Quantum Night

17

I 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 traffic 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 reflecting 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 firm 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-five. 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 offices of Nick’s firm.”

“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 office, or a government office, 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 fine in crowds, but I found myself wondering how many Nicks—how many p-zeds—were flocking 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 first, longer leg without a stop, then, after a quick bite, pressing on the rest of the way.

We put the radio on briefly to get a traffic report, but first 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—which pretty much went without saying here in The Peg—Kayla 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 filled with p-zeds, but looking at her profile, outlined by the light of the setting sun, that didn’t seem the most important thing. No, what I wanted—what 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 briefly 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 first, 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 fine 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 conflating 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 avaricious bank president. And yet we keep telling him that they’re the same thing. Well, maybe in this instance, the laypeople are right. Maybe 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 flavors of psychopathy.”

“Fourteen million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and fifteen.”

I looked at her.

“Math’s my thing,” she said, flashing 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 firing on all cylinders: a normal, fully conscious human being with the ability to reflect 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 profile, 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-reflection.”

“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 flint 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—with 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 filled with fully conscious beings, and another, completely separate world entirely filled 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 fine. 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 definition 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 finding scapegoats?”

“Exactly, which is more piling-on behavior, everybody converging on the same thought.” I looked out the side window at the flat, 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 reflection. 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…