The Flicker Men (9 page)

“We have.”

His face showed confusion. “A
new
finding, the message said?”

“Just watch.”

Jeremy observed while we ran the experiment. He looked in the box. He collapsed the wavefunction himself.

Then we put the puppy in the box and ran the experiment again. We showed him the interference pattern.

Again, his face showed confusion. He wasn't sure what he'd just seen. “Why didn't it work?” he asked.

“We don't know.”

“But what's different?”

“Only one thing. The observer.”

“I don't think I understand.”

“So far, none of the animals we've tested have been able to alter the quantum system.”

He scratched at the back of his neck. A line formed between his eyebrows. A single line of worry on his unlined face. He was silent for a long time, looking at the setup, thinking things through.

I let him get there on his own.

“Holy shit,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” Point Machine said.

“This is repeatable?”

“Again and again,” I said. I stepped forward and turned the machine off. The hum faded.

“Stay here.” Jeremy strode out of the room.

Point Machine and I looked at each other.

Jeremy was back a few minutes later, this time accompanied by another man in a suit. An older man, white haired. Upper management. One of the names behind the quarterly evaluations. One of the names who would be firing me.

“Show him.”

So I did.

Again came the moment of realization. “Jesus,” the man said.

“We'd like to run more tests,” I said. “Work our way up through every phylum, class, and order—primates being of particular interest because of their evolutionary connection to us.”

“Of course,” the manager said. His eyes went far away. It was the face of shell shock. He was still processing.

“We may need more resources.”

“Then you'll have it.”

“And a budget.”

“As much as you want,” the manager said. “As much funding as you want.”

*   *   *

It took ten days to arrange. We worked in conjunction with the Franklin Park Zoo.

Transporting large numbers of animals can be a logistical nightmare, so it was decided that it would be easier to bring the lab to the zoo than the zoo to the lab. Vans were hired. Technicians assigned. Point Machine put his own research on hold and appropriated a lab tech to feed his amphibians. Satvik's research also went on official hiatus.

“I don't want to interfere with your work,” I told him when I found out.

Satvik shook his head. “I must see this through.”

It was a Saturday morning when we set up the experiment in one of the new exhibits under construction—a green, high-ceilinged room that would one day house muntjacs. For now, though, it would house scientists, the zoo's strangest and most transient tenants. Blocking out the light was the hardest part, with canvas deployed over the broad glass entryway. The working floor itself was still unfinished and recessed below the level of the entrance; so three short stairs had to be assembled that led down to the wide octagon of bare concrete on which the tables were set up. Satvik worked the electronics. Point Machine liaised with the zoo staff. I built a bigger wooden box.

This box was six feet square, reinforced on all sides with two-by-four studs every twelve inches. It was large, strong, and lighttight.

Satvik noticed me with the electric saw. “Be careful,” he said. “Shortcuts lead to long cuts.” As he walked away, I wondered if that was one of his expressions, or if he'd made it up special.

The zoo staff didn't seem particularly inclined to cooperate until the size of Hansen's charitable donation was explained to them by the zoo superintendent. After that, they were very helpful.

Setup continued through the weekend until everything was up and running, just like at the lab. As a control, I put Satvik in the box and ran the test. He saw the light. The interference pattern collapsed into two distinct points on the capture screen.

“It works,” Point Machine said.

The following Monday we started the experiment. We got to the zoo early, and the keepers let us in the gates.

To corroborate our earlier work, we'd already agreed to start with frogs.

Satvik checked the light one final time, and then Point Machine put one of his frogs in the wooden box.

“You ready?” I asked.

He nodded. I looked over at Jeremy, who'd arrived with an entourage a few minutes earlier and now stood off to the side, near the wall. His face was set in concentration. Behind him, two managers in suits sweated in the muggy darkness. They were here to see the machine work. Point Machine stood by the capture screen, along with a handful of technicians.

I hit the button. The machine thrummed like a guitar string.

“How's it look?”

Point machine checked the screen. He gave a thumbs-up. “Just like at the lab,” he said. “No change.”

*   *   *

We ate lunch in the zoo cafeteria among the milling crowds. A thousand visitors, kids in tow. Balloons and ice cream. A double stroller jutted into an aisle while families came and went. No one had any idea about the experiment that would take place behind the construction signs just a few dozen yards away.

Point Machine ordered pizza but couldn't finish.

Across the table, my own stomach twisted, appetite gone.

“Which ones will it be?”

“There's no way to know.”

“If you had to guess.”

“It'll happen somewhere between class and order,” Point Machine said. “The primates for sure.”

“What do you think, Satvik?”

He looked up from his paper plate. “I don't know.”

Point Machine drained the last of his Pepsi.

“I'm telling you,” he said. “Somewhere in Primatomorpha. That'll be our first hit.”

*   *   *

We ran the first experiment just after noon. Satvik hit the button. The interference pattern didn't budge.

Over the next three hours, we worked our way through representatives of several mammal lineages: Marsupialia, Afrotheria, and the last two evolutionary holdouts of Monotremata—the platypus and the echidna. The zookeepers walked or wheeled or carried the animals to us in cages. One by one, the animals were placed carefully in the wooden box. The machine ran. The interference pattern never changed.

The next day, we tested species from the Xenartha and Laurasiatheria clades. There were armadillos, sloths, hedgehogs, pangolins, and even-toed ungulates. The third day, we tackled Euarchontogliries. We tested tree shrews and lagomorphs. Hares, rabbits, and pikas. None of them collapsed the wavefunction; none carried the spotlight. On the fourth day, we turned finally to the primates.

We arrived at the zoo early that day. Zoo staff escorted us through the gate and up the hill. They unlocked the muntjac house and turned on the lights. Satvik provided the zookeepers with the day's list, which they then discussed among themselves for several minutes.

We began with the most distantly related primates. We tested lemuriformes and New World monkeys. We put them in the box, closed the door, hit the button.

Then Old World monkeys. Subfamilies Cercopithecinae and Colobinae. The red-eared guenon and the Tonkean macaque.

Then a single Sumatran surili, which clung to the zookeeper's arm, face like a little gremlin doll. A stuffed animal that blinked. Finally, we moved to the anthropoid apes. All failed to collapse the wave.

On the fifth day, we did the chimps.

“There are actually two species,” Point Machine told us while the zoo staff prepared the transfer. “
Pan paniscus
, also called the bonobo, and
Pan troglodytes
, the common chimpanzee. They're congruent species—hard to tell apart if you don't know to look. By the time scientists caught on in the nineteen thirties, they'd already been mixed in captivity.” Zoo staff maneuvered two juveniles into the room, holding them by their hands like parents leading a child. “But during World War II, we found a way to separate them again. It happened at a zoo outside Hellabrunn, Germany. A bombing leveled most of the town but, by some fluke, left the zoo intact. When the keepers returned, they expected to find their lucky chimps alive and well. Instead, they found a massacre. Only the common chimps stood at the bars, begging for food. The bonobos lay in their cages, dead from shock.”

The zoo staff led the first chimp toward the box. A juvenile female. Its curious eyes met mine. They closed the door, and Satvik secured the latch.

“You ready?” I asked.

Satvik nodded.

We tested both species. Chimp and bonobo. The equipment hummed. We double-checked the results, then triple-checked.

The interference pattern did not budge.

Nobody wanted to speak.

“So that's it then,” Point Machine said finally. “Even chimps don't cause wavefunction collapse.”

I toggled the power switch and turned the machine off for the last time. The hum faded to silence.

“We're alone,” I said.

*   *   *

Later that night, Point Machine paced the lab. “It's like tracing any characteristic,” he said. “You look for homology in sister taxa. You organize clades, catalog synapomorphies, identify the out-group.”

“And who is the out-group?”

“Who do you think?” Point Machine stopped pacing. “The ability to cause wavefunction collapse is apparently a derived characteristic that arose uniquely in our species at some point in the last several million years.”

“How do you know that?”

“It's the most parsimonious interpretation. None of our sister taxa have it. This is a uniquely derived trait. An apomorphy. It must have arisen after our split from the other primates.”

“And before that?” I said.

“What?”

“Before that. Before us.”

“I don't follow.”

“Those millions of years. Did the Earth just stand dormant as so much uncollapsed reality? What, waiting for us to show up?”

 

13

Writing up the paper took several days. I holed up in my lab, organizing the data, putting it into a clear structure that could be read, digested, submitted for publication. The shakes were bad in the mornings, so I took my prescription, washing it down with coffee and orange juice. Once the paper was complete, I wrote the abstract. I signed Satvik and Point Machine as coauthors.

SPECIES AND QUANTUM WAVEFUNCTION COLLAPSE.

Eric Argus, Satvik Pashankar, Jason Chang. Hansen Labs, Boston, MA

 

ABSTRACT

Multiple studies have revealed the default state of all quantum systems to be a superposition of both collapsed and uncollapsed probability waveforms. It has long been known that subjective observation is a primary requirement for wavefunction collapse. The goal of this study was to identify the higher-order taxa capable of inciting wavefunction collapse by act of observation and to develop a phylogenetic tree to clarify the relationships between these major animal phyla. Species incapable of wavefunction collapse can be considered part of the larger indeterminate system. The study was carried out at Boston's Franklin Park Zoo on multiple classes of vertebrata. Here we report that humans were the only species tested that proved capable of exerting wavefunction collapse onto the background superposition of states, and indeed, this ability appears to be a uniquely derived human characteristic. This ability most likely arose sometime in the last six million years after the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

*   *   *

Jeremy read the abstract. We sat in his office, the single sheet of paper resting on the broad expanse of his father's desk.

Finally, I spoke. “You said you wanted something publishable.”

“Serves me right, telling you something like that.” The crease between his eyebrows was back again. “This is what I get.”

“Not so bad, is it?”

“Bad? No, it's incredible. Congratulations. This is amazing work.”

“Thank you.”

“Still,” he said. “It's going to start a shit storm. You must know that.”

Jeremy looked down at the paper I'd written, his blue eyes troubled. I could see him as a boy, eighteen again, sitting in the university library where I'd first met him. His face smooth and young. The ice storm and sliding truck still two years in his future. The paper that would complicate his life still more than a decade from his desk.

He looked up from the paper. “But what do these results
mean
?”

“They mean whatever you think they mean.”

*   *   *

Things moved fast after that. The paper was published in the
Journal of Quantum Mechanics
, and the phone started ringing. There were requests for interviews, peer review, and a dozen labs started replication trials, all with a keen eye toward finding the flaw in the procedure. And always it was assumed there
must
be a flaw. Outside the research community, it was the interpretations that got crazy, though. I stayed away from interpretations. I dealt with the facts.

Like this fact: there is exactly one liquor store on the shortest route between work and the motel. I took the long way, trees lining the road—and I didn't drink. Some nights I didn't trust myself to go home at all, didn't trust that I'd take the long way, so I stayed the night, bathing in the safety shower of the chem lab on the first floor of North building, a flagrant violation of lab protocol and all things holy. Around me were bottles of every chemical known to man—potassium sulfate, antimony trioxide, caustic potash, nitrogen sulfide, ferric ferrocyanide—every chemical, that is, except alcohol in a form that wouldn't poison me.

Satvik's office was still back in the main building, though he could be found, more and more often, only in his lab space, a small room he'd acquired on the second floor of South building.