Quantum Night

16

“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 baffled.

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.”

“Jim, 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 office.

“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 file 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 film 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 fifteenth, 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 flat of my hand sharply against the slate-gray door to Menno’s office 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, first 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 find 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 first-person, subjective experience. But we’d somehow taken all that away—and 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 fifteenth. 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 first? 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 battlefield microphone. Anyway, that meant we had access to some other classified 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 fix 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 five 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, fingers splayed. “My heart…”

“Yes?” said Menno.

My head was swimming. The knifing, 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 narratives they’d created to explain events even though they were just making things up.

I looked at Menno, a little reflection 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 office 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 classified. 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 pacifists. 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 figured 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 reflexively 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 floored 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.”