Quantum Night (17 page)

“Good morning, class. So, awhile 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 fight traffic 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 sacrifice 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 first.”

“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 sacrifice 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.

“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 fingers 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 first film 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 confident 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?”

V
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 difficult.

Nor, really, should have been the getting-together part. Both Air Canada and WestJet offered multiple direct flights each day between Winnipeg and Saskatoon, and the flight 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 flying 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 five 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 five 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 five percent, I felt I could do at least double that—and I did, for the first three years. And then I realized I wasn’t missing the money, and I upped my donation to fifteen percent, and, even when Virgil came along, and I started paying out twenty-five grand a year in child support, I didn’t cut back.

And, seriously, as much as I loved Kayla—and 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 . . . for 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 finally 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 office: 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 field, and looked up. I still didn’t remember anything from that half-year science-fiction course, but the next term I’d taken a poetry class, and a line of Archibald Lampman’s floated 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.

S
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 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.