your subconscious is repressing something, maybe you’ll want to

just accept that. You’re ne now, after all, aren’t you?”

“I think so.”

“The missing memories aren’t affecting your work or your personal

life?”

“Not until that D. A. tore me to shreds.”

“So, just keep in mind that the cure might be worse than the disease.”

Pax was still at Menno’s feet, but her eyes were now closed. “Sometimes

it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

Pax did look at peace. But I shook my head as I rose. “No,” I said. “I

can’t do that.”

A6

S I looked out my living-room window at the Red River, I thought

perhaps I’d been unfair back at the Atlanta airport. If Fox News

was a thorn in the side of every Democrat unlucky enough to hold public

of ce in the United States, it was perhaps fair to say that the CBC was

equally vexatious to any hapless Conservative trying to do his or her job

in this country. The irony was that the CBC was a public broadcaster

owned and operated, albeit at arm’s length, by the federal government. There is little if anything Barack Obama could have done to de ect

attacks from Fox News, but year after year of Conservative government

in Ottawa had whittled the CBC down to a fraction of what it had once

been, and even after Harper was nally given the heave-ho, tough

economic times kept the CBC’s funding from getting fully reinstated. I had CBC Radio One on. The female announcer intoned: “Although

their attempt to blow up the Statue of Liberty was thwarted over the

weekend, it’s been revealed that the two would-be bombers, both Libyan

nationals, entered the United States from Canada, crossing over from

Ontario into Minnesota near Lake of the Woods eleven days ago. This is

the second time this year that terrorists from Libya have entered the US

via Canada. President Carroway was clearly frustrated at his press

brie ng this morning.”

The announcer’s voice was replaced by a clip of the president: “I’ve

expressed my deep concern over this issue to Prime Minister Justin

Trudeau. Perhaps if the killers were owing in the other direction, he’d

take it more seriously.”

As the newsreader was moving on to the next story, my iPhone

played the Jeopardy!

theme music, meaning a call was being forwarded

from my of ce line, the one published on the university’s website. The

screen showed “KD Huron” and a number with a 639 area code, one I

didn’t recognize. I turned off the radio and swiped the answer bar. “Hello?”

An odd silence for a moment, then a hesitant female voice: “Hi, Jim. I

was in town, so I thought I’d look you up.”

“Who is this?”

“Kayla.” A beat. “Kayla Huron.”

The name didn’t mean anything. “Yes?”

Her tone was suddenly frosty. “Sorry. I thought you might be happy

to hear from me.”

It’s hard to talk and google on your phone at the same time, but

fortunately my laptop was up and running on my living-room desk. I

cradled the phone between my cheek and shoulder and typed her name

into the computer. “Yes,” I said, “of course I’m glad to hear from you…

Kayla. How have you been?”

The rst link was to her Wikipedia entry. I clicked it, and the article

came up with a photo that was surprisingly good by Wikipedia

standards, showing a pretty white woman in her mid thirties. “Well,” said Kayla, “it’s been a lot of years, Jim. Where to start?

I

mean, I’m ne, but…”

“Yeah,” I said, still stalling. “A lot of years.” The rst line of the entry

said she “explores consciousness at the Canadian Light Source”—wh ich

sounded like some aky new-age institution. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m here for a symposium at UW.” The

University of Winnipeg was the other university in town. “And, well, I

saw your name in the paper today, and gured, what the heck, I’d see if

you might like to have coffee, you know, to catch up…”

I scrolled down the Wikipedia entry: “…earned her MS (2005) and

PhD (2010) from the University of Arizona following undergraduate

work at the University of Manitoba (1999–2003)…”

“Yes!” I said, much too loudly. We’d been contemporaries here at U

of M—including during my lost six months. “Absolutely!”

“Okay. When would be good for you?”

I wanted to say, “Right now!” But instead I simply offered, “My

afternoon is open.”

“About one?

Suggest a place; I’ve got a rental car.”

I did, we said goodbye, and I put the phone down on my wooden

desk, my hand shaking. I took a deep breath. I had several hours to kill before I needed to

head out to meet Kayla, and, well, if my memory loss was indeed

associated with the stabbing, then starting by researching that event

seemed the logical rst step. There were normally numerous hoops to jump through to access

patient medical records—even your own—but fortunately I knew one of

the staff psychologists at the hospital I’d been treated at in Calgary; she

and I had served together on the board of the Canadian Psychological

Association. It was noon in Winnipeg, but that was only 11:00 A. M. in

Calgary, so it seemed like a good time to try my call. I tapped my way

through the menu tree to get the person I wanted. “Cassan dra Cheung,”

said the lush voice in my ear. “Sandy, it’s Jim Marchuk.”

Genuine warmth: “Jim!

What can I do for you?”

“I’m hoping you can cut through some red tape. I need a copy of my

own medical records.”

“Your own?

Yeah, sure, I guess that’s no problem. You were treated

here?”

“Yeah. I came in on New Year’s Eve 2000—we ll, after midnight, so it

was actually January rst, 2001.”

“That’s a long time ago,” she said, and I could hear her typing away. “Nineteen years.”

“Hmmm. You sure about that date?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Were you maybe an outpatient?

Not all records from that far back

are in our central system.”

“No, no. It was emergency surgery.”

“My God, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you brought in via ambulance?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not nding anything. Do you remember the name of the

surgeon?”

“Butcher,” I said. “Ha,” replied Sandy. “That’s funny.”

“That’s what I thought!”

“But there’s no Dr. Butcher in the system. Are you sure it was this

hospital?

Could it have been Foothills instead?”

I wasn’t sure of much at this point. “I…I guess. Um, can you try my

last name with a typo?

People sometimes put a C in before the K: M-A-

R-C-H-U-C-K.”

“Ah!

Okay—yup, here it is, but…huh.”

“What?”

“Well, the date wasn’t January rst—no one gets to have elective

surgery on New Year’s Day: there’s too much likelihood that the

operating rooms will be needed for emergencies, and all the surgeons

who can be are off skiing.”

“Elective surgery?”

“That’s right. On Monday, February nineteenth, 2001, you had an

in ltrating ductal carcinoma removed.”

“A what?”

“It’s a breast cancer.”

“I’m a man.”

“Men can get breast cancer, too. It’s not that common, because you

guys have so little breast tissue, but it happens. Says here they cut it out

under a local anesthetic.”

“No, no; that’s got to be somebody else—somebody with a similar

name. Besides, I was a student at the University of Manitoba then; I

wouldn’t have been in Calgary.”

“Well, what do you think you were here for in January?”

“I was attacked with a knife.”

“Jesus, really?

What’d you do back then?

Tell someone you’d voted

Liberal?”

“Something like that.”

“There’s no record of your being treated here for anything of that

nature.”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Um, okay. Thanks, Sandy.”

“Jim, what’s this—”

“I gotta go. Talk to you later.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I sagged back into my chair, my breath coming in short, rapid gasps. 7

“All right,” I said, looking out at the sea of faces. “Is morality

subjective or objective?

Anyone?”

“Subjective,” called out Boris, without bothering to raise his

hand rst. “Why do you say that?”

“Because it varies from person to person.”

“And,” called out Nina, “from culture to culture.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Some people are pro-choice; others are

pro-life. Some believe you should always lend a helping hand;

others think you make people weak by keeping them from having

to struggle for themselves. Right?”

Nods. “But Sam Harris—who knows who he is?”

“A famous atheist,” said Kyle. “Yes, true; his best-known book is The End of Faith. But he

also wrote one called The Moral Landscape, in which he argues

that if you de ne moral acts as those that promote the ourishing

of conscious beings, then there is such a thing as objective

morality. Consider this: imagine a world in which every single

person is suffering as much as possible; everyone is in as much

physical and emotional pain as the human body and mind are

capable of experiencing—something like being in hell or, I dunno,

Pittsburgh.”

Laughter. “Now, says Harris, what if we could dial it down a notch?

What if we could take the physical pain from a ten out of ten to a

nine out of ten, even for one individual?

Wouldn’t that be

objectively the right thing to do?

Is there any conceivable

counterargument, any possible moral view, in which not

decreasing the pain would be the right thing to do?

Yes, yes, we

can contrive scenarios in which it’s a zero-sum game—I turn

down your pain, but somebody else’s pain therefore has to go up. But that’s not the situation Harris proposed. He said every person

is suffering the maximum amount possible; there’s no way

lessening one person’s pain could increase somebody else’s. So,

given those circumstances, isn’t turning down even one person’s

pain clearly objectively the moral thing to do?

And turning down

two people’s pain would be even better, right?

And if you could

turn down everyone’s pain, even a little bit, that would be a moral

imperative, no?”

Boris was unconvinced. “Yeah, but who’s to say what the

maximum suffering a human can endure is?”

“Have you seen The Phantom Menace?”

Some of the students laughed again, but Boris just frowned. “If it can be a little less, it can be a little more.”

“Not if experiencing pain involves neurons,” I replied. “If

every pain-registering neuron is ring simultaneously, you’re

maxed out. A human brain is a nite object.”

“Some more nite than others,” said Nina, looking pointedly

at Boris. “Anyway,” I said, “we’ll talk more about moral relativism later. What I really want to get at today is utilitarianism—and

utilitarianism is striving for the exact opposite of Sam Harris’s

thought-experiment hell. Utilitarianism is a terrible name. It

sounds so cold and calculating. But really, it’s a warm, even

loving, philosophy. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were its

rst major proponents, and they said, simply, that all action

should be geared toward achieving the greatest happiness for the

Wgreatest number of people. The happier people are, the better. The

more people who are happy, the better.”

I looked at Boris, who was frowning again. “Comrade,” I said,

“you look unhappy.”

Nina and a few others laughed. “It just all seems so self-serving,” Boris said. “Ah, but it isn’t,” I replied. “Bentham and Mill are both clear

on that point. Under utilitarianism, you are to be neutral when

weighing your own happiness against somebody else’s. True, it’s

not a self-sacri cing philosophy—you don’t have to give up your

own happiness for the sake of another person’s. But if doing

something will cause your happiness to be diminished a little and

someone else’s happiness to be increased a lot, there’s no question:

you have to do it. You can’t put your needs in front of those of

other people.”

“Let me know how that works out for you,” Boris said. HEN I’d rst gone away to university, I’d left lots of stuff at my

parents’ house in Calgary; Heather had done the same. But when

our dad died, Calgary housing prices had been going through the roof,

and Mom wished to downsize. I’d gone back and disposed of things I

didn’t want and moved the things I did to Winnipeg in a U-Haul. And, as

with most people’s collections of junk they thought was worth saving, I

hadn’t looked at it since although I periodically added more boxes to the

midden—doing my part to give future archeology grad students

something to work on. I drove to the storage unit I rented and began to rummage around. Most of my crap was in identical corrugated-cardboard boxes I’d bought

from a moving-supply company, but some of it was in bankers’ boxes,

and some old clothing—doubtless out of style although I’d be the last

person to be able to actually con rm that—was in bright-orange garbage

bags. I’d lived in Winnipeg during my dark time, but I gured that there

should have been get-well cards from when I’d been in hospital in

Calgary, and copies of police reports related to the stabbing. But I

couldn’t nd anything like that. The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of

books. I shifted several boxes around, getting more of an upper-body

workout than I was used to. Eventually, I came across one labeled

“Textbks 2000-01” in black Magi c Marker. I placed it on the storage

unit’s oor and used a box cutter to slit open the strapping tape. Inside were the usual you-could-kill-a-man-with-them texts with titles

such as Social Psychology, Statistics for the Humanities, and Freud and

Jung in Perspective, but there were also a few science- ction paperbacks. Ah, that half-year English elective I’d taken. There were copies of

Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds and Nineteen Eighty-Four,

which were titles I recognized, at least, although didn’t recall having

read, and others I didn’t know at all. I picked up one with a beautiful

cover painting of a steamboat in a green lagoon: Darwinia by Robert

Charles Wilson. As had been my habit in those pre-ebook days, I’d used

the sales receipt as a bookmark. I opened the novel to the indicated page,

to see if the prose sparked any memories, but—

The receipt was from the McNally Robinson at Polo Park. That

branch didn’t exist anymore, but the date—

The date was 31-12-00, one of the few in that format that could be

unambiguously parsed: thirty-one had to be a day, and double-zero could

only be a year, which meant this book had been purchased New Year’s

Eve 2000.

Here. In Winnipeg. And the time stamp was 17:43, which must have been just before

closing on a holiday evening; even the nerdiest of nerds didn’t ring in the

new year in a bookstore. Of course, someone else might have picked up the novel for me, but

—

But, no, the credit-card number was printed on the bottom of the

receipt, with Xs substituting for all but the nal four digits, and those I

recognized; I’d had that number for many years. I must have gone in to

purchase the book, planning to get a jump on my class reading over the

remaining week of the Christmas break. Yes, technically, one could be in Winnipeg at 5:43 P. M. and still y to

Calgary in time to shout “Happy New Year!” six hours later—or,

actually, seven, if you take into account the time-zone change. But there’s

no way I would have gone home for New Year’s Eve but not Christmas,

even if my parents and sister were away. What the hell was going on?

I continued to rummage around and found a Dilbert wall calendar

from 2000.

I’d hoped there’d be one for 2001, as well, but there wasn’t. I

ipped to the last page, the pointy-haired boss staring out at me, and

looked at the days between Christmas—which had been on a Monday

that year—and New Year’s Eve. There were four appointments in my

handwriting spread across those six days. On Boxing Day, I’d noted

“Miles 6ish.” I hadn’t thought about Miles Olsen for years; he’d been in

one of my classes, and we used to get together occasionally for a beer. On

the thirtieth I’d written, “Pay dorm fees.” And on the twenty-ninth and

thirty- rst, I’d written simply “Warkentin.” There were no classes then,

so these must have been related to that research project I’d volunteered

for. I scanned further up the calendar; Warkentin’s name was written in

three more times in the week before Christmas. The ink was black for the

earlier appointments, blue for the later ones. I hadn’t added them all at

the same time, which meant the later appointments had been made after

the earlier ones; he’d asked me back for some reason—and on New

Year’s Eve, for God’s sake…

I’d told Menno yesterday that I’d been in Calgary on New Year’s Eve

2000.

Sure, it’s possible he’d forgotten that I was with him on that long-

ago date, but he hadn’t mentioned a thing. No, no, that’s not quite right. He’d faced me, his blind eyes behind

dark lenses, and he’d said, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” I’d thought that was

odd; he was a psychologist, after all—he should have been fascinated by

the challenge of recovering my missing memories. I’d used Gmail since the days when you needed an invitation to get an

account, but those archives only went back to 2004.

I’d had a student

address here at U of M in 2001, and so I’d called up the IT department

on the off chance that they kept email archives going back that far; they

didn’t. But I used to have a habit of printing out emails I wanted to keep

—and, to my delight, I found a le folder containing a bunch of them in

the same box that had yielded the calendar: a sheaf about half an inch

thick of dot-matrix printouts, one email per sheet, conveniently stacked

in send-date order. I worked my way through them: class assignments, a

few from my sister, but nothing that stirred any memories. I reached the end of February and ipped the page; the next email

was from March second, and—my goodness!—it was from Kayla Huron

to me. The subject line was “Re: Friday,” but whatever my original

message had been was lost to history; there were no quoted lines at the

bottom of what she had written, which was, “Yeah, me, too. And I’d love

to!

You like Crash Test Dummies?

They’re playing over at UW next

week. Can you pick up tickets?” That was all the email said, except for

the number 2.9 at the bottom. I kept reading messages; there were twenty or so from Kayla mixed in

with other things. The other things were all prosaic—I’d clearly only

printed out emails that had to-do items for me mentioned in them—and,

indeed, the Kayla ones all had action items, too, but they also had

something else: irtation, giving way after a couple of weeks to actual

smut. Apparently, we’d been way more than just classmates. And all her messages to me ended with the same number: 2.9.

Except

the last one, that is—and the action item was clear: “Pick up your stuff,

asshole.”

Near as I could gure, Kayla and I had been hot-and-heavy for three-

and-a-half months, until, apparently, it had all blown up. And, in about

half an hour, I’d see her for the rst time in nineteen years. I8

drove along Pembina Highway, heading for my rendezvous with Kayla

Huron, once again listening to the CBC. As I pulled into Grant Park

mall, the 1:00 P. M. newscast began:

“Big news from Parliament Hill: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s

Liberal Party has just fallen as his controversial carbon-tax budget

narrowly failed to pass a parliamentary vote. It’s a situation not unlike

the one that brie y ousted his father, Pierre Trudeau, as prime minister in

1974.

Canadians will go to the polls next month to choose our next

national leader…”

I walked across the asphalt, entered Pony Corral, and presented

myself to the pretty young woman standing at the lectern. I don’t know

why restaurants have lecterns; they made me want to teach. “Just one today?” she said. I hated it when they said, “Just one?” in that sympathetic tone. Sorry

you’re a loser, sir. But I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Actually, I’m meeting someone. Do you mind if I have a look?”

She gestured at the dining room, and I went in, looking around—but

Kayla spotted me rst. “Jim!”

I saw an attractive redhead in a booth. She’d been a brunette in the

Wikipedia photo, but the ginger color suited her. As I approached, she

rose. Normally, if I’d been greeting an old friend from that long ago, I’d

have gone in for a hug or a peck on the cheek, but Kayla appeared…

leery, perhaps, and so I simply sat down opposite her. Her expression changed—via a conscious effort, it seemed—and I

realized she was evaluating me in that way you do when you run into

someone you haven’t seen for a long time: looking for gray hairs,

receding hairlines, paunches, wrinkles. On the hair checklist, both boxes

were empty for me, and being vegan kept me trim, but, damn it, I

preferred to call them “laugh lines.” At least I wasn’t doing the same

thing; I had no old memories to compare the present her to—and I liked

what I saw just ne. Still, because it seemed the appropriate thing, I said, “You haven’t

changed a bit.”

She smiled, but, again, it was a little wan, a tad reserved. “Nor have

you.” She already had a glass of white wine. “So,” she added, “what’s

new?”

I liked to respond to that question with, “New York, New Jersey,

New Delhi,” but I didn’t know this woman, damn it, I didn’t know her at

all; I couldn’t be sure it would get a laugh. And yet at one time she had

liked me, and so just being myself seemed the way to go. I trotted out the

“New” list, and it did earn me a smile—and, at least for a second, the

hesitancy was gone. “Same sense of humor,” she said. “You remember Professor Jenkins?

What was that joke you told that got you kicked out of class?”

I was rescued by a waitress in a tight black top, cleavage showing. “Something to drink, sir?”

“What have you got on tap?”

She rattled off a list. I chose a dark craft beer, then turned back to

Kayla. Unfortunately, though, she asked her question again. “Do you

remember?

That joke?

Something about an orangutan?”

Christ, I don’t think I’ve ever heard an orangutan joke in my entire

life—well, except for The Simpsons singing “Help Me, Dr. Zaius” to the

tune of “Rock Me Amadeus.”

“I don’t recall,” I said. She shrugged a little. “Well, it was a long time ago. So, what’s up with

you?

Are you married?”

“I was, brie y. We divorced a couple of years ago. You?”

“Also divorced. I live with my daughter. She’s six.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ryan.”

I nodded. One of the many boy’s names that had become girl’s names

in my lifetime. I’m waiting for one of my friends to name their daughter

Buster or Dirk. The waitress returned with my beer. I thanked her and took a sip. Kayla and I had had a ght—a big one that caused her to walk out of my

life for two decades—but one that I didn’t remember at all. Mayb e she’d

been justi ably angry with me, or maybe she had wronged me horribly,

but in a way that had never quite been so true before, it really was no

skin off my nose. “Kayla,” I said, “about what happened, you know, all

those years ago. I just want to say I’m sorry.”

She looked at me for a few moments, as if seeking something in my

expression. Then she tilted her head slightly. “Thanks, Jim.”

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Kayla, I need your help.”

“With what?”

“I, ah, I had an accident many years ago, about two months before

we started dating. I don’t know if I ever told you…?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Well, I almost died. And apparently that did something to my

memory. I—I’m sorry, I truly am, but until today, until you called, I had

no memory of you.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then why’d you want to see me again?

You sounded so eager on the

phone.”

“I am. I lost memories of six months—January to June 2001—and I

want to get them back. I’m hoping you can ll in some of the gaps. Earlier today, I read some of our old emails, and—”

She looked aghast. “You kept those?”

“Printouts of a few, yeah.”

She took a sip of wine, then set the glass down carefully, as if afraid

she might knock it over. “That explains why I haven’t heard from you in

all the years since.”

“I’m sorry.”

A waitress glided by. Kayla tracked her movement, perhaps so she

wouldn’t have to look at me. When the waitress had disappeared from

view, Kayla dropped her gaze to the tablecloth. “I’ve googled you from

time to time,” she said “You’ve done well.”

“Thanks.” Silence for a moment. “Okay,” I said, “one thing’s been

bugging me. A lot of those emails ended with the number two-point-nine. What the heck does that mean?”

A spontaneous little smile—fond remembrance, perhaps?

“You really

have lost your memory, haven’t you?” She reached into her purse and

took out a retractable ballpoint pen. She then pulled a paper napkin

toward her. “You know how you make a love heart online?

The

emoticon?” She drew it: <3

“Yes?”

“It’s the less-than sign followed by the number three, see?

And what’s

less than three?

Two-point-nine. So it’s a cute way of saying the same

thing.”

“Ha!

That’s really clever.”

She smiled again, and this time the warmth was unmistakable. “That’s exactly what you said all those years ago when I rst used it.”

“So, forgive me, but…we were…we were in love?”

Her eyes tracked across the room again even though there wasn’t

anyone to follow. “Oh, who knows?

I thought we were, back then, but,

well, we were just kids.”

I took another sip of my beer. “Yeah.”

The server came to take our orders—wh ich was a case of opportune

knockers, as it helped break the awkward moment. “What’ll it be?” she

asked. “Steak sandwich,” said Kayla. “Rare. With the Caesar, please.”

“And for you?”

“The vegan wrap,” I said. “Very good,” she said, and sashayed away. Kayla’s eyebrows arched up. “The vegan wrap?

You used to love a

good steak.”

She was right, but that had been before I’d read Peter Singer. The

best-known modern utilitarian, Singer was the author of, among others,

Animal Liberation, which had kick-started the whole animal-rights

movement. Given humans can be perfectly healthy eating only plants, the

minor increase in our happiness that we might get from the taste of

chicken or beef in no way offsets the pain and suffering of animals raised

or slaughtered in cruel conditions. “I’ve changed,” I said affably. She narrowed her eyes, as if that were still somehow an open

question. “You don’t mind that I’m having steak?”

“I’m from Calgary. If I couldn’t stand being around people eating

beef, I’d never be able to go home again.”

“Ha.” She took another sip of her wine. We chatted for the next half hour, during which our meals came, and,

slowly but surely, she seemed to get comfortable with me, in part due, I

liked to think, to my charm, and in part perhaps to a second glass of

wine. She mentioned our dates from all those years ago that stood out in

her mind, including a road trip one weekend down to Fargo; attending

Keycon, Winnipeg’s annual science- ction convention; seeing the Blue

Bombers play; hanging out at Aqua Books and Pop Soda’s—both sadly

now defunct—and going to a traditional Cree sweat-lodge ceremony. I’d

hoped something would ring a bell, but I couldn’t remember any of

them. Kayla nally fell silent; it’s doubtless no fun reminiscing with

someone whose only responses are, “Really?” and “We did?” and “Wow,

that sounds like it must have been fun.” To ll the void, I delicately

broached another topic. “So, um, you’re a New Ager?”

She practically did a spit-take with her wine. “What?”

“Well, I only glanced at your Wikipedia entry, but it said you were

with something called the Canadian Enlightenment Centre.”

She had a wonderfully warm laugh. “You mean the Canadian Light

Source. It’s a synchrotron, Canada’s largest particle accelerator; just

under three gigaelectronvolts. It’s on the grounds of the University of

Saskatchewan.”

“Oh!

But it said you ‘explore consciousness.’”

“I do. Psych was your major, but just an elective for me; I was doing

physics. But Warkentin’s course really got me interested in the mind,

which is how I ended up working on the quantum mechanics of

consciousness. After graduating from U of M, I headed off to the

University of Arizona to study under Stuart Hameroff.”

“Who is?”

“An anesthesiologist. He was fascinated by exactly what he was

doing when he deprived people of consciousness. Roger Penrose, a

physicist who sometimes collaborates with Stephen Hawking, wrote a

book that said consciousness had to be quantum mechanical; it couldn’t

be just classical physics because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Stuart read it and got in touch with him, oh, almost twenty- ve years ago

now. That’s why I’m at the Light Source; there’s a synchrotron specialist

I’m working with there who’s got a technique for detecting superposition

without promoting decoherence.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, one must.”

She smiled warmly. “‘Superposition’ is that uniquely quantum

condition in which something is in two states at once: for instance, not

either here or there, but simultaneously both here and there. We call it

‘decoherence’ when superposition collapses. Anyway, my work builds on

what Stuart brought to Penrose. Stuart said, look, an inhaled anesthetic,

like halothane, affects the microtubules—the cellular scaffolding—in

neurons. There are two-lobed pockets in the microtubules, and each

pocket houses a free electron. When you’re awake, those electrons are in

superposition, simultaneously existing in both the top and the bottom

lobe. When the anesthetic is introduced, the electrons lose coherence,

collapsing into being in just one or the other lobe—and when that

happens, the patient ceases to be conscious.”

I frowned, trying to sort this out. “So halothane is used as an inhalant

to induce anesthesia?”

Kayla nodded. “Right.”

“And anesthesia is a state in which only classical physics occurs in the

brain?”

“When it puts you out cold, yes.”

“So, halothane is a classical gas.”

“Yes?”

“It has its own theme song.”

“What are you talking about?”

“‘Classical Gas.’ It’s that famous instrumental by Maso n Williams.” I

made ba-ba-ba-bump-ba-ba trombone sounds. “You are a very strange man,” Kayla said. She was not the rst to have observed that; still, I guess I looked

crestfallen because she reached over and patted the back of my hand. “Which is precisely why I fell for you all those years ago.”

I smiled, and she went on: “Anyway, my work is on consciousness as

a product of quantum superposition of electrons in neuronal

microtubules. And, well…that’s kind of why I looked you up.”

“I, um, don’t quite see the connection.”

“I saw the news coverage about your being an expert witness.”

I looked away. “Oh.”

“You know, you did know about your grandfather. I remember when

the news broke. You were morti ed.”

“Yeah, so my sister said. But I honestly don’t recall it. I—it’s so

strange, not remembering that period.”

“I’m sure.”

“And that’s why you wanted to see me?

Because of my grandfather?”

“No, no, no. I mean, yeah, that’s fascinating, but it was your

technique that caught my eye—the microsaccades thing.”

“Caught your eye. Microsaccades.”

“What?

Oh.”

“I’m here all week.”

She shook her head in what I took to be fond exasperation, then said,

“No, it was the correlation with the Hare Checklist that interested me. I’ve been following your work in that area.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Because, just like your microsaccades test, I’ve found a

quantum-superposition state that also precisely corresponds to

psychopathy. If you’re a high scorer on the Hare Checklist, you’ll have

this correlation, too.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, cripes, the time!

I gotta go. They’re expecting me back at three.”

And that should have been that, but the words just popped out of my

mouth. “Well, what about dinner?”

Her eyebrows ascended, but then, after considering it for a long

moment, she said, “Sure. Sure, why not?”

Kayla and I agreed to meet for dinner at 8:00 P. M., which gave me almost

ve hours to kill—and time to do some more reality-checking. She and I

hadn’t started dating until March of 2001, so she couldn’t help me with

what had gone down the preceding New Year’s Eve, but perhaps

someone else could. I suppose the information I wanted was also online, but nothing beat

the human touch. And so after returning to my of ce in the Duff Roblin

Building and making a phone call to be sure she’d be in, I wandered

along Dysart Road to the of ce of Sally Mahaffey, who taught

meteorology in the awkwardly named Faculty of Environment, Earth,

and Resources. That could be a miserable hike in winter, but now, in

May, it was pleasant as long as you avoided all the droppings from the

Canada geese wandering about. The interior of the Wallace Building was done in Early Modern

Tinkertoy, with red, green, and yellow tubes and pipes everywhere, and

its washrooms were bizarre standalone modules like indoor outhouses. Sally’s of ce was off a corridor painted oor to ceiling, doors included, in

bright yellow; going down it, I felt like I was inside a French’s mustard

squeeze bottle. Although there were lots of faculty members I’d never met, I’d run

into Sally a few times in her role as treasurer of the Faculty Association. She was sixty-something, with hair I thought of as appropriately

thundercloud gray. “Hey,” I said, entering. “Thanks for making time for me.”

Her of ce had wall-mounted metal shelving she used for a display of

vintage weather-forecasting equipment; I was pleased with myself for

knowing that the propeller with cups was an anemometer. “My

pleasure,” Sally said as she got up from her chair—which didn’t do much

to increase her height. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for some old weather data.”

“How old?”

“Two thousand and one.”

She sounded relieved. “I had a history student come here last week,

wanting to see the weather report for a key battle in the War of 1812.

I

had to explain to the poor thing that Environment Canada’s records

don’t go back quite that far.” She sat down in front of her computer and

proceeded to type rapidly, using two knobby ngers. “Location?”

“Calgary.”

“Airport or downtown?”

“Downtown, I suppose.”

“What date?”

“January rst, early in the morning. Like, 2:00 A. M.”

She worked away for a minute. Above her desk was a political

cartoon showing a trio of baf ed old men in baggy golf shorts on an

island only a few feet across surrounded by nothing but water. The

caption: “Climate-change deniers retire to Florida.”

“Got it,” she said, rolling her chair aside to let me have a look. There was so much data on the screen—meteorologists apparently

care about all sorts of measurements regular folk don’t—that it took me

a moment to nd my way around. But at last I spotted it: Falling snow. “That can’t be right,” I said, pointing. “Are you sure you’ve got the

correct date?”

She indicated where it was listed; the time was correct, too. “Can you

show me the hour before, and the hour after, please?”

She nodded and did so. For 1:00 A. M., the readout was also “Falling

snow.” For 3:00 A. M., it had changed to “Heavy snowfall.”

“But the sky was crystal clear,” I said. “I remember that.”

“I’ve seen a lot of wondrous weather in my day,” Sally said gently. “Tornadoes, sun dogs, hail the size of grapefruit. But I’ve never seen

snow come down from a cloudless sky. Are you sure you’ve got the right

day?”

“Yes.”

“And the right year?

It took me to February to stop writing 2019 on

things.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure about the date.” I recalled the stars so vividly

that night, Orion low in the southwest. I knew my way around the night

sky like the proverbial back of my hand; Orion is absolutely visible in

Calgary at that time of night in the winter months. Or, at least he is when

the sky is clear. I took hold of the edge of Sally’s desk for support. M9

TWO DECADES AGO

ENNO Warkentin was friends with Dominic Adler, a

transplanted Torontonian who held the university’s Bev Geddes

Chair in Audiology. They played racquetball together once a week; there

was no doubt Dominic was the better player. “Balance, my boy!” he’d

exclaim whenever he got in a return that astonished Menno. “And

balance is all in the inner ear!”

Menno had recently bought a carbon- ber racquet in the vain hope

that better equipment would make up for his lack of coordination. He

served, and wiry Dominic swatted the ball back. Predictably, Menno

missed. As he went to retrieve the ball, he said, “I walked by your lab

earlier. Saw a guy delivering a skid full of new computing equipment.”

He tossed the ball vaguely in Dominic’s direction. Dominic served, and Menno managed to return it three times before

he missed. When Menno went to get the ball again, Dominic said, “Yeah,

we got a major new research grant.”

“From who?”

Dominic put down his racquet and motioned Menno over. “The

DoD.”

Menno might not win at sports, but he was a demon at trivia. “We

call it the DND here in Canada. Department of National Defense.”

“Yeah, we do,” said Dominic. “But I’m not talking about the

Canadian one. I’m talking about the American one: the Pentagon.”

“Ka-ching,” said Menno. Dominic smiled. “Wasn’t he treasurer during the Ming Dynasty?”

“Ha.”

“What do the Americans want?”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” said Dominic. “But

they’ll never get that, so apparently they’ll settle for a battle eld headset

that lets soldiers hear over top of explosions and mortar re. My

department is going to try to develop one for them.”

“Can’t you do what those newfangled noise-canceling headphones

do?”

“Sure, yeah,” said Dominic. “That’s the easy part. The hard part is the

microphone. The last thing you want is the soldier shouting to be heard

above the explosions. Hostiles might overhear.”

“‘Hostiles,’” said Menno, amused. “You pick up the lingo.” Dominic tossed the ball into the air and

swatted it toward the wall, which was covered with skid marks from

previous impacts. “So how’s the project going?” asked Menno after he’d batted the ball

back. Dominic didn’t even try to return; he just let the ball zip past him. “It’s not. It’s damn near impossible to pick up a whisper when there are

bombs going off all around you.”

Menno glanced up at the analog wall clock, behind a protective

mesh. Their time was almost up. “Oh, that’s the wrong way to go about

it.”

Dominic retrieved the ball and started toward the door in the side

wall. “What do you mean?”

“Trying to pick up the sound is the problem. Don’t do that.”

“We have to hear what they’re saying.”

“No, you don’t,” said Menno. “Instead, pick up the phonemes as

they’re being coded mentally. Grab those with a targeted scanner. The

speaker doesn’t have to say anything aloud that way—n othing to

overhear. He just mouths the words. Whether he actually speaks them or

not makes no difference to the brain’s staging area; they have to be

queued up regardless. Grab them from there, then use a voice synthesizer

at the receiving end to reconstruct what would have been said out loud.”

Dom’s eyebrows climbed toward his widow’s peak. “And that would

work?”

Menno smiled. “Oh, who knows?

Actually, it’s only supposition that

there even is such a staging area. But if I tell you a phone number and

you try to remember it until you can jot it down, you’ll rehearse it over

and over in your head, right?

There’s a buffer somewhere that holds the

data you’re repeating. Scan that buffer and pick up sounds that aren’t

being said out loud.” Menno smiled. “At least you’ll get a good paper out

of it.”

“Except I can’t publish. All the work is under an NDA.”

“Huh. How big is your grant?” asked Menno. “Two hundred and fty thousand—US. Wanna collaborate?”

Menno was more used to grants from Canada’s Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council, which tended to be in the low ve gures,

if not four. But the Department of Defense!

Menno was a Mennonite, a

paci st. The idea of working for the military was detestable, and if other

members of his church found out, well, there would be devastating

consequences. But this wasn’t going to be published, and, heck, it wasn’t

weapons research; really, it wasn’t. It was just an intriguing physiological

investigation—with a giant research budget. “Okay,” said Menno, at last. “I’m in.”

“I don’t get it,” said Dominic, months later. “It worked ne on our rst

two test subjects. Why isn’t it working with this guy?”

Fine was overstating the case, Menno thought. They could indeed

now pick up unspoken phonemes from the brain, but they were still

having a lot of dif culty distinguishing many of them. Trying to tell a tuh

from a duh was proving impossible, although Menno suspected they

could write software to gure out which it should be based on the

preceding and following phonemes. But telling one phoneme from

another was predicated on rst actually detecting the phonemes—and

that had turned into a nightmare with this student volunteer from

Menno’s second-year developmental-psych class. Dominic and Menno were on the opposite side of a glass wall from

the subject, a doughy-looking Ukrainian kid named Jim Marchuk. Menno pressed the intercom button. “Jim, try again. What was that

phrase you were thinking?

Say it out loud for us.”

“‘Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.’”

“Right, okay. Now, again—but subvocalize, okay?

Over and over.”

The headset, Menno knew, was large and uncomfortable, and much

too unwieldy for battle. It consisted of a modi ed football helmet with a

dozen electronics packs, each the size of a deck of cards, attached to it,

and a thick bundle of cabling heading off to more equipment on a table

beside the chair Jim was sitting on. But if they could get it working at all

with this prototype, slimming the device down would be a task for the

DoD engineers. Menno and Dominic stared at the oscilloscope display, which was

showing the reconstruction of the signal being transmitted by the

headset. The trace was thick, running almost the height of the scope; it

looked more like white noise than anything meaningful. Dom had taped printouts from the previous two subjects on the wall

above the scope. They each showed a single, distinct line spiking and

falling. Underneath, he’d written in red marker the phonemes the

patterns represented. Menno shook his head. “I can’t even tell when he’s nishing one

rendition and starting another.”

Dominic reached for the intercom button. “Jim, thanks. Just be quiet

for a minute, would you?

Don’t say anything and don’t subvocalize. Just

sit there, please.”

Jim nodded, and Dominic and Menno turned back to the

oscilloscope, which was just as active as before. “Where do you suppose all that noise is coming from?” Dominic

asked. “I don’t know. You’re certain the equipment isn’t overheating?”

Dominic pointed at a digital readout. “It’s ne.”

“Okay, well, maybe this boy is a freak. Let’s test a few other people.”

Menno was wearing his heavy winter coat; Dom had on a bright blue ski

jacket with a lift ticket attached. It was 3:00 P. M. on a crisp afternoon,

and the sun was already well on its way down to the horizon. They were

walking along the Memorial Avenue of Elms, a road lined on both sides

with trees, leading from the Fort Garry campus to Pembina Highway. Menno liked trees; he hated war. As a psychologist, he understood that

this particular part of the university was a physical instantiation of the

cognitive dissonance he felt working on a DoD project. The Avenue had

been dedicated in 1922 to the men from the Manitoba Agricultural

College who had died in the First World War; two and a half years ago,

in June 1998, the dedication had been extended to include many who

had died during World War II and the Korean War, as well. “The Pentagon isn’t going to be happy with a microphone that can

only be used by half their soldiers,” said Dominic, the words coming out

in clouds of condensation. “For whatever reason, it just doesn’t work

with some people; why they have all that noise in their auditory cortices

is beyond me. I mean, if they were reporting tinnitus, it’d make sense. Or

maybe if they’d all listened to super-loud rock music, or something like

that. But it seems completely random.”

Menno thought about that as they walked past the block of stone

with the dedication plaques. “No,” he said at last. “Not quite random. You’re right that the majority of our sample group doesn’t have the

background noise, but if you look at the test subjects who came from my

class—Jim, Tatiana, the others—most of them do have the noise, and…”

“Yes?”

Menno continued along, the packed-down snow squeaking

underfoot. “Background noise…” he said, slowly pursuing the idea as if

it were a rabbit that would ee if startled. “In the auditory cortex…” His

heart was pounding. “Preferentially present in those who study

psychology.”

“Well, I always said psych students were a little weird.”

“It’s not just that,” Menno replied. “Psych attracts a certain kind of

student: kids trying to make sense of themselves. Cheaper than therapy,

you know?”

A single puff of chilled air: “So?”

“So, they’re obviously chewing things over, ruminating, wondering.”

He felt his eyebrows colliding with the wool of his cap, and he lowered

his voice, as if speaking softly would make the idea sound less crazy. “The background stuff. It isn’t noise.” He shook his head. “It’s—my God!

It’s inner monologue—stream of consciousness!

It’s the constant

background of a normal life, all the stuff you’re thinking inside: I wonder

what’s for lunch. Jeez, is it Thursday already?

Gotta remember to stop by

the store on the way home. Those thoughts—those articulated thoughts

—are made of phonemes, too. They’re never spoken, they’re never even

subvocalized or mouthed. But they’re words all the same, made up of

phonemes. And so the question isn’t—”

“The question isn’t,” said Dominic, coming to a dead halt beneath

skeletal branches, “why some people do have background noise in their

auditory cortices. The question is why most people do not.”

10

PRESENT

I entered the lecture hall in the aptly named Tier Building, rows of

rst-year students rising in front of me. Some were looking bright-

eyed and bushy-tailed even now, at stupid o’clock in the morning,

but most still showed signs of struggling to wake up. Tim Hortons

had clearly done dynamite business before class: half the students

had red cardboard cups on their swing-up desktops. I tucked my hands into the pockets of my black denim jeans

and strode to the lectern. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re

going to start with a joke. Stop me if you’ve heard this one

before.” I smiled and waited until I had their full attention—or, at

least, attention from those who usually gave it. “Here goes: why

was the road crossed by the chicken?”

I continued to smile at them, but no one laughed. After a few

seconds, I said, “Tough room,” and that, at least, merited a few

chuckles. “Anybody?

What’s the punch line?”

A white girl with long red hair in the third row started to say,

“To get to the…” But she trailed off, apparently realizing that

although that worked when the setup was the normal “why did

the chicken cross the road,” it didn’t make sense here. I tried again: “Anyone?

Why was the road crossed by the

chicken?”

IAn Asian boy in the fth row folded his arms in front of his

Winnipeg Jets sweatshirt. “There’s no answer to that, Professor

Marchuk.”

“Why not?”

The boy’s tone conveyed that his word choice was deliberate:

“Well, this ain’t English class”—and that, too, got some chuckles

—“but your joke is in the passive voice. There isn’t anybody

deliberately doing anything, so there’s no one to assign the

motivation of ‘to get to the other side’ to.”

“Exactly!” I said, delighted, as I always was, when a session

got off to a good start. “And you’re right, this isn’t English class;

it’s psychology. So let me introduce you to a core psychological

concept, namely the notion of agency—the subjective awareness

that you are initiating and executing your own actions. And then

we’re going to talk about why, although we all believe that we do

indeed have agency, perhaps we really don’t…”

returned to my condo, grabbed a shower, put on a wine-colored shirt

and black slacks, and drove over to The Forks. Once again, I was

listening to the CBC; The World at Six was on. “—and the stunning news that the leader of the New Democratic

Party has chosen not to seek re-election this time out,” Susan Bonner

said. “We reached political analyst Hayden Trenholm in Ottawa. Mr. Trenholm, what do you make of his announcement?”

A man’s voice with a hint of a Mari time accent: “The NDP were the

front-runners in the 2015 election but stumbled badly under then-leader

Tom Mulcair, and his replacement certainly also failed to excite. But if

they can come up with someone people from across the political

spectrum can get behind, the New Democrats could make some

interesting gains. Of course, they’ve been searching in vain for a person

like that since Jack Layton passed away in 2011…”

I parked my car and headed out into the cool evening air. I’d made

reservations for us at Sydney’s, an upscale place housed in the century-

old Grand Trunk Paci c Railway Stable. Kayla was already seated when

I got there—gotta love that punctuality—an d—wh at a sweetheart!—

she’d already asked the server to bring a vegetarian menu for me. We had

a great table by a semicircular window; it arched up from a horizontal

sill overlooking the con uence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Kayla

was wearing a shimmering blue top and gray pants. After we’d ordered, I said, “So, at lunch you were talking about the

quantum physics of consciousness.”

She took a sip of wine. “That’s right. My research partner is a woman

named Victoria Chen. As I said earlier, she’s developed a system that can

detect quantum superposition in neural tissue.”

“I’m no physicist, but I thought you couldn’t have quantum effects

like that in living things.”

“Oh, it de nitely happens in some biological systems. We’ve known

since 2007 that there’s superposition in chlorophyll, for instance. Photosynthesis has a ninety- ve percent energy-transfer ef ciency rate,

which is better than anything we can engineer. Plants achieve that by

using superposition to simultaneously try all the possible pathways

between their light-collecting molecules and their reaction-center proteins

so that energy is always sent down the most ef cient route; it’s a form of

biological quantum computing. Vic was curious about how plants

manage that at room temperature while we have to chill our quantum

computers to a fraction above absolute zero to get superposition. And,

well, as I mentioned at lunch, I’ve long been interested in the Penrose-

Hameroff model that says quantum superposition in the microtubules of

neuronal tissue is what gives rise to consciousness. So I convinced Vic to

let me try her technique on people, to see if there really is superposition

in human brains.”

“And?”

“And, oh my God, yes, there is. It’s not quite what Hameroff and

Penrose proposed, but they de nitely opened the door for this line of

work.” She sighed wistfully. “I suspect Vic and I will have to share our

eventual Nobel with one of them—they only allow three people on a

Nobel, so Stuart and Roger will have to ght it out between themselves.”

“Ha.”

“Yeah, see, they think consciousness occurs in the moments of

collapse from superposition to classical physics—that each moment of

collapse is a moment of consciousness, forty or so of them per second. It

was an interesting theoretical model when they rst put it forth in the

1990s, but Victoria has shown that superposition in microtubules,

unique among body structures, is maintained inde nitely—indeed,

probably permanently.”

I frowned. “But I thought quantum superposition was fragile. Doesn’t

it fall apart?”

“Not as far as we can tell. Not ever—or at least not as long as the

person is alive.”

“Why not?”

“Vic calls it ‘entanglement inertia,’ and, I’ve got to say that it’s a

revolutionary-enough discovery that it might get her the Nobel on her

own. See, a single electron will decohere rapidly, falling out of

superposition, but, for whatever reason, the countless trillions of

superpositioned electrons in a given brain are locked together in a way

that de es quantum theory, and so probabilistic laws apply. At any

moment, any one of them might wish to decohere back to the classical

state, but, unless a majority simultaneously want to, it doesn’t happen. We’ve got computer simulations that show the tipping point never

comes, at least not normally. Oh, an external force—an anesthetic, for

instance—can cause the superposition to decohere, but without

something like that, the superposition never collapses. It just keeps on

going on.”

I made an impressed face. “Has she published yet?”

Kayla shook her head. “It’s out for peer review at Neuron.”

“Sounds like a great paper.”

“I’ll send you a preprint. But it’s only the rst of several papers; she

and I also have one coming up in Physics of Life Reviews.”

I took a sip of my own wine. “Oh?

What about?”

“Well, Penrose proposed that each tubulin macromolecule has a

single two-lobed hydrophobic pocket with just one free electron. But he

also offhandedly remarked that there might actually be multiple

hydrophobic pockets, each with its own electron. And that’s exactly what

Vic and I have found: there are actually three hydrophobic pockets in

each tubulin macromolecule.”

“Okay.”

“And all the tubulin macromolecules in a given brain are quantally

entangled, meaning collectively they’re all in the same state: the

combination of superpositioned and classical electrons is the same in

every tubulin in the brain of a given individual.”

“Ah.”

“That means that each person is in one of eight possible conditions:

all three pocketed electrons in the classical-physics state; all three in

superposition; or six possible combinations of one or two electrons in the

classical state and the remaining ones in superposition.”

“Very cool.”

“Thanks. Now, we don’t think it matters which electrons are in

superposition and which aren’t; electrons, like all subatomic particles, are

fungible. So that means there are really only four states not eight: no

electrons in superposition, any one of the three in superposition, any two

in superposition, and all three in superposition. In other words, there’s

the classical-physics state, plus three states with quantum superposition:

Q1, Q2, and Q3.”

“Got it.”

“And it’s the Q2 state that caused me to look you up; that’s where my

research dovetails with yours. I ran a couple of hundred volunteers

through Victoria’s beamline—the test doesn’t take long—an d found that

everybody’s got at least one electron in superposition. Nobody was in the

classical-physics state; everyone was either Q1, Q2, or Q3.

And the three

cohorts are each successively smaller, a 4:2:1 ratio, each group half the

size of the one before it. In round numbers, sixty percent of our test

subjects had only one electron in superposition; thirty percent—half as

many—had any two in superposition; and about fteen percent had all

three in superposition.”

“I suppose it’s like juggling,” I offered. “Easy to keep one ball in the

air, harder with two, and a bitch with three.”

“Yeah, that’s our thinking, too. Assuming those ratios hold true for

the entire human race, if you think of Earth’s population as seven billion

people—it’s really more like 7.7, but for convenience’s sake let’s assume

abstinence-only sex education actually worked, and round down—that

means there are four billion in the rst cohort, two billion in the second,

and just one billion in the third.”

“Right.”

“Anyway,” said Kayla, “I was curious if there were any psychological

differences between the cohorts, and so I administered a standard ve-

factor-model personality measure on each subject and—badabing!—all

our Q2s had scores that correlated with psychopathy.”

“Ah,” I said, nally getting it. “You came up with a triad suggestive of

psychopathy: low conscientiousness, low agreeableness, high

extraversion.”

“Exactly!

Got essentially the same results when I tried HEXACO,

too, so we moved on to the Lilienfeld Psychopathic Personality Inventory

and the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and found an almost perfect

correlation between psychopathy and having any two of the three

electrons in superposition. Didn’t matter which two—that’s how we

con rmed the fungibility notion—but if you had two out of three, you

were a psychopath.” She raised a hand, palm out. “Not necessarily a

violent one, mind you. You were just as likely to be one of those Hare

calls ‘a snake in a suit,’ a ruthless businessperson. Still, it’s a clear-cut

relationship, just like your microsaccades thing.”

“You said about thirty percent of your test group were Q2s?”

“Yup, and evenly split between men and women.”

“My microsaccades test shows the same percentage and gender

balance. Did you get the kind of ak I did about that being a much

higher prevalence of psychopathy than is generally assumed?”

She smiled. “We cited you in our paper on that very point, but, yeah,

we’re expecting the reviewers from Physics of Life to challenge us on it.”

I nodded. As I’m sure Kayla knew, most older estimates put the

prevalence of psychopathy at between one and four percent of the

general population of men, and about a tenth of that among women. But

those values were due to sampling problems. Take Kent Kiehl, one of

Hare’s last grad students, who did the rst-ever scans of psychopaths’

brains—great work, that. He did his initial studies at the University of

British Columbia, where, with the extraordinary cooperation of the

Canadian Department of Corrections, he was able to routinely transfer

violent criminals who had scored high on the Hare Checklist to a

hospital where they could be scanned by fMRI; the precautions taken

against the prisoners escaping were worthy of a Hollywood lm. But when Kent was lured to Yale with a sweetheart offer—he asked

for double the salary his colleagues in Canada were getting and was told,

“Oh, we can do better than that”—he immediately became frustrated. He’d hoped to work with psychopaths at large in the New Haven

community: people with criminal records but now released from prison. But he found—duh!—that psychopaths weren’t good about keeping

appointments for scienti c experiments, and those rare times they did

show up, they were often too drunk or too uncooperative to be of any

use. Anyway, one of the chapters of Kent’s book The Psychopath

Whisperer begins by baldly declaring, “Fact: There are over twenty-nine

million psychopaths worldwide.” If you ip to the endnote, it turns out

he reached that gure by assuming the percentage of psychopaths found

in prisons accurately re ected the prevalence of psychopathy in the

population as a whole. But the ones behind bars are just the ones dumb

enough to get caught; with their skills at manipulation and deception,

psychopaths almost certainly are captured at a rate much lower than that

of normal people—my pal Devin Becker notwithstanding. Likewise, Kent claims that there are ten times as many male

psychopaths as females. Why?

Well, see, he says, there are ten times as

many male psychopaths in prison as females ones—which is true, but

there are also ten times as many male left-handers in prison, and male

redheads, and males who like anchovies on their pizza—si mply because

there are ten times as many men behind bars as women. Before my work, and now Kayla’s, no one knew how many

psychopaths there actually were. Twenty-nine million?

Nuh-uh, Kent. It’s

more like two fucking billion—thirty percent of Earth’s population, two

out of every seven people. The waiter came with our entrees. When he was gone, I said, “What

about the other two cohorts—you know, just one electron in

superposition, or all three in superposition?”

Kayla lifted her shoulders. “I couldn’t discern any difference between

Q1s and Q3s. No, as far as we can tell, there are only two types of

consciousness, at least from a quantum-mechanical point of view:

psychopathic Q2s, and everyone else.”

“Do you think you inherit your state?”

“It doesn’t seem to run in families. Oh, some people are the same

state as their parents, siblings, or children, but that’s not

disproportionately common. And, as far as we can tell, people don’t

change states—we’ve done as much of a longitudinal study as we can so

far, and no one has ever switched.”

“Fascinating,” I said. Marveling at the circumstances that had

brought us together again after so much time, I added, “Quite a

coincidence, you and me both ending up working on psychopathy.”

Kayla’s tone grew cold. “It’s not a coincidence, Jim.”

“What?”

She stared at me, and I met her gaze—until I couldn’t. “I got

interested in psychopathy because of you,” she said. “Because of the

horrible things you did all those years ago.”

“G11

TWO DECADES AGO

OOD evening, Jim. Thanks for coming in again.”

Jim Marchuk was carrying a plastic bag with the green

McNally Robinson logo. “No problem, Professor Warkentin. Bit

surprised anyone’s working on New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh, Christmas break is my favorite time on campus,” Menno said. “Peace and quiet. Summers are great, too—the campus is mostly empty,

and the weather’s nicer then, but Christmas is the best; the place is dead.”

Jim’s tone was light. “Universities would be wonderful if it weren’t

for all those pesky students.”

“No, no, no,” said Menno. “It’s faculty that drive me up the walls. Departmental meetings, committee meetings, so-and-so’s retirement

dinner, somebody else’s birthday lunch. Here, with almost everyone

away, a body can nally concentrate.”

“Huh,” said Jim. “You got a party to get to?”

“Kinda. Bunch of friends, we’re going to Garbonzo’s—hang out,

watch Ed the Sock do Fromage.”

“I’m sure that means something,” said Menno. “Anyway, we’ll get

you out of here long before midnight.”

“I’m happy to come in,” said Jim. “Dorm’s kinda lonely. But my

parents are off on a cruise for their twenty- fth wedding anniversary, so

not much point in going back to Cow Town.”

Dominic Adler entered the room, carrying the Mark II. “That’s not

the same helmet as before,” said Jim, but there was nothing suspicious in

his tone; he was just making conversation, and it beat talking about the

weather. “True,” said Dominic. “Completely new design.” They were hoping

that by using transcranial focused ultrasound—a new brain-stimulation

technique the DoD was experimenting with—they could boost the

phonemes enough to punch through the background noise. “Great,” said Jim, reaching for the helmet. It had different modules

attached to its surface, and, in addition to ones that looked like decks of

cards, there were two—one on either side—that looked like green hockey

pucks. “Put it on,” Dominic said. Jim pulled it over his head, and Dominic loomed in to make various

adjustments. “It’s a snugger t than the old one,” Jim offered. “Yes. We thought maybe we were losing alignment with the previous

setup.” Dom pulled on the chin strap, cinching it. “How’s it look,

Menno?”

Jim glanced toward Menno, as if expecting an assessment of his

appearance, but Menno was peering at the oscilloscope, which showed

the thick, chaotic trace of the para-auditory scan. “I think it’s ne,”

Menno said. “Okay,” said Dominic. He glanced at his calculator watch, then:

“Take your seat next door, Jim.”

Jim headed out into the corridor and went into the other room,

lowering himself onto the swivel chair on the opposite side of the glass. Menno turned on the cassette recorder, which had a little microphone

on a plastic stand. “Project Lucidity, stage two, test number fourteen on

thirty-one December 2000, 7:49 P. M. PIs: Dominic K. Adler and Menno

Warkentin. Subject JM is in place.”

Menno looked at Dom, who said, “Okay. Let’s rock and roll.” Menno

nodded and typed “execute” at his computer’s command prompt. He

poised his chubby index nger over the backward L of the enter key,

took a deep breath, then tapped it. Through the window, in the chair, they could see Jim’s head loll back,

as though he were looking up at the ceiling, the way one might when lost

in thought. Menno and Dom exchanged glances. Menno halted the program,

then touched the intercom button. “Jim?”

No response. “Jim?” said Dom, as if somehow the young man could hear him even

if he couldn’t hear Menno. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, shit,” Menno said, pointing at the oscilloscope, which showed

nothing but a perfectly at green phosphor line. Dominic’s eyes went wide, and the two of them rushed toward the

door, did a hasty turn in the corridor, then entered the testing room. “Jim!” said Menno, crouching before him. Dominic tipped Jim’s head forward by gently lifting the back of the

helmet. The student’s chin dropped to his chest. Menno attempted to check for a pulse in Jim’s right wrist. Unused to

doing the test he’d seen so often on TV, his own heart raced as he tried to

nd it, but at last he did, feeling the rhythmic movement of Jim’s radial

artery, good and strong and at the normal pace, too. “He’s just fainted.”

“Maybe the helmet is too tight,” Dominic said as he undid the chin

strap, then pulled the helmet off, setting it gently—it had cost sixty

thousand dollars, after all—on the tile oor. “Might have restricted his

circulation.”

Menno tried something else he’d seen on TV: lightly slapping Jim on

one cheek and then the other. “Come on,” he said. “Wake up.” But there

was no response from Jim. Menno then held his own hand in front of

Jim’s nose, feeling breath—warm, regular—on his palm. “What should we do?” asked Dominic. “Let’s get him out of the chair and onto the oor, before he falls out.”

They did just that, laying Jim on his back. “He’s not sweating,” said Menno. “He’s not breathing hard. He’s

just…”

“Unconscious.”

“Yeah.”

“But the others we tested,” said Dom, “the ones who normally didn’t

have an inner voice—nothing happened to them.”

“True.”

“So,” said Dominic, sounding increasingly desperate, “why in God’s

name won’t he wake up?”

“I don’t know,” replied Menno, “but we’ve got to call 911.”

“No, we can’t do that.”

“But he’s unconscious.”

“There will be too many questions. Lucidity is classi ed.”

“Yes, but this boy—”

“Look,” said Dominic. “He’s breathing. His pulse is steady.”

“What if he’s in a coma, for God’s sake?

He needs to be in a hospital. He’ll need water soon. Food. And he’ll have to go the bathroom.”

“Well, how do we explain—”

“I don’t care about that!” snapped Menno. “We’re in no position to

look after him.”

“We’re under a military nondisclosure agreement.”

“Damn it, Dominic!” Menno took a deep breath. “Okay, all right. Fine. Let’s get him out of here, out of the lab. Move him down to, I don’t

know, the men’s room. Then we can say we stumbled upon him, found

him passed out. New Year’s Eve—they’ll take him for a drunk student.”

“Until they do a blood test.”

“Look, I’m not going to just abandon him. Now, are you going to

help me move him or not?”

Dominic thought for a moment. “What if we’re seen?”

“Everyone’s gone for the night. Come on!”

Dominic hesitated. “For Christ’s sake, Dom. If I drag him on my own, it’ll leave dirt on

his clothes and scuff marks leading back here.”

Dom frowned, then bent over and took Jim’s ankles in his hands. Menno nodded his thanks and grabbed Jim’s arms just below the

shoulders. They lifted him so his bottom cleared the oor by a few inches

and moved, Dominic walking backward. At the threshold, they put Jim

down for a second and Dominic opened the door. He checked that the

coast was clear, then took his end again, and they quickly moved Jim

along the corridor, going by closed doors, the little windows in them

nothing but dark squares. They were just passing the women’s room—the men’s was the next

one along—when Menno heard a grunt. He looked down and saw that

Jim’s eyes were now open, showing whites all around the irises. Hearing was restored, as was vision. Fluorescent tubes behind frosted

panels moved by overhead. A male voice: “Dominic, stop.” And then the same voice: “Jim, um,

you, ah, you passed out. How do you feel?”

A response required; one made: “I’m okay.”

Arms freed; legs, too. Pressure on the back. A different voice: “Can you stand?”

Knees exed; palms pushed against the dusty oor. The word “yes”

was uttered as hands moved to brush away dirt. The rst speaker again: “You gave us quite a start.”

Silence. Then, lling the space: “I’ll be all right.”

“Yes, yes,” said the second speaker quickly. “Of course you will.”

Hours later, long after Jim had headed off to his sock-and-cheese thing—

whatever the hell that was—Dominic and Menno were in the lab, still

trying to make sense of it all. Dom was sitting on a three-legged stool,

looking at a printout of the oscilloscope tracings, showing the noise in

Jim’s auditory cortex disappearing at the instant he lost consciousness. On the wall behind him, held up by a pair of U-shaped acrylic braces,

was a souvenir baseball bat, commemorating the two consecutive World

Series wins by the Toronto Blue Jays. Menno, leaning against the

opposite wall, looked at it, idly wondering what it was like to be a bat. His reverie was interrupted by Dominic, saying for what seemed like

the hundredth time, “For God’s sake, all we were trying to do was boost

the queued phonemes so they wouldn’t be drowned out by his inner

voice. What could have possibly gone wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have people like Jim,” said Dom, trying to puzzle it out, “who

do have an inner voice, and then there are those who are—wh at?

Monologue-less?

Soliloquy-free?” He shook his head. “Bah. Those are

both awkward names.”

“True,” said Menno softly, as his heart suddenly began pounding. “But, my God, there is an established term for those without inner voices

—at least in my eld of study…”

12

PRESENT

“Okay,” I said, looking out at my rst-year psych class, “how

many of you drive to the university each morning?”

About a third of the students put up hands. “Keep your hands up. The rest of you: how many of you have

had a job you’ve driven to day after day?”

Another third raised hands. “Okay, now keep your hands up if this has ever happened to

you: you arrive at your destination—school, work, whatever—and

have no recollection of the actual drive.”

Most of the hands stayed in the air. “Cool,” I said. “Lower your hands. Now, think about that:

you undertook a complex task; you operated a vehicle weighing

over a thousand kilos, you negotiated traf c, you avoided

collisions, you obeyed signs and the rules of the road—you did all

that without high-level conscious attention; that is, you did it

while your mind was on other things. “Let’s try another one: how many of you have ever been

reading a book—not one of mine, you understand, but somebody

else’s—and gotten to the bottom of a page and realized you had

no awareness of what the page said?”

Again, lots of hands went up. “Okay, you might argue that driving a car is an example of

what laypeople call muscle memory, although the technical term is

‘procedural memory’—stuff you do without thinking about it, like

returning a serve in tennis or playing a musical instrument. But

what about the reading example?

Your eyes tracked across each

successive line, and, on some level, your brain was presumably

recognizing and processing the words. In fact, you can contrive

priming tests to demonstrate that the words were noted. If the

page referenced, say, a porcupine, and you’re asked, even though

your mind wandered off while reading so you say you have no

high-level conscious recollection of the page, to name a mammal,

chances are you’ll say ‘porcupine.’ So, reading can’t be dismissed

as just muscle memory, just your eyes tracking without actually

seeing. And yet you can do it, too, without real attention.”

I let that sink in for a moment, then went on. “So, it’s clearly

true that you can perform sophisticated acts without your full

conscious attention some of the time. And, by logical extension, if

you can do those things that way some of the time, then it’s

presumably possible there are people who do them that way all of

the time. Of course, we’d have no way to tell, would we?

When

you’re reading but not absorbing, nobody can tell that from the

outside. And when you’re driving but not paying attention, again,

well, if the police had a way of detecting that by some external

sign—your eyeballs rolling up into your skull, say—you can bet

they’d pull you over. But there is no external indication.”

I took a sip from the coffee cup on the lectern, then went on. “And that brings us to one of the most famous thought

experiments in philosophy. Imagine a being who didn’t just drive

all the time without paying attention, and who didn’t just read all

the time without paying attention, but who in fact did everything

all the time without attention. An Australian philosopher, David

Chalmers, is the guy most associated with this proposal. He says

it’s logically coherent—that is, there are no internal contradictions

—to the notion that a whole planet could exist full of such

entities: beings for whom the lights are on but nobody’s home,

beings who are, quite literally, thoughtless.” Another sip, then:

“W“Anybody got a suggestion for what we should call such

creatures?”

I was always happy to set that one up, and my students never

disappointed. “Politicians!” called out one. “Football players,”

called another. “Well,” I said, “almost anything would be an improvement

over the term we actually use. Such beings are called

‘philosophical zombies’ or ‘philosopher’s zombies.’ It’s a terrible

name: they’re not the walking dead, they don’t shamble along. Behaviorally, they’re indistinguishable from the rest of us. Sadly,

the phrasing ‘philosophical zombie’ is more common in the

literature than ‘philosopher’s zombie,’ but it doesn’t make sense:

the one thing such creatures are unlikely to be is philosophical. Oh, they might say things a philosopher would—‘A could well

follow from B,’ or ‘Yes, but how can we be sure your experience of

red is the same as my experience of red?’ or ‘Would you like fries

with that?’—but they’d only be acting like a philosopher. There

would in fact be no inner life, no rumination. Me, I mostly avoid

the zombie word. In the States, they can’t really abbreviate

‘philosopher’s zombie’ to its initials because it comes out sounding

like ‘peasy,’ as in ‘easy-peasy.’ But here we can safely call them p-

zeds, so let’s do that from now on.”

One of the students, a muscular guy named Enzo, raised his

hand. “Well, then, Professor Marchuk, if all that’s true—if it really

is possible—then how do we know you’re not a p-zed?”

“How indeed?” I replied, smiling beati cally at them all. TWO DECADES AGO

E have to try again,” said Dominic rmly, on January 2, 2001.

“Are you insane?” replied Menno. “You saw what

happened to that student, Jim Marc huk.”

“Which is precisely why we have to try again. We have exactly one

data point now. We can’t draw any conclusions from that.”

“That boy might have died. What if he’d never regained

consciousness?”

“But he did. And, really, we don’t even know that our equipment is

what caused him to black out.”

“Oh, come on!

It happened the moment we activated the helmet. What else could have caused it?”

“Who knows?

Correlation is not causation. But, anyway, if the effect

was unique to him, we need to know that. I’d hate to cancel a whole

program based on one failure.”

“You know who else said that?

General Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove

—right before the world came to an end.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dominic. “It’ll be ne. We’ll be prepared this

time. No fucking Laurel and Hardy carrying the body down the corridor. We’ll belt the next subject into the chair so he can’t fall out—don’t want

a concussion!

And if he does lose consciousness, well, we’ll just wait

patiently. Marchuk revived in a matter of minutes, after all.” He thought

for a moment. “Let’s try that business student, the runner. He had an

inner monologue, too, and he’s from Winnipeg; he should be around. What was his name?”

“Huron,” Menno said reluctantly. “Travis Huron.”

“Okay, Travis,” said Menno into the intercom. “We want you to just

think about the test message, all right?

Just that, nothing else. Do you

remember it?”

On the other side of the window, the athletic young man nodded. “‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy.’”

“Exactly. Just repeat that subvocally over and over once I say ‘go.’”

Another nod. Menno had his nger poised over the enter key, but just stood there,

unable to bring himself to press it. After about ten seconds, Dominic, standing next to him, muttered,

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” reached over, and stabbed the other enter key on

the numeric keypad, and—

—and Travis’s head tipped forward, and his strapped-in body sagged. “Shit,” said Menno, rushing out the door and into the adjacent lab. He unstrapped the helmet and tossed it across the room to get it out of

the way. It was just like with Jim Marc huk. Travis’s pulse was good—

Menno had no trouble nding it this time—and his respiration was

normal. Dominic entered, too; Menno had run here, but Dominic must have

fucking sauntered to take so long. “Well?” Dom said, as if inquiring

about the score in a sporting event he didn’t really care about. “Unconscious,” said Menno. “Otherwise ne…I guess.”

“It must be the transcranial focused ultrasound that makes them

black out,” said Dom, “but I’m not sure why.”

“We shouldn’t have done this,” said Menno, feeling nauseated. He

looked at his watch. “Two minutes.”

“It’ll be ne.”

Menno started to pace. “Damn, damn, damn.”

They waited…and waited…and waited, Travis breathing calmly the

whole time, although a little drool had started to come out of his half-

open mouth. “There!” said Menno. “It’s been fteen minutes. That’s got to be at

least three times as long as Marchuk was out. We have to call 911.”

Kayla ran up to the nursing station. “What room is Travis Huron in?”

The nurse—a stout, middle-aged woman—pointed to a green

chalkboard on the opposite wall. It was a chart of patients, with their

room numbers and the names of their attending physicians; Kayla found

the line about Travis and hurried down the corridor, low heels clicking

against ooring marked with colored stripes. The door to Travis’s room was open. He had a bed whose front could

rise; it was supporting his back at a forty- ve-degree angle. His eyes were

closed and his hair—dark, like Kayla’s—lay at against his scalp. Some

sort of drip was going into his left arm, and his right index nger had a

pulse monitor clipped to it. He was wearing a hospital smock the color

of an old woman’s hair rinse. “Travis,” said Kayla, coming up on his left side. No response. A slim and short male doctor in a white lab coat came in. “Hello,” he

said. “I am Dr. Mukherjee. And you would be?”

“Kayla Huron. His sister.”

“Ah, yes, good. Thank you for coming. Have you been briefed?”

Kayla shook her head. “Well, it falls to me, then,” said Mukherjee. “Your brother is in a

coma as far as we can tell. There is no sign of trauma or injury. He has

had an MRI, and there is no blood clot or tumor.”

“How long will it last?”

Mukherjee lifted his shoulders slightly. “That we do not know. There

are varying degrees of being in a coma: we use something called the

Glasgow Coma Scale to assess motor response, verbal response, and eye

response. Sadly, your brother scores the lowest—the worst—on all three

axes. Of course, we will do everything we can. With luck, he will wake

up at some point.”

“With luck?” snapped Kayla. “What the hell happened?

How did he

get here?”

Mukherjee was carrying a clipboard. He looked at it. “He was

brought in by ambulance”—a glance at his watch—“ ve hours ago. Apparently he was found unconscious in an empty classro om at the U of

M; a janitor stumbled upon him.”

“What are you doing to help him?”

“We are attending to his physical necessities. But you, young lady, can

sit with him. Chat. If he makes any response—speaks, turns his head

toward you, or the like—let the nursing station know. Just pull that red

cord there, do you see?” He turned and left. Kayla looked at her watch; Christ, she’d never make it to the club

tonight. A chair with orange vinyl padding and a chrome frame was

tucked against one wall. She scraped it across the oor. Once it was by

Travis’s bed, next to the stand holding the drip bag, she sat on it. “Come

on, Trav,” she said. “Wake up, damn it. It’s me, it’s Kayla. Wake up.”

He didn’t react. She looked at him, studying his face, something she

hadn’t done for ages. She still thought of him as an angular, geeky kid—

but he’d grown into a handsome young man, with clear skin, a high

forehead, and…

…and, she knew, piercing blue eyes. But they weren’t visible now: his

lids were closed, and the eyeballs beneath were stationary, she could see

that. No rapid eye movement, no dreaming. “Trav, for God’s sake,” Kayla said. “Mom will have a t. You don’t

want me to worry her. Wake up, will you?” She hesitated, then took his

hand; it was warm but limp. “Travis?” she said. “Travis, are you there?”

“You really effed up the helmet when you threw it across the room,” said

Dom. “I didn’t throw it,” Menno replied. “I just—”

“Man, you hurled it.”

Maybe he had; he was furious at the fucking thing, and at himself. “Anyway,” said Dom, “if we’re going to get more work done before

classes resume on the eighth, we’ve got to get that rst kid who fainted—

what’s his name?

Jim Marchuk?

We’ve got to get him to come in.”

“Why?” Menno asked. “To recalibrate the equipment. He’s the only one we have previous

readings from who’s still around; all of our other experimental subjects

have gone home for the holidays.”

“Why on Earth would he agree to put that helmet on again after

what it did to him the last time—not to mention what happened to

Travis Huron?”

“Surely those things were because of the transcranial focused

ultrasound,” said Dominic. “We won’t activate that part; it obviously

isn’t working quite right. But if we don’t calibrate the helmet properly,

any new subvocalization data we collect will be useless.”

“Jesus, Dom, we should just shelve the whole project.”

“For what reason?

Nobody but you or I knows about the subjects

fainting.”

“It’s not fainting, damn it. Travis is in a coma, and, unlike Jim

Marchuk, he shows no signs of coming out of it.”

“I agree that’s really unfortunate,” said Dom calmly. “But we’ve

stumbled onto something huge—huge—and I’m not going to just walk

away from it. We need to get Marchuk back in here.”

At last, Menno nodded reluctantly. “I suppose it can’t hurt to ask.”

“Sorry to bother you again during the holidays, Jim,” Dominic said. He

was sitting on a lab stool, and Menno was leaning against a wall. As far as Menno could see, Jim looked no worse for wear despite

what had happened last time. He was dressed in tan corduroys and a

tattered Calgary Stampede hoodie. “No problem,” said Jim. “Are you sure you’re all right?” asked Menno. Jim looked puzzled by the question. “I’m ne, thanks.”

Dominic scowled slightly and took back control. “Good, good. We

were hoping you’d be willing to do another stint with the helmet.”

“The new one or the old one?

I didn’t much like that new one.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dominic. “We’ve, ah, loosened it up; it, um,

won’t be as tight a t this time.”

“I don’t know,” said Jim. Of course the boy was going to refuse, Menno thought. But Dominic

pressed on. “Please.”

Jim frowned. “It would really help us out,” Dominic added. Menno shook his head slightly. It was a waste of—

“Sure,” said Jim, with a shrug. “Why not?”

“Okay, Jim,” said Dom into the intercom mic, looking at the young man

through the glass. “Try again.”

“I am trying,” said Jim. Menno pointed to the oscilloscope. “The phonemes are there, and

there, see?”

Dom nodded. “But there’s nothing else,” said Menno. “Ask him to try another

phrase.”

“Jim,” said Dom, “think the words to ‘Humpty Dumpty’—you know,

the nursery rhyme.”

Jim nodded, and the oscilloscope dutifully showed little spikes for

each syllable. Dom looked at Menno. “Maybe you damaged the helmet more than I

thought.”

“No,” said Menno. “When I put it on myself, just to test, it showed

the usual internal noise. But we can’t use me to calibrate because we

didn’t save any of my earlier recordings.”

Dom keyed the mic again. “Jim, can you make sure the serial cable

coming out of the equipment bank is tight in its socket?”

Jim checked the RS-232C port. “Snug as a bug in a rug,” he said. The boy fell silent, and Menno’s heart sank as he looked at the at

line on the phosphor screen. “Oh, God,” he said. Fortunately, the

intercom was off; Jim was staring blankly into space. “It’s not our fault,” Dom said quickly. “The hell it isn’t!” snapped Menno, pointing at the at horizontal

tracing. “We did that to the boy. We shut off his inner voice.”

“W13

PRESENT

HAT horrible things?”

Kayla looked out the semicircular window. The sun had

set; the rivers were dark and still, winding blacktop roads. I let the words

hang there for a moment as she chewed on her lower lip. At last, she

looked back at me, blue eyes slightly narrowed. “You really don’t

remember?

Not even that?”

“Honestly, no.”

“Look,” she said, “I kept track of you a bit over the years. Checking

online now and then, or asking mutual acquaintances how you were

doing. And people kept saying things like, ‘Oh, yeah, Jim. What a nice

guy!’ And you were a good guy when we started dating. Thoughtful,

kind, supportive. So when…”

She trailed off and looked at the blond brick wall. “What?” I said. “So when you got violent, it was a total surprise, you know?

Knocked me for a loop.” She lowered her voice, and then, softly, sadly,

she added, “Figuratively and literally.”

I was absolutely oored, and I’m sure my eyes went wide. “My…

God. I—Kayla, honestly, I wouldn’t—I’d never…”

She lifted her head and nally met my gaze—and held it, looking

really, really hard, her attention icking from my left eye to my right and

back again. “Did you take your own test?” she asked. “The

microsaccades one?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“And I’m normal, absolutely. Not a psychopath.”

“You know, just on the numbers, there’s a thirty percent chance you

are.”

“I’m not.”

She drew her eyebrows together and compressed her lips. “Look,” I said, “whatever happened—wh atever I did—I’m so, so

sorry. It has to be related to the brain damage that caused me to lose

those memories. But I’m all right now.”

“You can’t know that. Until a few days ago—until what happened on

the witness stand—you didn’t even know you’d lost any memories. Who

knows what else you don’t remember doing?”

“I’m not a psychopath,” I said again. “I can prove it with my

goggles.”

She looked dubious again. “I mean, your technique is interesting,

but…”

“Okay, all right. Prefer your own equipment?

How ’bout this?

I’d

love to see that synchrotron of yours, and you can test me for yourself. What is it, ten hours by car to Saskatoon?”

“Eight, if you’ve got a heavy foot like me, but, seriously, Jim, that’s

not necessary.”

“Hey, I’m only teaching a couple of summer courses. My last class

ends at 1:00 on Thursday, and you said that’s about when you’re going

home. I don’t have another class until 8:00 A. M. Wednesday morning.” I

made my tone offhanded. “We could do it this weekend. Wouldn’t it be

nice to have someone to share the driving?”

She was clearly startled. “Well, I mean, um, how would you get

home?”

“Greyhound?

VIA Rail?”

She looked out into the darkness again, then slowly turned back to

me. “Okay, sure. Why not?

But I have to warn you: Saturdays I go see

Travis.”

I was surprised at the way my heart fell, but Kayla was brilliant and

beautiful; was it any wonder she had a boyfriend?

“Oh. Um, okay.”

“You could come along, if you like. Just like old times.”

Good grief!

Just how much had I forgotten?

“I, ah, wouldn’t want to

be a third wheel.”

She looked startled for a moment. “You really don’t remember, do

you?

Travis is my brother.”

“Oh!”

“We used to visit him here in Winnipeg, back when we were dating.”

She saw my puzzled expression. “He’s in a coma; has been for ages.”

“What happened?”

“Nobody knows. They found him passed out. No head injury,

though; he didn’t trip and smash his skull, or anything like that.”

“Huh.”

“He was so strong, and not just physically. He was a brick, you

know?

He was fourteen when our dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. Our mother was a mess, but Travis, he was her pillar of strength.” She

paused. “Anyway, Trav and I grew up in Winnipeg, but when I got the

job at the synchrotron, I moved him and my mom to Saskatoon.” She

shrugged a little. “It didn’t make any difference to Travis, and Mom was

delighted to be closer to her granddaughter; she looks after Ryan for me

when I can’t.”

“Oh, that must be handy, having her live with you.”

“My mom?

No, no. She’s just sixty-two. She’s got her own place. She’s a freelance graphic designer; works out of her house. But Travis is

in a facility. I visit him every Saturday morning, sit with him for an

hour.” She smiled ruefully. “It’s almost like therapy. I talk about my week,

natter on, say whatever comes to mind. I long ago gave up any hope that

he’s going to respond, but…”

“Sure,” I said. “And, yeah, I’d be happy to keep you company on

Saturday, if you’d like me there.”

“Thanks. I know it doesn’t make any real difference if I go or not,

but, well…” She shrugged. “It’s something I have to do.”

I nodded. “Some people in minimally conscious states or with locked-

in syndrome are aware of, and do appreciate, visitors, even if they can’t

respond.”

“And doubtless some of those at the facility are minimally conscious. But not Travis.”

“Oh?”

“I had an ambulance service bring him to the Light Source a while

ago. Took him on a stretcher down to the SusyQ beamline; that’s short

for ‘superpositioned systems—quantum.’ Vic ran our process on him.”

Kayla let out a small sigh. “Might as well have put a hunk of granite in

front of the emitter; they both would’ve shown the same thing.” She

shrugged. “Scientist rst, little sister second, I guess. Anyway, that’s how

we con rmed our notion about the classical-physics state: no

superposition means a complete lack of consciousness.”

I didn’t want to seem insensitive, but, well, the utilitarian position

would be clear in a case like this. “So then, ah—”

“Why don’t I pull the plug?”

“Well, yeah.”

She shrugged a little. “He’s my brother.” I couldn’t think of a good

response, so I remained silent. But after a time, she went on. “I know he’s

not suffering; he can’t be in any pain. And, well, where there is life, there

is hope.”

I peered out the semicircular window, radial slats making it look like

a half-submerged captain’s wheel. The immaculately groomed waiter

deposited the bill, then disappeared; I paid, since Kayla had gotten lunch. Kayla was staying at Inn at The Forks, which is why I’d chosen Sydney’s. I walked her the hundred meters or so to her hotel. The Inn was ve stories tall, and apparently pretty upscale. I’d been

to the lobby a few times but never to the rooms—and it didn’t look like

that was going to change this evening. The elevators were close to the

front desk, affording little privacy, although an indoor waterfall provided

some masking white noise. “You really want to come to Saskatoon?” Kayla asked, facing me. “Absolutely,” I said. “And—oh, shit.”

“What?”

“I forgot. Damn!

I have to make an appearance at the CMHR

Thursday at four.”

“At the what?”

“The Canadian Museum for Human Rights.” I pointed at the north

wall, hoping she could visualize what was on the other side of it. “It’s

that round, glass-and-steel building just over there. They’re having a

reception to kick off a lecture series, and I’m on the board of directors,

so…”

“Can you bring a date?”

My heart skipped a beat. “Um, sure. Sure, yeah.”

She pushed the up button. “I was hoping to get to visit that museum

on this trip, but haven’t had a chance. Okay; let’s do it. We’ll hit the road

right after the reception.”

“Wonderful!

Thank you.”

The elevator arrived. She hesitated for a moment, leaned in and gave

me a quick hug, then entered the car. I headed out the sliding glass doors into the summer evening. I didn’t

often get down here to The Forks, but whenever I did, I made a point of

walking around the Oodena Celebration Circle, an amphitheater sixty

meters across and 2.5 meters deep. Equidistant around its perimeter are

eight steel armatures that look like cyborg lizards with long tails curving

up toward the sky. Each tail has several sighting rings mounted on it,

which encircle speci c stars at dates and times speci ed on

accompanying plaques. The west armature, for instance, can be used to

nd Altair, Betelgeuse, Regulus, and Procyon. Meanwhile, gaps between

red stone monoliths frame the rising sun on the solstices and equinoxes;

I’ve sometimes been on hand with members of the RASC to explain

things to tourists. Here, in the dark, the place had a wonderfully spooky

quality; it had often been the meeting-up point for Winnipeg’s annual

Zombie Walk. I strolled around the grassy circumference, hands shoved in my

pockets, thinking. Kayla had said I’d hit her. Me. I’d never hit anyone, not as an adult. Even as a kid, it wasn’t in my nature, not since—

Yeah. When I was eight or nine, I’d been in a ght in the parking lot of my

school, with Ronny Handler, a kid my age who’d attacked me for no

good reason—really, what utter bullshit it was for the teacher to say it

takes two to start a ght—and, to my surprise, in an adrenaline-fueled

rage, I’d been able to knock Ronny down, and I was so furious, so

incensed, so livid at the unfairness of not being able to walk to school

without being picked on because of—wh at?

My shorts?

My buzz cut?

My ears?

Who the hell knew?

When Handler was down, I leapt up and assumed a crouching

posture in mid-air, my knees together but bent, and I was ready to come

down hard on his head, which was sideways on the pavement, and I

knew—eight years old, and I knew—that if I continued what I’d started,

if I let the trajectory run its course, my knees would smash into him, and

I might well fracture his skull, and maybe even kill him. And, in that split second, still in the air, I changed my posture,

altering my course. My bare knees crashed into the asphalt right beside

Ronny’s head, the impact excruciating, my skin being brutally scraped—

but Handler survived. I hadn’t been worried so much about him as about

the consequences for me if I’d followed through on what I’d begun, and

I’d known that shouting “He started it!” would do no good at all if he

were lying there bleeding. I remembered thinking this was a moment that

could have changed my life, and I’d done the right thing, just in the nick

of time. That was, I supposed, one of the rst times that my reason had

overcome any baser instincts I might have had. And it—my reason—had

held sway ever since. Except for near the end of my dark period, apparently. I was passing the northeast armature, a great beast hovering above

me, the long tail fading up into the night. I pulled out my phone, looked

at the glowing digits. It was after 10:00 P. M., which meant that the

psychology department would be deserted, and so I could—

But no. No, that would be crazy. And yet—

And yet, apparently, it wouldn’t be the worst thing I’d ever done. I passed a couple of grad students and a janitor as I made my way down

the corridor. Being assistant department head was mostly an

administrative pain in the butt, but the job did come with a master set of

keys. When the coast was clear, I let myself into Menno’s of ce. Four avocado-green ling cabinets lined one wall. I was afraid they

might be locked, but they weren’t. Menno himself probably hadn’t been

in them for years; paper les were of little use to a blind man, I

supposed, but perhaps teaching assistants or grad students maintained

them for him. I quickly found the “L” les, but there were none about

Lucidity, and so I started at the top drawer of the rst cabinet, and

looked at every le in turn. I almost skipped by one labeled “DoD,” but was intrigued. Was it

really the American military?

And indeed it was—and related to Project

Lucidity, to boot. I laid out each page on the oor and snapped photos of

them with my iPhone. I thought about leaving, but there was a touch of

Pavlov’s dogs in me, I guess; I’d been rewarded once, and I wanted to see

if I’d be rewarded again. I continued on past D, through E, F, G, and so

on, betting against myself that there’d be no X or Z les…and there

weren’t; the last paper le was labeled “Yerkes-Dodson handout.”

But there was one drawer left, and so I opened it—and found it

crammed with old VHS videocassettes. Seven were labeled “Altruistic

Behaviour Study 1988,” one was labeled “Teaching Company Audition,”

and ve were labeled “APA AGM 1994.” But there was one that had me

salivating: the sticker on its spine said, “Lucidity Subject JM,” who

doubtless was me—the time-honored custom of referring to patients and

experimental subjects by their initials, as if that afforded real anonymity. I took that cassette, headed out of Menno’s of ce, being careful to turn

the lights back off—not that Menno would notice—and drove to my

condo, ve minutes away. I hadn’t used my VHS player in years, and was relieved to nd it still

worked. I looked so young!

And so did Menno—and it was startling to

see him back before he’d lost his sight; I’d forgotten how expressive his

eyes had been. “Let me just identify this recording,” he said in a sibilant

voice that was a tad more energetic than it was today. He cleared his

throat. “January sixteenth, 2001.

Subject JM.”

My heart skipped a beat: footage of me from the beginning of my

dark time!

Still, that made sense: yes, I’d been involved with Lucidity in

2000, but I couldn’t recall doing any interviews, or, for that matter, why

one would bother to interview people about fairly boring hearing tests,

or whatever the heck it had been?

I wondered what had moved Menno

to start doing them at this point. He leaned back in his chair. “Thanks for coming in, Jim.”

“My pleasure.”

“So, I’m just going to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Be my guest.”

“How have you been?

How do you feel?”

“Fit as a ddle,” I said. “Right as rain.”

“Good, good. Your classes are going okay?”

“Yes. I’m enjoying them all.”

“And what about participating in this study?

Have you been enjoying

that?”

“Sure. And, you know, as a student, I can always use the extra cash.”

“I’m sure,” said Menno. He moved his chair closer to mine. “And

how do you feel compared to before you became one of our

experimental subjects?”

I saw myself blink three times rapidly. “The same,” I said. “Why?

Shouldn’t I?”

There was something at in Menno’s tone. “Yes, of course.”

The interview lasted seven minutes, according to the timecode

running along the bottom of the screen. It was followed by the next one,

exactly one month later, on February 16, 2001, which was pretty much

the same, although my birthday had passed two days before, meaning I

was now twenty. The one for March 16, 2001, was similar, too. Kayla and I had

recently started dating. I talked about how we’d gone to Pop Soda’s the

night before and listened to some live jazz; not fancy, but within our

student budgets. Other than that, my response to all the questions he

asked was the same mixture of clichés, platitudes, and banalities that had

lled the previous interviews, and, as I soon discovered, lled the next

two, as well. I was ne, chugging along, keeping my head above water,

hanging in there. But the nal monthly interview, conducted on Monday, June

eighteenth—the sixteenth having fallen on Saturday, it seems—was

radically different in tone. “This is just like the other times, okay?” said Menno. “A routine

evaluation; same questions as always.”

I had arms crossed in front of my chest. “Yeah, okay. Let’s get it over

with.”

“Tell me how you feel today, Jim.”

“Fine.”

“You’re happy?”

“I’m okay, yeah.”

“Healthy?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“How are things with Kayla?”

I—the one here in 2020—shifted on my living-room couch; the other

me, back in 2001, sat motionless. “They’re ne.”

“You’ve been going out for over three months now.”

“Yeah.”

“And how do you feel about her?”

“She’s okay.”

“Just okay?

Do you love her?”

“Sure. She’s great in bed.”

“I mean, do you have feelings for her?

Romantic feelings?”

“She’s a good lay. And she looks good, y’know?

Impresses the other

guys, me being with her.”

“And that’s important?”

“Course. Gotta be seen to be on top, man. The king. Gotta be in

control.”

I paused the playback and looked at the image of myself frozen on

the screen. I would have sworn up and down that I’d never talked about

a woman that way before in my entire life; I wouldn’t have believed it if

—well, if it wasn’t right here, on video, in front of me. My stomach was

knotting, and I tasted acid at the back of my throat. I let the playback resume. There was silence for a long moment—I

thought I must have accidentally muted the sound—but it was just

Menno digesting what I’d said, apparently, because at last he spoke

again. “What about your sister?

Heather, is it?

How do you feel about

her?”

“She’s all right.”

“Anything else you want to say about her?”

“I keep in touch. Make her think she’s important, y’know?”

“Why?”

“She’s a soft touch.”

“For money, you mean?”

“Yeah, for money. She’s a lawyer now. Deep pockets.”

I sagged back into my couch, numb. What the hell had happened to

me back then?

14

YouTube has countless lms of psychological experiments, and I

often used the ceiling-mounted projector to show them to my

students. One of my favorites is the Heider and Simmel animation

from 1944, which starts by showing a large hollow square with a

black triangle inside it. Soon one side of the square hinges open,

and the triangle moves out. A smaller black triangle and a small

circle move in from the right side of the frame. The three solid

shapes slide around the screen, sometimes touching, while the

hinged square periodically aps open and closed. I remember when I rst saw that cartoon myself as an

undergraduate in Menno Warkentin’s class. He asked us to write

down what had happened in the lm. I’d said the large triangle

was a monster unleashed from a cage to chase off a boy and a girl

who were out exploring; the boy—yeah, back then, my

consciousness about gender-role stereotypes hadn’t yet been raised

—bravely fought off the monster, while the girl snuck into the big

square to steal treasure; eventually, the boy and girl escaped, and,

in a t of anger at having been bested, the monster destroyed its

cage. My response was typical if idiosyncratic. Others had seen

mating rituals, battle eld maneuvers, or slapstick comedies—but

we’d all experienced some sort of story. When Heider and Simmel

M rst did this test, only three of their hundred and fourteen subjects

dispassionately described what the lm actually depicted: two

squares and two triangles moving about an empty space. Everyone else constructed a narrative, pretty much out of whole

cloth. As always, my own students did not disappoint. Boris, in the

front row, said, “It’s a political allegory, right?

The big triangle,

that’s the United States. And Mexico, that’s the little triangle. The

apping box represents the border, sometimes open and

sometimes closed, and in the end, by trying to keep everyone out,

the US ends up destroying itself.”

You could hear the crickets in the room; nobody else had seen

anything quite like that, I guess. I let a few more people share their interpretations—which

ranged from bawdy to rom-com treacly to shoot-’em-up mayhem

worthy of Liam Neeson—and then I got down to the point. “There’s a word for what all of you have just done. It’s

confabulation. We tell ourselves stories, building them out of

almost nothing, then convince ourselves they’re true…”

ENNO Warkentin didn’t come in to the university on Thursdays,

so after my morning class, I headed over to his apartment in the

heart of downtown. As always, the CBC was on in my car, this time with

news that did surprise me. Hayden Trenholm, the same pundit I’d heard interviewed yesterday,

was speaking with Piya Chattopadhyay. “So,” Piya said, in her bubbly voice, “former Calgary city mayor

Naheed Nenshi has just thrown his hat into the ring, running as the

federal NDP candidate in the riding of Calgary Southwest. Hayden, what

do you make of that?”

“It’s a coup for the NDP,” said Trenholm, “since there has long been

speculation that Nenshi was being wooed by the Trudeau Liberals. The

fact he went to the NDP might be seen as an indication he has bigger

ambitions than Cabinet. I wouldn’t be surprised if the caucus declares

him the acting leader in the next few days.”

“And what about the riding he’s running in?”

“It’s the perfect choice if Nenshi is being positioned to lead the New

Democrats. Calgary Southwest is Stephen Harper’s old riding; the folks

in it know well the perks that go with being the home base of a prime

minister. But people all across Calgary love Nenshi, and they enjoy that

he’s become an international star. Back in 2013, when Rob Ford was the

butt of jokes in Toronto, Nenshi was doing a conspicuously spectacular

job in Calgary—so much so, as you’ll recall, Piya, that Maclean’s named

him the second-most-important person in Canada, right after the prime

minister.”

“True.”

“And in 2015, the City Mayors Foundation awarded Nenshi the

World Mayor Prize, naming him the top mayor on the planet. The only

other North American contender, Houston’s Annise Parker, came in

seventh.”

I made a right turn onto Portage and started looking for a place to

park. Piya said, “When he was rst elected in Calgary in 2010, Nenshi

became the rst Muslim mayor in North America.”

“Yes, that’s right,” replied Trenholm. “He practices Nizari Ismaili, a

branch of Shia Islam.”

“But mayor is one thing,” said Piya. “Prime minister is something

else. Is Canada ready for a Muslim at 24 Sussex Drive?”

“Well,” replied the pundit, “that’s for the people to decide—four

weeks from today.”

As they moved on to the next story, I found a spot on the street—a

rare nd this time of day—and even though it was three blocks from

Menno’s apartment, I took it. I’d dropped him off a few times before but had never been up to his

second- oor suite (no point paying extra for a view, he’d quipped).

I was

somewhat curious about how—or if—he’d decorated the place. In fact, it turned out to be nicer than my condo; the living-room

furniture, in silver and cyan, was clearly a matching set, and each wall

had a lovely framed Emily Carr print showing the British Columbia

coast. Replica Haida totem poles—dark, unpainted wood— anked the

door to the kitchen. Menno was dressed as old professors usually were, in slightly baggy

beige slacks and a brown cardigan. He had his dark glasses on; I

wondered if he normally wore them when alone or had put them on

when I’d buzzed from the lobby. “Jim!” he said when I’d arrived at his unit’s door “Welcome!

What

brings you here?” He motioned for me to come in. Pax was eyeing me

from across the room. “Have a seat.”

I did so, settling onto the couch. Menno sat in the easy chair that

faced it at an oblique angle. There was a little table next to it on the left;

Pax sat down beside him on the right. “I’ve seen the video interviews with me,” I said. “About the Devin Becker trial?”

“What?

No, no. The ones you did. In 2001.

With me. In the old

physiology building at Fort Garry.”

Protracted silence, then: “How did you nd those?”

“The truth?

I had a look around your of ce.”

Menno was quiet again. “Oh,” he said at last. “I’d asked you what had happened during that period. Why didn’t

you show me the tapes?”

“I know it was news to you that you’d lost your memory, Jim. But it

wasn’t news to me.”

“Jesus, Menno. How long have you known?”

“Since 2001.

Since you lost it. I’m sorry, but, well, it was obvious

back then. I didn’t realize you’d lost six whole months, but it was clear

you’d lost some amount of time.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

He lifted his shoulders. “Because you were on the mend.”

“The mend?

From what?”

“I don’t know,” Menno said. He couldn’t see my expression, but must

have sensed I was going to object because he held up a hand. “Honestly,

I’ve tried for twenty years to gure it out.” He exhaled loudly. “You

know what?

It’s a relief to get to talk about it. Since Dominic moved

away, I’ve had no one to discuss this with.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Dominic Adler and I were working on developing a device to detect

phonemes that hadn’t been spoken aloud—that is, for detecting

articulated thoughts in the brain. You’d responded to our notice in The

Manitoban, looking for experimental subjects.”

I did a lot of those sorts of things back then; anything to bring in a

few extra bucks. “I remember. Some sort of helmet contraption…?”

Menno nodded. “We had two of them, actually. We started out with

the rst one, and we could indeed pick up the activity in your brain, but

it was very faint, and it was being drowned out by what we thought was

noise. So we developed a second helmet that added transcranial

ultrasound. The idea was to see if we could boost the signal we wanted

in your primary auditory cortex, make it more of an internal shout

rather than a whisper, so we could pick it up better with our scanner. But

instead you and—you lost consciousness.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, you did. TUS stimulation was completely new back then; we

didn’t expect it.”

I put a hand on my chest. “What I do remember from that period is

the kni ng, but…”

“Yes?”

“Well, from what I can tell, I was here in Winnipeg on New Year’s

Eve 2000, not in Calgary.”

Menno lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know where you got the idea of

the kni ng from, but it didn’t happen, at least not then. But…yeah. You

were here that night—and got knocked out by our helmet, and when you

came back, well, you didn’t come all the way back.”

I looked at him quizzically, but he couldn’t see that. “What?”

“You’d had an inner voice beforehand—I’d seen it on the oscilloscope

—but, as we soon discovered, it was gone afterward.”

“What do you mean, ‘an inner voice’?”

“Just that: an internal monologue; articulated phonemes in the brain

even when you weren’t speaking. But after you blacked out, it was gone. The lights were on—”

“—but nobody was home?” I said. “Seriously?

Really?”

“Yes.”

“A fucking p-zed?

A philosopher’s zombie?

Jesus. Not just amnesia,

but…” I shook my head. “No. No, that’s just a thought experiment. A

philosopher’s zombie can’t really exist.”

Menno was quiet for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, in a soft voice, he

said, “They do. They’re everywhere.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Most of the people we tested didn’t have inner voices.”

“Then your equipment must—”

“Stop!

You think we didn’t triple check?

What I’m telling you is

true.” He waved generally in my direction. “The only thing remarkable

about you was that you had started out with an inner voice, then lost it

for a time after you blacked out.”

“How long was I out?”

“Maybe ve minutes. And a few days later, we tested you again—

without the TUS, of course—and, well, your inner voice was gone.”

“And so you decided to interview me on a regular basis to see—”

“To see if there was any difference. I wish we’d done some interviews

with you beforehand, but we had no way to know what was going to

happen.”

“I didn’t watch the interviews all the way through, but I didn’t notice

anything different—”

“There wasn’t anything major,” con rmed Menno. “Your external

behavior was much the same as before.”

“Until the nal tape,” I said. “Oh,” Menno said, very softly. “Right.”

“It wasn’t just on that tape. People could tell; Kayla could. I’d

changed.”

“Kayla?”

“My girlfriend—at the time, I mean. Kayla Huron, and—”

Menno looked startled. “Huron?”

“She was one of your students. I saw her yesterday, for the rst time

in almost twenty years. She told me I—I hit her back then. Me!” I shook

my head, still struggling with that reality. “And then, my God, the

horrible things I said in that last interview. Un-fucking-believable.”

He nodded slowly. “You did change near the end. I don’t know why.”

“You must have some idea!

And, for Pete’s sake—wh y’d I change

back to normal?”

“Jim, honestly, I don’t know. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, for almost six months before that change, you were indeed a

philosopher’s zombie.” He moved his head left and right—perhaps in

negation, perhaps visualizing the hordes that had haunted him for

decades. “And you were just as vacant, just as empty, just as dead inside

as the countless millions of others surrounding us all the time.”

I walked—or staggered—out of the lobby of Menno’s condo onto

Portage Avenue. Here, at lunch-time, there were thousands of people

going east, and thousands more going west, and I just stood still, an

island in the stream, ghting to keep my balance. Coming toward me was a man with his head bent and his thumbs

typing away on his phone. Behind him were two men wearing earbuds—

both, as it happened, with the distinctive white Apple cables. They owed

past, not even glancing at me, just mindlessly navigating around an

obstacle. Mindlessly. Jesus, could it be?

Three teenage girls were coming toward me now, smoking. The

Surgeon General’s report had come out probably before their parents had

been born, but still, vapidly, they smoked. This time, I was the one to

move out of the way, trying to avoid their exhalations. And since I was moving, I continued to do so; Newton’s rst law, and

all that. I passed a homeless man, a cardboard sign next to him saying,

“Hungry—Please Help.” In front of him was an empty Campbell’s soup

can; some people had tossed coins into it. I wonder if Canada eliminating pennies from circulation in 2013 had

much of an impact on panhandlers. Of course, anyone offering a single

penny would have been rightly cursed for it, but, still, there was a lot less

small change to go around. On the other hand, Canada had one- and

two-dollar coins in wide use, something Americans had never managed;

maybe our indigents did better than theirs. Years ago, I’d read that the introduction of the rst credit cards had

had a big impact on the incomes of bunnies in Playboy Clubs. Before

that, when they’d had to pay cash, men would say “Keep the change,”

even if it resulted in exorbitant tips. But once they started lling out

charge slips, they did the math and tipped the normal percentage. Christ, what digressions!

But that’s the way my mind works—one

thought sparking another, a cascade of notions and connections. And I’d

always assumed it was that way for everyone, but…

But if what Menno had found was true, then most of these people

weren’t having inner monologues like mine; most of them didn’t have

thoughts bouncing around from place to place. No, most of them weren’t

thinking at all, at least not in a rst-person, self-re ective way; they

weren’t having any subjective experiences. I looked at them as I continued to walk. Hundreds upon hundreds of

people wearing blue jeans—a default, an easy choice, a simple rule. I remember Monty Henderson, who lived on my parents’ street. He’d

gone on to join the Calgary Police. He said that on the rst day of

training the new recruits were told to “ t in or fuck off”—and they all

just capitulated. I was moving mostly against the ow of pedestrians now; for

whatever reason, the tide had turned, and the bulk of them were going

west. One bumped into me. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and beetled on. I’d once seen a documentary about ocking behavior in birds. To get

the effect we observe, each bird only has to apply three simple rules. The

“separation rule” says avoid crowding your neighbors—you gotta give

the other birds some room in order to avoid collisions. The “alignment

rule” says look at where all the other birds are going and pick a heading

for yourself that’s an average of everyone else’s trajectories. And the

“cohesion rule” says move toward the average position of all your

neighbors, an edict that prevents the ock from dissipating. Computer

models that employ these rules produce behavior indistinguishable from

real ocking; similar rules control the schooling of sh. Could the movements of humans be equally simple?

Birds almost

certainly did this without conscious thought; sh clearly did. A ock of birds. A school of sh. A crowd of humans. Were we really all that different?

And were other rules just as simple, and just as mindlessly applied?

Choose clothes that are similar to those that others are wearing; adopt

phrases you’ve heard others use; lower your gaze when passing someone;

try not to bump into people, but if you do, apologize. So many of the things we do are clearly algorithmic. Did I really

think I was the rst unathletic kid to fake tripping over a nonexistent

stone to explain a pathetic performance in a race?

They all do that. The

rst guy to try the old yawn-becoming-an-arm-around-her-shoulders-at-

the-movies bit?

They all do that. The rst person to…

Maybe it didn’t even take three rules; maybe it took only one. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. T15

HE University of Manitoba has an illustrious history in psychology

and philosophy, which is why I’d chosen to go there, and why,

despite an urge to refer to my students as Sweathogs, I’m happy to still

teach there. It’s where pioneering neurophilosophers Patricia and Paul

Churchland taught from 1969 to 1984; it’s where Michael Persinger of

God-helmet fame got his PhD in 1971; it’s where Bob Altemeyer

produced the test for right-wing authoritarianism that was extensively

cited in Nixon counsel John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience;

and it’s where Menno Warkentin did his pioneering reciprocal-altruism

studies. And so, of course, there were faculty here who might be able to

help me with my problem, but I wanted somebody who wasn’t closely

associated with Menno, and so I looked up memory researchers at other

institutions. Soon enough, I settled on Bhavesh Namboothiri, who taught

across town at the University of Winnipeg. I’d met him in passing at a

few conferences: a husky guy perhaps ten years older than I with a New

Delhi accent I occasionally had trouble parsing. I went to meet him in his of ce, which was an odd wedge shape, with

tomato-soup-colored walls and bookcases so shallow that a couple of

centimeters of many volumes stuck out past the shelves; I hoped they

were bolted in place. We shot the usual academic breeze for a while—how the

administration was killing us, how nice it was to have a mostly empty

campus in the summer, how criminal it was that academic salaries were

lagging ever further behind private-sector equivalents—and then I got

down to the heart of the matter, so to speak. “I was reading online that

you’ve been doing some remarkable work in recovering lost memories.”

“Yes, indeed. I hope someday to apply it to a few of our federal

politicians.”

“Ha-ha. But, see, here’s the thing: I don’t remember anything from

the rst six months of the year 2001.”

Namboothiri’s unibrow ascended his forehead. “But your memories

before that, and after, are normal?”

“As far as I can tell.”

He leaned back in his chair and interlaced his ngers behind his

balding head. “Do you have any idea why you can’t remember that

period?”

I took a deep breath. If this man was going to help me, he had to

know at least part of the truth. “Yes. It has to do with the nature of

consciousness. I was one of the subjects in an experiment done back then

at U of M, and it had the effect of knocking me down to being a

philosopher’s zombie.”

“You’re shitting me. You mean Chalmers and all that crap?”

“Yes, exactly. For those six months, my lights were on, but nobody

was home, and I can’t remember anything from that period. And yet a

philosopher’s zombie must have some sort of memory—otherwise, its

behavior wouldn’t be indistinguishable from that of a normal person. I

took courses, I interacted with people, I even managed a relationship

with a girl—and the memories of that time had to have been stored

somewhere. But for the life of me, I can’t access them.”

Namboothiri nodded slowly. “We all have memories we can no

longer access. For most of us, that’s everything before about the age of

three; that’s when we switch from indexing memories visually to

indexing them verbally. The switching happens at the same time children

start having imaginary friends—and that makes perfect sense: they’re

beginning to have an inner monologue and don’t yet realize that it’s

themselves that they’re talking to.”

“Very Julian Jaynes,” I said, referring to the author of one of my

favorite books, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the

Bicameral Mind. “Exactly. Anyway, verbal indexing is much more ef cient, which is

why once you have a signi cant vocabulary, you switch over to it. It’s

way easier to mentally say, ‘Remember the house my friend Anil lived in’

than it is to shuf e mentally through pictures of every house you’ve ever

committed to memory, hoping for a match. But, you know, there are

adults who do index their memories visually. Ever read Temple Grandin?

The famous autistic?”

I nodded and cited the title of her most popular book. “Thinking in

Pictures.”

“Exactly. And apparently she does.” He brought his hands down to

his armrests and leaned forward, almost conspiratorially. “You know as

well as I do that neuroscience advances through a series of unfortunate

accidents—fortunate for us, the researchers, but often devastating for the

patients. You know how rare retrograde amnesia is—outside of soap

operas, I mean. Imagine how rare it is to nd someone deep on the

autism spectrum suffering from it. But one of my patients here has

precisely that condition. Poor woman suffered a traumatic brain injury in

a motorcycle accident; couldn’t recall anything much from before the

collision, her whole life basically wiped out.”

“Like Lieutenant Uhura in ‘The Changeling.’” I’d expected the usual

blank stare I got when I made one of my patented “All I need to know in

life I learned from Star Trek” references, but, to my surprise,

Namboothiri pointed a nger at me, and said, “Exactly!

In that episode,

Nomad supposedly wiped her memories. But, you know, what must’ve

really happened is the same thing that happens when you format a disk

drive. A normal formatting doesn’t wipe the drive clean; it just wipes the

le allocation table—essentially, the index. All the other ones and zeros

on the disk are left intact, which is why you read about police recovering

les criminals thought they’d erased. That’s what must’ve happened to

Lieutenant Uhura: the indexing of her memories was wiped, but the

memories themselves were left intact—wh ich explains her being back at

work on the bridge of the Enterprise in the next episode. Well, same

thing for the woman in the motorcycle accident. Her memories were still

there, but the index of them—in her case, as an autistic, a massive visual

index—was damaged by the impact. But using a variation of the

Montreal technique, I’ve been able to help her re-access her memories.”

“You mean with direct electrical stimulation of her brain?

Like

Wilder Pen eld did?

The whole ‘I smell burnt toast’ thing?”

“Yes. Of course, we’ve come a long way since Pen eld’s day. We don’t

have to open the skull to do the stimulation. The beauty of it is, as we

learned thanks to the case I’ve been talking about, the visual memory

index, long abandoned in neurotypicals, is physically separate from the

verbal memory index. So, in your case, well—how old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Fine. Well, in your case, we don’t have to rummage around through

the thirty-six years or so of memory that you’ve indexed verbally. If I’m

right, any memories you laid down during your philosophical-zombie

period will be accessible through the visual index. Instead of looking for

a six-month needle in a thirty-nine-year haystack, the memories from

those six months in 2001, or at least the index entries for them, will only

be mixed in with a few years of much older memories, and, since those

memories are of early childhood, they’ll be easy to recognize as irrelevant

to the task at hand.”

“Excellent, excellent. Thank you.”

“Have you had a recent MRI?”

“No.”

“All right. I have a friend at St. Boniface. Let me call her and see if

she can squeeze you in.” He picked up the phone on his desk and made a

call; I only heard his side. “Hi, Brenda, it’s Bhavesh. Listen, I need to get an MRI done for a…a

patient of mine, and I don’t want to—wh at?

Really?

Hang on.” He held

the handset to his chest. “How fast can you get over to St. Boniface?”

I frowned. “This time of day, no traf c?

Ten minutes.”

“Go!

She’s got a cancellation at half-past two.”

I hurried out the door. “J16

“So,” I asked, looking out at the sea of faces, “in our example,

why do we accord moral standing to Jacob, but not to the robot?

Why do we say the state can’t execute Jacob but it can shut off

and dismantle the robot?”

“Well,” said Zach, in the second row, “Jacob is a Homo

sapien.”

“Homo sapiens,” I said. The kid looked baf ed. I was reminded of the Wayne and Shuster skit about the

assassination of Julius Caesar. The private eye investigating Big

Julie’s demise orders a “martinus.” “Don’t you mean martini?”

asks the bartender. And the detective snaps back, “If I wanted

two, I’d ask for them.”

“Homo sapiens is singular,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a

Homo sapien.”

“Oh. Okay. So what’s the plural of Homo sapiens?”

I rattled off all seven syllables: “Homines sapientes.”

The kid didn’t miss a beat. “Now you’re just making shit up.”

IM, thank you for coming in,” Namboothiri said. I’d found an

email from him waiting for me when I’d woken up, and had

hustled back to his of ce. “My pleasure.”

“I have the MRI scans from St. Boniface.”

He sounded concerned—and that made me concerned. “Oh, my God. A tumor?”

“No, not a tumor.”

“Then what?”

“It turns out the medical-imaging group at St. Boniface didn’t have to

open a new le for you. They already had one.”

“But I’ve never been there—well, except to visit sick friends.”

“Ah, but you were there, in 2001.

It seems I’m not the only

importunate professor in town. Back then, one Menno Warkentin twisted

a few arms and got you in to be scanned, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

My heart was pounding. “And?”

“And my friend at St. Boniface sent that scan along, as well. They

normally don’t keep records from that far back, but yours was tagged for

retention for research purposes; the radiologist noted he’d never seen

anything like it.” He turned to a monitor. “Here you are today, in 2020.”

He hit Alt-Tab. “And here you are in 2001.”

I knew the layout of the brain, but I was no expert at reading scans. “Yes?” I said, looking at the older scan. “Here,” said Namboothiri pointing at a thin hyperintensity line—

what one might have taken for a scratch on the lm if it hadn’t been a

digital image. “Damage to the amygdala,” I said, stunned. He pointed to another line. “And the orbitofrontal cortex,” added

Namboothiri. “The paralimbic system,” I said softly. “Bingo,” said Namboothiri. He pointed to the recent scan. “The

encephalomalacia has abated over the years, although the lesions are still

present. But the abnormality dates back to at least”—he peered at the

bottom left corner of the image—“June fteenth, 2001.”

“My God. Um, look, could transcranial focused ultrasound create

lesions like that?

That’s what Menno’s equipment used.”

“TUS?

No way. These are more like, I dunno, burns.”

“Shit.”

“Anyway. I thought you’d want to know. I’m going to work with the

recent scan, mapping out where to search for your missing memories. Sadly, I do have many other things on my plate, but I’ll get to it as soon

as I can.”

I pushed the at of my hand sharply against the slate-gray door to

Menno’s of ce and it swung open, banging against the wall-mounted

stopper. Pax rose up on all fours, and Menno swung around in his brown

leather chair. “Who’s there?” he asked, sounding more than a little

frightened. “It’s me,” I said. “Jim Marchuk.”

“Padawan!

You startled me. What can I do for you?”

“You’ve already done plenty,” I said, fury in my voice as I closed the

door behind me. “I’ve seen the MRI.”

Menno’s broad face often betrayed what he was thinking; I suspect

that since going blind, he’d more or less forgotten about trying to control

his facial expressions. And so this, naked in front of me, was what

someone looked like when, after almost twenty years, they heard the

other shoe falling. Still, he made a game attempt: “What MRI?”

“The one done near the end of my dark period, showing the lesions

to my paralimbic system.” Normally, by this time, Pax would have curled

up at Menno’s feet, but she recognized the anger in my tone: she stood at

attention, ears perked, mouth open, teeth exposed. “Jim…”

“What were you trying to do, for God’s sakes?”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I’m so, so sorry.”

“How many times were you going to use me as an experimental

animal?”

“It wasn’t like that, Jim. Not at all.”

“Christ, rst you knock me into a coma—”

“I never wanted any harm to come to you, ever.”

“—then you wrecked my paralimbic system. Actual fucking brain

damage!”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you!

I was trying to cure you.”

Boisterous students were moving down the corridor. While waiting

for them to pass, I digested this. “Cure…?”

“Yes,” said Menno emphatically. “We kept testing you with the

Lucidity equipment, hoping to nd that your inner voice had come back. A month, two months, three months—it was killing me, what we’d done

to you. Of course, there’s more to consciousness than just an inner voice

—it’s a whole suite of things—but that was the only aspect we could

directly check for. When it’s present, it surely correlates with it being like

something to be you, to having rst-person, subjective experience. But

we’d somehow taken all that away—an d I had to try to bring it back.”

“So you carved into my skull?”

“Nothing as dangerous as that. And we succeeded, you know. Your

inner voice did come back.”

“The MRI I saw was dated June fteenth. But I have no recollection

of anything until the beginning of July.”

Menno tilted his head, as if thinking. “It was so long ago. I don’t

remember. But…but, yeah, now that I think about it, your inner voice

didn’t come back right away. It was—God, well, I guess it could have

been a couple of weeks later.”

“Damn it, Menno, you want me to go to the dean or to the press

rst?

Or maybe the cops?

What the hell did you do to me?”

He was quiet for a long moment, then spread his arms. “Lucidity was

a military project, did you know that?

We were working on a battle eld

microphone. Anyway, that meant we had access to some other classi ed

techniques. The Pentagon was testing a system—they’ve since abandoned

it, thank God—using two intersecting laser beams to trigger action

potentials. The beams supposedly passed harmlessly through living

tissue, and, well, there was a paper out of Russia that suggested an

approach related to stimulating the amygdala that I thought just might

bring you back, so—”

“Jesus!”

“I was trying to x things—”

“And instead fucked me up even worse!”

Pax was staring at me, still startled by my anger, but Menno’s voice

was calm. “As I said, the laser system didn’t work as advertised. Turned

out the damn thing destroyed tissue along the lines of both beams—

although fortunately the beams were extremely narrow, and they

cauterized the blood vessels. Thank the Lord for neuroplasticity, though;

you bounced back from the damage, but…”

“But it was like Phineas Gage,” I said. “I’m so sorry,” said Menno. “I was trying to help. And, look, Kiehl

didn’t publish until ve years later; I had no way of knowing.”

I thought about that. Kent Kiehl’s seminal paper “A Cognitive

Neuroscience Perspective on Psychopathy: Evidence for Paralimbic

System Dysfunction,” had come out in 2006.

He demonstrated that

damage to what he dubbed the paralimbic portions of the brain—

including the amygdala—could cause people to exhibit psychopathic

symptoms. Phineas Gage, the Vermont railway worker who, in 1848, had

a tamping iron blown straight up through his skull, probably suffered

from that sort of damage, turning him from an affable fellow into a

manipulative, reckless, irresponsible, promiscuous monster—in other

words, a psychopath. “I’m truly sorry, Jim,” Menno said again. “Paralimbic damage,” I said, thinking aloud. “But…” I put a hand on

my chest, ngers splayed. “My heart…”

“Yes?” said Menno. My head was swimming. The kni ng, the guy with the splayed teeth,

the blood freezing on the sidewalk. I remembered it all so clearly. And—

No. Damn it. No. Another old paper came to mind—I’d cited it

myself in some of my own publications: Armin Schnider on

“Spontaneous Confabulation, Reality Monitoring, and the Limbic

System.” Schnider contended that those with anterior limbic damage

became absolutely convinced of narrat ives they’d created to explain

events even though they were just making things up. I looked at Menno, a little re ection of me staring back from his

opaque glasses. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly macho guy, and,

of course, there was nothing funny about breast cancer, but, still, men

were strange when it came to that part of their anatomy, and a stabbing

is a way more interesting story to tell, but—

No, no, I would have been here in Winnipeg on—what date had

Sandy Cheung said?

February something…

February nineteenth. Monday, February nineteenth. First business day

during Reading Week—or, as some of my less-academically-minded

friends called it, Ski Week, the time each year during which Canadian

universities had no classes so students could catch up on their work. Yes,

if I’d needed a tumor removed, I might well have arranged to have had it

done when I could be back in Calgary with my family. Jesus. I looked again at Menno. “You fucked me up.”

“I’m so, so sorry. I really was trying to help.”

I leaned against the of ce door, thinking. “The inner-voice stuff—or,

more to the point, the lack of inner-voice stuff: did you publish about

that?”

Menno shook his head. “Like I said, all our research was classi ed. And when Dom moved to the States, well, it was his project, really.”

“You’d made a major breakthrough—philosopher’s zombies exist!—

and you kept quiet about it all these years?”

“I had to,” Menno replied. “I’m a Mennonite.”

“Yes?” I said. “So the idea of people without inner lives contradicted

your religious beliefs?”

“What?

No, no. I mean, yes, I suppose so—where’s the soul, and all

that?

But that’s not what I’m talking about. Mennonites are paci sts. I

couldn’t tell the DoD what we’d found. God, can you imagine what

they’d have done if they knew?

Talk about cannon fodder!

They could

use our technique to identify which soldiers would make the best

mindless little drones. I had to bury the research as much as I could.”

That took me aback. “You think p-zeds are blindly obedient?”

“I know so—because until I messed up your amygdala, you yourself

were. I was stunned when Dom managed to talk you into continuing

with our experiments; I’d gured you’d never want to see us again. But a

guy in a lab coat asks you to do something, and, boom!, yes, sir; as you

wish, sir; no problem, sir. Philosopher’s zombies aren’t leaders; they’re

followers. They don’t want anything themselves. Bob Altemeyer was

probably identifying p-zeds, as you call them, with his research here on

authoritarian followers, and Stanley Milgram almost certainly was

identifying them back in 1961 with his obedience-to-authority

experiments. Of course a p-zed will shock someone just because they’re

told to do so; they have no inner voice arguing against it. Thank God,

eventually yours came back.”

“So no harm, no foul, right?

It all worked out in the end?

You robbed

me of half a year of my life!”

I expected some sort of protest; no matter how accurate the charge,

most people re exively defend themselves. But Menno just sat there

quietly for a long moment, and then, slowly, deliberately, he removed his

glasses, set them on his desk, and he looked at me. With his dead glass eyes. “I felt terrible about what happened to you, Jim. You have no idea

how much it tore me up. And, as a psychologist, I know all about the

indicators, the signs—the preternatural calmness that comes over a

person when the decision has been made. And when I made my decision,

I recognized it for precisely what it was, but nonetheless, it seemed the

thing to do.”

His eyes always faced straight forward; he was incapable of a

sidelong glance. And he was looking at me, or at least facing me, and

although he blinked at the normal rate, his aim never wavered. Even

though I knew he couldn’t see a thing through those glass spheres, it was

more unnerving than even the psychopathic stare. “You think it was easy, living with what we’d done?

What I’d done?”

He shook his head, blind gaze swinging like twin searchlights. “It

tortured me. I couldn’t sleep; couldn’t—you know.” He paused. “I drove

out to Dauphin one night—a long drive, a mostly empty highway. There

were trees at the side of the road, which is what I’d expected, but it was

frustrating as hell—just saplings, young elms. I wanted something

massive, something I was sure wouldn’t snap in two. And then, there it

was—a whole stand of them. I took aim at one in the middle, and I

oored it. And, well…” He waved a hand in a circular motion in front of

his face. “This.” He shrugged a little. “It wasn’t the outcome I was

looking for, and it’s been a bitch, let me tell you, all these years, being

blind.” The glassy spheres faced me once more, and I looked at them for

as long as I could. “I can’t make up for what I did, Jim, but recognize

that, in some measure at least, I’ve paid for it.”

I17

was still in a daze from Menno’s revelations when the taxi dropped me

at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The design was supposed

to suggest dove’s wings surrounding a glass spire that rose a hundred

meters into the sky, but to me it looked like God had crammed a Bundt

cake down around a traf c cone. I was running late, and Kayla had already checked out of her room at

the nearby Inn at The Forks; she’d texted me to say she’d headed on in to

the reception. I hustled over to the entrance, giving my ritual nod to the

statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the way. The reception was being held in the Garden of Contemplation, which

was in the vast lobby adjacent to the re ecting pool. It was bordered by

re-creations of the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway,

commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Most of the men were

in suits and ties, but I was dressed more casually; Kayla and I planned to

make it all the way to Saskatoon tonight, and I wanted to be comfortable

for the drive. I looked around but didn’t see any sign of Kayla. But I did see Nick

Smith, a partner in an accounting rm that was helping to sponsor the

lecture series. He had a golfer’s tan that was close to a sunburn and was

chatting with someone I didn’t know: a handsome black man of about

thirty- ve. As I drifted by, the man was saying, “I don’t even know how

to put this, but—”

Nick caught sight of me, and he leaned out of the conversation long

enough to pull me in. “Oh, Jim, let me introduce you to someone. Jim

Marchuk, this is Darius Clark. Jim’s on the board here.” Darius was

standing in a military at-ease posture, with hands clasped behind his

back. As Nick turned back to face him, he adopted the same pose. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “Darius is giving a lecture here tomorrow,” Nick said. “Well, not exactly,” Darius said. He had a bit of a Southern drawl. “I’m accompanying my partner. She’s the one giving the talk.”

“Ah,” I said. “But I was just saying to Mr. Smith here—”

“Please, call me Nick.”

Darius smiled at that. “I was just saying to Nick, I’m visiting from

Washington—DC, that is. Latisha and I live there.”

“I love that city,” I said. “No,” said Darius affably, “you love the Mall and maybe a few

streets on either side. The city itself is pretty crappy.”

“Oh.”

“I only moved there to be with Latisha. She works for the DoJ, the

Department of Justice. Anyway, my point is this. Y’all are having this

wonderful reception for us here, and earlier today, we went to lunch at

the of ces of Nick’s rm.”

“Nice,” I said. “It was. And I don’t just mean the food. I never had bison before,

but…”

Darius trailed off, and I smiled encouragingly. “Yes?”

He lifted his shoulders. “Now I know what it feels like to be white.”

“Pardon?” I said. And, to my surprise, Nick chimed in with, “Say

what?”

“If you’re black, you can’t walk into a law of ce, or a government

of ce, or anything like that in DC without people looking at you like

you’re there to rob the place. You have no idea what it’s like with people

always expecting the worst from you.” He spread his arms. “But here I

was welcomed, made to feel right at home. Nobody looked alarmed or

scared when I came in. Everybody was like, ‘Good afternoon, sir. May I

take your coat?’”

“Welcome to friendly Manitoba,” Nick said. It was an empty response; “Friendly Manitoba” was the slogan on

our license plates. Most Indigenous Canadians would tell a very different

story about visiting highfalutin places here. “I guess,” said Darius. Nick was protracting his vowels now. “Really,” he said. “It’s totally

normal here.”

Darius narrowed his eyes. “Are you making fun of me?”

Just then, a woman who must have been Latisha joined us; she

slipped an arm around Darius’s waist, and I took the opportunity to

maneuver Nick toward the bar. “What’s wrong with him?” Nick asked, glancing back at Darius. “You were imitating him,” I said. “Pardon?”

“You’re saying ‘pardon’ now, but you said ‘say what’ back there.”

“Did I?”

“And you were totally copying his posture and accent.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Why would I—”

“Everybody does it to one degree or another. ‘Unconscious mimicry,’

it’s called.”

“Oh,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

I looked at him, my heart pounding, as I wondered if that were

literally true. Across the lobby, I spotted Kayla emerging from the ladies’ room. I

told Nick I’d catch him later and hurried over to her, feeling

apprehensive as I maneuvered around people. Normally I was ne in

crowds, but I found myself wondering how many Nicks—how many p-

zeds—were ocking about me. The route we’d planned from Winnipeg to Saskatoon was pig-simple: a

straight line 570 kilometers due west on the Trans-Canada to Regina,

then north for 260 kilometers on Saskatchewan Highway 11 up to

Saskatoon—the perfect sort of trip to be executed without much

conscious thought. Despite our late start, we were determined to make

the rst, longer leg without a stop, then, after a quick bite, pressing on

the rest of the way. We put the radio on brie y to get a traf c report, but rst caught the

tail end of a newscast: “The bodies of six more dead migrant workers

have been found today in Texas. State governor Dylan McCharles denies

any correlation between this and the passing of the McCharles Act…”

Later, after we’d gotten the word to avoid Confusion Corner—wh ich

pretty much went without saying here in The Peg—K ayla turned off the

radio, and I said, “I went to see Menno Warkentin this afternoon.”

“Oh, wow!” she replied. “How’s he doing?”

“Fine, I guess. But he knew all about my lost time, and—”

And I faltered. I’d intended to immediately tell Kayla about the big

psychological discovery, about how the whole world was lled with p-

zeds, but looking at her pro le, outlined by the light of the setting sun,

that didn’t seem the most important thing. No, what I wanted—wh at I

needed—was for this brilliant, beautiful woman to understand what had

happened all those years ago; her wariness at lunch made perfect sense in

retrospect, but I couldn’t stand having her continuing to be worried. “He

explained it all to me,” I said. “About those horrible things I did. He’d

tried something back in June 2001, an experimental technique, and it

damaged my limbic system.”

She brie y faced me. “My God, really?”

“Yes. Fortunately, the damage was along two very narrow paths. You

know Phineas Gage?”

“The guy who got a metal rod blown through his head?”

“Exactly. Left a nine-centimeter-diameter hole, but he survived for

twelve years. It changed him, though—permanently in his case; made

him pretty much psychopathic. Well, what Menno did to me was similar

to what happened to Phineas Gage—um, but at a narrower gauge, so to

speak; the damage was microns wide instead of centimeters. My brain

rerouted around it.”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I wasn’t sure at rst, but it’s been

obvious over these last couple of days that you’re back to your old self,”

she said. “Hell, I wouldn’t be alone with you here in the middle of

nowhere if I didn’t think you were.”

“Thanks.”

“And, y’know, I’ve read your blog; I’ve read your books. There’s no

way a psychopath could have written them.”

“Hitler was fond of animals and children.”

“You’re not helping your case,” she said, but I could hear the mirth in

her voice. “Sorry.”

“But I don’t understand. Why was Menno experimenting on you like

that?”

“Well, see, a couple of months before you’d met me, he’d done

something that caused me to lose my inner voice…”

One hundred kilometers…

“And Menno believes most of the human race has no inner monologue?”

asked Kayla. “That’s right. Something like sixty percent, he thinks.”

“Hmmm. That’s roughly the same percentage Victoria and I found

are in the Q1 state.”

“I wonder if it’s the same sixty percent,” I said. “If those in the Q1

state, with one electron in superposition, all have just the minimum level

of mental functioning, well, their lights could indeed be on with nobody

being home.”

“Philosopher’s zombies,” said Kayla, still getting used to the notion. “Right. Who the hell knows what IQ tests really measure, but a Q1

might do just ne on them; pattern recognition and spatial translations

could be entirely autonomic, after all.”

“True.”

“And you’ve already shown that Q2s are psychopaths—who surely

have an inner voice, an inner life, but literally think only about

themselves; they have no empathy.”

“So you were a Q2 when you…when you did those things?”

“I—no, no, I couldn’t be. As I said, psychopaths clearly do have inner

voices; they’re plotting and scheming all the time. But I’ve been

consulting with a memory expert at UW. He thinks the reason I can’t

remember that entire period—not just the part where I was behaving

normally but also the part where I was behaving badly—was because I

was a p-zed throughout; no inner voice, so no verbal indexing of the

memories.”

“So there are two kinds of psychopaths?”

“Maybe,” I said. “One group would be quantum psychopaths—Q2s

—with two of the three microtubular electrons in superposition. The

other group would be those with paralimbic damage. Oh, sure, there

could be some overlap: some Q2s might happen to have paralimbic

damage, but so might some Q1s and Q3s. Perhaps the psychological

community has been con ating two separate things: Q2s, who are

psychopathic at the quantum level, and hapless SOBs who have brain

damage that leads them to doing terrible things.”

“I bet that’s true,” said Kayla. “You know, you, me, Bob Hare, we’ve

all run into that problem. Remember Hare’s Snakes in Suits, about

psychopaths in the workplace?

Try to tell the average Joe that

psychopaths are everywhere and he balks, because to him the term

exclusively means crazed killers like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The average guy sees a difference not just in degree

but in kind between Paul Bernardo and a surgeon who can

dispassionately open up somebody’s chest. And he doesn’t see the

connection between Jeffrey Dahmer and an avari cious bank president. And yet we keep telling him that they’re the same thing. Well, maybe in

this instance, the laypeople are right. Mayb e we actually are talking

about two distinct phenomena.” I shrugged a little. “It doesn’t help that

psychopathy—of either kind, I suppose—can manifest itself in so many

different ways, thanks to differing genetics, upbringings, socioeconomic

conditions, childhood abuse or lack thereof, and so on. There are twenty

traits on the Hare Checklist, right?

Each of which can be absent, weakly

present, or strongly present, and you need a score of thirty or above to be

diagnosed a psychopath. That means there must be thousands of

different avors of psychopathy.”

“Fourteen million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four

hundred and fteen.”

I looked at her. “Math’s my thing,” she said, ashing a radiant smile. Two hundred kilometers…

“Okay, but if Q1s are p-zeds, and Q2s are psychopaths,” I said, “what

does quantum-superposition state three correspond to?”

“Us?” said Kayla, throwing out an idea. “What do you mean by ‘us’?”

“A person ring on all cylinders: a normal, fully conscious human

being with the ability to re ect upon yourself, to think about whether

what you’re doing is right or not. In other words a person with—”

“A conscience,” I said. “Precisely. A conscience.”

Could it be that simple, I wondered?

An additive effect?

Stage one,

with one of three electrons in superposition: basic functioning, but no

awareness. Stage two, with two of three electrons in superposition: the same

basic functioning as before, but with self-awareness added on. And stage three, with all three electrons in superposition: everything

from stage one and everything from stage two, plus an extra layer—a

degree of thoughtful introspection, a conscience—added on top. “Consciousness with conscience…” I said. I saw Kayla’s pro le, illuminated now only by the dashboard lights,

nod. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Oh!

And it could be abbreviated C-W-C, right?”

In the dim light, I pantomimed writing the three letters in the air. “Conscious with conscience. I like that there’s a W in the middle, because

there literally is a double you: two yous, the basic consciousness, and

then a looking back on that consciousness, a self-re ection.”

“C-W-C,” she said. “Bit of a mouthful.”

I was reminded of Douglas Adams’s quip about WWW being the only

abbreviation that had three times as many syllables as the thing it stood

for. Still: “Only if you spell it out. If you say the initials as a word, C-W-

C spells ‘quick.’ You know, like in bright or mentally agile: a quick mind,

a quick wit…”

“Hmm,” she said. “It’s like the Norm MacDonald bit about the Fantastic Four.”

She shot me a glance. “Reed Richards is giving them their new names: ‘Sue, you’ll be The

Invisible Woman. And Johnny, how cool is this?

You’ll be The Human

Torch. And, me, let’s call me Mr. Fantastic—yeah, that’s it. Oh, and Ben,

you’ll be The Thing.’ Old Ben wasn’t too happy about that. ‘You get Mr. Fantastic and I get The Thing?’”

“Well,” said Kayla, “the p-zeds quite literally won’t care that we got a

better name.”

“And the psychos?”

“Don’t tell them,” said Kayla. “Don’t make them angry. You wouldn’t

like them when they’re angry.”

“Continued Marvel motif for the win,” I said, my heart beating faster. Three hundred kilometers…

“But come on,” said Kayla. “I mean really. How could it possibly be

true?

How could most of the population be philosopher’s zombies?”

“Well, it’s like the Neanderthals, right?” I said. “They had bigger

brains than us. But they were nothing but p-zeds. They made no art. They didn’t bury their dead with grave goods—implying they had no

concept of an afterlife. They didn’t go in for bodily adornment: no

makeup or jewelry, except near the end of their reign, and then that

might well have been simple mimicry of us.”

“They made tools,” Kayla said. “So do chimps and crows. Doesn’t mean there’s anyone inside having

an interior monologue. And remember, the Neanderthals made essentially

the same tools for 200,000 years: the Mousterian industry. They chipped

stone choppers exactly the same way, with no innovation, no

improvement. Never once, as far as we can tell, when a int nodule

broke in an odd way that might have been better did a Neanderthal tilt

his head to one side and say, ‘Hmmm…isn’t that interesting?

And what if

I did this…’ Instead, he discarded any such nodule and just kept doing

the same old thing without really being awake.”

“Caught knapping, so to speak.”

I’d heard it as “Caught napping,” and she must have realized that. She took her hands off the steering wheel long enough to act out

whacking two stones together. “You know, knapping—wi th a k.”

“I can see why I fell for you all those years ago,” I said, grinning, as

the headlamp from an approaching car bathed our faces in light…

Four hundred kilometers…

“The problem with leaving philosophical zombies to the philosophers is

that they take things to the extreme,” I said. “Camp A—David Chalmers

is in it—proposes a creature that is quark-for-quark identical to a normal

person but, despite being precisely the same physically, has no

consciousness, and yet somehow behaves indistinguishably from an

entity that is conscious. It’s an argument designed to show that

consciousness is something non-physical. “Camp B—Daniel Dennett is in it—says Chalmers and others who

say zombie behavior would be indistinguishable from normal behavior

are simply wrong in asserting that consciousness is something that can be

separated out like that. Dennett would say consciousness is not a single

thing, but a combination of capacities.”

“Right,” said Kayla. “And Chalmers postulates one world entirely lled with fully

conscious beings, and another, completely separate world entirely lled

with zombies—‘Zombieworld,’ as he calls it.”

“Okay.”

“But I’m with Dennett; I’ve always had a problem with the

Zombieworld postulate. For a thought experiment in a classroom, it’s

ne. But in real life?

In actuality?

I just don’t see how you can get a

viable society as complex as our own that consists solely of nonconscious

entities. Without at least some conscious beings for the nonconscious

ones to emulate, you’d get—well, you’d get Neanderthals: a stagnant

civilization, with nothing changing. No, you need some truly conscious

people; you need quicks. We Q3s come up with new ideas, and they’re

emulated over and over by the Q1s.”

“But if the Q1s are behaviorally different like that—however subtly—

then they aren’t really philosopher’s zombies, not in the sense Chalmers

means.”

“Yeah, okay. So let’s make p-zed a full acronym to distinguish our

zombies from his. P-Z-E-D: ‘philosophical zombies exhibiting

differences.’ And ours really are philosophical, right?

‘Philosophy’ means

‘lover of wisdom,’ and our p-zeds do love wisdom, in the sense of being

attracted to it because they don’t have any of their own. But when an

idea comes along—”

“You’re talking about memes,” said Kayla. I nodded. “I guess I am: ideas that propagate through society. It’s

funny that the phrase ‘going viral’ has become synonymous with ‘meme.’

P-zeds of the kind we’re talking about have no conscious defense against

ideas, no matter how stupid they are, and so are easily infected by them.”

Kayla nodded. “That would explain the polling-credibility gap. You

know how you constantly hear poll results that seem to imply that you

are an outlier?

You don’t know anyone who believes in creationism, yet

the polls say the majority of Americans, at least, do. You don’t know

anyone who believes in alien abductions, but the polls say most people

do. Maybe those are cases of memes taking over and spreading through

the p-zed population. Yes, there may be a little spillover into the Q2 or

Q3 levels, but by de nition it’s mostly Q1s that are susceptible to that

sort of unthinking acceptance.”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’s the whole p-zed playbook: just say or do

whatever the guy next to you is saying or doing. And, well, if a Q2 or a

Q3 can plant a notion, no matter how abhorrent, it can spread.”

I couldn’t see if Kayla was frowning, but it sounded like she was. “It

still seems…I don’t know, a bit pat?”

“Not really,” I said. “René Girard had it right. He argued that

humans are basically imitative creatures. We don’t think for ourselves;

rather, we just copy what others are doing. He was decades ahead of

modern neuroscience. Long before mirror neurons were discovered, he

intuited—from his studies of existing cultures and from reading ancient

texts—that most of our behavior is imitative—‘psychological mimesis,’

he called it.”

“Wasn’t Girard the guy who talked about societies always nding

scapegoats?”

“Exactly, which is more piling-on behavior, everybody converging on

the same thought.” I looked out the side window at the at, dark prairie

under a sliver of moon. “We’re all hominidae; we’re all apes. Well, what’s

the thing that apes have in common?

It’s right there in the name we give

to them—to us. Apes?

We ape each other; we copy each other. Monkey

see, monkey do. Great apes?

Damn straight. We excel at imitation.”

Kayla replied, “And we—or the p-zeds, at any rate—copy

indiscriminately, without re ection. And if the person they’re copying is a

psychopath, then their behavior ends up being de facto psychopathic,

too.”

“Exactly what happened in Nazi Germany,” I said. “The average—

well, I was going to say the average Joe, but I suppose it was the average

Hans over there—wasn’t a bad guy. But he and his fellow countrymen

were great at aping, and the people they saw, assholes like Hitler and

Himmler and Goebbels and Goering, people who were psychopathic

monsters, became, quite literally, their role models. They copied their

attitudes, their speech, their practices. Think of the Nuremberg rallies: all

the p-zeds falling in line…”

“Just like…”

She trailed off, but I knew what she’d been about to say, and so I said

it for her: “Just like my grandfather.” Of course, if he really had been

Ernst the Enforcer, I suppose he was more likely a Q2—one of the hubs,

like Devin Becker, around whom p-zeds clustered, the carcinogen that

caused a mob of Q1s to metastasize. I stared through the windshield, the lights of Regina smoldering

ahead. Five hundred kilometers…

W18

E hit Regina around 10:30 P. M. By that point, we were exhausted,

and I think we both looked wistfully at the motels ashing past as

we entered the city. But Kayla had to be at work the next day, and so,

after a brief stop for coffee and donuts to keep our blood sugar up, I

took over the driving and got us the rest of the way to Saskatoon. Kayla’s

daughter, Ryan, was staying over at Kayla’s mother’s place, and—

And it was late, and, despite all our progress, Kayla did seem skittish

being alone in her house with me, and so I said, “The couch looks great,”

and I stretched out on it, put on the white-noise app on my iPhone, and

was asleep within minutes. But, for once, I had very nice dreams. Kayla and I made it to the Canadian Light Source a little after 9:00 A. M. I

was amused to note that its street address, on the University of

Saskatchewan campus, was 44 Innovation Boulevard; I suspect the other

occupants of that street were hard-pressed to match the sort of things

Kayla described as she gave me a tour. “A synchrotron,” she said as we

walked along, “is an amazingly versatile tool; it’s the Swiss Army knife of

particle accelerators. You can tune its output to do almost anything,

adjusting energy range, wavelength, resolution, photon brightness, and

beam size. The researchers here do work in fundamental physics,

archeology, geology, botany, new fuel sources, materials science—you

name it.”

“And you said you tested your brother here?

Was that unusual—a

human subject?”

“It used to be, but now we often treat people here. One of the

beamlines is called BMIT—that stands for Biomedical Imaging and

Therapy.”

The synchrotron’s giant storage ring was in a vast square pit,

surrounded on three sides by indoor balconies. The inner side of each

balcony looked down on the ring; the outer side had doors leading into

of ces and labs. As we walked along, Kayla pointed out the various

beamlines—straight projections at oblique angles coming off the ring. She must be used to the constant mechanical roar coming from below,

but it was giving me a headache. “Hey, Kayla,” said a sandy-haired man approaching us; he was

wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. “Welcome back.”

She smiled warmly. “Hi, Jeff.”

“How was Manitoba?”

She glanced at me. “Enlightening.”

Jeff looked amused. “Don’t forget those budget reports, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Kayla replied. “Who’s that?” I said, after he’d walked on. “Oh, sorry. That’s Jeff Cutler; he’s the acting director.”

“Like Clint Eastwood?”

“What?

Oh. Ha-ha.”

“He always dress like that?”

“Actually, yes.” Kayla pointed across the great expanse of the

synchrotron to the balcony on the opposite side. “People have to nd

him all the time; the Hawaiian shirts make him easy to spot. Vic has her

own variation on that; she always wears black, head to toe, and—see!

That’s her, over on the other side.”

“You spotted her; how can she spot you?”

“Easy,” said Kayla. “I’m the one who always has a cute guy in tow.”

She winked, and we headed around two more sides of the square. Victoria was walking and texting; we got quite close before she looked

up. “Hey, Kay,” she said, smiling. “Vic, this is Jim Marchuk.” Vic traded a look with Kayla—a

suppressed grin. Evidently there’d been some discussion about whether

Kayla would look up her old boyfriend when she went to Winnipeg. “And Jim, this is Dr. Victoria Chen.”

“Hello, Jim,” Vic said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

I gave the automatic “All good, I hope” response, and saw, in a

quirking of Vic’s mouth, that it in fact hadn’t all been good; of course

Kayla had told her friend about how it’d gone south all those years ago. “You guys all ready?” Vic said. “We’re lucky today; I get the beamline

while the sun’s still up.” She glanced at the phone she was holding. “My

beamtime starts in four minutes.”

“Great,” said Kayla. Victoria turned around and began walking

briskly. I was amused to see that she was using her hexagonal dosimeter

as a hair clip to hold her long black hair in place. Kayla fell in beside her,

and they chatted physics as we went along. I kept looking down at the

bustling activity in the pit; it reminded me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. When the last balcony came to an end, we headed down a staircase

onto the synchrotron oor. There were other researchers here, some in

lab coats, and Vic and Kayla greeted each one we passed. We quickly came to the SusyQ beamline, which had a gurney parked

in front of it. Victoria had already received ethics approval and

experimental permits for her ongoing work with humans here, but she

still needed me to sign a waiver; I did so without bothering to read it. And then I lay down on my back, and, as Vic loomed in, I couldn’t help

but notice that she was quite lovely. She put a strap—thick, off-white, the

kind of material seat belts were made of—over my forehead to hold my

head still. And then, with Kayla’s help, she rolled the gurney to the end of

her beamline, a series of tubes that terminated in a conical emitter. I looked up at the ceiling, far above. Conduits and pipes hung from it,

and there was a yellow crane unit depending from tracks that apparently

allowed it to move backward and forward as well as left and right. Victoria said, “Okay.”

“Yup, anytime you’re ready.”

She laughed. “We’re done, Jim.”

“Oh.”

She leaned over me again and undid the strap. I rubbed my forehead

to restore circulation; the strap’s texture had been impressed into my

skin. “And what’s the scoop?”

“You’re a Q3, just like me and Kayla,” said Vic. “A super position to be in,” I said as I sat up. “Is he always like that?” Vic said, looking at Kayla. Kayla sighed affectionately. “I’m afraid so.”

I got off the gurney and walked over so I could see the monitor they

were looking at. Vic pointed. “See the three spikes?

Each one is an

electron in superposition.”

“What’s that?” I said, pointing to a wobbly horizontal line much

higher up on the display. “We’re not sure,” said Vic, frowning. “It’s always there when we do

our runs, and it never changes. It looks like some sort of quantum

entanglement, but…” She shrugged. “We’ll identify it eventually,” said Kayla, “but—yeah, it’s been driving

us nuts.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sure you’ll gure it out.”

K19

AYLA had work to do that day, which left me with many hours to

kill. I wanted to ll in as much of my missing six months as

possible, and so I decided to see if anyone I knew from that period

happened to live in Saskatoon now. Kayla set me up in an empty of ce at

the Light Source, and I typed this query into the computer there:

“University of Manitoba” graduated 2003 Saskatoon

I looked at the rst batch of results—LinkedIn pages, business listings

—but didn’t recognize any of the names. I clicked “Next,” and, lo and

behold, there was someone I knew well: David Swinson; we’d had

adjacent dorm rooms. He’d become an optometrist, it seems, and his

business address, according to Google Maps, wasn’t far from the Light

Source. What the hell, I thought, and headed off to ask Kayla if I could

borrow her car. The shopping mall was small by the standards of such things, just a

couple dozen stores, most of which were chain clothing shops: The Gap,

Lululemon, Old Navy. But there were also a few professional of ces: two

family practitioners, an accountant, and my friend Dave the optometrist. His unit had a front window with posters of people wearing glasses. Actually, I was convinced they were posters of people wearing glasses

frames: there was no distortion or re ection to give any indication that

they had lenses in them. I swung the door open, and a little chime sounded. Inside was a

receptionist’s desk, some chairs, wooden racks lled with frames, and

another door that presumably led to the examining room. The

receptionist must have been away because a man emerged from the back

wearing a navy-blue lab coat. I wouldn’t have recognized him on the

street. All but the barest fringe of Dave’s hair was gone, and a full beard

hid much of his lower face. His blue eyes were bracketed by crow’s-feet,

and his skin had both a roughness and looseness it hadn’t possessed

when he’d been in his early twenties. “Dave?” I said. He looked at me without the slightest hint of recognition, which

disappointed me. I liked to think I’d aged better than he had. “Yes?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Jim. Jim Marchuk. You know, from U of M.”

The eyes went wide, and color came into his lined face. “Fuck,” he

said softly. “I know it’s been a long time, but—”

“Get out.” His voice had taken on an edge. “Get the fuck out.”

“Dave, I—”

“Don’t you fucking ‘Dave’ me. Jesus Christ. Jesus Fucking Christ.”

I tried to keep my tone friendly. “I just want to ask you a few

questions.”

“About what?

About how you almost ruined my whole life?

What the

hell are you doing here?

I’m going to piss on your fucking grave, asshole

—and you can’t be in it soon enough.”

“Dave, honestly—”

A vertical vein was standing out in the middle of his forehead. “‘Honestly’?” he sneered. “‘Honestly’?

You don’t know the meaning of

the word.”

“Dave, I don’t know what you think I did, but—”

“But nothing,” he said. His sts were trembling at his sides. He

seemed to be aware of the fact that he was losing it, because he took a

deep breath and let it out slowly. And then he spoke, low, measured:

“This is private property. I’m asking you—I’m telling you—to leave. Right now.”

“Dave…”

“Right now, or I call the goddamn police. Understand?” He pointed

to the glass door, his arm shaking as he did so. I looked at him a moment longer, then shrugged a little. I was worried

about what he might do if I turned my back on him, so I backed out,

wondering exactly what the hell I had done to him all those years ago. I walked around the mall in a daze for a while, trying to regain my

equilibrium and waiting for my heart to stop pounding. When I at last

felt in control enough to operate a motor vehicle, I drove back to the

Light Source to return Kayla’s car. Although my business there was technically concluded—I’d been

analyzed on the beamline, and could take a cab to the bus station for the

long trip home—it was now Friday afternoon, and, to my delight, Kayla

suggested I stay through the weekend. She didn’t live far from the Light

Source, and rather than have me hang around there while she worked,

she volunteered to drive me back to her house. We swung by Victoria’s

of ce rst, and Kayla retrieved her spare key from Vic—apparently, they

each had a key to the other’s home—so that I could go out for a walk

later, or whatever, and then she drove me back. I thought she was just

going to drop me off, but she turned off the car, and came on in with me,

and—

—she swung me around, draped her arms around my neck, pulled me

close, and kissed me. When our lips nally separated, I said, softly, “Wow…”

She smiled up at me, blue eyes twinkling. “I wasn’t sure before, but

you did pass the test. Plus, Vic thinks you’re a catch.”

She took my hand and led me upstairs to her bedroom, its walls

painted a soft mint green, and soon our clothes were off, and we were

lying on the bed. I’d certainly fantasized about something like this

happening, but, well, it was midafternoon, and, even with the lights off,

plenty of illumination poured in through the window. I couldn’t help but

feel an even worse case of the discomfort I’d experienced when Kayla

and I had met at lunch. Nobody looked as good at thirty-nine as they did

at twenty, and although I tried to get at least some exercise every day, she

was doubtless thinking I’d aged since the last time she’d seen me naked. But I thought Kayla looked absolutely stunning: smooth skin; at

tummy; small, high breasts; and a landing strip that was presumably her

hair’s natural dark brown. She also had a gorgeous tattoo of a turquoise

butter y, its body running parallel to but just above her panty line. I

traced the leading edge of its upper wing with my ngertip and was

surprised to nd that it covered a raised ridge. She must have anticipated my question. “That’s why I got the tat,”

she said. “Looks so much nicer than an appendectomy scar.” And indeed

it did; it was lovely, just like its bearer. Kayla had condoms in her night table, and we rolled around, most

pleasantly, for half an hour—until she had to return to work. Kayla returned four hours later, accompanied by her six-year-old

daughter. Ryan bounded into the living room, where I was sitting

reading, to say hello. She had long light-brown hair and brown eyes, and,

when she smiled, a dimple in her left cheek; she was wearing a T-shirt

showing a singer named Lorde (helpfully labeled beneath her photo—

otherwise, I’d have had no idea).

“Ryan,” Kayla said, catching up with her, “this is Jim.”

“‘Jim,’” she said, trying it out. “I think I’ll call you ‘Jiminy,’ like

Jiminy Cricket.”

“Then I’m going to call you ‘Ginger Ale,’” I said. “Why?”

“’Cause adults sometimes drink rye and ginger ale.”

She frowned, puzzling it through, then, “Oh!” Her smile was radiant. “Okay, Jiminy!”

Our secret names established, Ryan said, “Do you like Taylor Swift?”

“Are you kidding?

She’s one of my top-ten favorite Taylors!”

“She’s got a new video!” exclaimed Ryan. “Let me show you…”

I smiled at Kayla, who smiled warmly back at me, and Ryan took my

hand and led me over to the couch, where a MacBook was sitting. She

opened it up, went to YouTube, and as she played me a string of her

favorite videos, I ooohed and aaahed appropriately. Having not yet had a chance to shop since returning from Winnipeg,

Kayla didn’t have much food in the house. I volunteered to pay for pizza

to be delivered, Kayla recommended a place called TJ’s, and we got two

pies—a large #14 (pepperoni and mushrooms) for the girls, and a small

#19 (“veggie supreme”) with no cheese for me. After dinner, I watched while Ryan showed off her skills at Minecraft

and Platypus Pirates. When it was time for her to go to bed, she gave me

a big hug. Kayla took her upstairs, and I read news on my phone. Appallingly, three Latina women—maybe illegally in the US, maybe not

—had been found shot to death just outside Dallas. Meanwhile, the NDP

caucus, which had almost immediately declared Naheed Nenshi party

leader, was getting good press: The Toronto Star had an editorial with

the headline “We Need Naheed,” which was fun enough to say that I

suspected it would become a meme. When Kayla returned, she sat next to me on the couch and put a

hand on my thigh. “Ryan really likes you. Normally, she can’t wait to get

away from my friends.”

“She’s sweet,” I said. “I enjoyed every minute.”

“You’re really good with kids. Seriously. Ever thought about having

one of your own?”

I looked away. “Yeah,” I said. “From time to time.”

“A20

NNA-LEE, Jim, thanks so much for coming in,” Dr. Villager

had said—three years ago now, I guess it was. “Sure,” I replied, taking the left-hand seat facing her desk, and, “Of

course,” said Anna-Lee, settling into the right-hand one. “I have some news,” Villager said. Anna-Lee must have heard

something in the doctor’s voice; she reached over and took my hand,

squeezing it. “As you know, I always recommend amniocentesis for

women over thirty- ve, purely as a precaution. And, well, there’s good

reason for that. The risk of certain anomalies goes up dramatically after

that point.”

“My God…” Anna-Lee’s voice was almost inaudible. Dr. Villager nodded. “The fetus has Down syndrome.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, knowing, of course, that she must be. “Yes, absolutely. He—it’s a boy—has three chromosome twenty-ones. The provincial health plan will pay for an abortion if you wish.”

“My God,” said Anna-Lee, again. “My God.”

“You don’t have to decide today,” Dr. Villager said. “But you should

decide soon.”

Anna-Lee and I were lying in bed, side by side, each of us on our backs,

each staring up in the dark at the featureless ceiling. “Sweetheart,” I said,

“we talked about all this before you took the test.”

I was hoping for a verbal acknowledgment, or, at least, the rustling of

the pillow to indicate that she was nodding in agreement. But there was

nothing. “I mean,” I continued, “since we’re only planning on having one

child, we need to consider whether this child is the best use of our

resources, right?

There’ll be enormous extra expenses, and, no matter

what we do, the child will almost certainly have a life not only of lesser

quality but also lesser quantity; people with Down rarely live past their

twenties.”

She was immobile, a toppled statue. “And, well, you know the utilitarian position: one can’t give special

consideration to one’s own needs; you can’t put them above those of

others. But you can factor them in as you would anyone else’s. This isn’t

the life we wanted. Yes, sure, parenting is always a full-time job, anyway,

but this will leave no room for anything else. And the economic

impact…”

I trailed off, wishing she’d give some sign—any sign—that I was

getting through to her. “That’s our son you’re talking about,” she said at last. I blew out air. “An embryo has no—”

“Please,” said Anna-Lee rmly. But I pressed on. “An embryo has no more moral standing than what

we’d give to an animal with a similar level of self-consciousness,

rationality, ability to feel, and so on. The utilitarian position—”

“Fuck utilitarianism,” she said, and rolled onto her side facing away

from me. I rolled onto my side, too, wanting to spoon her, but I knew enough

not to reach out and touch her just then. With my ear pressed against the

pillow, I could faintly hear my heartbeat. Or—

No, no. Of course it was my own heartbeat. Who else’s could it have

been?

I was there in the delivery room when Virgil came out into the world. He

was quiet; even after Dr. Villager slapped him gently on the bottom, he

made no sound. I’d hoped, against all logic, to see a normal child, but

even with his features squished and wet, it was obvious the prenatal

diagnosis had been correct. Virgil’s face was at, and his tongue

protruded slightly. Dr. Villager handed him to Anna-Lee, who still had

tears on her face from the pain of delivery, but her expression was joyous

as she held the boy—until she looked up at me. Although I was doing my

level best, her gaze went cold. They kept Virgil and Anna-Lee at the hospital for four days after his

birth; apparently there was a whole suite of things that could go wrong

early on for a Down child—respiratory problems, dif culties suckling,

and more. I spent as much time as I could at the hospital; Anna-Lee’s

mother was there during those visiting hours when I couldn’t be. When they were nally ready to discharge Virgil, I came to take him

and Anna-Lee home. I went into the familiar hospital room, with its pale-

yellow walls; my faculty health plan covered the extra cost of the private

room. I was surprised to nd my mother-in-law there, too, standing

silently next to the bed. “I’m not coming home,” Anna-Lee said the moment I entered. Virgil

was sleeping on her chest. “But Dr. Villager said—”

“I’m leaving here,” Anna-Lee said, “but Virgil and I are going to stay

with my parents.”

I was silent for a time, digesting this. “May I ask why?”

“I never want Virgil to see that look in your eyes.”

“What look?”

“The look that says you wish he’d never been born.”

“Anna-Lee, please…”

“It’s true, isn’t it?

That’s how you feel.”

I opened my mouth but couldn’t nd any words. Anna-Lee held our baby tightly and shook her head. “Oh, for Christ’s

sake, Jim.”

I shook my head, dispelling the memories, and turned back to face Kayla,

in her living room, in the here and now—and I quickly sought to move

the conversation on from the topic of children. “Are these of Travis?” I

said, getting up to look at a cluster of photos in little frames on one of

her bookshelves. I could see the family resemblance to Kayla: they both

had high cheekbones, generous noses, and perfectly vertical foreheads. She moved in to stand next to me. “Yup.”

He was wearing a brown-and-yellow University of Manitoba T-shirt

in one of the shots. “He went to U of M, too?”

“Yeah. Business school. He was quite an athlete—gre at runner, but

also did snowboarding, motocross, and more.” She pointed at another

picture. “That’s him nishing the Boston Mara thon.”

“What year was that?”

She picked up the frame, ipped it over, and looked at what had been

written on the backside. “Two thousand,” she said. “‘The Millennial

Marathon.’” I was about to say, “Actually…” but she beat me to it: “Of

course, not really—but that’s what they called it.” But then her voice

grew wistful. “Last time he ever got to run it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He’s been in his coma since 2001.”

My heart skipped a beat. “What date?”

“I don’t remember. Sometime before you and I started dating,

though.”

“Which was the beginning of Marc h, so, if you’re sure it was 2001,

then that means January or February.”

“I guess.”

“You’d said they found him passed out. Where?”

“In a classroom.”

“On the U of M campus?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you know which building?”

“No. Why?”

“Was he by any chance a subject in Professor Warkentin’s

experiments?”

“I have no idea.”

“Jesus.” I moved back to the couch and collapsed onto it. “Jim?

What’s wrong?”

“Menno Warkentin told me something a little while ago. He said he

felt so guilty about what happened to me, he…we ll, he tried to kill

himself, he said. It didn’t work out; he crashed his car, and ended up

blind—”

“My God!

Really?”

“That’s what he said. But, when you think about it, what had

happened to me?

According to a reading he saw on his oscilloscope, I’d

lost my inner voice. But, externally, my behavior was pretty much the

same as before—so that’s an awfully abstract thing to feel suicidally

despondent over, even for a psychologist. And, yeah, he’d tried to x

what had gone wrong, using lasers, but that only made it worse, causing

my time of…of bad behavior. But what if I wasn’t the only one who’d

fainted because of Menno’s equipment?

What if an athletic business

student had passed out, too, and he had never recovered?

That would

weigh on you, month after month, if the guy never woke up, if his life

had been totally ruined because of you.”

“Holy shit,” said Kayla. “Exactly,” I said. “Holy shit.”

“What do we do now?”

“I took photographs of his paper les about his project. Let’s look

through those and see if any of them mention your brother.”

We transferred the photos from my iPhone to her MacBook so that

we could study them on a bigger screen, but there was no mention of

Travis—or a subject TH. “Do we confront Warkentin?” asked Kayla. “Well, we could—but if he denies having anything to do with Travis,

we’ll have tipped him off, and he could dispose of any other records that

might prove it. Perhaps we should bide our time.”

Kayla thought about this, then nodded. “I’m good at that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. A skill I learned from my brother.”

We stayed up awhile longer, but although I’d napped in the

afternoon, Kayla was tired. Trying not to be presumptuous, I asked if she

perhaps had a blanket for the couch; it had gotten chilly last night. She

stood up, turned, faced me, held out her hand, and said, “Don’t be silly.”

We headed upstairs, got naked, and cuddled pleasantly for a while,

and then separated slightly; she fell asleep before me, I think, but it

wasn’t long until I nodded off, too, until—

Until I suddenly sat straight up in bed, gasping for breath. “Jim?” I was disoriented, and the woman’s voice startled me; it took

me a moment to realize who it was. She shifted in the bed, and I felt her

hand on my back. “My God,” she said. “You’re shaking like a leaf.”

I was also sweating, the sheets damp beneath my thighs. In the

darkness I couldn’t see anything except two red LEDs, glowing like a

demon’s eyes. I hadn’t had this nightmare for weeks, but it had been the same as it

always was. Me in a rage, lashing out, holding a wooden torch—but,

bizarrely, the ames were dark and frozen—wh ile in front of me stood a

demon, a monster, a thing that had to be stopped, that had to be

punished…

I brought one of my hands to the center of my chest, feeling the

pounding of my heart. “Sorry,” I said. “Bad dream.”

“It’s okay,” Kayla replied softly as she lay back and gently pulled me

down toward her, holding me. From this angle, I could no longer see the

LED eyes; there was nothing but blackness. 21

“Good morning, class. So, a while ago I asked how many of you

drive to the university each day. Remember?

We were talking

about philosopher’s zombies?

Well, let me ask the opposite

question: now that the weather’s good again, how many of you

walk here each day?”

A rather small number of hands went up. “Huh,” I said. “Well, I often do. In fact, I did so today. I live

about two kilometers north of here right on the Red River, and I’ll

tell you, it’s way more pleasant to walk along the bank than it is

to ght traf c along Pembina Highway—except for today, that is. Just as I was coming out from under the Bishop Grandin Bridge, I

saw a little girl facedown in the water.”

A couple of students gasped. I nodded and went on. “She was right by the shore, probably

unconscious, and the river wasn’t moving fast today, so I could

easily wade in and grab her.” I paused. “And, you know, I was

going to, but, well, damn it, look at these shoes.” I stepped out

from behind the lectern. “Nicest ones I own. They’re not leather—

you guys know me better than that!

But they’d still have gotten

wrecked, don’t you think?

And they’d cost two hundred dollars. So, I walked on by. You all would have done the same thing, right,

if you were—wait for it—in my shoes?”

I’d seen the transition sweep across the faces as one by one the

students realized it was a hypothetical. “We do know you,” said Boris. “And if that had really

happened, you would have gone in.”

I smiled. “True. But why?”

“Because the life of a little girl is way more valuable than any

pair of shoes. In fact, there’s no material object you shouldn’t

sacri ce to save a human life.”

“Exactly,” I said, and I looked out at the students. “So, again,

suppose it was any of you—Felicity, there, I’m no judge, but those

pumps look like they cost a couple of hundred.”

“Each,” said Felicity, smiling. “Well?

Would you wade in to get the girl?”

“I’d take them off rst.”

“What if—”

And she had them off already. “Okay,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “But what if

you were wearing shoes like mine—”

“Puh-leeze!” said Felicity, rolling her eyes. Laughter rippled

across the room. “—and had to unlace them; there’d be no time for that. You’d

have to act fast. Would you?”

“Absolutely,” said Felicity. “Good. I knew you had it in you.” I looked around the room. “Anyone?

Is there anyone here who wouldn’t sacri ce a pair of

really nice shoes to save a drowning girl?”

No one spoke up; several people shook their heads. “Good, good. Because, you know, that story I just told you?

It

is true. Except that the little girl wasn’t drowning in the Red River

right by my home. She was starving to death in Africa. And the

$200 I spent on my shoes could have just as easily saved her life

there if sent to a reputable aid agency. So, if I were to pass a hat

now, how many of you would feel obligated to put in $200, or an

IOU for that amount, if you knew it would go directly to saving a

life in Africa?

Not how many of you would feel it was a decent

thing to do, but how many of you would feel you had to do it?”

No one responded. V“Okay,” I said. “Any Trekkies here besides me?”

A few hands went up, and, after they saw some of their

classmates admitting it, a few more went up—and one of the girls

with a lifted hand had her ngers splayed in the Vulcan salute. “Okay, Melody,” I said. “How’s your Star Trek trivia?”

“Tiberius,” she said at once. “Ha. True. But let’s play Trekkie Jeopardy!

for a moment. You

remember J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek from 2009—the rst lm in the

reboot?”

“Sure.”

“Remember Spock as a boy being quizzed by computers on

Vulcan, right after the Vulcan bullies had been picking on him?”

“Sure.”

“You can’t see the questions he’s being asked, but the scene

ends with him giving this con dent answer: ‘When an action is

morally praiseworthy but not morally obligatory.’ Remember

that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so, Alex, for $1,000 in the category of ‘Philosophical

Terms,’ what question was Spock asked?”

“Umm…” said Melody. “Ah, ur…”

“No, no. Not in Vulcan,” I said. “In English.”

She laughed, and so did several others. “I haven’t a clue.”

“Anybody?” I said, looking around. “What question must the

computer have asked Spock?”

Pascal, in the fourth row, rose to the wager. “What is

supererogation?”

“Exactly!

And no, that’s not watering your plants too much. Supererogation is when you do something good that you didn’t

have to do. So, class, why do you say that it’s a moral imperative

that you save the little girl who is drowning right in front of you,

even at a cost of $200, but at best that it’s merely supererogatory

—a mitzvah, in other words—if you give the money to save a

child in a foreign land?”

ICTORIA Chen’s boyfriend was named Ross. He taught high-

school English at City Park Collegiate, just across the South

Saskatchewan River from the synchrotron. On Mondays, he had a spare

period after lunch, and, so today, as always, he drove over and picked Vic

up, and the two of them went to Alexander’s Restaurant. Vic, as usual,

was wearing all black, and Ross was displaying his preference for blue. After they ordered—the Thai noodle bowl for her, a jalapeño

guacamole chicken burger for him—Ross said, “One of my students

handed in an essay on Friday with emojis in it.” He shook his head. “Can

you imagine?”

Vic looked at him. He’d told her about this just yesterday. Ross went

on: “I hate that. I’m tempted to give her an F just because.”

She tilted her head to one side. Of course, people did this all the time:

they had an experience and shared it with everyone they ran into; they

didn’t really keep track of who they’d already told. Vic liked to think she

was the exception, but, then again, that was probably similar to the

statistic she’d gone around quoting—quite possibly, she supposed, to the

same person more than once—that eighty percent of people think they’re

more attractive than average, which couldn’t actually be the case. Ross was still on his hobbyhorse. “I mean, seriously?

Emojis?

And

they weren’t even appropriate emojis!

I’ve taught Hamlet every year for

ten years now, and, trust me, there’s no point you can make about that

play that’s enhanced by a picture of a panda bear winking and sticking

out its tongue.”

She thought about saying, “I know, baby,” or even, “You told me that

yesterday,” but he was getting near the end of the rant, and so she

decided to just ride it out and enjoy her noodles. I’d never done a long-distance romance before, but Skype and texting—

and, my goodness, sexting—really helped. I don’t know how people

managed such relationships in years gone by, but, now that I was back in

Winnipeg, although I desperately missed holding Kayla, at least the

keeping-in-touch issue didn’t seem dif cult. Nor, really, should have been the getting-together part. Both Air

Canada and WestJet offered multiple direct ights each day between

Winnipeg and Saskatoon, and the ight only took ninety minutes. It

wasn’t particularly expensive; you could usually get a roundtrip ticket

for under $250, all-in. My heart went out to my contemporaries who had only landed

sessional-teaching gigs and were living on little more than they’d had as

grad students, but I was a tenured professor; I grossed $145,000 per

year, so ying to Saskatoon once or twice a month shouldn’t have put a

dent in my lifestyle. Except, damn it all, practice what you teach. As Peter Singer so

rightly said in his 2009 book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To

End World Poverty, it would take 250 billion dollars a year to eliminate

poverty. If the richest billion people in the world (a group that I, and just

about every middle-class or better North American, fell into) were to

each give ve dollars a week, poverty could be wiped out. But they don’t. Singer, who devised the thought experiment about the

drowning girl that I riff on in my classes, suggested that everyone should

pledge to give a portion of their net income to charities—and then, to

overcome the easy out of saying charitable donations are wasted on

overhead and fat-cat executives, he set up a website,

TheLifeYouCanSave. org, listing cost-effective charities, such as Oxfam,

for which almost all the money given really does go to those who need it. But that was the easy part of his site. The hard part, at least for

people like me who value their word, is the little clickie labeled “Take the

Pledge.” You plug in your gross income and the country you live in, and

it calculates what would be a reasonable amount for you to commit to

give to charities. In my case, it suggested I could afford to donate ve

percent, or $7,250, each year to organizations helping people in extreme

poverty. But I teach ethics; I know all about diffusion of responsibility. I know

that most people are going to give hardly anything at all. And so, if the

average Joe should be giving ve percent, I felt I could do at least double

that—and I did, for the rst three years. And then I realized I wasn’t

missing the money, and I upped my donation to fteen percent, and, even

when Virgil came along, and I started paying out twenty- ve grand a

year in child support, I didn’t cut back. And, seriously, as much as I loved Kayla—an d I think I really and

truly was falling head-over-heels in love with her—could I cut back on

my donations just to facilitate our relationship?

No, of course not. And so although those $250 round trips were a

bargain, I could only afford them now and again. This time, I was

driving on my own to Saskatoon. I sometimes quip that I have sympathy for moon-landing deniers. After all, no one had walked on the moon since 1972; how could we

possibly have done that then but couldn’t do it now, almost half a

century later?

But after making this drive to Saskatoon a couple of times,

I have to say I was also beginning to understand members of the Flat

Earth Society. Every Canadian knew the joke, immortalized in the

opening credits of the sitcom Corner Gas, about Saskatchewan being the

place where you could watch your dog run away…f or three days. It was election night—I’d voted before leaving Winnipeg—but instead

of listening to the CBC, which would have hours of pointless speculation

before the polls closed, I played an audiobook: Dan Falk talking about

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Falk was speculating that one likely reason we’ve never detected alien

signals is that shortly after developing radio, any civilization almost

certainly also develops the ability to destroy itself. We’d only been a

broadcasting species for 125 years now; who was to say we ourselves

would be around much longer?

On that somber note, I did nally switch to the radio, just in time to

hear a man speaking, a hint of astonishment in his crisp tones: “The CBC

is now prepared to call it. It’s by a slim margin, but we will have a

majority NDP government; Naheed Nenshi will be Canada’s twenty-

fourth prime minister. Our analyst Hayden Trenholm is with me here in

Toronto. Hayden, your thoughts?”

“What a close race!

It’s not quite a ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ moment,

but I do think it’ll take a lot of people by surprise. Still, Nenshi is no

stranger to election-night upsets. Six weeks before being elected mayor of

Calgary in 2010, polls had his support at just eight percent. He won over

his doubters once in of ce: he was re-elected in 2013 with a staggering

seventy-four percent of the vote. He didn’t do that well tonight, but it’s

still a historic victory.”

I turned off the radio, smiling, and not just because my party had

won; it was also cool to see a hometown Calgary boy make good. The black sky was a hemispherical bowl stretching from horizon to

horizon, and I can’t resist a clear night. I pulled over, wandered out into a

eld, and looked up. I still didn’t remember anything from that half-year

science- ction course, but the next term I’d taken a poetry class, and a

line of Archibald Lampman’s oated into my consciousness from back

then: The wide awe and wonder of the night. The sky was cloudless,

there was no moon, and the stars shone down in all their profusion. I

looked at them, as I always did, in amazement, but Dan Falk had left me

thinking, and I found myself feeling profoundly sad as I contemplated

the deafening silence, wondering indeed how long our own civilization

had left. S22

ASKATCHEWAN never observes Daylight Saving Time, which

means, here in the summer, I arrived an hour earlier than I would in

winter. But it was still after 11:00 P. M. when I pulled into Kayla’s

driveway. I would have been raring to go, even if I hadn’t put away two

liters of Coke during the drive; the lovemaking was affectionate and fun,

and we fell asleep in each other’s arms. In the morning, Ryan—who’d been long asleep by the time I’d arrived

—joined us for breakfast, and she gave me a gift, a beadwork wristband

she’d made showing the letters JC. “For Jiminy Cricket!” she squealed. I

smiled broadly and slipped it on. We then took her to the University of Saskatchewan’s Museum of

Natural Sciences, not far from the Light Source. Saskatchewan was

dinosaur country, and she gawked at the skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex,

Triceratops, and Stegosaurus, but I think she liked the indoor waterfall

and koi pond the best. As Kayla took Ryan to the washroom, I checked the news online. The

right-wing Toronto Sun was in trouble, it seemed, for having run not an

election-night picture of Nenshi, but one from years ago of him in

Muslim garb under a giant headline that read, “Minority Government.”

But otherwise the news of the election seemed to be going over

reasonably well here in Canada. American newspapers usually completely ignored Canadian news, so

I didn’t expect much there, but a number of my Facebook friends had

linked to the same clip of President Carroway, apparently talking about

the election. I clicked on the story. Quinton Carroway was his usual slick self, immaculately groomed,

not a hair out of place. “Mr. President,” called out a reporter, “does it

concern you that Prime Minister Nenshi is Muslim?”

Carroway smiled that smile of his, as if someone was tugging up on

shing line at the corners of his mouth. “I compliment him on being the

rst Muslim head of state anywhere in the Western World. Quite an

achievement, that, quite a signi cant achievement. And to do so with

Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party, to boot!

A couple of

monumental rsts. Across the border—the longest undefended one in the

world—we offer congratulations.”

It’d been a lot colder last night, standing out in that eld, looking up

at the stars. But it was now, not then, that I felt a chill run down my

spine. Saturday night, Kayla, Ryan, and I drove out to the Saskatoon Airport,

which, as Kayla pointed out to me, was named for John Diefenbaker, one

of the other prime ministers who’d been kicked from power by a non-

con dence motion; maybe Justin Trudeau would be remembered with an

airport of his own someday. We weren’t here so I could go home, though;

rather, Kayla had agreed to pick up Victoria Chen, who was returning

from a symposium at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo. Vic gave Kayla and Ryan hugs when she came out of the gate, and I was

pleasantly surprised when she gave me one, too. “How was the conference?” I asked. “Amazing,” Vic said. “Everyone was making the same joke: you’d

think if anyone could do it, quantum physicists could; there was so much

good simultaneous programming, we all wanted to be in multiple places

at once.” She shook her head in wonder. “Haroche and Wineland were

there, and D-Wave unveiled a new one-kiloqubit model, and…”

And Kayla was clearly following all this; for my part, I took the

handle of Vic’s rolly bag and pulled it along while the two women talked

quantum mechanics. After a bit—or a qubit—it proved too much for

Ryan, though, and she plucked at Victoria’s sleeve. “Aunt Vic, did you

bring me anything?”

“Ryan!” admonished Kayla. “What do you think?” Vic asked Ryan with a sly grin. “I think you did!” Ryan exclaimed. “I think you’re right!” Vic exclaimed back. She had a shoulder bag,

and we stopped while she reached into it. She pulled out a small plush

animal—a zebra, which seemed an odd thing to bring back from

Ontario. But then I saw the letters IQC embroidered on its rump; it was

swag from the conference, and the stripes, now that I got a good look at

them, were in the classic two-slit interference pattern. None of that

meant anything to Ryan, but she squeed appropriately at the gift. “And, since we’re stopped,” said Vic, “I also brought something back

for you, Kayla—sort of. It’s really for the Light Source, but I won’t be

going in to work again until Monday, so, technically, you wouldn’t be

taking it from work if you borrow it between now and then.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a small, rugged-looking

aluminum case. There were some chairs nearby, and she walked over to

them, sat, and opened the case. Inside, cushioned by black foam rubber

cut to precisely cradle it, was a silver device maybe thirty centimeters

long. “What’s that?” Kayla asked. “Well, for want of a better name,” Vic said, “they call it a quantum

tuning fork.”

It did indeed look like a tuning fork. Half its length was a cylindrical

handle; the other half consisted of two parallel cylindrical tines, each

about as thick as my index nger. But that didn’t justify using the Q-

word. “What’s quantum about it?” I asked. Victoria pried it out of its case and held it up as if she were warding

off a vampire. “They developed this at IQC. The handle contains a

nonlinear crystal in an optical cavity that lets photons bounce around

repeatedly, resulting in twin beams coming out of the tines; the beams

promote electron superposition.”

Kayla looked impressed, and I decided this was a good time to do

some social mimicry of my own; I copied her expression. Vic went on: “We’re giving the institute some beamtime in exchange

for the loan of this prototype. It works pretty well as far as it goes. It’s

great at getting things into superposition, but it doesn’t make the

superposition any less prone to decoherence. Still, you take a block of

material, use this on it, and you have a working quantum-computing test

bed for the nanoseconds until decoherence occurs.”

Kayla got it immediately. “What happens if you use it on a human

being?”

“On a normal human being?” asked Victoria. “Nothing at all; a

bunch of us tried it.” She acted out pointing it at her forehead. “But on

someone who isn’t already in a superposition state?” She smiled a

megawatt smile. “It sounds like an experiment worth conducting, doesn’t

it?”

“Oh my God,” Kayla said, astonished, then, more softly, almost

reverently, “Oh my God.”

The “facility,” as Kayla always called it, was cleaner than such things had

been in the past. Still, most of these people had been abandoned to the

state, the staff looking after them with all the compassion and care of

cowhands tending livestock. Travis didn’t have a private room; there was

no point in that. Three other people, each of whom had been diagnosed

as being in either a coma or a persistent vegetative state, shared the

space. The Venetian blinds were down, as they had been on my previous

visits; I imagined they’d been down for years. I looked at Travis, eyes closed, face blank, lips slightly parted, snoring

softly. Nineteen years he’d lain here—or, before that, in similar facilities. The years of inactivity had taken their toll; the scrawny creature before

me showed no signs of his erstwhile athleticism. I looked at the gaunt face, the pale skin—skin that had last basked in

the sun when George W. Bush had been in the White House and Bill

Cosby had been a role model, back before the world had ever heard of

Sarah Palin or Amy Schumer, before the Kindle and Facebook and

Megamatch, before Breaking Bad and Mad Men and The Big Bang

Theory. “Hey, broski,” said Kayla, in her ritual greeting; as I’d seen on

previous visits, it had settled into a routine, a schtick, a mindless

template. She paid no attention to the other occupants, two men and a woman;

of course, no one had to worry about propriety with these…patients?

Inmates?

Residents?

No, no, patients was the right word: they were all

in nitely patient, waiting out wars and recessions, fads and trends, with

equanimity. Travis’s chest rose and fell rhythmically. In the corridor, I could hear a

couple of women walking by, chatting. My iPhone case had a little

kickstand on its back; I set it on top of a cabinet opposite Travis so it

could quietly video what we hoped would be a wondrous event. “Anyway,” said Kayla, perhaps to Travis, perhaps to me. She reached

into her soft-sided briefcase and pulled out the tuning fork, the handle

bifurcating into its two parallel tines like a map of possible outcomes. Down one path, the status quo, with Travis lying here another decade—

or six—until nally some part of him gave up the ghost, and the state

was relieved of its burden. Down the other path, just maybe, a new life

for him, an awakening after so many dark winters. And clutched in

Kayla’s hand, the superposition of those two paths—both possibilities,

renewed life and living death. She looked at me and gestured with her head at the doorway. We

hadn’t told the staff what we were going to try; if anybody here decided

it was a medical procedure or test, there’d be mounds of paperwork. On

the way over, Kayla had said it had taken weeks to get permission from

the facility’s insurer for that time she’d brought Travis to CLS. Everything here was routine, I’m sure, and it wasn’t as though Travis

was going to be interrupted by a nurse bringing dinner on a tray; his

sustenance owed into him via a gastric feeding tube going into the left

side of his abdomen. Still, I moved to the doorway and checked up and

down the dreary corridor. The women I’d heard before were gone; the

coast, as the saying went, was clear. I closed the door, turned back to face

Kayla, and nodded for her to proceed. She loomed over her brother and touched the twin tines to his

forehead, one above his closed left eye and the other above the closed

right. And then she thumbed a red slider switch on the handle. It would have been cool if the tuning fork had begun to glow with

violet energy or had emitted a sound like sheet metal warping, but

nothing happened—either on the device, or, as far as I could tell, to

Travis. Of course I felt sorrier for Kayla, who’d had her hopes raised,

than for Travis, who had had no change in his happiness—or lack

thereof. Kayla pulled her hand back, withdrawing the tuning fork. And then,

with a what-the-heck lift of her eyebrows, she rotated it a half turn so

that the tine that had been on the right was now on the left, and she

again gently but rmly pressed the twin tips against her brother’s

forehead, and—

—and Travis’s eyes uttered open. V23

ICTORIA Chen had to know for sure. She was waiting for Ross in the Light Source’s glassed-in

entryway. She became even more nervous than she already was when

11:00 A. M. passed and there was still no sign of him; another researcher

had the beamline at 11:30.

But at ten after, he nally arrived. Vic got him

signed in, had him clip on a dosimeter, and took him on the long walk

down to the SusyQ beamline. “You sure you don’t mind?” she asked as she fussed with her

equipment. Ross was his usual amiable self. “No, of course not. I’d do anything

for you, my love. You know that.”

She tapped a series of commands on her keyboard. “Thanks,” she

said. “You’re a good man. Now, if you’ll just lie down here…” She

indicated the gurney. Ross smiled. “Fancy a nooner?”

“Not today, dear,” she said, making a show of waggling her

eyebrows, “but there’s always tonight.”

“Indeed there is,” he said, and he lay down on his back. That was

either supine or prone—she could never remember which was which—

but, either way, his lean form, in dark-blue cotton slacks and a light-blue

dress shirt, looked ne. He really was a good boyfriend: attentive to her

but low-maintenance himself; even-tempered; and an absolute machine

in the sack. “Thanks for doing this, hon,” she said as she af xed the head strap. “I think there’s a really good paper in it.”

“My pleasure.”

“Just relax. As the doctors like to say, this won’t hurt a bit.” She used

her mouse to click an on-screen button, and the process began. Initially,

her monitor showed a plain horizontal line—no superposition—but it

did that for everyone; it took about ten seconds to gather the data, and—

Ah, and there it came. The line undulated and then a huge peak

appeared at the left side, showing a single superimposed electron. She

waited anxiously for the second peak to appear, and then the third one,

and—

And she waited and waited and waited. Oh, the usual wobbly

horizontal line appeared up high, but the spike down below gained no

companions. Ross shifted on the gurney. She moved over to the beam emitter,

which was centered on the crown of his head, and, after a moment, she

did the only thing she could think of doing: she icked her nger against

its side, the way one does with electronics that might have a loose

connection. But the emitter was solid-state, she knew, and the display

remained exactly the same. One, and only one, superposition. Vic felt her mouth drop open. That

was crazy. That was nuts. She knew Ross…it was the right word: she

knew him intimately. She knew everything about him. He couldn’t be…

there was just no ef ng way he could be, but…

She found herself backing away, and her derrière bumped against the

edge of a desk. She looked at him, and he shifted his eyes to look at her. “Are we done?” he asked. He meant the experiment, of course, but—no, no, he didn’t mean

anything. He wasn’t thinking about the experiment, not if what Jim

Marchuk had told Kayla was right. He wasn’t thinking about anything at

all. He was just saying something that t the circumstances, responding

to some internal timer or external cue. But the question couldn’t be more

apt. Were they done?

Jim must be wrong. Either that, or the equipment was faulty. She

loved Ross—and Ross loved her. She knew that. Not just because he said

it, but because he showed it, in a hundred—a thousand!—ways .

She moved in, undid the strap, and said, “You can get up.”

And he replied as he always did when she said the words “get up”—

the same joke over and over again, the same routine—by looking down

brie y, then ashing a lascivious smile, and saying, “That’s easy when

you’re around, babe.”

Input. Output. Could it be?

Could he really be a machine—albeit a biological one—

not just in the sack but in everything?

And, if that were true, if Jim Marchuk was right, could she go on

dating a…a thing, an emptiness, a zombie?

She wasn’t ready to give voice to the thought but, yes, damn it all,

they were almost certainly done. What the fuck?

Bright light from overhead; Travis Huron scrunched his eyelids shut. What the hell was he doing lying down?

A man’s voice: “Holy Jesus.”

And a woman’s voice tinged by…wo nder, perhaps?

“Travis?”

Travis reopened his eyes, but it took effort; his lashes were sticking

together, interlocking cilia on twin Venus ytraps. The light stung, and he

was having trouble focusing. He blinked repeatedly. And then the same

as-yet-unseen male he’d heard earlier—Travis assigned its owner the

name Master of the Bleeding Obvious: “His eyes are open!”

“Travis?” said the female voice again. He turned his head, feeling a

twinge in his neck as he did so, and there, standing next to him, her eyes

wide, was…

Well, if he’d had to guess, he’d have said it was Mom, except Mom

didn’t quite look like that, and was ve or six years older. But she was

Mom-esque, whoever this was. “Travis?” the woman said again. “It’s me. It’s Kayla.”

“No,” Travis said, the word barely a whisper. The woman took one of his hands in hers. “Yes,” she replied,

squeezing gently. “You’ve been in a coma.”

Travis felt his heart pounding. “A…” He’d wanted to repeat the

phrase “a coma” as a question, but throat congestion mired the second

word before it got out. The woman nodded. “For nineteen years. It’s 2020 now.”

His head was swimming. That was an eye-test score, for Christ’s sake,

not a year. He tried to speak again: “Twenty…,” then stopped, cleared his

throat, and pushed ahead. “Twenty-twenty?”

“Uh-huh,” said Kayla. Travis swallowed, then coughed a couple of times. Next to—we ll, yes,

he supposed it really was Kayla—was a man about the same age. About the same age…

And if Kayla was in her late thirties, then he—Travis himself—must

be…

He did the math: in 2020 he would turn—had, perhaps, already

turned—forty-one. “What”—his voice still rough, the words still dif cult to expel—“do

I…look like?”

The man and woman exchanged glances, then the man moved over to

a cabinet and picked up something at and rectangular. He tapped its

surface then ipped the device around, holding it out for Travis to see…

My God. Not just a still photograph, but high-resolution live video of a guy

whose jaw dropped as Travis felt his own mouth falling open—a man

with hair peppered gray retreating from a forehead marked by horizontal

creases, a man who looked at least as much like Travis’s father had as

Kayla looked like their mother. Travis couldn’t bear the sight of what he’d become, but he couldn’t

turn away, either. “What’s that?”

“That’s you,” replied the Master of the Bleeding Obvious, gently. “No, no. The…that thing?”

“Oh!” A smile across the man’s kind face. “My iPhone—um, my cell

phone.”

“No buttons.”

“It’s a touch screen,” said the man, tapping its surface. “That’s…a phone?”

“Not just that; it’s a talking computer.” He turned it to face himself. “Sear E,” he said—whatever that meant—“um, let’s see. Ah, okay, how

’bout this: if the sun wasn’t blotting them out, what planets would be

visible right now?”

A silky female voice emanated from the device: “Venus is high in the

sky in Taurus, just two degrees west of the sun. Mercury is twenty-one

degrees farther west in Gemini, and Jupiter forty-seven degrees east in

Aries.”

The future, thought Travis. I’m in the fucking future. E24

VERYTHING changed for Kayla after that. Travis was suddenly

her number-one priority; whatever plans we’d had for my current

visit were instantly forgotten. Of course, it wasn’t as if he could just

waltz out of the place. His limbs had atrophied, and even his jaw muscles

were so weak it wasn’t clear whether he’d be able to chew food. At a

minimum, he was facing many months of physiotherapy, and even after

that, he might well need a motorized wheelchair for the rest of his life. We didn’t know whether Travis’s microtubular electrons were going

to stay in superposition for good—yes, I had come up to speed on all

this; there was no way I was going to be Penny to Kayla’s Leonard—and

so Kayla’s mother Rebekkah was summoned at once so she also could

spend time with Travis before, perhaps, he slipped away again. Kayla had never brought Ryan to see her uncle, and given all the

things that Kayla and Rebekkah suddenly had to do on Travis’s behalf, it

fell to me to look after her. I spent the next three days doing just that—

and I have to say I loved every minute. I took her to the Fun Factory,

where we played laser tag, and to the Western Development Museum,

which had a re-creation of the Saskatoon boomtown of 1910; the

blacksmith let Ryan try out his hammer. We also went to the Children’s

Discovery Museum, and to Wendy’s and Dairy Queen. I was curious

about how Travis was managing but nonetheless was having the time of

my life. And, as Ryan and I walked along, her little hand in mine, I thought

about my son Virgil, and about my life that could have been and wasn’t. Propped up in his bed, Travis looked out the window. The blinds were

raised—Kayla had done that for him before she’d stepped out—and, if he

needed any further proof that signi cant time had passed, the summery

landscape of green grass and leaf-covered trees provided it; for him, it

had been a snowy winter just a few hours ago. Of course, that January and this June were separated not by just ve

months but by nineteen years. His sister and mother were elated: his

return was a miracle they’d stopped hoping for. But Travis was furious at

the loss of all the intervening time, and he was devastated by how his

body had wasted away. For Christ’s sake, he was suddenly in his forties!

By this point, he’d planned on being a corporate vice president with a

half-million-dollar home—or whatever amount a fancy place went for

these days. He should’ve had the trophy wife, the 2.1 kids, the red

Jaguar. Instead, he had just $347 in his Scotiabank account, plus, he

supposed, whatever interest had accrued on it, if monthly service fees

hadn’t whittled the damn thing down to nothing. He’d heard Kayla and his mom talking—funny how candid they

were, as if a part of them still felt he couldn’t possibly hear what they

were saying. It had been decided that, when the doctors discharged him,

he’d move in with his mom—yup, that was his life now, the

quintessential loser, in his forties, living in his parent’s basement. But how

the fuck had he ended up like this?

What the hell had happened?

He clearly remembered everything from the last few days—the last

few days nineteen years ago: going to see Dude, Where’s My Car?

at the

Polo Park Cineplex on New Year’s Eve; picking up a girl at the bar

afterward; watching a new show called CSI and thinking that its

gimmick would wear thin quickly, only to have Kayla tell him today that

the damn thing had stayed in production until 2017.

But what had

caused him to become Rip Van Winkle?

Oh, right!

He had been—

“Great news!” His sister came back into the room; he was still

startled by how she looked now. “I spoke to the dietitian. He’s going to

work out a plan to get you back onto solid food. We’ll have you eating

cheeseburgers and nachos before you know it.”

“Thanks,” he replied, but he didn’t feel much enthusiasm. He didn’t

want to eat; he wanted to walk—he wanted to run!

Perhaps she’d read something in his face because she added at once,

“And the physiotherapist will be here tomorrow to do an assessment.”

Just then, a nurse came in, pretty, Asian, maybe twenty- ve. Travis

turned to look at her as she checked his IV drip, and—

And it should have been obvious. It should have been clear at a

glance. He should have been able to see it. But he couldn’t. This nurse might be vulnerable, she might be afraid, she might be the

perfect means to an end—any end—for him. But he couldn’t tell. The sense he used to have, the ability that had

been there his whole life, the perception that had guided his interactions

with others for so long, was gone. The nurse, noting his gaze, smiled at him, but it wasn’t the interested

smile he was used to getting from women; it was a comforting “there,

there” smile, sympathy for the old man. The nurse left, and Travis turned back to face Kayla. He used to be

able to read her easily, too, but not anymore. And yet he did sense…

something. As he looked at her, he…he felt…“pain,” he supposed was the

right word for seeing her this way, although that didn’t…it…he couldn’t,

but…

He narrowed his eyes, detecting the skin on his forehead, which had

clearly loosened over the years, wrinkling as he did so. That was a

strange sensation, but not as strange, not as unprecedented, not as

fucking weird as…

…as this…this sadness—that was it!—this ineffable sorrow not for

himself, not for the two decades he’d lost, but for his sister, for the toll

the passage of time had taken on her, the decay she’d undergone. Still, unlike him, she hadn’t missed out on the last nineteen years. She’d lived them, every moment, doubtless dozens of triumphs and

dozens of tragedies. So why did he feel so melancholy when he looked at

her?

Why did he feel…

Why did he feel anything for her?

What the fuck was going on?

“You okay, Trav?” Kayla said, sitting down on a chair near his bed. “I guess.” He paused for a beat. “So, Mom said you’re a big-time

rocket scientist now, huh?”

“Quantum physicist,” Kayla replied. “A professor?”

She shook her head. “I don’t teach. I’m a researcher.”

A question popped into his head, one that it had never occurred to

him to ask before. “You happy?”

“With my work?

Sure. The synchrotron is an amazing place, and it

pays well enough.”

“And other than work?”

“Honestly?

My ex is a pain in the ass.”

“Your ex?

You’re married?”

“And divorced.”

A huge chapter of her life he’d completely missed. And—my God—he

wasn’t even sure he knew his own sister’s name now. “Did you take his

name?”

“Nope. Still a Huron. As we say in the physics world: inertia.”

“And this guy was an a-hole?”

“So it turned out. Only good thing that came out of that relationship

was Ryan.”

“Who?”

“My daughter.” A pause. “Your niece.”

Incredible. “Six, going on thirty,” Kayla said. “I’ll bring her by to meet you

soon.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. And yeah, to answer your question, basically, overall, life is

good. I’m making amazing breakthroughs at work, and you’ve met my

boyfriend Jim; he’s really good to me and Ryan.”

He thought about this—and, oddly, about how he felt about it all. It

was very, very strange, but he replied, saying words that he’d said

countless times before but meant—really meant—for the rst time: “I’m

happy for you.”

W25

HEN he’d been fteen—which was seven subjective and twenty-

six objective years ago—Travis’s hand had gotten sliced open. He’d walked into a plate-glass window at a shopping mall that he’d

thought was an open door. It should have been made out of safety glass

but wasn’t, and the damn thing broke into giant slabs. As he lifted his

arm to shield his face, one of the huge sections dropped from the top of

the frame and smashed into the back of his right hand, cutting it down to

the bone. The tendons were severed, the wound gaped, and he was

rushed to the emergency department. All of the surgical beds were in use, and so they put him in something

like a dentist’s chair, with his hand supported on a little tray, and the

reconstructive surgeon, called in from a concert he’d been at, sat on a

stool next to him and carefully sutured up the tendons, which looked like

gray fettuccine noodles. They’d only used a local anesthetic, and Travis

had watched, fascinated, examining the inner workings of his hand. The scar, Travis was pleased to see, had faded greatly over the last

two decades, doubtless the only part of him that had improved with age. Still, this was a bit like that: for the rst time, he realized, he was

re ecting on the inner workings of his own mind. And, like that—like

seeing the tendons, the bone, the whole mechanical infrastructure of his

metacarpus—it was interesting for a time, and something he was glad to

have experienced, but not anything he needed to do again, and certainly

not something he wanted to be subjected to all the time. Kayla had been sitting with him for the last couple of hours,

presenting a compressed version of twenty- rst-century history to date:

the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a

second space shuttle blowing up, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the

election of the rst black American president, Canada being dragged far

to the right and then snapping back to the left with—holy crap!—the

recent election of a Muslim prime minister, same-sex marriage being

legalized across Canada and a decade later across the US, the polar ice

caps shrinking, and so much more. It was overwhelming. But around 6:00 P. M., Kayla’s boyfriend Jim showed up to let Kayla

take a break. They disappeared into the corridor for a couple of minutes,

and Travis looked out the window. The trees were swaying—it had

become quite a blustery day. An eagle ew by, passing just above a pole

with a tattered, faded Canadian ag. Jim re-entered and took the seat Kayla had been using. Travis

regarded him. This guy was presentable enough, but his sister, even

having aged, was better-looking. Travis said, “How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine,” replied Jim. Travis shook his head. “Last birthday I remember, I turned twenty-

two. Now, I’m forty-one.”

“Tempus fugit,” Jim said, and Travis found himself immediately

liking the guy. He didn’t follow the phrase with raised eyebrows, which,

Travis knew, would have been literally—ye s, literally, not guratively—

supercilious; he didn’t shoot Travis a “That’s Latin” or a “Do you get it?”

look. He just calmly assumed that whomever he was talking to was as

bright as he himself was. “Yeah,” said Travis. “So, listen,” said Jim, “I asked Kayla, and she said it was okay to talk

to you about this. I was at U of M, too, when you were, but I can’t

remember things from back then, and, well, I thought maybe you could

help me ll in some blanks about my past.”

Travis considered for a moment. Previously, words like those would

have been seductive music: You know something I don’t; you’ve got

something you can hold against me. But he didn’t feel any urge to…to

use this poor sap. He…

He wanted to help the guy out. Christ, Travis thought, what’s wrong with me?

I looked at Travis Huron, and he looked back at me. Travis was Kayla’s

brother, but I felt in a small way like he was my brother, too. After all, he

was the only other guy my age I knew who also had no memory of the

rst half of 2001.

Yes, he’d lost so much more than that, but I could

qualitatively, if not quantitatively, understand what he was going

through. And even if I could somehow recover my memories of my dark

period, they would presumably be old memories, faded, unreliable, like

anyone’s of that long ago. But Travis remembered things from back then

as if they’d just occurred. Except…

Damn it, something was niggling at my consciousness. And, yes,

consciousness was the heart of the matter. Menno Warkentin said I

blacked out after trying on his Lucidity helmet. If that contraption did

more than render me unconscious—if it really was what put an end to

my self-awareness for the next six months—then I could sort of

understand why I didn’t remember anything from the period following

my blacking out, until, for whatever reason, I ceased being a p-zed. But why didn’t I remember putting on the helmet?

Why didn’t I

remember going to Menno’s lab on New Year’s Eve?

Hell, why don’t I

remember going to McNally Robinson and buying that sci- paperback

earlier the same day?

Surely I should at least vaguely recall that stuff, but

I couldn’t dredge up anything from the day I became a p-zed. But Travis hadn’t been subjected to Menno’s lasers. He presumably

had no paralimbic damage promoting confabulation; his memories

should be accurate. And so, after he asked me how old I was, and he

lamented how old he himself had become, I simply asked him: “Did you

take part in an experiment at the university run by Professor Warkentin

and Professor Adler?”

Travis managed a rueful smile. “Yup. I remember it like it was

yesterday. Those guys still around?”

“Warkentin, yeah; he’s emeritus at U of M. Adler’s in Washington

now. So, you remember the Lucidity helmet?”

“I don’t think I ever heard them call it that, but you mean the

football helmet with all the doodads attached?

Sure. I came in on

December fteenth, they put it on me, and I did some tests, thinking

words without saying them.”

“Exactly. Yes. And then they had you come back again, right?”

An odd look passed over Travis’s face, as if he was surprised at how

important this seemed to me. “No.”

“They didn’t?”

“No. I came in once, got my twenty bucks, and that was it.”

“What about the day you blacked out?

I’d assumed you’d come in

again to do an experiment. They found you on campus, and classes

didn’t resume until the eighth.”

“Not that I recall.”

Damn. I’d been so sure Warkentin was responsible for what had

happened to Travis. “You don’t remember the day you fell into the

coma?”

“Not a thing. I remember going to bed the night before, which was

January rst. I’d gotten a paperback of this new thriller, Angels &

Demons, for Christmas, and I started reading that—in fact, that’s just

about the last thing I remember.”

There was an obvious joke to be made about Dan Brown novels; I

resisted. “But you don’t recall anything at all from the next day?

Anything after you woke up?”

He shook his head. “As far as I remember, the next time I woke up, I

was right here—with you and my sister standing over me.”

“Huh,” I said, baf ed. If Travis had been knocked down into a coma

by the same mechanism as me, why didn’t either of us remember putting

on the helmet?

I could understand losing memories after the botched

stimulation with transcranial focused ultrasound, but why would we lose

ones from before that?

“You’re a shrink, right?” asked Travis, looking quizzically at me now. “I’ve got a PhD in psychology,” I replied, “but I don’t have a clinical

practice.”

He waved that away. “But you’re trained in this shit, and—funny, I

don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but I need somebody to talk to.”

I leaned forward in the chair. “I’m all ears.”

“I feel different now,” Travis said. “Different from the way I did

before. I’m ghting it, but…”

“What’s different?”

“It’s hard to describe. But I keep thinking about…we ll, about what

I’m thinking about. I was always a charge-ahead kind of guy. Never look

back, no second thoughts. You know?

Just do it.”

“Like Nike,” I said. “Yeah, exactly. Hey, they still use that slogan?”

“Yup.”

“Anyway, that’s the way I used to be. But now, I keep going over in

my mind things I’ve done.”

I frowned. “You never did that before?”

“Never.”

“What about planning for the future?

Thinking about things you

haven’t yet done?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve always done that: considering alternatives,

guring the angles. But that’s different; there’s a point to that. You can

change the future, right?

You can’t change the past—so why…”

“Obsess about it?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, I guess that is the right word.”

“And you’ve only been doing this since…”

“Since Kayla woke me up.”

“Are you sure?

Did you ever keep a diary?”

“No.”

“A journal?

A blog?”

“A what?”

“A web blog; a public online journal.”

“Christ, no. Why would anyone do that?”

“Is it making you unhappy, this ruminating?”

“Yeah. It’s…I’ve got these…I don’t know what to call them, but…”

“Regrets?” I proffered. Travis repeated the word, as if trying it on, seeing if it t: “Regrets…”

And then at last he nodded. “Things I might’ve done differently—m aybe

should have done differently, and…”

“And you’re not used to thinking in terms of ‘should.’”

He seemed to consider this, too, then: “Yeah.” He shook his head. “It’s just…weird.”

It wasn’t weird, not for Q3s, but…

But it was for psychopaths. They didn’t ruminate and they didn’t get

depressed; it was almost unheard of for a psychopath to become

suicidally despondent. “What about your feelings toward, say, Kayla?”

“That’s weird, too!

I mean, she’s my sister, right?

Always has been,

always will be. And I was a good big brother, you know?

Wouldn’t let

anyone mess with her. But, well, now that I…”

“Think about it?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Now that I think about it, that was really about

me, right?

Making sure people respected me?

I didn’t—sounds shitty to

say this, I know—but I didn’t really care about her. I didn’t understand

that, not at the time—but now I keep wondering how she’s doing. And I

want her to be happy.”

My pulse was racing. There was too much physics and psychology

involved to quickly explain this to Travis just now, but I felt sure in my

bones that I was right. Yes, the quantum tuning fork—a device almost as

cool as The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver—had restored superposition to

Travis Huron’s brain, but it had done an even better job than we’d

thought. Prior to his falling into the coma, he must have had two of the

three electrons in each of his tubulin thingamajigs in superposition,

making him a quantum psychopath. But, assuming he had returned to

Menno’s lab, just as I had, the transcranial ultrasound stimulation

provided by the Mark II helmet must have caused those electrons to all

decohere, falling back en masse to the classical-physics state, making him

lose consciousness. But when Kayla had goosed his brain, instead of just two, all three of

the electrons in each pocket had gone into superposition. Prior to 2001,

he’d been a card-carrying psychopath, and now, apparently for the rst

time in his life, Travis Huron was what I had been for most of my life:

fully conscious with conscience, a CWC, a quick. “It’s depressing,” Travis said, after a moment, “having all these…these

regrets…running around in my head.”

I nodded slowly. “Welcome to the club.”

K26

AYLA returned around 7:00 P. M., and I went out into the corridor

to chat with her again. “How’s he doing?” she asked. I didn’t know what to tell her—and, anyway, it was probably better

to have the conversation about Travis’s change in mental state when we

were going to have a longer time to talk. “He’s okay.”

Kayla looked down the corridor with its hard, scuffed ooring, doors

alternating left and right, each leading into a room containing one or

more patients. “I want to help the other people here,” she said, “if any of

the rest of them are in deep, total comas. See who I can wake up, but…”

“Yes?” It sounded like a good idea to me. “But we can’t just pull an Awakenings on them all,” she said. “Many

of these people have been abandoned for years, decades. Some have no

family, and for those who do have families, surely they should be present

when they wake up. Plus, frankly, I want to be sure that Travis’s

superposition is holding before we get anyone else’s hopes up.”

“Makes sense.”

“Still,” she said, “this could change the world.”

I looked down the corridor; the sun was setting through a window at

the far end. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it could, at that.”

I left Kayla with her brother; as they spoke of their childhoods and their

parents, I really was feeling like a third wheel. Plus, I was starving, and I

only knew two other adults in Saskatoon: the optometrist David Swinson

who, if I recalled correctly, planned to urinate on my cemetery plot, and

Kayla’s research partner, Victoria Chen. I almost didn’t call Vic, assuming

she’d be out with her boyfriend, but then gured there was nothing to

lose. To my surprise, she was free and happy to meet me for a bite to eat. She suggested the Konga Cafe, which turned out to be a Caribbean place

in a little strip mall here in Riversdale. I got there rst, and rose when she

arrived. She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. We sat opposite each other, and she said, “So, how are you?”

“Honestly?” I tilted my head. “Con icted.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I spent some time with Kayla’s brother Travis today. And,

well, up until he came out of his coma, it seems he was a quantum

psychopath. I haven’t told Kayla yet—frankly, I don’t know how to tell

her.”

“Are you sure of your diagnosis?”

I shrugged, conceding that there was some room for doubt. “I grant

that the only quantum-superposition testing you did on him was while he

was in a coma, so there’s no record of his quantum state prior to that. And, as far as I know, no one had ever done the Hare Checklist on him,

and I doubt there’s any video of him from the last century that’s high-

enough resolution to show whether he was doing microsaccades then. But all of those things are merely correlates of psychopathy. Actual

psychopathy is a state of mind: a complete disregard for others; a lack of

re ection and rumination—and that’s what Travis described to me.”

“Wow,” said Vic. “Are Kayla or Ryan in any danger from him?”

“No, not now.”

“Good.”

“I’ll tell Kayla before I leave tomorrow, but…” I exhaled noisily. “I

bet Kayla would have had an easier childhood if Travis had been a Q1

instead of a Q2.”

Sadness washed over Vic’s face, and she said slowly, “Speaking of

which…”

“Yes?”

“My boyfriend Ross. My ex-boyfriend, I should say. He…he’s a Q1.

I

tested him on the beamline.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head. “It’s…dif cult, you know?

Finding

decent guys who are okay with not having kids, that’s hard.”

“Don’t you want kids?”

“‘Want’?” she said. “Yes. But I can’t have any. I wish I could, but…”

She shrugged a little. “Cervical cancer; had a hysterectomy.”

“I’m sorry, Vic.”

“Thanks. Ryan’s the closest thing to a child I’ll ever have.”

“Oh, she’s a doll.”

“Yeah,” said Vic, looking sad. “Yeah, she is.”

“Anyway,” I said. “I’m sorry about you and Ross.”

She lifted her dark eyebrows. “I guess they really are everywhere. Makes you wonder how society can function.”

“Ross teaches high school, right?”

“Yes. English.”

“Well,” I said, spreading my arms, “there’s a curriculum laid down by

the Ministry of Education, right?

He has to teach these books in this

order by that time, and prepare his students for taking this standardized

province-wide test. Any number of people could do that; indeed, any

number do—there must be thousands of high-school English teachers in

Saskatchewan.”

“A good teacher makes a difference.”

“Sure, yeah. But there are lots of bad teachers or indifferent ones in

the system, too. I don’t say that being a university professor is better—

although it pays better—but the requirement to do original research to

get a PhD might mean you get fewer p-zeds at that level although I’ve

seen lots of trite, paint-by-numbers dissertations in my day. You know

what they say: the only word that rhymes with ‘theses’ is ‘feces.’”

“I guess. It’s just—I mean, I really liked him. And I thought he liked

me. But he’s…he’s a robot.”

The server came; I ordered Red Stripe, an imported Jamaican beer;

Vic asked for a Pepsi Next. “I still don’t get how a society could function with most of its

members not being truly conscious,” Vic said. “Welllll,” I replied gently, “the majority of Ross’s students would

likely be p-zeds, too. And most jobs are repetitive. It’s only the length of

the repeat cycle that varies: a few seconds if you work on an assembly

line, a few hours if you drive a bus, daily if you manage a restaurant, and

yearly if you teach a course. Every September, I trot out the same

introductory lectures I gave the year before.”

“I guess.” She let out a sigh. “I just can’t believe I was fooled by him.”

I shook my head. “Psychopaths fool people. They deliberately

deceive; they get off on it. But p-zeds?

They just are. Ross wasn’t trying

to hurt you; he wasn’t trying to do anything.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said. The server brought our drinks—mine in a

bottle, Vic’s in a can—as well as some johnnycakes as an appetizer. “It’s

just hard,” she continued, “not knowing who’s…who’s real.”

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence for a time, then I said, “Anyway, Vic, there’s

something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Shoot.”

“I said Travis was a psychopath—but he isn’t, not anymore. He was

almost certainly a Q2 before his coma, but the coma knocked him out of

superposition—or, I guess, the other way around: he got knocked out of

superposition, ending up in the classical-physics state, and that caused

him to lose consciousness, right?”

“That’s the process, yes,” said Vic. “But when he came out of the coma, he came out as a Q3—I’d bet

money on it. He’s got a conscience for the rst time, and, frankly, is

gobsmacked by it.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“Yeah, but here’s the part I don’t get. I admit that I’m struggling with

all this quantum-physics stuff, so maybe you can explain it to me. Travis

started as Q2, got knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came

back up as a Q3—a higher level than he’d been at originally.”

“Okay.”

“But I started out as a Q3—fully conscious with conscience—got

knocked down to the classical-physics state, and came back at a lower

level, emerging from my own blackout as a Q1 p-zed. Why is that?”

Vic’s thin lips turned downward. “That is a good question.”

“He doesn’t remember what happened to him any more than I do,

but we were almost certainly both knocked out by the same piece of

equipment although admittedly we were revived in different ways. Still,

he went up, and I went down.”

“Well, if I understand what Kayla told me correctly, you came back—

to the extent that you initially did come back—almost immediately;

Travis was in a coma for nineteen years.”

“True. And I suppose it might be completely random—a throw of the

dice.”

Vic nodded. “If that’s the case, given the 4:2:1 ratio of the cohorts,

maybe you’ve got a four-in-seven chance of coming up as a p-zed, like

you did, and a one-in-seven chance of coming up as a quick, like Travis

did. But I’m always suspicious of apparent randomness.”

I took another sip of beer. “Me, too.”

When I got back to the facility to pick up Kayla, her mother Rebekkah

was just leaving—and so I maneuvered her over to a couple of chairs in

the lobby. “Have you been enjoying Saskatoon?” she asked. “Yes. It’s lovely. Such sunny days!

And no mosquitoes. I’m not

looking forward to those back in Winnipeg.”

Rebekkah was a handsome woman with lively eyes. “Tell me about it. I survived fty-one summers there.”

And that was the opening I’d been hoping for. “Speaking of The

Peg…”

“Yes?”

“You raised your kids there, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Travis was into sports, even as a kid?”

“Oh, my, yes. The harder, the better. Not Kayla, though: she was the

studious one.” Our orange-upholstered chairs were facing each other, and

she leaned closer, conspiratorially. “I never told the kids this, but my

father—their grandfather—referred to them as ‘Jock’ and ‘Nerd’ behind

their backs.” She smiled. “He meant it with love, but it’s true: they were

different as night and day.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “Well, look, I’m interested in, you know, nature vs. nurture, and all that. Sometimes sports are displaced aggression. Was

Travis, you know, a violent child?”

“Well, there wasn’t much consciousness of it back then,” Rebekkah

said, “but, yeah, he was a bully, frankly. My husband and I weren’t really

aware of it too much at the time, but he probably wasn’t the nicest guy

to other kids. But all the kids’ parents loved him. That boy had the gift of

the gab; I don’t know where he got it.”

I nodded. Glibness and super cial charm were classic psychopathic

traits; so were bullying and pointless cruelty. But I was hoping for

something de nitive. After all, the notion that people change quantum

states upon rebooting from total unconsciousness was huge, and I

couldn’t just rely on what Travis had subjectively told me about his own

feelings. “Were there a lot of pets on your street?

Dogs?

Cats?”

“Oh, yes. Sure.”

I often oated hypotheticals with my students, who always gured

out that they were precisely that. I didn’t like doing so with Rebekkah,

but I said, even though no such thing had actually happened in my own

neighborhood, “We used to have tons of pets on the street I grew up on.”

I put on a puzzled face. “But a lot of them disappeared. We didn’t know

what to make of it. Turned out this kid up the street was capturing them

and killing them.”

“God,” said Rebekkah. “We had the same thing. Some creep was

stringing up dead cats from trees—including two kittens that belonged to

us—and we found others cut into pieces. It was awful…” She shook her

head. “I tell you, Jim, I didn’t like that my Travis used to beat up other

kids, but I wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten his hands on whoever

was doing that.”

Kayla, on the other hand, was another matter; keeping secrets was no

way to build a relationship. “I had a long chat with your brother this

afternoon,” I said to her, as we lay side by side later that night. “He told me. He likes you.” She smiled. “Big-brother stamp of

approval.”

“He’s a good guy,” I said. “Now.”

“What do you mean, ‘now’?”

“What was he like as a kid, a teenager?”

“You’re getting at something,” said Kayla. “What?”

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “He’s changed,” I said. “Before

his coma, he was a psychopath.”

“You said you didn’t remember Travis from before.”

“I don’t. But he described his inner life from then to me:

consciousness but no conscience, not until now. He used to be a Q2, but,

for whatever reason, he booted up again as a Q3.”

She looked stunned. “No. Really?

My God, are you—are you sure?”

“Pretty much.”

“Jesus. So what does that make me?

Debra Fucking Morgan?

Too

much the loving sister to see what her brother really was?”

“I’m not—no one is judging. I just thought you should know.” She

said nothing, so I went on. “And at least he isn’t one anymore. He

genuinely cares about you.”

“Now,” said Kayla bitterly. “And let’s hope he stays that way. But, look, you know the Hare

Checklist as well as I do. Did he, y’know, have lots of girlfriends?”

“You’ve only seen him now, after wasting away for almost twenty

years,” she replied, nodding. “I’m his sister, and even I knew how hot he

was.”

“Promiscuity,” I said softly. “Strings of meaningless relationships. And

you said he was into extreme sports: that’s need for stimulation. You also

said he was a brick when your father was ghting cancer; I’m betting he

kept it together even at the funeral, right?”

“And you’re saying that’s evidence of shallow affect?”

I couldn’t shrug lying down, but I lifted my eyebrows. “Classic trait.”

“I—” But she didn’t nish whatever thought she’d started. “I’m so sorry, honey. But remember, he’s ne, now.”

She rolled on her side, facing away from me; I was afraid she was

angry, but then she said, “Hold me.”

I did, nestling into the curve of her back, spooning her tightly. I didn’t

know what to say, and so I just held her, and we lay there, waiting for

sleep to take us. A27

FTER Jim had returned to Winnipeg, Kayla decided to come clean

with the staff at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care. “And so,” she

said, “if there are other patients here who have no consciousness at all, I

might be able to help them.”

Nathan Amsterdam, the medical chief of staff, was fty-something,

with blond hair swept back from his forehead, hollow cheeks, and a

long, thin face. “It’s incredible,” he said. “But, you know, you really

should have told us in advance what you were planning to do. If

something had gone wrong…”

“He’s my brother; the court gave me power of attorney ages ago. I

authorized it—and it worked.”

“Still, if it’d had some deleterious effect—”

“It didn’t. It cured him.”

He was quiet for a time, then: “Well, what’s done is done.”

“So far,” said Kayla. “But I want to do it again. Is there anyone else

here whose condition is similar to what my brother was in?

A score of

just three on the Glasgow scale?

I want to help, if I can.”

“I’d have to check with our legal counsel…”

“For pity’s sake, Dr. Amsterdam, you’re not going to bury a miracle

in red tape, are you?”

Amsterdam’s of ce walls were lined with cherry-wood bookcases; he

sat behind a matching desk. “Off the record, we have four—no, ve—

patients with locked-in syndrome, and a dozen or so in minimally

conscious states. But with no signs at all of consciousness or awareness?”

He frowned, and the concavities of his cheeks deepened. “There’s one. Been in a coma since a car accident, oh, ve or six years ago. Her

husband is almost as dutiful as you—comes in every other Wednesday

night to sit with her.”

“Can you put me in touch with him?”

Amsterdam’s head moved left and right. “No. But I can ask him if he

wants to get in touch with you.”

I was standing before fty or so students. My ringer was off; I was

famous for chastising students when their phones rang while I was trying

to teach. But I did have the phone on the lectern, face-up, so I could keep

an eye on the time in a way that was less obvious than looking at my

watch. There was no clock at the back of the room although there was

one behind me: the students got to see the hour evaporate, but the

professor didn’t. The little tablet vibrated and the display brie y lit up, showing the

time—11:14 A. M.—and the automatic noti cation I’d set, and forgotten,

at the beginning of the trial: Google Alert—“Devin Becker verdict.” I

violated my own rule, picked up the phone, and looked at my inbox. The

headline for the article said: Savannah Prison ringleader sentenced to

death. The source beneath it was MSNBC. com, although doubtless if I

did a search, there’d be dozens of stories already, and hundreds by the

end of the day. And then, I guess, I just stood there, mouth agape, while all those eyes

looked at me. I heard someone cough, someone else typing, another

person knock a pen to the oor. But I kept staring at the message. I

wanted to click through to the report and watch the video, then and

there, but—

“Professor Marchuk?” said a woman from near the front of the hall. I

blinked, looked up, but said nothing. “Sir?” said the same person. “Are you okay?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that, and so I just composed myself

and pressed on with the lecture. “Watson, you see, was the quintessential

behaviorist. He felt that people were simple stimulus-response machines

that could be trained any way you wished through reward and

punishment. He once said, ‘Give me a child and I’ll shape him into

anything…’”

Kayla got a call from the husband of the woman in the coma, and she

immediately drove the hour out of the city to his farm. Dale Hawkins

was perhaps sixty years old, with a shock of graying hair and a full,

matching beard. Although he was wearing a plaid work shirt, he had an

intricate tattoo of vines and leaves terminating on the back of his left

hand; Kayla assumed it was a full sleeve. On one wall of his living room

he had three framed photos of his wife. She had a broad face and brown

hair. “I miss her so much,” Dale said. “I miss her every day.”

“I know,” said Kayla. There was a rough-hewn wooden coffee table

between them, but she reached across it and took his hand. “I know

exactly what you’re going through. My brother was in a coma, too, and

this technique helped him.” She got her tablet and streamed the video Jim

had made of Travis waking up. Dale watched, trans xed. “And your brother, he’s all right in the head?” asked Dale, once the

video was over. “He’s the same as before?”

And that was the question she’d been wrestling with. “No,” she said. “Honestly?

He’s different. Better, but different. And your wife might

come back different, too—and, I have to tell you, not necessarily better.”

They talked some more while Dale looked at the photos of his wife,

and Kayla looked at them, too. She had different expressions in each one:

a smile, a look of thoughtful contemplation, her features set in

determination. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women

merely players. The words Kayla had memorized in high school came

back to her. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his

time plays many parts. “Okay,” Dale said at last. “Let’s give it a try.”

I came into my living room—you had to go down a couple of steps to get

to it, all Mary Tyler Moore-like—and sat on the couch, facing the TV. I

fumbled around looking for the correct one of the four remote controls,

activated the set, selected the web browser, went to CBC. ca, and there it

was, the second story under “International News.”

“After deliberating for six days,” said a tall female reporter I’d never

seen before, “the jury in the Devin Becker case handed down a death

sentence. Under Georgia law, when a jury unanimously recommends the

death penalty, which it did here, the judge has no option but to impose it. Becker sat emotionless in court as the jury forewoman read the

verdict…”

Soon they were showing footage of the jurors exiting the courthouse. I recognized them, but I’d never heard any of them speak until now. They

cut to the heavyset black woman, a bouquet of microphones each

sporting a different logo in front of her. She said, “The defense tried to

say he had no choice in what he did. Hooey. Guy knew what he was

doin’, and he did it. We all answerable to the Lord for our actions.”

It was all there in that woman’s statement—a woman I’d only known

as Juror 8, but I’d now seen identi ed by the text on-screen as Helen

Brine. Devin Becker was quite possibly going to die by lethal injection

because I’d failed to deliver the goods. The reporter went on: “Under

Georgia law, a verdict of rst-degree murder can be found in cases where

murder involves torture. The original case against Becker had hinged on

the state establishing that his maltreatment of the prisoner before

drowning him amounted to torture; clearly, the jurors here bought that

argument.”

The newscast automatically moved on to the next story, this one

being presented by an anchor I did recognize, Ian Hanomansing. “Continuing with news from south of the border, in the wake of further

deaths in Texas…”

I groped for the remote, turned off the set, lay back on the couch, and

looked up at the white ceiling, the little spikes of its stippled surface

hanging down like ten thousand swords of Damocles. T28

HEY could have just tried the tuning fork without preamble, but if

it didn’t work, Kayla would never know whether the failure was

because of some aw in the device or because Mrs. Hawkins wasn’t

actually currently in the classical-physics state, and it seemed best to

determine that beforehand rather than try to beg for further cooperation

from Dale if she didn’t wake up. Of course, if it turned out she wasn’t

currently free of superposition, they’d give the tuning fork a try anyway

—what the heck. And so, just as they’d done with Travis, Mrs. Hawkins was brought

via ambulance to the Canadian Light Source, and taken on a gurney

down to the SusyQ beamline. Kayla had told her boss Jeff what she was

doing, and he was standing at one side, his Hawaiian shirt turquoise and

aquamarine today; next to him was Dr. Amsterdam. Dale was on hand,

too, and he’d shaved off his facial hair. “I didn’t have the beard when she

was awake,” he explained, “and I want her to recognize me

immediately.”

Mrs. Hawkins—Jill—looked no older than she had in the smiling

photograph at the farmhouse, except that her hair was now completely

gray; it might well have been back when that photo had been taken, too,

but any dye job had grown out in the interim. A CLS staffer was recording everything on video as Victoria and one

of the ambulance attendants carefully positioned Jill with the crown of

her head by the conical beam emitter. Vic didn’t bother to strap Jill’s head

in place; she wasn’t moving at all. As always, the test didn’t take long. Kayla knew it was odd to feel

elated that this poor woman was showing absolutely zero consciousness

—but, as she looked at the readout on Vic’s monitor, she did feel just

that: no superposition; not even that usual background-noise line high

up. Mrs. Hawkins was in the classical-physics state. “Perfect,” said Victoria, grinning. Vic got the quantum tuning fork out of its foam-lined case. She

handed it to Kayla, who held it, the metal shaft cold in her hands. Dale,

wearing a nice gray dress shirt, was whispering a prayer as his tattooed

hand gripped the back of a chair. Kayla touched the fork’s twin tines to

Jill’s forehead and slid the red switch on the handle forward. Nothing happened. True, even if the fork restored superposition, it

didn’t necessarily mean that Jill would actually wake up; she could be

blissfully asleep now. But Vic’s monitor showed no change. Kayla took a deep breath and tried rotating the fork, ipping the

tines, just as she’d done with Travis. But it made no difference. The

readout still didn’t show any spikes. Of course, the conditions were different than with Travis; the

synchrotron itself and tons of other high-tech equipment were operating

here. But Victoria’s colleagues had been using the tuning fork for many

days now with substrate blocks adjacent to beamline emitters, and it

worked just ne in boosting them into superposition. And, yes, Kayla

would go back to the facility with Jill and try again there, just to be sure,

but…

But she knew in her heart that it wasn’t going to work, and looking

over at Dale, this rugged, tattooed farmer now with tears running down

his cheeks, she felt awful. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She was sorting through other words she

might say, hoping to nd ones that could comfort him, such as noting

that at least things were no worse than before, but—

But Dale beat her to it, turning to Dr. Amsterdam, and as soon as he

nished speaking, she knew that things were, in fact, much worse. “Until

today,” he said, “I always thought she was in there. I always thought she

could hear me when I talked. I always thought she’d come back to me

someday, but…” He gestured at the monitor and its damning at line. “But she’s gone, isn’t she?

Been gone for years.” He wiped his nose with

his arm, the shirt’s sleeve pushing up to reveal more ivy. “It’s time to let

her go.”

I walked out onto my third- oor balcony and looked at the Red River

rolling by. Between my building and it was a green strip with a couple of

picnic tables. It was dark out, and, as a gibbous moon was rising over the

park on the opposite side of the river, I batted away a few of the season’s

rst mosquitoes—they were coming earlier every year. While I stood

there, I saw two people jogging north, and, shortly thereafter, two more

running south. P-zeds?

Psychopaths?

Quicks?

Who knew?

I returned to the living room and plunked myself back down on the

couch. My walls were a celery shade; that wouldn’t have been my choice,

but that’s what they’d been when I moved in. I stared into the soft

greenness, thinking…

…and I must have lost track of time, because I was interrupted by the

bleep-bloop-bleep-bloop of an incoming Skype call. Kayla was supposed

to reach out to me tonight at 10:00 my time, after she’d put Ryan to bed;

I hadn’t realized it had gotten so late. I hurried over to my laptop and

clicked on the button to answer the call. She was in her living room, wearing a plain brown top, her red hair

tied back. She looked melancholy, and I guess she must have thought I

looked the same way, because we both said, “What’s wrong?”

And that, at least, caused each of us to smile, however wanly. “Okay,”

I said. “You rst.”

She recounted her attempt of this afternoon to revive one of the other

patients from the long-term-care facility. I was quiet, listening. “I don’t get it,” she said at the end, “and neither does Vic. Why did

the quantum tuning fork restore my brother’s superposition but not Mrs. Hawkins’s?”

I lifted my shoulders and shifted on the couch, then tilted my laptop’s

screen back slightly to reframe myself in the outgoing video. “I don’t

know. There’s something different about your brother. Why did I wake

up only a few minutes after Menno knocked me into a coma, but your

brother stayed in that state for almost twenty years?

Sure, each brain is

unique, but it would be nice to know why Travis reacted differently from

me and differently from this woman.”

“I feel horrible,” said Kayla. “I got her husband’s hopes up. She didn’t

respond when we tried again with her back at the facility. Her husband’s

going to see his lawyer and get the paperwork done so that they can stop

feeding her.”

“Oh,” I said softly, knowing better than to point out that this was

indeed the right utilitarian move. “I mean,” said Kayla, “she’s been gone for years—al most certainly

since her accident. But still…”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway.” She tilted her head. Behind her, I could see the table and

bookcases in her dining room. “How was your day?” she asked. I thought brie y about what normal couples talked about at the end

of the day, and kind of envied it. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve been

following the news, but…”

“Yes?”

“They handed down the sentence in the Devin Becker case today.”

“Oh!

No, I hadn’t heard. And…?”

“They’re sending him to death row.”

“Oh.”

“So I failed to convince the jury that his psychopathy was a

mitigating factor.”

“Well, after…” She trailed off; she’d been about to say, no doubt,

after the district attorney tore me to shreds on the witness stand, it’s no

wonder. But it didn’t have to be said in words; her lifted eyebrows were

enough. I nodded. “Yeah. Georgia law has all sorts of provisions for executing

people when the victim is a cop or prison guard; nothing in the rules

about when the perpetrator is one. But the statute says death can be

imposed in cases where the victim was tortured, and, well, you saw the

Savannah Prison videos, I’m sure.”

“Yeah.”

I let out a long, whispery sigh, and pretty much simultaneously she

did, too. “Anyway,” I said. “It’s late—here, at least. And I’ve got a 9:00 A. M. class.”

“Okay,” said Kayla, looking out at me from my computer’s screen. “Sleep well, baby.”

“You, too,” I said. But I doubted either of us was going to sleep at all. T29

HERE was a strip mall behind my condo building, running

perpendicular to the river. It contained an equal mixture of stores

that interested me (Best Buy, Staples) and didn’t (Toys“R”Us, Petland).

But there was also a Subway, where I could get a decent vegan sandwich

or salad, which is why I walked over there this morning, and a

Dollarama, which sold the Winnipeg Free Press; if the line was short

there, I often popped in to pick up a copy. Today it was, and I headed

home with the paper tucked under one arm and carrying my salad with

the other. Once I was back up in my apartment and had poured myself a Coke

Zero, I sat at my little breakfast nook and read as I ate. The page-one headline, above the fold: 150 Killed in Nairobi

Shooting Rampage. Flipping the paper over: Manitoba Chiefs Decry

Ottawa Funding Cuts. Next to that: McCharles Calls Dem Opponents

“Unpatriotic.”

Inside: 18 Dead in Texas “Cleansing.” Brandon Priest Charged in

Sex-Abuse Case. Canada, US, Fall Far Short of Carbon Targets: Report. The editorial: Despite a Muslim PM, PQ Continues to Push

Islamophobic “Charter of Values.” And an op-ed: Canada Needs to

Open its Doors to Jews Fleeing Europe. The business page was no better: Michigan Decerti es All Public-

Sector Unions. Euro Plummets as Spanish Debt Crisis Worsens. Apple,

Amazon Defend Chinese Work Conditions. Canadian Income Disparity

at All-Time High. I found myself wondering, as I had so many times over the years,

What’s wrong with these people?

But, unlike those previous occasions,

this time I supposed I had an answer. I’d known about the vast numbers

of psychopaths for a couple of years now, but even so, there weren’t

enough of them to account for all the craziness in the world. But evil

needs followers, and, given the 4:2:1 ratio between the cohorts, there

were four billion p-zeds out there just waiting to be led. Of course, those people were entitled to the same moral consideration

as any other comparably sophisticated being; I wouldn’t abuse or kill an

animal—and I wouldn’t countenance anyone doing that to a p-zed. And

yet, Q2s, and, I feared, even many Q3s, if they knew of the prevalence of

Q1s, would mistreat them. The most chilling line from the remake of

Battlestar Galactica was the edict, “You can’t rape a machine,” uttered

when humans were sexually assau lting Cylons, who were physically

indistinguishable from humans. Sure, Cylons acted like they were upset

at being attacked—but it’s only rape, the humans felt, when done to one

of our own. And the second most chilling line?

The show’s oft-repeated mantra of

“So say we all!”— t in or fuck off. Y’know, Admiral Adama, if you

wanted to make the case that humans are morally superior to machines,

browbeating everyone until they’re all mindlessly chanting “So say we

all!” along with you was probably not the best way to do it. No, I wasn’t going to tell anyone else about the existence of huge

quantities of p-zeds. As far as we knew, the three quantum states were

uniformly distributed across the general population; there was nothing in

Menno’s work or that of Kayla and Vic to suggest anything to the

contrary. But if the quantum taxonomy became general knowledge, it

wouldn’t be long, I knew, before the accusation that all ll-in-the-blanks

were p-zeds would be used to justify not just the horror of rape, but

slavery and murder, too. Menno Warkentin had been right to keep secret

the existence of people without inner voices, and I intended to do the

same. And then the call I’d been waiting for came. Dr. Bhavesh Namboothiri, over at the University of Winnipeg, had

nally nished mapping out my visual memory index, based on the

recent MRI scan I’d had at St. Boniface. In other words, he nally had

the key; it was time to open the lock. It was a warm summer day as I

drove to his lab—but not warm enough to account for how much I was

sweating. I’d sort of expected to be laid out on a gurney, looking up at the

ceiling, but it was much easier for Dr. Namboothiri to probe the top of

my head with me sitting in a simple low-to-the-ground bucket seat on a

rotating stand. Nor was he wearing the surgical garb I associated with

Wilder Pen eld. Rather, he had on blue jeans and a loose- tting dark-red

shirt. After all, as he said, he wasn’t going to open my skull—just my

mind. Namboothiri stood next to me, and next to him, on a wheeled tray,

was a device about the size of a shoebox. Attached to it were two long

cables, each ending in a metal tip, a bit like the probes on an ohmmeter. He placed one of the probes over my left temporal lobe, and the other

near the anterior cingulate cortex. There was clearly some sort of readout

on the box that he could see but I couldn’t; he kept glancing over at it. “Okay,” he said. “Do you feel anything?”

“No. Nothing.”

“And what about now?”

“Nothing.”

“And now?”

“My God…” I said. I recognized her at once, of course—and yet had

no other recollection of her when she was this young, or of her with

1980s-style big hair. “What is it?”

“My…my mother. She looks so young, and…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I mean, they told me my nursery had puke-green walls, but I’d

had no recollection of that. But…but this must be it.”

He slightly repositioned one of the probes; I felt a twinge of sadness

as the vivid image disappeared. “Okay, and now?”

“A teddy bear, but not one I ever recall seeing before.”

“And here?” Namboothiri moved the probe again, and I tasted

something cloyingly sweet. “Perhaps children’s cough syrup?”

“And here?”

“My dad—with hair!—reading to me.”

“And here?”

I sucked in air. “What?” said Namboothiri. “That’s it. That must be it!”

“What are you seeing?”

“Kayla—my girlfriend, as she must have been during my dark period

—but…”

“Yes?”

“Younger. And…”

“Yes?”

“Naked.”

Maybe Namboothiri smiled; maybe he didn’t. “All right,” he said. “De nitely the right time period. And—”

I almost stopped him from moving the probe, not because the

memory was so pleasant, although it was, but because this was the rst

bit of that time I’d recalled at all, and I was afraid we’d never get it or

any other part of it, back, but—

“A classroom,” I said. “And…perfume. God, yes, I’d completely

forgotten: that crazy Eastern European chick who sat in front of me in

that science- ction course; always came to class drenched in perfume. What’s her name…”

“You tell me.”

I scrunched my eyes shut, and it came to me. “Bozena.”

But suddenly her face—and the smell—we re gone. Still: “But I don’t

understand. I’m remembering smells and sounds, not just visuals.”

“Sure, and you remember those with the verbal indexing system, too,

even though they’re not words; elicited memories will be of your full

sensorium, no matter how they’re indexed.”

“Ah, okay.”

The next three memories he invoked were clearly of my toddler years,

including what I rather suspect, as a Valentine’s baby, was my rst time

seeing the ground without snow on it. And then it was back to 2001, or,

at least, I assumed so; I’d lived in that campus residence for two years,

but only memories from my dark period should be indexed here. “And this?”

At rst I thought I wasn’t recalling anything. Then I became

conscious of a sense of pressure all over my body. It was what I imagined

being bound in a straitjacket felt like. Except I wasn’t immobilized; I was

moving head rst, like I was being pulled up an incredibly narrow

elevator shaft. No, not up—not a vertical movement. Horizontal. And I

wasn’t being pulled. I was being pushed. The pressure on me kept

increasing, so much so that—

God. —my head!

I could feel my head being crushed. Another memory, from another time, another part of my brain,

another indexing system, brie y came to me: my fear on that day I’d

jumped up and almost smashed in Ronny Handler’s head. But my skull wasn’t being crushed from one side; it was being

compressed from all sides, and I felt the bones—

I felt the bones sliding, like tectonic plates, some of them even

subducting…

And then, cold on the crown of my head; the pressure releasing on

the top, then farther down, then—

Eyes stinging, because of…

Because of light. “My God…My God…”

“What?”

“It’s my birth!”

Namboothiri didn’t sound surprised. “Yeah, there have been

numerous reports of autistics remembering their births—because they

continue to access the visual-indexing system their whole lives.”

“It’s—wow. Incredible.”

“It’s proof of concept, is what it is. Everything’s stored in there, all

right, right back to the beginning. Don’t worry; my equipment records

the coordinates of each contact. We should be able to elicit any of these

memories again at will now. So, we’re all set to nd out exactly what

went down all those years ago—call it ‘2001: A Memory Odyssey.’ We’ll

pick up again in our next session.”

“But—my God, please. Can’t we continue?”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I really am. But you’re not the only one with summer

classes to teach.”

I nodded, grateful for these few glimpses—but desperate for more. I30

N high-school physics—my last exposure to that discipline prior to

reconnecting with Kayla—everyone gets to see the famous 1940 lm

of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a suspension bridge more

than a mile long over Puget Sound. In the lm, the bridge starts swaying

left and right in the wind, and the pavement undulates from side to side,

rising and falling to breathtaking degrees, before the bridge nally breaks

apart, its midsection crashing into the water far below. Every student

watching that lm is stunned—it looks so unreal, so impossible, you

think it can’t possibly be true, that nothing like that could ever happen in

real life. There’s a similarly shocking lm I sometimes show my students. Like

the one of Galloping Gertie—the nickname given to that bridge—this

one is old. It shows a man—a business executive, as the news stories later

revealed, standing on a ledge high up the side of an of ce building. He’s

clearly despondent, clearly distressed, but someone—a tourist with a

movie camera below—has caught sight of him. Soon, others note the

man as well, and, as we can see when the tourist brie y tilts his lens

down, quite a sizable crowd develops, all gawk ing up at the man. And then a male voice rings out—the camera, aimed back up at the

poor soul high above, doesn’t show whose—cutting loose a single

affricative syllable: “Jump!”

The man on the ledge is startled, and, brie y, there’s a ripple of

disapproving tut-tuts on the soundtrack, but then another male voice is

heard: “Jump!” And a woman joins the chorus: “Jump!” And soon, the

cry is going up throughout the crowd. “Jump!” “Jump!” “Jump!”

At last the poor fellow does indeed do what the crowd is bidding,

more or less. He doesn’t jump, but he does use the ats of his hands to

push himself against the window behind him, and falls in a manner so

similar to Don Draper’s plunge on the opening credits of Mad Men that

I’ve often wondered if the animators used this lm as a source. The

tourist dutifully records its all, including the impact on the pavement far

below, the man hitting so hard that he actually bounces back up and then

crashes down again, dead. When I run the lm in class, I usually stop with the man pushing off

—no need to show the horror of a person actually dying, and, besides, I

want the students to concentrate on the other horror: the reality that a

group of strangers, come together purely by the happenstance of their

individual wanderings, can suddenly exhibit conscienceless behavior that

few if any of its members would display in isolation. These days, of ce windows don’t open, there are no ledges to step out

on, and even the replacement Tacoma Narrows Bridge has suicide

netting, and so there aren’t as many smartphone videos of crowds urging

someone to leap to their death as you might image. But similar things—

one asshole starting something and it propagating like a contagion

through a population—still happen. They happen all the time. When I’d been in high school, they’d taught us that the Tacoma

Narrows Bridge had collapsed due to resonance between high winds that

matched the bridge’s natural structural frequency. But that was wrong—a

dated interpretation, even then. It turns out, as I learned years later, that

the real cause was a completely different phenomenon, something called

aeroelastic utter. The old explanation, which seemed to make a kind of

sense, was factually inaccurate. And when I’d rst seen that lm of the suicidal jumper, all those years

ago, my prof had said it was an example of deindividuation, the loss of

self into a crowd. But that, too, was wrong; that, too, was a dated interpretation,

proceeding from the false assumption that there was a self to lose. I’d known for months that Heather would be in town tonight. Gustav

would never let her take a pleasure trip on her own, but even he

understood that her business—the business that kept him in sports cars

and ne liqueurs—required her to travel now and then; she was staying

at my place. There was a play I’d been dying to see at the Royal Manitoba Theatre

Centre called Shocking, a ctionalized account of the life of Stanley

Milgram; it was having a trial run here before moving to Broadway next

year for the sixtieth anniversary of Milgram’s infamous obedience-to-

authority experiments. I’d bought the tickets long before any Winnipeggers seriously thought

the Jets might make it to the Stanley Cup—but, astonishingly, they had,

and, as luck would have it, the night Heather and I were going to the

play was also the night of the nal game between them and the New

Jersey Devils at the MTS Centre, just a kilometer west of the John Hirsch

Mainstage. Parking downtown was out of the question: thousands who

weren’t inside the arena had come out to watch the game in bars and

restaurants nearby; we took a bus to the Exchange District and walked

through the warm June evening to the theater. Out front were bronze

statues of the theater’s founders—made, I suppose, in a founder foundry. The one of Hirsch was wearing glasses; I always thought that looked odd

on a statue. The program booklet had a reproduction of the “Public

Announcement” Milgram had used to recruit test subjects from the New

Haven community, offering “$4.00 for one hour of your time” for what

he’d presented as a “study of memory.” Milgram had been just twenty-

seven when he’d started his experiments; the dapper fellow with the salt-

and-pepper hair and full beard shown in psychology textbooks was

Milgram-as-elder-statesman, not the haunted young man trying to make

sense of the Eichmann trial and what Hannah Arendt would soon dub

“the banality of evil”—the seeming ease with which average people

could be made to slide into doing cruel things. The actor who portrayed Milgram was a little old for the portions of

the story set in 1961 but was quite compelling, and the reconstructions

of Milgram’s shock machine and lab were spot-on. The psychologist in

me wanted to quibble with a couple of things—the playwright had relied

too heavily on Gina Perry’s 2013 book about Milgram’s work, which I’d

found unconvincing—but the theatergoer was thoroughly entertained,

and Heather had sat rapt, absolutely motionless, throughout the entire

performance. As my sister and I headed out of the theater, I would have loved to

have been able to tell her about the reality of p-zeds. The ability of

Milgram and his assistants, as authority gures, to get subjects to

administer what they thought were increasingly severe—and even life-

threatening—electric shocks despite the protests and eventual screams of

the recipients had confounded social-science researchers for six decades. Most of Milgram’s subjects, although paying lip service to having

qualms, kept ramping up the voltage again and again; his success rate

was exactly what you’d expect if sixty percent of the human race were

mindless zombies with a large dose of heartless psychopaths on top. I didn’t say any of that to Heather, though. Still, as we passed the

statues again, I asked, “What did you think of the play?” It was getting

on to 11:00 P. M., and the air had grown chilly. “It was good,” Heather replied. “That all?

Just good?”

She paused as if thinking, then: “Yeah.”

We headed south, the Red River a long block to our left. Rounding a

corner, I heard a great commotion up ahead: people shouting and yelling,

and, within seconds, multiple car alarms, and the jangle of shattering

glass. “What the hell?” said Heather. I pulled out my phone, clicked on the CBC app. The rst headline

said it all: “Jets Crash 5 to 4 in Sudden-Death Overtime.”

“Christ,” I said as what I assumed were store alarms started wailing

—followed shortly thereafter by two white police cars barreling past us

from behind, their roof lights on. “We better turn back,” I said, but within seconds, I could hear rioters

behind us, as well. “Come on!” I shouted, pointing down a side street

that looked empty. We started to run, but Heather, now in stocking feet

after removing her high heels, couldn’t keep up with me. I slowed down

but quickly realized the mistake I’d made. The buildings on either side of

us were mostly dark, but up ahead, where this street crossed another, I

could see a mob running east, and, in rapid succession, I heard three

more windows shatter and a trio of new alarms joining the cacophony. To our left, smoke was billowing up above the dark silhouette of a

four-story of ce building. There was a narrow, litter-strewn alleyway

between two of the buildings here, and we headed down it. We’d

probably be safe simply hiding, and I was all for that, but, incredibly,

Heather urged me to keep going. “Come on!” she said. “Let’s see!”

The whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of a helicopter caused me to look

brie y up—and in that moment, Heather took off down the alley,

heading toward the roaring crowd. I followed, soon catching up with her. We emerged from the alleyway

less than twenty meters from ve muscular guys, all in Winnipeg Jets

hoodies, ipping a red Hyundai Elantra onto its roof; its alarm was

wailing. Heather stopped dead, and I have to confess I did, too; you hear

about things like that on TV, but to actually see it was something else. The windshield shattered as the car’s canopy collapsed under the

vehicle’s weight. The guys looked at their handiwork, and one of them

shouted, “Fuck the Devils!” The others soon took up the cry, raising

clenched sts to the black sky, and, to my astonishment, my own sister

followed suit, hollering, “Fuck the Devils!”

It wasn’t “Jump!

Jump!

Jump!”—but it was spreading. “Heather!” I shouted. “For God’s sake!”

The band moved on, and instead of going in the opposite direction,

Heather started following them. The alignment rule: pick a heading for yourself that’s an average of

everyone else’s trajectories. “Heather!

Are you nuts?” I set off after her. The ve hoods came to a

halt, and so did my sister, giving them space. The separation rule: avoid crowding your neighbors. She turned and faced me. “Come on, Jim. You only live once.”

The punks were trying to roll another car, but either they were

running out of alcohol-fueled steam, or it was heavier than a Hyundai,

because they weren’t managing to get it elevated past the tipping point. Beyond them, a re was burning brightly: another person’s car had

been set ablaze. And someone else was throwing things at a storefront,

trying to get the glass to shatter—

—which, at last, it did, the sound a sharp counterpoint to all the

other noises rising up about us. Heather tipped her head down, and I thought she was averting her

gaze from the carnage, but then I realized she was looking around for

something she herself could hurl through a window. I surged in, took her by the elbow, swung her around, and pulled her

along with me back into the relative safety of the alleyway. “For God’s sake,” I said, “there are security cameras everywhere, and

you’re a fucking of cer of the court.”

She looked pissed for a moment, then nodded and lifted her

shoulders. “Yeah, I guess.”

The rioting was likely to last all night. Winnipeg had never had

something like this before, but Vancouver had—twice—and other cities

all over the globe had seen this sort of hooliganism in the past, although

more often, in fact, in the winning team’s hometown than in the loser’s. I could smell smoke now, and the background of shouts and sirens, of

alarms and things shattering, continued. I stared at my sister. Christ, could it be?

The whole point of

philosopher’s zombies is that, at least most of the time, there’s no way to

tell one from someone who is thinking on a conscious level. And, damn it

all, the revelation of their existence had been so easy to accept in the

abstract—six out of every ten humans lacking an inner life. But my own

sister?

I continued to look at her, and she looked back at me, and I tried to

fathom what, if anything, was going on behind those brown eyes of hers,

as the mob surged and roared through the city I called home. I pulled

Heather close, hugging her in a way I hadn’t for decades, keeping her

warm and safe against the ickering ames. My eyes stung—but surely it

was from the smoke. Sirens blared from all directions, and we waited, my

sister and I, together and yet oh-so-apart. T31

HE rioting continued for hours. Fire trucks and ambulances were

stymied by overturned cars and barricades made of whatever torn-

down fences, garbage cans, recycling bins, loose lumber, and other junk

people had pushed into the middle of the roads. I had a plan that I hoped would get us to a safe haven, which started

with having us backtrack along Main Street to Lombard Avenue. On the

way, we saw another car being ipped, and three more that already had

been. A pair of red Canada Post mailboxes had been knocked over, and

one of them had spilled its contents onto the sidewalk. The building on

our left had ve large square ground- oor windows in a row, and

Heather and I watched as a guy used a crowbar to smash each of them in

turn, a perfect bingo of destruction. We exited Lombard at Waterfront Drive by a railway bridge that

crossed the hundred-meter width of the Red River. I’d hoped we could

clamber up and get over to the residential neighborhood on the east side,

but there were already a bunch of people on the tracks, the safety fencing

having been torn down. And so, instead, Heather and I headed south

along Waterfront Drive, the trees of Stephen Juba Park between us and

the river on our left and the deserted Shaw Park baseball stadium on our

right. The air was thick with smoke—some of it burning wood, some of

it marijuana. We continued cautiously forward. Several of the streetlights

high atop their standards looked like they’d been shot out with ri es. Two young punks came at us from out of the row of trees, each

brandishing a two-by-four. I couldn’t make out their faces in the

darkness, but it was clear we were going to be attacked when one of

them said, “Holy shit!

It’s Professor Marchuk!” They turned and

hightailed it into the night. My heart was pounding, and Heather looked scared to death as we

continued cautiously along. One drunken guy lying in the grass waved a

knife at us and called out in slurred voice, “Come here, asshole!

I’ll cut

your balls off!”

There was no way to make it the ten kilometers to my home on foot

with Heather in high heels, and there was too much broken glass now

for her to continue to go shoeless. But looming ahead to the south was

the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, now just a few hundred

meters away. We pushed forward, but if there was rioting in the Exchange District,

there was rioting in The Forks, as well; I could hear a roar coming from

that direction, and ames were licking up from just about exactly where

I’d taken Kayla to dinner not that long ago. Heather and I hurried along. We passed close to two guys involved in

a knife ght—reminding me of that night all those years ago, except—

Except that night was just my imagination; this one was real—and so

much worse. There was a scream from behind us as we pushed ahead,

followed by someone growling, “That’ll teach you!”

Finally, we made it to the long, roo ess, stone tunnel leading to the

museum’s entrance. I pulled out my phone and scrolled until I found the

number for the security desk, which I’d called occasionally in the past for

after-hours access. “CMHR Security,” said a man’s voice. “Hello. This is James Marchuk. I’m on the Board of—”

“Oh, hi, Dr. Marchuk. This is Abdul.”

“Abdul, thank God!

I’m just outside the main entrance to the

museum; it’s crazy out here. Can you let me and my sister in?”

“Oh, my, yes—two secs,” he said, clicking off. We waited anxiously; it

was more like two minutes than two seconds, and felt like two hours. At

last, Abdul opened the farthest left of the four glass doors, and Heather

and I scurried inside; the guard locked the door immediately behind us. “We’ve got three calls in to WPS for support,” Abdul said. “They’re

trashing the grounds on the south side. The Gandhi statue has been

toppled. It won’t be safe to leave again tonight.”

“God,” said Heather, shaking. “Let me take you guys upstairs,” Abdul said. “At least there are

couches you can sleep on.” We nodded, and he led us down the stone

corridor and past the giant wall panels proclaiming in English and

French, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

But the interior lighting was off, and I could only make the words out

because I already knew what they said. Much of the museum’s shell was made of glass, so when the sun came up

the next morning, the building was lled with light. I hadn’t been aware

of actually falling asleep, but I must have at some point because it was

the brightness that woke me. I staggered out of the curator’s of ce I’d

been sleeping in and went to nd Heather. She was standing at a railing, looking down at the alabaster-clad

bridges crisscrossing the museum’s cavernous interior. I’d stood here

before, also looking down, and the spectacle always reminded me of the

scene in Forbidden Planet in which Dr. Morbius shows his visitors the

twenty-mile-deep cubic interior of the dead-and-buried Krell city on

Altair IV. Morbius’s words from that classic lm popped into my head. The heights they had reached!

But then, seemingly on the threshold of

some supreme accomplishment which was to have crowned their entire

history this all-but-divine race perished in a single night…

“Hey,” I said, joining my sister staring into the abyss. “You all right?”

“I guess.”

“Let’s see if we can get back to my place, okay?” I tried to make a

joke of it. “It was bad enough being out there last night; wait till the

school buses full of kids on eld trips arrive here.”

“School’s out for the summer,” she said, her tone at. “Yeah,” I replied. “I guess it is.” And that’s when I turned around,

looked out through the great curving glass, and saw the plumes of black

smoke against the blood-red dawn. It was a shocking bus trip back to my home. I was used to other

passengers chatting with friends or having their heads bent down,

thumb-typing on their phones, but everyone was looking out the

streaked, dusty windows. Many people, including Heather, had mouths

agape; the pedestrians I saw were likewise looking shell-shocked. Of course, most of the damage was super cial: smashed windows,

torn-down fences, obscene graf ti; there was only so much mayhem

people who’d arrived unprepared could cause. Still, it was distressing to

see, and the CJOB app said there had been eleven fatalities—one of

which was almost certainly from the knife ght Heather and I had passed

—and thirty more people were in hospital. I’d called Kayla from the museum to let her know I was all right, but

we only spoke brie y. She hadn’t been aware of the riots here; we

arranged to Skype this evening. The bus let us off at the far side of the strip mall from my condo

building. We walked through its parking lot, past my building’s outdoor

pool, into my lobby, and headed up. My unit had two washrooms but

only one shower; we both desperately needed to clean up, but I let

Heather go rst. While she showered, I went out on the balcony and

looked out at the river implacably rolling along. About fty meters

upriver from me, near one of the picnic tables, a couple of guys were

shing. My thoughts turned to Saskatoon, but only partially to Kayla; yes, I

missed her enormously and certainly could use her hugs after last night. But I was also thinking about CLS, and wondering if there was any

possible way to get my sister down on Victoria’s beamline so I could

know for sure whether Heather really was a Q1.

I ran through memories of our childhood together: times she’d made

me laugh, times she’d made me cry, times when I’d been worried about

her—and times when it seemed she’d genuinely been worried about me. Could she have just been going through the motions?

Granted, I’d had

no particular psychological acumen as a child or teenager, but surely

now, in retrospect, it should be obvious one way or the other. We had been very different in high school. She’d hung around with

the popular crowd, doing all the things popular kids did, drinking and

smoking and cutting classes. And she certainly followed fashion trends,

and to this day I can recite the lyrics of every Spice Girls song, having

heard her play their damn albums over and over again. Me, I’d refused to

wear blue jeans—I didn’t own a pair until I was thirty—or T-shirts with

any kind of advertising on them, and I’d listened mostly to the great sci-

movie soundtracks of John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. Granted, she

had gotten good marks in school—sometimes better than my own—but,

then again, taking in input and mindlessly spitting out output was

precisely what p-zeds were presumably adept at. I was startled by the sound of the screen door behind me sliding

open. Heather had changed into clean clothes. “Your turn,” she said. I nodded and headed inside. It felt good to get all that grime and

sweat off me, and, afterward, I grabbed a quick shave, then headed into

my bedroom, which was just past the little guest room Heather was

using, and put on fresh clothing. My one pair of blue jeans was hanging

in my closet. I did wear them sometimes when I taught in the summer,

but I stopped myself as I reached for them and instead took down a pair

of beige slacks. When I was nished, I returned to the living room. Heather was still

on the balcony, looking at the river. I did that often myself, but I was

always woolgathering as I did so—which was physically

indistinguishable from just idly standing there, in neutral, waiting for

something to prod activity. I stepped out onto the balcony. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothing,” she said. And then, as if that required a justi cation,

“Enjoying the view.”

I looked at her, wondering. I know, I know—I’d wondered about

Kayla, too, but Kayla had been scanned on Victoria’s beamline, and,

besides, she continued to endlessly surprise me. But my sister?

Oh, I’d

surprised her, apparently, when I hadn’t known about what had

happened to our grandfather, but when was the last time she had

surprised me—prior to last night, that is?

I turned and looked out at the river, too, and—

—and something was going on. The two shermen were still there, all

right, but so were a couple of uniformed cops, and two more men were

crab-walking down the grassy embankment. “Come on!” I said, moving back inside. Heather followed, and, as we

headed down the stairs, I thought about whether this was any different

from what had happened last night. As we exited out into the late-

morning sunshine, I decided it was: last night, she’d fallen in with the

mob; today, I was simply curious. Fortunately, Heather was back to wearing at shoes, and it took us

less than a minute to trot over to where all the excitement was going on. We weren’t the rst rubberneckers to show up; a pair of female joggers in

sweatpants had stopped to gawk. Something large had been hauled up onto the riverbank: a bundle

more than a meter long swaddled in green garbage bags tied around with

duct tape. A cop was keeping us at bay, but we jockeyed for a better view—and

got it. The bags had ripped open on one side and a lower leg and foot

were protruding. “Oh, God,” said Heather softly. We stood there trans xed; the guys in plain clothes were clearly

crime-scene investigators. One of them snapped pictures of everything,

while the other took samples of the skin, which was smooth and the

color of coffee with cream. The uniformed cops, meanwhile, were getting

statements from the shermen; I strained to listen. From what I could

make out, when they rst saw the bundle, they’d assumed some jerk had

dumped his garbage in the river, but, as it drifted by, one of them saw the

exposed skin. They were both wearing hip waders, and had managed to

snare the package before the current took it away; they’d hauled it

ashore and called 911.

The crime-scene guys eventually went to take the body away, picking

up the bundle—only to have the garbage bags split completely open and

the corpse drop out and roll a bit down the embankment. And there she

was: an Indigenous woman, with long black hair, and the side of her

head caved in from a heavy blow; she looked to be no more than twenty. I fought to keep what little there was in my stomach down, and

thought brie y of that story I sometimes told my students when

introducing utilitarianism about the girl drowning in this very river. The

bridge I spoke about in that scenario was just south of here; I looked

over at it for a moment. But there were two salient differences. First, my little hypothetical

was just that, a made-up example; this was all too real. And, second, that

hapless child had simply slipped and fallen in. But this young woman—

somebody’s daughter, possibly somebody’s sister, perhaps even

somebody’s mother—had been brutally murdered, and although it would

doubtless be some time before a report would be made public, if she was

like the legions of others who’d gone before her, she’d probably been

sexually assaulted. Yes, the carnage in Texas was getting media attention, but that was

only because it was new. The endless stream of missing and murdered

Indigenous women and girls here in Manitoba should have been a

national disgrace. Back in 2014 and 2015, when the tally had been just

twelve hundred natives unaccounted for, then-Prime Minister Stephen

Harper, when demands went up for a federal inquiry, had said that the

issue “isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest.”

Last night’s stay at the Human Rights Museum had been physically

uncomfortable, but my mind went back further to when I’d visited it

with Kayla, attending that reception in the Garden of Contemplation,

and how socially uncomfortable that had been. But prior to Nick Smith’s

unconscious mimicry of him, that African-American fellow—Dar ius

something—had said he’d been so pleased by the way he was treated

here in Winnipeg: “Now I know what it feels like to be white.”

But that was only because the choice of out-group was arbitrary: in

one place, it might be Jews; in another, those of African ancestry; in

Texas now, Latinos. And here, in Winnipeg, the geographic center of the

North American continent, it was Native Canadians who were routinely

discarded—a fact that had led Maclean’s to call Winnipeg “Canada’s

most-racist city” in 2015.

Usually one to pop up with a factoid for every

occasion, I’d kept my mouth shut when Darius had made his comment,

just as so many of us had for so long. Heather had been right this morning: school’s out for the summer. Everywhere I looked, all over the planet, shit was getting real. H32

EATHER had an afternoon of business meetings—the reason

Gustav had allowed her trip out here—and when they were done, I

met her for a nal cup of coffee, then drove her out to the airport. I

could have just dropped her at the curb, but instead I parked and helped

her in with her luggage. My sister had always been one to overpack. I

used to think that was because she was contemplating myriad possible

scenarios at her destination; now I wondered if it was simply that she

quite literally couldn’t make up her mind about what to bring and what

to leave behind. Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport has an

awful lot of syllables in its name for what is in fact a fairly small facility. After I’d hugged my sister goodbye and she’d headed through security, I

found myself looking wistfully at the departure board, listing both a

WestJet and an Air Canada ight to Saskatoon this evening. But I’d have

to content myself with Skype. We ivory-tower types usually get to avoid rush-hour traf c, but

tonight I had to endure it: the hundreds of thousands of cars that moved

about each day ebbing and owing like tides. Some of the drivers were

on autopilot only for this boring routine, but for most, this part of the

day was no different than any other—just moving with the ock,

following the programming, doing what everybody else was doing. I’d missed both breakfast and lunch, so I went through the drive-

through at McDonald’s—billions and billions served—and got fries and a

salad, then continued the slow slog back to my home, only occasionally

glancing out my side window at the mess still being cleaned up from last

night. When I at last pulled into my parking lot, I walked up the grassy

hillock to see where all the action had taken place this afternoon, but

everyone was gone without a trace, and the whole awful thing would

soon be forgotten, just another statistic. Once I got back into my apartment, I checked my email. There was

one from Bhavesh Namboothiri:

Sorry, Jim!

I know we have an appointment tomorrow, but my

home was vandalized pretty badly last night—some of the rioters

don’t just hate the Devils, I guess. I’ll be in touch when I’m able

to resume our sessions. I went and lay down on my bed. I felt sorry for poor Namboothiri,

but I wasn’t too upset that we had to postpone. I was having a hard-

enough time facing the present just now; I wasn’t sure I was up for

horrors from my past. A little after 5:00 P. M., Kayla Huron removed her dosimeter and put it on

the rack by CLS’s glass-fronted entrance. Victoria Chen was heading out

at the same time, and she unclipped her dosimeter, too, letting her long

black hair fall around her shoulders. They walked toward their cars

together, the sun still high in the western sky. Saskatoon was known as

the sunshine capital of Canada—a city of light; just one of the reasons

that it had beaten out London, Ontario, to be the home of the nation’s

synchrotron-research facility. “Any plans for this evening?” Kayla asked Vic as they made their way

across the asphalt. “Just a quiet night at home reading. You?”

“After I pick up Ryan from my mom’s, just dinner and TV. Oh, and

Skyping with Jim.”

Vic looked at her. “How’s that going?”

“Honestly?

The whole greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thing

begins to irritate after a while. I mean, yeah, I get it, but…”

“Yeah. But, you know, at least he walks the walk.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s totally serious about it.”

“For sure,” said Vic. “And the world would be a better place if

everyone thought like him.”

“True.”

“But really,” Vic said, “the world would be a better place if everyone

thought, period.”

Ever since my divorce—ever since I’d gone back to living alone—I had

reverted a bit to my student ways. Not completely, of course: I liked craft

beers; Kraft Dinner, not so much. But I did have a fondness for the

convenience of microwave popcorn, and I heated up a bag. I took it over

to the couch, positioned my laptop on top of the footstool to properly

face me, and opened Skype. It was still two minutes until 8:00 P. M., our

agreed-upon time to chat this particular night. Kayla was showing as

of ine. I idly looked at my other contacts: lawyer Juan Garcia was

online, presumably in California; my ex Anna-Lee was online, too—and I

wistfully imagined Virgil was playing somewhere near her. My little boy. I took a deep breath and let it out, a slow, sad exhalation. The clock in my taskbar changed to 8:00, with still no sign of Kayla;

she normally had the scientist’s obsession with punctuality. I nibbled

some popcorn, and checked Facebook and Twitter while I waited for her,

but, when 8:10 rolled around, I was reaching to shut my laptop’s lid

when I noticed her status change from of ine to online. I selected “Video

Call,” straightened up, listened to Skype’s jaunty ringing for a few

seconds, and then, as often happened, I heard Kayla before I saw her. “Jim?” she said, sounding anxious. “Thank God you’re still online.”

I began to say, “Are you—” when the picture nally popped in. At

rst it was dark—the background brighter than her—but then her

webcam adjusted itself, and there she was, the left half of her face

bloodied, red hair askew. “God!” I said, my heart suddenly thundering. “What happened?

Are

you okay?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll be all right. Just scared to

death.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“It’s crazy out there. I stopped at a traf c light, and punks swarmed

in and started rocking my car back and forth.”

“Christ. Why?”

“I don’t know. But they’re rioting here, too, just like Winnipeg last

night.”

“Over a hockey game?”

“God knows,” she said. “I got away from them, but my car slammed

into another vehicle. Somebody cut in front of me, trying to get away

from some other assholes.”

“Holy shit.”

“Look, I gotta get this cleaned up.” I thought she was going to

terminate the call, but instead she said, “Here…” and the image went

wild as she picked up her MacBook. I saw ashes of her walls and

ceiling, and then, after a moment, she’d clearly perched the machine on

her bathroom counter. I watched from the side and looking up as she

leaned into the mirror and used a tan washcloth to daub a cut on her

forehead; the cloth came away crimson. “Should you see a doctor?”

“The tow-truck guy said if you’re ambulatory, they’re saying don’t

come in tonight; they’re full in the emergency rooms right across the

city.” She ran some water—sounding quite loud to me—then washed her

face. “There,” she said. “Not too bad. No need for stitches.”

“Let me see.”

She moved closer to the camera and I had a look at the cut; she was

right that it would probably heal on its own although the area around it

had turned visibly more purple since she’d rst logged on. “God,” I said. “I wish I was there.”

She moved back. “So do I, baby.” She looked off camera, in the

direction, I knew, of her bathroom’s little frosted window. “The night’s

just begun, and I suspect we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.”

Kayla and I talked for a while longer, then she had to go comfort Ryan,

who was distressed by what had become a constant background wailing

of sirens and alarms punctuated by the sound of gunshots. I didn’t hear anything untoward in my own neighborhood that night,

and so I wasn’t aware until I turned on the TV that rioting was going on

again in downtown Winnipeg as well as in Saskatoon, and, as I saw

unfolding on the screen, in Vancouver and Edmonton and Toronto and

Montreal, too. Although in some of the footage you could see people

making halfhearted attempts to pretend this was still about hockey—

wearing jerseys, brandishing sticks like clubs—it was clear, to me at least,

that for the most part it was just looting coupled with mayhem for the

sake of mayhem. The current catalyst happened to have been a hockey

game; in San Francisco in 2019, new traf c ordinances; in Ferguson in

2015, the anniversary of an unconscionable jury verdict; in Knoxville in

2010, college football coach Lane Kif n defecting to a rival team. The

spark didn’t matter; a similar con agration could ignite anytime

anywhere. Of course, there were times when it had gone the other way. In a

single week in 2015—the rst week of summer, as it happened—the US

Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and ruled that same-sex marriage was

a constitutional right, and the Confederate ag started coming down

across the South as Amazon, eBay, Sears, and Walmart all stopped selling

merchandise depicting it. Facebook was a sea of rainbows and high- ves. People who’d been hoping and praying for those very things said they

couldn’t believe how quickly the tide had turned. That time, the light side

of the Force had caught the wave; tonight, sadly, it was the dark side. I saw Prime Minister Nenshi urging calm, and interviews with

various mayors and chiefs of police exhorting people to stay indoors. Even the US channels were covering the Toronto riots, which looked to

be running all along Yonge Street from Harbourfront to Bloor; it was an

hour later there, meaning it had ticked past midnight, so that, as a

commentator observed, this was technically the third day of rioting in

Canada. Eventually, I got up off the couch, taking my popcorn bag, a few

unpopped kernels still rattling around in it, to the kitchen, and tossing it

in the trash. And then slowly, sadly, I headed off to bed, hoping against

hope that at some point soon reason would prevail. T33

HE mayor of Winnipeg urged people to remain indoors the next

night. No of cial curfew had been imposed, but I did stay in,

watching TV news and sur ng on my tablet. By now, the violence was overwhelming local police everywhere. Canadian Forces personnel had been deployed to aid with riot control

and to protect provincial legislatures as well as Parliament Hill in

Ottawa; that city, as well as Calgary, had erupted in violence on this

third night. The only thing that seemed to be keeping it from being a

total coast-to-coast bloodbath was that so few Canadians owned

handguns or automatic weapons. Still, the death count was into three

gures here in Winnipeg, where it had all begun, and it was at least a

dozen in every other city that had rioting. Fox News was gleeful in its reporting: “All eyes are on Socialist

Canada and its Muslim prime minister,” said Sean Hannity, “wondering

what he will do to quell the unrest up there.”

Coverage of the continuing attacks on undocumented immigrants in

Texas was all but absent on Fox, although MSN BC reported that the

vigilantism was spreading, with three people turning up dead near Las

Cruces, New Mexico, and two south of Phoenix, Arizona, states that had

nothing like the McCharles Act in place. Meanwhile, the body of another dead Indigenous woman had been

found here in Winnipeg, and two more in northern Manitoba; also, two

Cree men near Thompson had been killed by white teenagers in a drive-

by shooting as they walked along the side of a road. Boko Haram was still running amuck in Nigeria, and statistics

released today showed that over 8,000 Jews left France for Israel in

2019.

“You can smell it in the air,” said a Parisian rabbi. “A pogrom is

coming here, mark my words.”

Thursday, I had a departmental meeting after my classes ended, but that

was done by three. I got in my white Mazda and began the long drive to

Saskatoon, a large coffee in my cupholder and a twenty-pack of Timbits

on the passenger seat. Once out of the city, I didn’t turn on the radio; I

didn’t put on an audiobook; I just drove in silence, particularly enjoying

the times when the highway was empty and I could fool myself that I

was all alone in the universe and nothing bad was happening anywhere. But, once again, the illusion was shattered as a pair of high beams

lanced through the darkness at me from behind. I was doing a hundred klicks, but the guy behind me was closing. There was no one coming this way, though, so he had plenty of room to

pass if he wanted to on the left, and I moved toward the shoulder to give

him even more space. The gap between us was narrowing. I hated assholes who didn’t dim

their lights in circumstances like this, but his were like a pair of

supernovae. He was maybe fty meters behind me. Twenty. Ten. And then, suddenly, he was right beside me, but—

—but he wasn’t passing me. He was pacing me, staying next to my

car. I looked out, but my own night vision had been shot by his

headlamps, and in the dim interior of his car, all I could make out were

two silhouetted gures. I decided to ease up on the accelerator so my car

would fall back, but when I did that, he copied me, and—

Fuck!

His passenger-side door scraped against my driver-side one. I tried to

give him more room, moving fully onto the shoulder, but he kept

slamming into my side, pushing me farther and farther to the right. I hit the brakes, meaning his next attempt to push me off the road

caused him to cut in front of me instead. He spun sideways, I skidded

forward, and we collided, both of us pinwheeling into the adjacent eld. My airbag deployed, trapping me long enough that by the time it

de ated one of the guys was out and had smashed my driver’s side

window and opened the door. I felt myself being hauled out, the dome

light in my car letting me at last see their faces—two kids, maybe

eighteen or twenty, one in a jean jacket, the other in a leather one. The man in leather was off to the side; I think he’d been the driver. He pointed at me, and said, “Finish him.”

And that’s when I realized the guy in denim was brandishing a length

of metal pipe about as long as his forearm. I was in the gap between the

two cars but jumped on the hood, pivoted on my ass, and took off into

the eld adjacent to the road, a at expanse that went on to the dark

horizon; I’d be more than content if they watched me run away for three

days. “Get him!” shouted the driver—the guy, quite literally, in the driver’s

seat; probably a psychopath, with a p-zed stooge who would follow his

every command. I ran as fast as I could, which, with epinephrine coursing through me,

was pretty damn fast—not that there was anywhere to go, but I hoped

the guy would give up after a bit, and—

Jesus Fucking Christ!

My left foot went into a prairie dog’s burrow, and I pitched forward,

smashing my face into hard, dry earth. Jean-jacket quickly caught up and

loomed over me, the metal pipe raised high above his head. I rolled on my back and lashed out with my legs, ensnaring my

attacker’s right ankle, and even though the terrain was at, I succeeded in

pulling him off balance and he fell. I scrambled to my feet and, smashing

one shoe down on his wrist, managed to wrestle the pipe from him, and

—

And there was no one around, no one to help, no farmhouse, no

anything. I thought the guy, seeing I had his weapon, would scurry away

and leave me to catch my breath, but he didn’t. Leather-jacket had more

—some!—sense, and had gotten back into their car and was now

speeding off, but this guy was implacable; he had his orders, and he was

going to carry them out. I was holding the pipe in both hands, the way a

slugger would grip a baseball bat, but the guy pulled out a switchblade

and continued to come at me, so I took off again across the eld—but it

was inevitable that he’d catch up; he was younger and had longer legs. My heart was pounding, my lungs aching. Like Menno, I thought of

myself as a paci st—but a paci st need not be a passivist. And so I stopped running. Turned. Planted my feet rmly on the ground. Raised the lead pipe—like Moonwatcher raising the thigh bone—and

brought it down, down, down onto Jean-jacket’s head. The sound I’d avoided all those decades ago when I’d spared Ronny

Handler—the sound I’d always assumed would be a loud cracking, like

the one my mother’s porcelain vase had made when I’d accidentally

knocked it to the oor—turned out to actually be a dull thud, as if I’d hit

a tree stump with an ax handle. But regardless of the acoustics, the visual effect was…

Yes. The visual, in the moonlight, was satisfying. The skull denting, the scalp splitting, and blood pouring out…

I staggered for a moment—but not as much as the guy in front of me

did. He swayed back and forth, and then, like the Twin Towers coming

down, collapsed vertically into a heap. I spun on my heel and ran toward

my car. Of course, I called it in. The RCMP arrived rst, and then the EMTs, who

pronounced the guy dead at the scene. The of cers were sympathetic, but

they had me follow them in my car into Regina. I wasn’t charged with

anything, and so they let me go to a hotel instead of staying in a holding

cell, and by the time all the paperwork was done the next morning, it

was close to ten. I continued on the last couple of hours to Saskatoon—

but, it became apparent that the damage to my car was worse than I’d

thought; I barely made it there, and, after calling my insurance company,

I took the car to a body shop for repairs. I wanted to go straight to the Canadian Light Source, but as much as

I couldn’t wait to see Kayla, she had to make a living. Instead, I took a

cab to her place, and, using the spare key I still had, let myself in, took a

quick shower, went to her bedroom, and collapsed. I was awoken by the sound of the front door opening, and, looking at

Kayla’s nightstand clock, I saw I’d slept for almost three hours. “Sweetheart?” I called out. “Yes, honey?” And then a giggle. It was Ryan, not her mom. “Ryan?” I said. “And Rebekkah,” came her grandmother’s voice. “I’ll be down in a minute,” I called back. I quickly dressed and headed downstairs. Ryan rushed over and gave

me a hug, which I sorely needed. But when we disengaged, she looked at

me with horror. “What happened to you?”

My hand went to my bruised cheek. I’m all in favor of telling kids the

truth—there’s no Santa Claus; your parents leave the money under the

pillow when you lose a tooth; babies come from sex; when you die, that’s

it, there’s nothing more—but deciding whether to say “Mommy’s

boyfriend just killed a man” was above my pay grade; I’d let Kayla make

the call on what her daughter should know. “I was in a car accident,” I

said, which at least wasn’t wholly untrue. “Wow,” Ryan said. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” I said, and that was certainly the truth. “I gotta go pee,” Ryan announced, which was just as well; I needed a

minute—or a lifetime—to pull myself together. I exchanged a few

remarks with Rebekkah, then she left, and I went to the kitchen. There

was a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge; I poured two glasses and took

them over to the dining room with its bookcases. Ryan joined me when

she was done in the washroom. “How was day camp?” I asked. “Good.” She looked at me and scrunched up her mouth, thinking. “What?” I said. “Can I ask you a question, Jiminy?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going to marry Mommy?”

“We haven’t talked about it.”

“But are you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

She looked down at the oor. “Oh.”

“We’ll just have to see how things go, okay?”

She nodded, then, looking up at me again: “Have you been married

before?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

I lifted my hands slightly. “She left me.”

“Why?”

“We disagreed about what we wanted.”

“Oh. What did you want?”

“The greatest good for the greatest number.”

“And what’s the greatest number?”

I thought about that, long and hard, thought about this wonderful

young lady, thought about my boy Virgil, thought about everything, and,

at last I drew Ryan into another warm hug. “Two-point-nine.”

T34

HE next morning, Kayla entered the of ce 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 pro le.”

“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

gure 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 rst 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 gure. “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 nd the le 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 rst 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 ipped back to the le 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 le plus an additional one minute and

forty-three seconds was…11:19:25 A. M. She said the gure 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

ipped 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

nd 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 rst 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—wo uld register, at least a little, while

the constant distant background churn of total strangers coming in and

out of existence would be too insigni cant 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.”

“Net ix 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 ts,” 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 eld 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 de nition, 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. 35

“Professor Marchuk?”

It was Veronica, in the third row, her hair in long cornrows. “Yes?”

“I get it. I mean, I really do. I get how all this utilitarian

thinking can be a good thing. But, well…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it just seems so cold, is all. So calculating.”

I looked out at the students. Veronica appeared genuinely

con icted, but Boris had a smug expression, and his arms were

crossed in front of his chest, as if his classm ate had just detonated

a nuke on my pet philosophy. He looked positively disappointed

when I said, “You’re right, Veronica.”

And, for her part, Veronica looked surprised. “I am?”

“Yes, certainly. On the surface, being a utilitarian appears to

mean embracing your inner psychopath.” I paused. “Do you guys

know the Trolley Problem?”

A few nods, including Boris, but mostly blank faces. “Well,” I said, “imagine a streetcar is barreling along the

tracks, out of control. There’s a split in the tracks: one fork leads

to where ve people are standing and the other leads to where one

person is standing. The trolley will hit and kill the ve unless you

throw a switch and divert it onto the other track, in which case

it’ll only hit and kill one person. Do you throw the switch?

Boris?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Exactly right, comrade. One dead instead of ve; pure

utilitarianism. But what if there’s only one track, and no switch,

and instead it’s you and that exact same one guy, but the two of

you are standing on a footbridge over the tracks, and you, you’re a

little guy, but he’s a big fellow—so big, he’ll stop the streetcar for

sure if you push him off the bridge so that he lands in front of it

before it plows into the other ve people. Do you push him off?

Same utilitarian equation, isn’t it?

One person dead instead of

ve?

Veronica, do you push him off?”

“No.”

I smiled. “Nor would most people. In fact, when Bartels and

Pizarro studied that scenario, they found it was mostly

psychopaths who said they’d do the supposedly utilitarian thing

and shove the big guy off the bridge; normal people couldn’t bring

themselves to do it.”

“See,” said Boris, “you have to be a psychopath to follow strict

utilitarianism.”

“That’s Doctor Psychopath to you, comrade.” A few laughs. “But, no, you’re missing the point. Pushing the guy off the bridge

is an easy answer for a psychopath because psychopaths don’t

give a damn. And not giving a damn is the opposite of

utilitarianism. “In the two-tracks scenario, there’s no room for second

thought: I’m killing one guy instead of ve. In the footbridge

scenario, there’s lots to dither over: how do you know that the

heavy guy will be big enough to stop the streetcar; yeah, someone

told you that he will be, but do you believe that?

Are you sure?

And are you sure there isn’t a touch of prejudice here?

How’d that

guy get so fat, anyway?

Is his life worth less than someone else’s?

Oh, but what if his obesity is due to a glandular condition or

genetics?

And is it really true that jumping yourself wouldn’t be

enough to stop the train?

Who says so?

“If it turned out that pushing the fat guy didn’t actually stop

the streetcar, so now six people died instead of ve, a psychopath

Iwould shrug, and say, ‘Live and learn.’ But a utilitarian would be

devastated by it. Having a conscience means agonizing over

things, it means doing the right thing because you’ve weighed all

the factors, it means caring so much it hurts. And that’s a feeling

no psychopath will ever know.”

T was going to take another two days to x my car, damn it all, and I

needed to get back to Winnipeg. Although it would have been nice to

have Star Trek’s transporter at my disposal, at least Captain Kirk was

able to help me out: I got a bargain last-minute airfare from

Priceline. com, and so was now at Diefenbaker, waiting for my plane. Often when ying in Canada, I ran into people I knew at airports;

Canada has only a handful of major cities, and academics travel a lot to

conferences. So, I wasn’t really surprised to see Jonah Bratt arrive at the

same gate I was at. The ight from here to Winnipeg continues on to

Ottawa, and Jonah teaches psychology at Carleton—poorly, according to

RateMyProfessors. com. “Hey, Jonah,” I said, standing up to shake his hand. He was tall and

cadaverously thin, with pockmark ed skin and graying hair. “Marchuk,” he said. His grip was almost nonexistent. “What are you

doing here?”

“Visiting a friend. You?”

“Attending a colloquium on Jung at U of S.”

“Ah,” I said. It was a small gate area, and he sat down close to me, with one empty

seat between us—leaving the space required by ocking rules, or just

being a prick and making it awkward for someone else as the waiting

area lled, I couldn’t say. He pulled out a tablet and began to read what looked like a journal

article. My attention was caught by the big TV hanging from the ceiling,

which was showing CTV News Channel. “More on the horri c news out

of Corpus Christi, Texas,” said the anchor, Dan Matheson. The image cut

to what looked like a large natural sinkhole in the ground, and in it were

human bodies, most clad in jeans and T-shirts, overlapping like

jackstraws. The anchor went on: “Work continues on the mass grave found here

yesterday, about 350 kilometers south of Houston. Police are now

removing the bodies and so far four of them have been identi ed by their

next of kin: Miguel dos Santos, twenty-four; his brother José dos Santos,

nineteen; Carlos Lobos, twenty-eight; and Juan Rameriz, twenty-two. Our Ben Pryce has more. Ben?”

The picture showed a man holding a microphone standing at the lip

of the sinkhole, Texas State Troopers milling about on the far side. “Dan, this open-pit grave was located by a couple of hikers early

yesterday morning. As you can see, we’re off the beaten path here. The

four identi ed bodies were all migrant farm workers apparently illegally

in this country, and I’ve been told, off the record, that the other fteen

bodies—ten men and ve women—all appear to be Latino or Latina. Cause of death in most cases seems to have been a single bullet to the

head, in what I overheard one police of cer call ‘execution-style.’”

The picture changed again, showing a large wooden board on which

two words had been painted in ragged brushstrokes. “Dan, images of this sign, which I’m told was found on top of the

bodies, have already gone viral online. As you can see, it reads, ‘As

requested.’”

“Like Nazi Germany,” I said, shaking my head. Bratt looked up. “You lose.”

“What?”

“You lose. Godwin’s Law.”

What he actually meant was a corollary to Godwin’s Law: the

implication that any argument has gone irretrievably off the rails when

someone trots out a comparison to the Nazis or Hitler. “Because the

Holocaust was—what?” I said. “Sui generis?

Something that could never

happen again?” I motioned toward the TV set. “It’s happening right

now.”

“It’s just a blip.”

“It’s accelerating—and it’s going to get even worse. Hitler at least had

to set up huge government infrastructure to pull off his killings. Fucking

McCharles has crowdsourced his genocide.”

“There’s just no evidence that—”

I pointed at the screen. “The evidence is right there!

Why—”

But we were interrupted by the Air Canada gate clerk calling our

ight. Apparently Bratt’s Altitude status made him eligible for pre-

boarding, as he immediately rose from his chair, and, without a word of

goodbye, shambled toward the Jetway. The next day, after my classes were done, I headed over to meet Bhavesh

Namboothiri, who nally was able to see me again. I took a bus, which

gave me plenty of opportunity to observe the damage that had been done

during the riots. In many places, windows were boarded up with

plywood, fences were still down, and there were scorch marks on the

asphalt where cars had been set ablaze. Namboothiri managed to elicit a couple more childhood memories—

which were certainly fascinating to experience, and, under other

circumstances, would have been worth the price of admission. But they

were just pyrite; we were after nuggets of gold. And, soon enough, he was turning up those, too: one of Menno’s

lectures; then, as Namboothiri repositioned the probes, another by

Professor Jenkins—sadly, apparently not the one during which I’d told an

orangutan joke; another shifting of the probes brought back memories of

me indeed having a tumor removed from my left breast in Calgary; one

more repositioning, and Kayla and I were playing strip Trivial Pursuit, in

which instead of getting a wedge each time you answered a question

correctly, your opponent lost one of their six pieces of clothing; and then

—

Oh. Oh. So that’s what I’d done to David Swinson. I’d remained in Winnipeg that summer, having taken a data-entry job

in the registrar’s of ce on the assumption that my relationship with

Kayla would continue. David, who’d had the dorm room next to mine

during the preceding academic year, had once eaten what was left in my

bucket of KFC without permission. And so, near the end of June 2001,

I’d gone onto the registration computer and dropped him from every

course he’d selected for that coming September—and, for good measure,

had him give up his place in the dorm, as well. When he returned to

Winnipeg from his summer back home, he discovered he wasn’t

registered and had no place to stay. Somehow—perhaps we’d nd that

memory later—he must have eventually realized I was responsible. I shuddered, feeling horrible that I could ever have done such a nasty

thing—and was grateful when Namboothiri moved on. Next up were innocuous memories: a few more from my toddler

days; going to see the movie version of Josie and the Pussycats—

something that probably was best forgotten; Heather coming for a

weekend visit, and—

“Move the fucking probes!”

Namboothiri eased off and the images melted from my consciousness,

but I was gasping and my pulse was racing. “Are you okay?” he asked. “We can stop for the day if—”

I lifted a hand. “No. No, I’ll be all right. Just…” My arm was

shaking; I lowered it. “Just give me a moment.” Another memory came to

me, but not because the doctor was eliciting it; this one was from my

verbal index, and relatively recent: Menno Warkentin talking to me in his

of ce, trying to dissuade me from digging into my past. “Sometimes it’s

better to let sleeping dogs lie,” he’d said. But I’d replied, “No, I can’t do

that.”

And I couldn’t. I had to forge ahead. I gripped the arms of the chair tightly, forcing the blood from my

knuckles, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. I’m ready.”

“All right,” Namboothiri replied, returning the probes to the same

spots on my skull. Friday afternoon, June 29, 2001.

The corridor outside the of ce of

Dominic Adler. Knuckles rapped against the door, and words were

spoken: “Dom, it’s me, Jim. Can I have a moment?”

The door opened, revealing Dominic in russet slacks and a gray,

short-sleeved shirt. “Hey, Jim. Come in. What’s up?” He gestured at a

chair and turned to walk to his desk. Jim’s body surged in from behind, and Jim’s hands grasped Dom’s

neck on either side. A crack!

split the air as the neck was twisted ninety

degrees to the left. Dominic’s body slumped to the oor. The front of Jim’s shoe impelled itself into Dom’s kidney, and sounds

emanated once more from Jim’s mouth: “Take that, motherfucker.”

Without my asking him to, Namboothiri pulled the probes away once

more. “You okay?”

Breathing rapidly, my skin slick with sweat, I reached up to wipe my

brow—and once again my hand was trembling. “Jim?” Namboothiri

said. I scrunched my eyes shut, but the awful memory lingered. “Jim?

What did you see?”

I tried to compose myself then swiveled the chair to face him. “You’re

a psychiatrist, right?”

He nodded. “Which makes you an MD, right?

A medical doctor?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“So this conversation is privileged, correct?

Even though I came to

you without a referral, I’m still your patient, isn’t that right?”

“Jim, my God, what did you see?”

“Say it,” I snapped. “Say I’m your patient. Say this is privileged.”

“Yes, yes, of course. You’re my patient. I can’t be compelled to

divulge what we discuss.”

I blew out air, took another moment, then: “Back in 2001…” I shook

my head, nding the words almost as impossible to speak as the thought

was to think. “I killed a man.”

“Oh…God. No, no.”

“Broke his neck. Deliberately.”

Different responses seemed to swirl on Namboothiri’s face, but at last

he said: “Who was it?”

“Dominic Adler. Menno Warkentin’s research partner.”

“Was it—was it self-defense?”

God, how I wished it had been!

I’d killed that p-zed in the prairie

eld a short time ago, and that had indeed been self-defense. Even so, I’d

barely been able to live with myself since, but this—this!

I shook my head. “It was premeditated. And…brutal.”

Namboothiri was quiet for a moment. “And do you know why you

did it?”

“The motive, you mean?”

“No, not that,” said Namboothiri. “Do you know why?”

I recalled the hairline scratches on my old brain scans. “The

paralimbic damage you uncovered, I guess, but…” I sighed. “I never

thought I could…I just…” Acid was clawing its way up my throat. “We can stop digging, if you want,” Namboothiri said. My heart was still beating rapidly. “No. I have to know the rest.”

L36

TWO DECADES AGO

ATE June was about as nice as Winnipeg ever got. This year the

last snowfall had been in April, and the mosquitoes wouldn’t make

their rst appearance for another month. Menno Warkentin walked

down the hallway, his black Bruno Magli shoes making soft impacts

against the institutional tiles. During the academic year, the corridors had

been bustling with overworked students and harried faculty rushing from

place to place. But although there were some summer students, few were

on hand here, the Friday night leading into the Canada Day long

weekend. Menno entered the lab he shared with Dominic Adler and walked

over to the worktable. Stacked on its surface were eight new sensor

packs that would go on the Mark III helmet, and next to them, the old

green transcranial-focused-ultrasound pucks. Those wouldn’t be included

on the new unit, of course, but Dom kept running tests with them, trying

to gure out why they’d caused people to black out; the DoD had goosed

his grant by a hundred grand so he could pursue that. Menno looked around to see if there was any sign that Dom had been

in the lab today. His usual spoor included open bottles of Dr Pepper with

a at inch left undrunk at the bottom, but there were none to be seen. Menno hit the power-bar switch that turned on the desktop computer

and its bulky seventeen-inch VGA monitor. Windows 98 began its slow

boot-up; he wondered if XP, due later this year, would be any faster. He heard the door opening. “Ah, Dom. I was hoping—” But it wasn’t

Dominic. “Oh!

Jim. I wasn’t expecting you. I thought you were going to

Lake Winnipeg for the long weekend.”

A voice emanated from Jim’s mouth. “That’s what I told everybody. Never hurts to have an alibi.”

Menno made a snort. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. You happen to pass

Dom on the way in?”

The mouth worked again: “He’s in his of ce.” Eyes swiveled toward

the wall, where the faux Louisville slugger was held up by its two acrylic,

U-shaped supports. A comment required; one made: “Chekhov’s gun.”

The bat was taken down, the grip encircled by hands. The club was

swung at empty air. “Dom’s pretty particular about that thing,” Menno said. “You should

probably put it back.”

More words were generated, empty, automatic: “Remember when the

Blue Jays won those back-to-back World Series?

I was eleven the rst

time and twelve the second. In Calgary, we don’t often root for anything

related to Toronto, but we did then.”

Jim started closing the distance between them, the bat held rmly, his

heels making ticking-bomb clicks. Startled, Menno backed away. His rear

was soon against the worktable, and—

Shit!

Jim swung the bat right at him. Menno moved with the same poor

coordination he brought to his squash game, barely getting out of the

way in time. “For God’s sake, Marc huk!”

Jim wheeled around and swung once more. Menno ducked. “Help!”

he shouted. “Somebody help!” But he’d been right earlier—the campus

was dead. Backing the other way across the room now, he found himself

stumbling onto a metal folding chair. He rolled off it just as the bat came

smashing down onto the top of the chair’s back. Menno grabbed the

chair’s legs and hefted it, using it as a shield to ward off additional

swings. Jim tossed the bat aside so he could grab the chair’s frame and

soon had wrested it free. He threw the chair aside; it folded up at when

it clattered to the oor. Menno tried to make it to the door, but the younger man was thinner

and more agile; he easily positioned himself in front of it. Jim lunged,

and Menno, to his own astonishment, managed to deke out of the way. As Jim sailed past, Menno tried a maneuver he’d seen on TV, interlacing

his own ngers to form a two- sted club and bringing it crashing down

on the student’s back, driving him face- rst into the oor. Menno turned to escape but found himself pitching forward—Jim

had grabbed his ankles. As soon as he hit the ground, he rolled onto his

back. Jim came toward him, picking up the folded chair, but it was an

unwieldy weapon, and he tossed it aside again. Menno pulled his knees

up toward his chest, then lashed out with a double kick as Jim came

nearer, sending the student backward against the worktable, the neat

stack of sensor modules scattering across its surface from the impact. There was excruciating pain in the small of Menno’s back; he’d

perhaps broken his coccyx. He pushed himself up from the oor, while

Jim tried to lift the computer monitor. It came up about a foot, then

jerked to a halt, its video cable, screwed in at the back, anchoring it. But

the heavy AT-style keyboard, the size of a window shutter, pulled free

from its connection, and Jim came forward, whooshing it back and forth. Menno tried once more for the door, but Jim quickly blocked the

way. He swung the keyboard repeatedly, and Menno felt the wind of its

movement as he pivoted and dashed toward the worktable. He hated

turning his back but did so for an instant, grabbing one of the TUS

hockey pucks in each hand. Jim surged in, smashing the keyboard onto Menno’s head. Menno

staggered for a moment; Jim tossed the keyboard aside and threw the

professor to the ground. Menno landed at on his back, arms splayed as

if making a snow angel—but he’d held on to the pucks. Although they

were normally activated by commands sent through the helmet, each one

had a slider switch on its rim for manual testing; Menno desperately

tried to nd those switches with his thumbs. Straddling him, Jim grabbed Menno’s throat. Menno almost let go of

the pucks so he could tear at the kid’s arms, but he knew the younger

man was stronger. Instead, he rotated each puck in his hands, the way

one turned thermostat knobs, and at last found the switch on the left

one, sliding it forward. He felt his eyes bugging out and his larynx compressing as he

continued rotating the right puck clockwise, working his grip around its

circumference. The crazed student kept squeezing his throat, but at last

Menno found the other switch, but—fuck!—that one seemed to be stuck. His vision was blurring and his lungs were on re, and—

—and it nally dawned on him that, given the way he was holding

them, if the left puck’s switch moved up, then you had to slide the right

one’s switch down, which, just as the pain was reaching unbearable

levels, he did. He then slammed the pucks onto the sides of Jim’s head,

clashing cymbals, and held them there like green earmuffs, until—

—until his attacker’s eyes rolled up, and his arms went slack, and he

came crashing down on top of Menno, who immediately pushed him off,

leaving the boy unconscious on his side. The professor also lay there for

a moment, gasping, then, slowly, he pulled himself to his feet. He was

hunched over, still trying to recover, when the landline phone rang. He

had no intention of answering it—he wasn’t even sure if he could speak

yet—but the goddamned jangling just added to the pounding in his ears. He turned off the pucks, then looked down at Jim. Riiiiing!

His rst thought was to haul back and kick the bastard in the head—

Riiiiing!

—but that faded. He knew Jim Marchuk, and this wasn’t him: not the

old, inquisitive A-student with the inner monologue—

Riiiiing!

—and not the new philosopher’s zombie without one. Riiiiing!

This sudden outbreak of violence had to be the result of what Menno

himself had recently done to the poor boy. Riiiiing!

The phone nally stopped, thank God. Menno was too winded to run

away, and, damn it, if he left the boy lying here, knocked into

unconsciousness, whoever eventually found him would doubtless call

911, and at the hospital they’d do an MRI and see the damage to his

paralimbic system—and people would wonder how those fresh laser-

carved lesions had been made. Menno staggered over, found a chair, put the pucks in his lap, and

closed his eyes for—

—for how long he didn’t know, but he was awoken by the sound of

movement. Oh, God!

On the oor, Jim was rolling onto his back. And

then the phone rang again, just twice, its bell signaling round two. W37

HAT the hell?

Where am I?

How did I get here?

I looked at the window, and—

Blue sky?

Sunshine?

Trees covered with leaves?

But…but it’s January!

How in the hell did I…?

My head hurt—but not from a hangover. I reached up to touch it,

and—ouch!

I’d banged it against something. I rolled the other way, and there was Professor Warkentin, looking

like someone had just kicked the living crap out of him. I stared at him—really stared at him, locking my gaze on his fat face. Fucking guy was an asshole, pure and simple. An impediment. You could

see it. Guy like that never should have been born. Waste of oxygen

molecules. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but—

—but it didn’t matter. It was time to do something about it. Seeing Jim stirring, Menno grabbed the hockey pucks and got up, but the

student, still on the ground, shot his arms out and yanked hard again on

Menno’s ankles. Menno lost his balance, falling backward, crashing to

the oor. One of the hockey pucks went ying although he managed to

keep hold of the other one. Jim got up, dusted himself off, and scanned around the room. He

spotted the baseball bat and picked it up from where it had landed,

looking at it quizzically, as if he’d never seen it before. But then he turned

and, gripping it with both hands, started coming toward Menno, who

was still lying face-up. Menno rolled on his side, another jolt of pain

going through him as he did so. The loose hockey puck was about four

feet away. He started moving toward it. Jim swung again with the club but managed to hit the oor instead of

the rapidly beetling Menno, and the bat broke in half. Jim brie y held its

stem up in front of him, the splintered end like frozen torch ame, then

tossed it aside; it banged against a whiteboard-covered wall and clattered

to the oor. Menno scooped up the second puck, rolled over 180 degrees so that

he was facing Jim again, and, with a sudden access of adrenaline, got to

his feet and charged toward Jim, propelling him backward against the

whiteboard, the dry-erase markers that had been stored on an aluminum

shelf clattering to the oor. Menno slammed the pucks against Jim’s

temples again, but—

Fuck!

He’d forgotten he’d turned them off. He quickly found the switch on

the one in his right hand and thumbed it forward, but the other one had

to be rotated single-handedly while he tried to reach its slider. Jim spun himself and Menno around and drove a punch into

Menno’s solar plexus, propelling him backward, his spine slamming

against the whiteboard. The younger man pressed an open left palm

against the center of Menno’s chest, pinning him, and he brought his

right hand up to the edge of Menno’s jaw. Menno was still trying to nd the switch on the other puck. Jim’s

thumb moved up, pressing hard into the lower part of Menno’s cheek,

then he inched the digit farther upward, passing the side of Menno’s

nose, then, repositioning it once more, and—

Fuck!

Fuck!

Fuck!

—digging it into Menno’s eye. Menno brought his knee up into Jim’s groin. Jim grunted but

continued to press in with his thumb and its hard, sharp nail. The pain

from the marker ledge biting into Menno’s spine had seemed like agony

—until he had this to compare it to, as—

Jesus Fucking God. —as Jim’s thumb pierced his left eyeball. Menno gasped. In a lightning-fast move, Jim switched hands, pushing

Menno against the wall with his right one now and lifting his left. Fighting nausea but still fumbling with the puck, Menno at last found

its on switch. The pain was unbelievable, as—

God damn it!

—as Jim’s thumb burst through his other eyeball. Menno groped to get the pucks over the student’s temporal lobes and

—

Yes!

Judging by the sound, Jim must have collapsed at once like a sack of

potatoes, but Menno couldn’t see that—he couldn’t see anything. He

stumbled forward and tripped over what he guessed was one of Jim’s

legs, splayed out across the tiles. Menno managed to regain his balance,

made his way to the door, fumbled in a gray nothingness for the knob,

and staggered out into the corridor. Kayla Huron walked down the empty corridor. It was a warm, sunny

day, and she was wearing cutoff jeans and a white blouse tied off above

her navel. Since she’d broken up with Jim, she was back on the market

and didn’t mind advertising—and all that time at the gym had been

paying off. Kayla had a summer job working in the physics department, which

was perfect: the money she’d make would just about cover her third-year

tuition. U of M’s Fort Garry campus wasn’t that big; she’d caught sight of Jim

a couple of times as he was coming out of the Tier Building—an d had

promptly hidden herself. She had zero interest in having contact with her

many exes, and if she never saw James Marc huk again, it’d be too damn

soon. As she made her way across campus, listening to NSYNC on her

Walkman, she’d kicked back a full bottle of Snapple. Thanks to it, a pit

stop was in order, and so she nipped into the nearest building, taking the

wide stairs up to the main oor two at time. To her left, down at the end,

was a man, but the women’s room was to her right, and so she began to

head that way, but—

But there had been something odd about the man. She turned around,

and, yes, he was staggering, arms out in front as if groping along, and—

And, by God, it was Professor Warkentin. Even at this distance, she

was sure that’s who it was. “Professor?” she called out. “Are you okay?”

He turned. “Help me,” he said weakly—or, at least, that’s what she

thought she heard echoing down the corridor. She quickly jogged down

to him, but found herself stopping short, her hand going to her mouth,

when she saw blood streaming from his eyes…

No, no. Not from his eyes; from his eye sockets. “My God, Professor, what happened?

I—um. Where’s a pay phone?

I

can call 911.”

“No!

No.”

“But sir!”

“Please.” The syllable was a gasp; he was clearly in agony. “Just get

me to my friend’s of ce.”

“You need to see a doctor!”

“Just do it. Do what I ask. Please.”

“But—”

“Please!”

“Okay, okay. Which room?”

“Along this corridor. Two or three from the end. On the left. Dominic

Adler’s of ce.”

Kayla’s grandfather had been blind; she knew how to lead someone

by cupping their elbow, and she instinctively did just that. “Who are you?” Warkentin said. “A student,” Kayla said. “You taught me last year.” She quickly found

the room he wanted. The door was closed. Kayla let go of Warkentin’s

elbow and opened it, and—

“Oh, God!”

“What?”

She crouched down next to the fallen man, checking for a pulse—but

the coolness of his skin told her she wasn’t going to nd one. “There’s—

there’s a dead man here.”

“Oh, shit!” said Warkentin. He started fumbling toward the doorway,

and Kayla got up to let him get in. Once he was, he snapped, “Close the

door!”

She did so. Warkentin was breathing in loud, raspy gasps. “Okay,”

she said, “we have to call the police.”

“No,” the professor replied sharply. “No. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“But he’s dead.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Thin, black hair. Sir, I think his neck is broken.”

“Is he wearing a calculator watch?”

“Um—yeah.”

“Damn it. That’s Dom. Jesus. Jesus.”

“There’s a phone here,” said Kayla. “Do I have to dial nine to get an

outside line?”

“Don’t call 911,” said Warkentin. “Don’t call anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Help me nd a chair.”

Kayla wheeled the one out from behind the desk and placed it

between the wall and the body lying on the oor; she then guided

Warkentin toward it, and he lowered his bulk into it. His chest was

visibly heaving, he was slick with sweat, and his skin had turned a yellow

gray. “Okay,” he said, once seated. “Listen to me. This”—he gestured at his

own face—“can’t be reported. Nor can that.” He waved vaguely in the

direction of the body. “But—”

“Listen to me!

There’s classi ed research going on here. It—um, it got

out of hand, but—”

“Classi ed?” Kayla repeated, astonished. “Yes. For the US military. So we can’t go to the Canadian

authorities.”

That all seemed rather improbable to Kayla, but it was also weirdly

fascinating. “Are you sure you don’t need to see a doctor?” she said. “For God’s sake, of course I do!” He didn’t seem to be actively

bleeding anymore, but he winced frequently—wh ich looked odd and

creepy with his eye sockets the way they were. He fumbled for his wallet

and proffered it. She noted it was rather fat with bills, including a couple

of brown ones, a denomination she rarely saw. “My cousin is a doctor, a surgeon. He’ll help. There’s a little slip of

paper in there with phone numbers on it, see?

Jacob Reimer, that’s my

cousin. Call him.”

“I will,” said Kayla, moving over to the phone, “but—”

Warkentin was breathing rapidly, great shuddering inhalations, and

he was hunched over now, clearly in agony. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh,

God. Oh, God.”

“—but, sir, what are we going to do about the body?”

“We’ve—God, fuck, damn, shit—we ’ve…we ’ve got to get rid of it.”

“What?” said Kayla. “We’ve got to dispose of it. No one can ever know.”

Kayla felt the old excitement welling inside her. Carving up

neighborhood cats and dogs had been glorious, but this—this would be

so much better!

Such a release, such a wondrous release!

“I’m in,” she said. I38

PRESENT

’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 nd

you immediately started confabulating stuff to ll 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 ames. 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

paci st. How could you look at me after that?”

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

A ash 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 nal 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 of ce 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— agrant violations of

the campus ethical guidelines—and the whole department was at risk,

too. U of M could have been decerti ed 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 traf cking, 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 oor, 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. I39

hadn’t planned to return to Saskatoon for several more days, but I

needed to see Kayla, so I had my teaching assistant take my

Wednesday and Thursday classes for me. My car, nally repaired, was now at Kayla’s place; she’d picked it up

from the body shop for me. That meant ying was my best option to get

to Saskatoon, and, to my delight—the only good news I’d had in days—I

was able to get a one-way ticket for only $300; I’d expected much more

of a gouge for a same-day ight. I called Kayla to let her know I was coming. The trip was brief

enough that I didn’t have to use the john, which was good because I’d

gotten stuck with a window seat and I hated asking someone to move

just so I could get out. Kayla was still at work when I arrived, but, since

it was after normal business hours, I didn’t feel guilty about going

straight to the synchrotron; Ryan was at Rebekkah and Travis’s place,

and the last thing I needed was to be on my own in an empty house. The cab turned onto Innovation Boulevard and headed toward the

glass-fronted building that housed the Light Source, but the driver came

to a stop a hundred meters shy of the circular driveway. Four Saskatoon

police cars, their roof lights blinking, were blocking the way. I told the

cabbie to wait and got out. A uniformed of cer approached me. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “No one gets in.”

It was only then that I became conscious of a helicopter overhead. “My girlfriend is in there. What’s happening?”

“No one’s in there,” corrected the of cer. “The building’s been

evacuated.”

“What?

Why?”

“Bomb threat.”

I pulled out my phone—and saw that it was still in airplane mode. I

turned that off, and I hit the speed dial for Kayla. “Jim, thank God,” she said. “I tried calling you, but—” Her next few

words were bleeped out by the sound of my voice-mail indicator going

off. “—about forty minutes ago.”

“Are you safe?

Where are you?”

“At home.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, hurrying back to the taxi. As we drove out,

we passed the bomb-disposal van lumbering its way in. I’d come to Saskatoon because I needed comforting after what

Namboothiri had uncovered. But the moment I saw Kayla, I wanted

instead to comfort her. I held her tightly in the entryway for a time, then

she led me into the kitchen, where she had a drink—am ber liquid over

rocks—going. She took a gulp, winced, then waved the glass vaguely at

the liquor cabinet by way of offering me something. Instead, I opened the

fridge and took out a can of beer. “Why the bomb threat?” I asked as I pulled the tab, a small geyser

going up from the opening. “We’ve been having a lot of protests lately.”

“Why?”

“Remember when people were picketing the Large Hadron Collider

because they thought it was going to create a black hole?

Some mindless

jerks got it into their head that the same thing could happen here.”

“Ah,” I said, shaking my head. “Anyway, how are you?

You came all this way; what’s wrong?”

I took a swig of beer. “I know I did some horrible things to you in

2001, and to Dave Swinson—the guy who became an optometrist. But I

found out today that I’d done even worse things. The memory-specialist

I’ve been working with helped me recall them.”

I’d expected her to ask, “What things?” Certainly that would’ve been

my rst question. But she didn’t. She simply swirled her glass, the ice

cubes clinking, and said, looking only generally in my direction, “We’ve

all done things we aren’t proud of. It doesn’t matter who we once were;

all that matters is who we are now.”

“Yes, but—”

“You literally weren’t yourself back then. You weren’t anybody. Just a

philosopher’s zombie.”

“I was for most of it, but…”

“Yes?”

“But at the end of June, Menno knocked me out again, and I came

back as a Q2 psychopath—a real psychopath—and then, I…I…”

“What?”

“I gouged out Menno’s eyes.”

She was quiet for a time, then, nally, she said simply, “Oh.”

“God knows what else I would have done, but he managed to knock

me out again, and when I woke up from that, I was back to my old Q3

self, I guess, but confabulating memories to trowel over the missing

time.”

“So, wait, wait, you’re saying you were knocked down into a coma

three times?” She sounded excited, as if this all con rmed something for

her. “Once—what, New Year’s Eve 2000, right?

Then twice more at the

end of June 2001?

And you changed your quantum state each time you

rebooted?”

“I guess, yes.”

“Coma, coma, coma, chameleon,” Kayla said. I was clearly having an effect on her. “I’m here all week,” she added, but her grin was way wider than her

joke deserved. She started toward her study down the hall. “Come with

me.”

“Look,” Kayla said, gesturing at her large desktop monitor. “That’s the

simulation Victoria and I have been developing.” She had taken the seat

in front of the computer, and I was crouching next to her. “Yes?” I said. “See?

It’s looping.”

I thought that was a bad thing, from the handful of Word macros I’d

tried to debug over the years; I was proud all out of proportion to the

actual achievement of my one that turned MLA citations into APA

format. “You mean it doesn’t terminate?

It just keeps running?”

“No, no, no, the simulation stops just ne whenever we want it to. It’s not the program that’s looping; it’s the output.”

“What?”

She hit some keys, and a chart appeared on her screen. “Okay, look. These are the three possible quantum-superposition states: Q1, Q2, and

Q3.”

“Right.”

“Well, Vic and I have been trying to solve that problem you discussed

with her: you said my brother Travis started as a Q2—a quantum

psychopath—got knocked down into a coma, and then came back up as

a Q3 quick, right?”

“Right. He leveled up.”

“Exactly. But you started as a Q3, and, after being knocked into a

coma back on New Year’s Eve 2000, you revived as a Q1—you leveled

down, in other words; the exact opposite of Travis, right?”

“Right.”

“And I couldn’t square what the simulation was showing with the

reality you’d reported. I had thought you’d gone Q3 to Q1 then bounced

straight back to Q3—but you just told me that wasn’t what happened. You actually went Q3 to Q1, then to Q2, and then to Q3, one step at a

time. And that’s exactly what the simulation predicts. See, what

happened to you isn’t the opposite of what happened to Travis, it’s the

same thing: each time you go down to the classical-physics state, you

reboot, if you reboot at all, one level higher up—but the levels wrap

around!” She pointed at her screen. “The math proves it: the change

vector is a modulus, an absolute value. It statistically prefers being

positive but, if that’s not possible, a negative delta occurs.”

“Um, so if you started as a Q1—”

“If you started as Q1, you’d come back from a coma as a Q2; if you

were a Q2, like Travis, you’d come back as a Q3; and if you were

originally a Q3, like you, you’d wrap around to being a Q1!”

“That’s—wow.”

“Wow indeed. But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly

what happened to you and to my brother and to…” She trailed off. “That’s fabulous, baby!

You’re a genius.”

“Thanks,” she said, but she was frowning. “There’s still one problem,

though. Somehow, while Trav was in a coma, the value of his previous

superposition state had to be stored for nineteen years. For him to revive

as a Q3, somewhere the fact that he’d previously been a Q2 had to be

retained even when he was no longer in superposition.”

I’d been trying to come up to speed on all this. “Don’t almost all cells

in the body have microtubular scaffolding?

Not just brain cells?

The ones

in neurons are the ones Penrose and Hameroff implicated in

consciousness, but maybe regular body cells might retain a degree of

superposition even when neuronal tissue doesn’t. Kind of like muscle

memory.”

I meant that last bit as a pun, but she nodded as if I were more clever

than I really felt just then. “Maybe, maybe.” She shrugged a little. “Who

knows?

The bottom line is, whatever the mechanism, there clearly is such

a memory.”

“Cool,” I said. “But, so are you saying this happens to anyone who

completely loses consciousness?

If they revive, they come up at one level

higher than they were at before—or, if a Q3, wrap around to being a Q1,

as I did?”

“Yes, I think so. But they have to actually have their brain drop into

the classical-physics state. That doesn’t happen during sleep; sleeping is a

conscious condition, which is why you dream and why external stimuli

can wake you up.”

“True,” I said. “And, I’ve heard tons of stories about people who have

temporarily lost consciousness through a coma, general anesthesia, or a

near-death experience. Those who know them best often say they were

changed by the experience. Family and friends say some people who have

had NDEs are more mellow afterward—and, in many cases, they would

be. If you were a psychopathic Q2 beforehand, you’d come back as a

thoughtful, re ective Q3.

And if you were a Q3 beforehand, you’d wrap

around to being a Q1 p-zed, literally without a care in the world. Of

course, that doesn’t happen with every case of general anesthesia, but—”

“Welllll,” said Kayla, “not to freak you out or anything, but a lot of

the drugs we use in operations aren’t really anesthetics; that is, they don’t

actually put you out cold. Rather, they’re paralytics that also inhibit

memory formation. They keep you from moving during surgery, and they

keep you from remembering all the pain, but they don’t actually put you

out in the quantum-mechanical sense.”

“Holy shit. Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow. Well, thanks heaps. Something new to have nightmares

about.”

She smiled contritely. “But there are groups that do suffer total

knockouts disproportionately: boxers, football players, and so on. Most

of the time it’s just—just!—a concussion. But every once in a while, one

of them really is knocked out cold. And, you know, most of them

probably started out as nice-enough guys. But everyone’s read those

stories about some of them eventually turning into psychopaths, beating

their spouses and so on.”

I nodded. One of the Green Bay Packers was in court just last week

over having assaulted his wife. “Anyway, that’s it!” said Kayla triumphantly. “That’s the pattern!

Once you realize that the states wrap around, it’s simple. It’s elegant.”

I was asleep next to Kayla, but even when exhausted, I always dozed

lightly, and a small change in the illumination ltering through my

eyelids woke me up. Next to me, Kayla, naked, was thumb-typing on her

phone. “Texting your other lover?” I said; I was naked, too. “No, no.” She continued typing furiously. “I’m sending myself a note. I thought of another mathematical proof that the states do in fact wrap

around; I don’t want to forget it.” She tapped a little longer, then

decisively banged the screen with her index nger and turned to me,

illuminated by the phone, a satis ed smirk on her beautiful face. I gently pulled her back down, so that she was facing me. I stroked

her hair, its copper color undetectable in the darkness; stroked her

shoulder, the skin smooth; worked my way toward her breast, perfect,

round, soft, my palm moving in light circles over her nipple, which

hardened; and then, sliding lower down her torso, touching the ridge that

marked the leading edge of one of the wings on her blue butter y tattoo. The ridge; her scar. I had one of my own, of course, on the left side of my chest, where

that crazed addict’s knife—

No, no. It hadn’t been heart surgery; it had been the removal of a

tumor in my breast. Above my sternum. No need to saw through bone. And so no need—yes, yes: that was what Cassandra Cheung had told

me over the phone from Calgary: “Says here they cut it out under a local

anesthetic.”

Meaning I hadn’t had my consciousness shut off. I wasn’t knocked

down to the classical-physics state then, back in February 2001—and so

nothing had changed: I was a p-zed before the surgery and a p-zed

afterward. But Kayla—

“Wow, indeed,” she’d said earlier tonight. “But it’s exactly what the

math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother

and to…”

And to whom?

But no…that was crazy. And, yet, when I’d started to tell her what I’d done to Menno, she

de ected it, saying, “It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters

is who we are now.”

Once were. Are now. Jesus. Could it be?

Could she—

Kayla must have felt my spine stiffen because she said, softly,

“What?”

My heart beat a few times, then. “Your tattoo…”

“I thought you liked it?”

“You had an appendectomy.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Abdominal surgery.”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“When I was twenty-two.”

“So, 2003?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And they put you under, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

I found myself pulling slightly away from her. “When were you going

to tell me?”

“Tell you what?” But it was obvious from her tone that she knew

what I meant. “Tell me that you’d been a psychopath when we were dating. If

you’re a Q3 now, you were a Q2 before the operation.”

“If,” Kayla said rmly, “the anesthetic had actually caused

decoherence, had actually put me out cold, hadn’t just been an amnesia-

inducing paralytic, hadn’t—”

My voice was a mere whisper. “Oh, Kayla…”

She was quiet for a time, then, at last: “You’re right. I should have

told you.” She exhaled noisily. “But, yeah, I am another data point: you,

me, and Travis, we all changed states, shifting up or down exactly as the

model predicts.”

“Why not tell me?

If anyone could have understood, I—”

“It wasn’t the same thing. You have no idea what it’s been like all

these years. You, at least, don’t remember the bad things you did in the

past—or you didn’t until just now, thanks to the spelunking you did with

that memory expert, what’s-his-name…”

“Namboothiri.”

“But me?

I remembered it all. Torturing animals as a kid. Being so

cruel to a girl in junior high that she tried to kill herself. I couldn’t tell

you about all that; you’d never look at me the same way again.”

“That’s not so.”

“But then I woke up in a hospital bed one day and realized that I’d

changed. I told you that it had been Menno’s class that got me interested

in consciousness, but that’s not true, and—I’m so sorry—I said it was

what you had done all those years ago that got me interested in

psychopathy. But that’s not true, either. It was the advent of my own

conscience the summer after I nished my bachelor’s degree that did it. That’s why I’ve devoted my career to this. I’ve been trying to gure out

how I could have done the things I did, and why I no longer had

uncontrollable urges to do similar things.”

She reached over, took the hand I’d withdrawn, and placed it over her

tattoo again. “A butter y, see?

In honor of my metamorphosis.”

I40

T would have been nice if, after Kayla had shared the truth of her

transformation with me, we had been able to fall asleep holding each

other, accepting that who we are now mattered more than who we’d

been then. But a peaceful sleep was not to be: we were immediately

interrupted by a tentative knocking on the bedroom door, followed by a

plaintive voice calling, “Mommy?”

Kayla found the bedspread, which I knew to be sea green although it

looked slate gray in the darkness, and pulled it up to cover both of us to

our shoulders. “What is it, sweetheart?” Kayla asked. Ryan took that as leave to enter, and I heard the knob working and a

small squeak from the hinges. She was revealed, suf ciently illuminated

by light spilling through her own open bedroom door on the opposite

side of the corridor that I could see her eyes go wide. Apparently

whatever she’d assumed normally happened after she’d been tucked in

for the night did not include me joining her mother naked in bed. But

that shock was quickly set aside, and Ryan said, “I’m frightened by the

noises.”

I could see on Kayla’s face that she was about to ask, “What noises?”

But she checked herself: with doors open on both sides of the hallway

now, she could hear them, too. Kayla’s bedroom faced the backyard;

Ryan’s, the street—and it was from the street that the growing sounds of

a raucous mob were coming. Kayla got out of her bed—apparently this was a household where the

parent was routinely seen naked by the child—and she quickly put on a

robe and led Ryan from the room to investigate. That gave me a moment

to retrieve my pants and shirt, strewn on the oor. I then hustled over to

join them. Kayla had wisely turned out the light in Ryan’s room by the time I

got there. Up the street, under the sodium lamps, a knot of six or eight

teenagers was moving along, hurtling rocks at windows. The riots here

had previously been con ned to the downtown core; this was the rst I’d

heard of them spreading to the suburbs. Of course, in a smallish city like

Saskatoon, that wasn’t a particularly far journey—but still. There was no phone in Ryan’s room, so Kayla nipped back across the

hall to call the police from there. In the yellow light, Ryan moved closer

to me and reached up and took my hand. The mob was passing a small

hatchback parked by the side of the road. A crowbar rang against its side

panel, and the horn started honking, one blast per second, an android’s

heartbeat. Kayla returned. “I tried three times,” she said. “Busy!

Fucking 911 is

busy.”

The mob rocked the hatchback, but it was too wide and squat for

them to ip over, I guess, since they were soon moving forward, passing

the house next to Kayla’s. We couldn’t see that building from this

vantage point, but we could hear a booming male voice shouting from

what I presumed was its open front door: “Get the hell away from here!

Go on now!

Get lost!”

That would not have been the tack I’d have taken, and indeed, it

caused the seven teenagers—I’d managed to get a head count nally—to

start moving onto his front lawn. Something caught my eye, and I looked

for a second in the opposite direction. Another cluster of what must also

be Q1s or Q2s was approaching—it was beginning to look like, by dumb

geographic luck, Kayla’s house was where the two groups would meet,

assuming the ones on her neighbor’s lawn didn’t tarry long there, and—

Boom!

Boom, boom!

The glass in front of us reverberated. Ryan let go of my hand and

clutched her ears. I’d thought Kayla’s next-door neighbor had opened re

from his stoop; the reports were echoing, their source dif cult to locate. But after a second I realized that the guy who lived across the street from

Kayla had come out into the night, brandishing what, to my untrained

eye, looked like a hunting ri e. I couldn’t see the results of the rst two shots—but the third one had

hit one of the teenagers, who was closer to the road, in the back, and

he’d gone face- rst into a lawn that this time of night must have been

slick with dew. The ock dispersed, the four I could see running—two heading down

the street, two more going up, unthinkingly heading for the second mob. Boom!

Another shot ruptured the night, and I saw a runner brie y splay all

four limbs like a crippled star sh, then tumble forward to the asphalt. Kayla and Ryan had dropped below the windowsill, and they were

scuttling out of the room, toward the relative safety of the back of the

house. But I stood trans xed, stunned by it all. “Jim!” Kayla whisper-

shouted. “Get down!”

I dropped to the oor just as the ri e erupted again. A second car

alarm went off, a harsh counterpoint to the one already wailing. I kept

hoping for the sound of sirens, too—police swooping in to serve and

protect—but all we heard the rest of that long night was honking horns,

breaking glass, gunshots, and screams. The cacophony nally abated by dawn. Kayla’s bedroom faced east, and

the sun bloodied the horizon early this time of year. Ryan had joined us

in bed. As we got up, Ryan announced emphatically that she didn’t want to

go to day camp, which was good, actually: leaving here would have

meant taking her by the dead bodies. A quick check out her bedroom

window showed no sign of the cops or an ambulance having made it

here yet; Kayla had nally gotten through to 911, but the harried

operator had simply said the police would get there as soon as they

could. And although an email from Jeff Cutler reported that no bomb had

actually been found at the Light Source, I didn’t want Kayla returning to

it. In the end, we decided to simply hole up in the house. Kayla called to

make sure her mom and brother were all right (they were), and she

phoned Victoria, who was likewise ne; Vic lived in an apartment

building and had looked down on the roiling violence in her own

neighborhood from the comparative safety of her eighth- oor balcony. She didn’t have beamtime until late today, and so said she’d come on

over and work with Kayla from here if the roads were passab le. I’d known Kayla was the woman for me when I rst saw that she had

bookcases in her dining room. She also had books on the top of toilets—

I’d once had to move volumes by Feynman, Bohr, Rutherford, and

Penrose when I’d needed to take the top off the tank after her downstairs

one didn’t ush properly. But, in addition to books everywhere, she also

had TV monitors in each room. I tuned the one in the kitchen to the CBC

News Network as Ryan and I busied ourselves making breakfast while

Kayla had a shower. I wasn’t going to make bacon or eggs, but toast with

jam, bananas (yay!), and yogurt would do the trick. Apparently, yesterday President Carroway had been surreptitiously

recorded on a cell phone giving a talk to business executives in

Wyoming, and the footage had been posted on YouTube. The video

showed Carroway standing at a podium but the upper-left corner of the

image was cut off—I soon realized because the camera was partially

hidden under a linen napkin. “Many of you here today,” Carroway

intoned, “remember the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis. Our

great nation held hostage by Muslim oil barons in the Middle East, the

very lifeblood of our economy cut off at their caprice.”

There was an indignant murmur from the audience. Carroway went

on: “Why, in 1974, because of them, your national government—loath

then and loath now to intervene in states’ affairs—had to impose a

national speed limit of just fty- ve miles per hour!”

The table got jostled by a waiter; Carroway shifted in the frame. “We can never again let anyone put the brakes on America. And yet

Canada still refuses to turn on the oil pipeline we so desperately need. That’s right, my fellow Americans: the new leadership in Ottawa, under

the command of Naheed Kurban Nenshi, has already caved to so-called

‘First Nations’ Indians and rabid environmentalists.” Carroway shook

his head. “You’d think green Canucks would be happy to see the tree line

inching north—all the more trees for them to hug!”

The next story also featured the president. Yesterday, Carroway had

actually given Nenshi a call, the gist of which the president discussed in a

news conference. The angle and lighting were more attering in this

footage, and this podium bore the Presidential Seal. “Mr. President,” called out a female journalist, “I understand rioting

continues in cities and towns across Canada, as well as now in many

places in Europe.”

“Yes, that’s right, I’m afraid,” said Carroway. “Obviously, civil unrest

anywhere in the world is a concern, but when it’s occurring in our own

backyard, we have to take special notice.”

Another reporter, this one male: “Have you spoken directly to Prime

Minister Nenshi about it?”

“Yes, indeed. We spoke early this morning. The United States has

offered every possible assistance, but the prime minister assured me that

his small army and his local and national police—you know, the

Mounties—were more than capable of containing the situation.”

A different male reporter: “This was your rst of cial call to

Canada’s Muslim prime minister since he was sworn in, wasn’t it?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did you speak to him about the issue of Libyan terrorists entering

the US via Canada?”

“That topic didn’t come up, but I’m sure Mr. Nenshi knows it’s

always at the top of my mind.”

Another woman: “Well, what other issues did you raise with the

Canadian leader?”

Carroway frowned brie y. “Prime Minister Nenshi and I had a frank

exchange of views. I emphasized the historic ties between our two great

nations, but I also expressed to him our deep, heartfelt concern that his

country’s record on the rights of the unborn is profoundly disturbing to

us. Having nally gotten our own house in order, we can no longer turn a

blind eye to the slaughtering of innocents elsewhere. Here in North

America, Canada stands alone, a rogue state, on this issue. Our great

neighbor to the south, Mexico, only allows abortion on very narrow

grounds. Indeed, in all the New World—North, Central, and South

America—only Canada, Communist Cuba, and the tiny nations of

Guyana, French Guiana, and Uruguay offer unrestricted access to

abortion.”

A male journalist: “Given the overturning of Roe v. Wade by our

Supreme Court, are you concerned that American women will travel

north to procure procedures that they can’t obtain here?”

Carroway nodded. “We’re certainly monitoring the situation—

monitoring it very, very closely.”

Ryan had been watching me as much as she was watching the TV,

and I guess she could tell by my body language that what was being said

had disturbed me. “What does ‘monitoring the situation’ mean?” she

asked. I went to fetch the toast; it had apparently popped up a while ago but

I’d been too preoccupied to notice. “I wish I knew, Ginger Ale.”

I changed channels—and Fox News, which I had my own TV set to

skip over, came on. As soon as I saw what they were talking about, I

muted the sound and silently read the closed captioning rather than

exposing Ryan to it. The Correction. That’s what Fox kept referring to it as. Innocuous. A minor course

change; just setting things right. A remedy, for God’s sake. Sure, the other news channels had more accurate names for it, but

Fox’s audience was the largest, and even those who wrote the network’s

name as “Faux News,” an Internet meme for more than a decade now,

had heard it called “The Correction” in clips on The Daily Show or on

Facebook. No one would ever know the exact death toll, but the extermination

started by the McCharles Act—the law of the land in Texas, and it

seemed the de facto law across most of the Southern states now—was

rising rapidly. One estimate put it already at more than ve thousand,

with no end in sight, and many thought it was much, much higher; after

all, those family members of victims—or of “correctees,” as Fox called

them—who’d escaped being culled themselves weren’t likely to come

forward to report a missing sibling or child. The image switched to an elderly Latina woman, tears on sun-creased

cheeks, looking out over the site of another mass killing, bodies strewn

across parchment-colored dirt. I quickly turned off the set before Ryan

looked up from her breakfast. W41

HEN Kayla joined us, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, and

with a towel wrapped around her head, I lled her in on what was

happening, starting with the call between the president and the prime

minister. “Carroway,” she said, as if naming a bacillus. “The guy’s got to be a

psychopath.”

“I imagine so,” I agreed. “And, for that matter,” said Kayla, “Governor McCharles, too. I’d

love to get those guys down on the beamline, prove the truth about them

to the world.” An idea blossomed on her face. “Say, what about your

microsaccades technique?

Can’t you do it on them?”

“I doubt they’re going to volunteer to put on my goggles.”

“No, no, but you said you could do it with lm, right?”

At some point, I’d told Kayla the same story I’d told my sister

Heather about analyzing Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter. “Yeah,” I said, “but The Silence of the Lambs was a special case—a

sustained close-up shot of the character staring directly into the camera,

and I could get it at 4K resolution.” I shook my head. “It’s the same

problem with the videos Menno made of me in 2001.

I’d love to try my

test on that VHS tape, con rm that I was a Q1 even during the nal

interview—prove it was paralimbic damage not quantum psychopathy—

but the footage isn’t nearly high-enough resolution, and, besides, they’re

kind of side views; no way to visually check for microsaccades.”

“Hell,” said Kayla, “the president of the United States has to be one

of the most-photographed people in the world. There must be existing

footage of him that’s suf ciently high-resolution.”

“Sure. The Sunday-morning political shows—Stephanopoulos, Meet

the Press—are all done in 4K now, but they keep cutting away. One, two,

three, cut; one, two, three, cut. Even when he’s talking, they keep going

to a reaction shot.”

“Don’t those programs have the footage they didn’t broadcast?”

I’d made a few dozen TV appearances over the years. “Not normally;

those sorts of interviews are done live-to-air or live-to-tape: the director

switches between cameras as the interview is being conducted, and only

the image from the selected camera is actually broadcast or recorded.”

“What about press conferences, like that one you just saw?”

“They’d be good, but, again, he has to keep looking at the same

thing, and I doubt he does.”

“How much footage do you need?”

“Well, if he’s not a psychopath, it should be obvious after three or

four seconds—but to prove that he is?

I’d really like ten uninterrupted

seconds.”

“Ten seconds with no blinking?”

“Blinks are ne, but he needs to be looking at the same thing for all

ten seconds, and without his cooperation, that’s going to be hard to get.”

“Maybe,” said Kayla. “Maybe not. He makes tons of public

appearances. And lots of people have great cameras these days. Find the

next rally he’s at and ask online for someone to get high-res video,

focusing on his eyes.”

“Who would do that?”

“Tons of people. Your technique is public knowledge now—”

“No, it isn’t. I mean, the goggles are public knowledge, after the

Becker trial, but the fact that you can also do the test with high-

resolution footage?

I’ve kept that under wraps.”

“Why?” asked Kayla. Why, indeed?

Besides just a concern for people’s privacy, there were

two main answers. First, just as Menno had felt it better to hide that

most of humanity lacked inner lives, I’d worried that if untrained

individuals started trying to apply my test, the inevitable incorrect

diagnoses from those who simply failed to detect microsaccades that

were actually there would ruin relationships and careers, and maybe even

lead to vigilante justice. As I’d told Heather, Bob Hare had voiced similar

concerns in 2011 when Jon Ronson had published his pop-sci book The

Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, which

described the PCL-R and suggested laypeople could make correct

assessments. And the other reason?

Economics. Hare made royalties off the PCL-

R, the complete kit for which sold for $439; I—and, just as importantly,

my university, which held the patents—stood to make a lot more money

licensing Marchuk Goggles than we did from a technique anyone could

apply. I explained this in a few words; Kayla got it instantly. “Still,” she said,

“there have to be people out there who either have, or can get, the

footage you need.”

The doorbell rang; Victoria had arrived. Ryan announced that today

was a perfect day to watch Minions III for, by my guess, the thousandth

time—that would keep her occupied, and a Google scavenger hunt

would keep me busy while the physicists worked. And, at last, I found what I wanted. I’d had no idea there were websites

devoted to whether famous people had had plastic surgery, but in fact

there are lots of them. Few performers publicly admitted to a facelift or

boob job, and that had given rise to an online industry of minutely

analyzing supposedly before-and-after photos and having commentators

of varying degrees of expertise hazard opinions about what work might

have been done. On a site arguing that Quinton Carroway had had an

eyelift—I didn’t even know that was a thing—there was a very-high-

resolution still frame of his face with a caption saying it was taken from

some pirated footage checking the president’s makeup before a recent

speech. I dropped a note to the site’s proprietor, asking if the actual video

was online somewhere, and, to my surprise, ten minutes later he’d replied

with a BitTorrent link to a solid minute of 4K video of an extreme close-

up of the president. I checked on Ryan while it downloaded to my

laptop, then stuck my head into Kayla’s of ce. “No, no, no,” Kayla was saying, “surely the Hamiltonian at t-prime is

going to be at least as big as it was at t.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but I’ve got some good footage of

Carroway, and I’m about to run my analysis. Want to see?”

They rose, and we headed back to the dining-room table upon which

my laptop was resting. The footage was still loading frame by frame into

the software. I’d become quite attuned to eye color while doing my research on

microsaccades. Anthony Hopkins has pale blue-gray eyes; Jodie Foster’s

are a more gunmetal blue—although, for some reason, they’re shown as

brown on the poster for The Silence of the Lambs, which depicts her

with a death’s-head hawkmoth covering her mouth. It’s easy to pick out

the pupil against blue or green eyes; it’s a lot harder to track it against

brown ones—which is what President Carroway had—and I preferred to

track the actual pupil than the iris. But ddling with the brightness and

contrast settings let me get a good-enough lock, and I hit the play button. “Okay, here we go.”

One second. Two. Three. Four. “Damn.” His gaze darted to the left. One. Two. “Shit.” He tipped his whole head down. One. Two. Three. His hand came up to rub his left eye. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Sev—nope, turning, as someone

called to him. One. Two. “Crap.” He looked off to the right. One. Two. Three. Four. “Oh, for the love of Pete!” Some clown had

walked in front of the camera. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. “Yes!” Seven. Eight!

“Yes!” Nine!

“Yes, yes!” Ten!

“So?” said Victoria anxiously. “Is he or isn’t he?”

“Just a sec,” I said, switching over to the pupillary-deviation graph. Nothing greater than one minute of arc—the kind of jiggle caused by the

body’s own pulsing blood; microsaccades were at least two arc minutes

and could range up to a hundred and twenty. “Bingo,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “There’s no

doubt about it: the president of the United States is a psychopath.”

Starting late in our afternoon, there were reports of riots in Cologne,

Rome, and Budapest, and that night, there was more rioting all across

Canada, but, thankfully, no more along Kayla’s tree-lined street—

although border cities such as Seattle, Detroit, and Buffalo were showing

signs of similar lawlessness. “I don’t get it,” Kayla said, sitting next to me on her living-room

couch after we turned off the news. “What’s the trigger?”

I shook my head. “There isn’t one.”

“But the rioting is spreading.”

“And so are fashion styles, and Internet memes, and conspiracy

theories, as always. And Boko Haram is conducting raids, like every day,

and antisemitism is expanding like a poison puddle across Europe again. And idealistic kids are being radicalized, like every other day. And people

are joining cults and reading their horoscopes, like every other damn day. Wars are raging in the Middle East and Africa, as usual; climate change is

being ignored, evolution denied, sexism and racism perpetuated, all as

per usual. Sure, most memes that take hold are reasonably benign, but

malignant ones can spread just as easily, whether you call them the KKK

or National Socialism or the Troubles in Northern Ireland or a decade or

more of missing and murdered Native women in Canada.”

“But something must have caused them to spread.”

“Sure, but it was doubtless something small. Losing a hockey game in

Winnipeg; other picayune catalysts elsewhere. You don’t need a complex

explanation—some particle-physics or neuroscience mumbo jumbo—for

something that’s happened over and over and over again throughout

history.” I glanced down at the spot where her blouse was concealing her

tattoo. “Butter ies don’t just symbolize metamorphosis; they symbolize

small changes having big effects.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

She leaned in and kissed me, then went off to put Ryan to bed. When

we retired for the evening, Kayla fell asleep before I did, and I lay in the

dark, listening to the susurration of her breath, waves lapping a beach. It should have come as no particular surprise, I supposed, that

President Carroway was a psychopath. Such people were ideally suited to

politics, each one a heaping plateful of traits selected from a

smorgasbord that included pathological lying, charisma, glibness, skillful

manipulation, and promiscuity—literally and guratively getting into bed

with whoever served the needs of the moment. Working my way through

the presidents I knew anything about, I suspected several others had also

been psychopaths, including some Democrats (surely Lyndon Johnson

and almost as certainly Bill Clinton) and some Republicans (doubtless

Richard Nixon and maybe George W. Bush, although I’d go even money

that Dubya was a p-zed in the thrall of Dick Cheney).

But holding suspicions and actually knowing were two different

things. And as I lay there, a sickle moon hanging low out the window, I

wondered what the Leader of the Free World was going to do next. I42

did not have to wait long to nd out. The next morning, President

Carroway’s latest speech was all over the media. Kayla and I, and

Ryan, sensing the solemnity of what was going on even if she didn’t

understand it, watched it, the three of us sitting slack-jawed in front of

the living-room TV. Carroway began by striding to the podium and

uttering four words that would doubtless become a meme in their own

right: “My fellow North Americans…”

My heart thundered. The president went on in the adamantine

baritone I’d previously heard admonishing those passing through

airports: “On my order, beginning at 9:00 A. M. Eastern time, US Customs

and Border Protection agents closed the border between the United

States and Canada, locking down all vehicular crossings and all US

Customs stations at Canadian airports. At the same time, United States

Air Force jets scrambled from McChord Air Force Base in Washington

State, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base in Ohio, and Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland; these jets have

now secured Canadian airspace.”

“My God…” Kayla said softly. Carroway’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. “At 9:17 A. M., our

ambassador to Canada, Schuyler Grayson, accompanied by a United

States Marine Corps honor guard, presented himself at 24 Sussex Drive

in Ottawa, the home of the Canadian prime minister, to urge Prime

Minister Naheed Nenshi to nally accept our aid in quelling the ongoing

rioting that has begun to spill over the border into this country.”

I wasn’t sure which of us initiated it, but Kayla’s left hand and my

right found each other. “Prime Minister Nenshi once again refused our assistance in

containing the situation. This has left us with no choice; America’s

interests must be protected throughout the world. And so, on my orders,

US troops are now moving into Ottawa, into all provincial capitals, and

into other Canadian cities with populations in excess of one million;

government buildings and essential infrastructure in each will be secured

by nightfall. The Governor General of Canada, who serves as

Commander in Chief of the Canadian Forces, has seen the wisdom of

asking her troops to stand down, and we expect a smooth transition.”

Gimlet eyes bored into the camera, a cold, reptilian glare: “God bless

the United States—including our northern provinces and territories, now

fully under American protection.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said softly. “We’ve been annexed.”

And then things got worse. In a brave attempt at thinking life would go on pretty much as

normal, Ryan had relented and gone back to day camp, and Kayla had

returned to the Light Source. I’d intended to work on the third edition of

Utilitarian Ethics of Everyday Life, which I’d been putting off far too

long, but I found myself trans xed by what was happening. Rarely, if

ever, was Canada the lead “International News” story on any site, and I

hadn’t realized until just now how comforting that actually was. But

suddenly everyone—the BBC, NHK, Al-Jazeera, both the American and

Australian ABC, and more—was talking about the True North, not so

strong and something less than free. Actually, as the day wore on, the coverage shifted from what was

happening in Canada to how others were reacting to it: outrage from

London, which still took a paternal interest in its erstwhile colony; Pope

Francis decrying this return to imperialism; a gathering of Iraqi imams

denouncing what they called the transparent Islamophobia behind this

agrant violation of international norms; some Americans claiming

Carroway had manufactured “the Canadian crisis” to distract from the

culling of illegals within the United States; a government of cial in

Mexico fretting that his country was bound to be taken next. By three in the afternoon—which, CTV Saskatoon informed me, was

6:00 A. M. in Moscow—it had become clear that the Russians, who’d as

yet made no public announcement, were reacting very negatively. Three

Akula-class nuclear submarines had been tracked moving boldly into

Canadian Arctic waters. According to the pundits, the Kremlin was

viewing Carroway’s incursion as if it were the Cuban Missile Crisis in

reverse: with Canada suddenly a de facto part of the United States,

America was now head-butting the Siberian frontier. As a woman from

Harvard observed, except for Alaska and the Chukotka Peninsula, which

had been locked in a staring contest across the Bering Strait since the end

of the last ice age, the two superpowers had been kept safely apart by the

vast granite hulk of Canada—until now. Kayla got home from work at 7:10 P. M.; she’d picked up Ryan on the

way here. “Have you been following the news?” I asked, gathering them

in a hug. “Oh, yes,” Kayla said. I’d muted the sound on the living-room monitor when I’d heard the

front door opening, but Vladimir Putin was on the screen. At the best of

times, he had a dour countenance. Today he looked positively livid

although, given that his government had annexed Crimea—home to

many a Marchuk—back in 2014, he apparently only waxed apoplectic

when someone else mounted an invasion. “He’s got to be a psychopath, too, you know,” said Kayla, tilting her

head at the screen. It seemed almost super uous to check, but as Kayla took Ryan

upstairs to get cleaned up, I dropped a note to my online benefactor from

yesterday, who was as accommodating and expeditious as before. He

said there was no doubt among those who tracked such things that the

Russian president had had a raft of cosmetic operations, including a nose

job, cheek llers, and at least one facelift, not to mention an ongoing

regimen of Botox injections; I was soon downloading high-resolution

footage to my laptop that purported to show telltale signs of these

procedures. The video, which seemed to be of Putin enduring a long question

from some journalist who doubtless shortly thereafter had received a

one-way ticket to the Gulag, contained a solid twelve seconds of the

president’s full-on disdainful stare. Just as Kayla had opined, my

software con rmed that Vladimir Putin was indeed a psychopath. I

shared this news as she came back downstairs; Ryan had stayed up in her

room. Kayla nodded. “Which means,” she said, a quaver in her voice, “he’s

not likely to back down.”

“Neither is Carroway,” I said. “It’s like how it was with your brother

Travis—extreme sports, right?

The rush of adrenaline?

You think

snowboarding is a kick, imagine nuclear brinksmanship with trillions of

dollars’ worth of weapons at your command.” I shook my head. “Those

two pricks are loving this.”

We watched the muted images for a time—intercuts between

Carroway and Putin, back and forth, thrust and parry. “Somebody has to

stop them,” Kayla said at last. “Yes,” I replied softly—so softly that she asked me to repeat myself. “Yes,” I said again, boosting my outer voice to match my inner one,

“somebody does.”

K43

AYLA 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 inging 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—al l 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 speci c 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—wh at?—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 ourishing 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 of ce, 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—wr ap

around to being Q1 p-zeds.” She moved things around with her mouse

until her chart re ected 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 rst time ever, the majority of the human race will nally be ring 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 rst 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 rst 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