Quantum Night

22

Saskatchewan 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 fishing line at the corners of his mouth. “I compliment him on being the first Muslim head of state anywhere in the Western World. Quite an achievement, that, quite a significant achievement. And to do so with Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party, to boot! A couple of monumental firsts. 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 field, 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-confidence 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 finger. 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 infinitely 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 finally 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 flowed 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 firmly pressed the twin tips against her brother’s forehead, and—

—and Travis’s eyes fluttered open.