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“You said about thirty percent of your test group were Q2s?”

“Yup, and evenly split between men and women.”

“My microsaccades test shows the same percentage and gender balance. Did you get the kind of flak I did about that being a much higher prevalence of psychopathy than is generally assumed?”

She smiled. “We cited you in our paper on that very point, but, yeah, we’re expecting the reviewers from Physics of Life to challenge us on it.”

I nodded. As I’m sure Kayla knew, most older estimates put the prevalence of psychopathy at between one and four percent of the general population of men, and about a tenth of that among women. But those values were due to sampling problems. Take Kent Kiehl, one of Hare’s last grad students, who did the first-ever scans of psychopaths’ brains—great work, that. He did his initial studies at the University of British Columbia, where, with the extraordinary cooperation of the Canadian Department of Corrections, he was able to routinely transfer violent criminals who had scored high on the Hare Checklist to a hospital where they could be scanned by fMRI; the precautions taken against the prisoners escaping were worthy of a Hollywood film.

But when Kent was lured to Yale with a sweetheart offer—he asked for double the salary his colleagues in Canada were getting and was told, “Oh, we can do better than that”—he immediately became frustrated. He’d hoped to work with psychopaths at large in the New Haven community: people with criminal records but now released from prison. But he found—duh!—that psychopaths weren’t good about keeping appointments for scientific experiments, and those rare times they did show up, they were often too drunk or too uncooperative to be of any use.

Anyway, one of the chapters of Kent’s book The Psychopath Whisperer begins by baldly declaring, “Fact: There are over twenty-nine million psychopaths worldwide.” If you flip to the endnote, it turns out he reached that figure by assuming the percentage of psychopaths found in prisons accurately reflected the prevalence of psychopathy in the population as a whole. But the ones behind bars are just the ones dumb enough to get caught; with their skills at manipulation and deception, psychopaths almost certainly are captured at a rate much lower than that of normal people—my pal Devin Becker notwithstanding.

Likewise, Kent claims that there are ten times as many male psychopaths as females. Why? Well, see, he says, there are ten times as many male psychopaths in prison as females ones—which is true, but there are also ten times as many male left-handers in prison, and male redheads, and males who like anchovies on their pizza—simply because there are ten times as many men behind bars as women.

Before my work, and now Kayla’s, no one knew how many psychopaths there actually were. Twenty-nine million? Nuh-uh, Kent. It’s more like two fucking billion—thirty percent of Earth’s population, two out of every seven people.

The waiter came with our entrees. When he was gone, I said, “What about the other two cohorts—you know, just one electron in superposition, or all three in superposition?”

Kayla lifted her shoulders. “I couldn’t discern any difference between Q1s and Q3s. No, as far as we can tell, there are only two types of consciousness, at least from a quantum-mechanical point of view: psychopathic Q2s, and everyone else.”

“Do you think you inherit your state?”

“It doesn’t seem to run in families. Oh, some people are the same state as their parents, siblings, or children, but that’s not disproportionately common. And, as far as we can tell, people don’t change states—we’ve done as much of a longitudinal study as we can so far, and no one has ever switched.”

“Fascinating,” I said. Marveling at the circumstances that had brought us together again after so much time, I added, “Quite a coincidence, you and me both ending up working on psychopathy.”

Kayla’s tone grew cold. “It’s not a coincidence, Jim.”

“What?”

She stared at me, and I met her gaze—until I couldn’t. “I got interested in psychopathy because of you,” she said. “Because of the horrible things you did all those years ago.”

11

Two decades ago

“Good evening, Jim. Thanks for coming in again.”

Jim Marchuk was carrying a plastic bag with the green McNally Robinson logo. “No problem, Professor Warkentin. Bit surprised anyone’s working on New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh, Christmas break is my favorite time on campus,” Menno said. “Peace and quiet. Summers are great, too—the campus is mostly empty, and the weather’s nicer then, but Christmas is the best; the place is dead.”

Jim’s tone was light. “Universities would be wonderful if it weren’t for all those pesky students.”

“No, no, no,” said Menno. “It’s faculty that drive me up the walls. Departmental meetings, committee meetings, so-and-so’s retirement dinner, somebody else’s birthday lunch. Here, with almost everyone away, a body can finally concentrate.”

“Huh,” said Jim.

“You got a party to get to?”

“Kinda. Bunch of friends, we’re going to Garbonzo’s—hang out, watch Ed the Sock do Fromage.”

“I’m sure that means something,” said Menno. “Anyway, we’ll get you out of here long before midnight.”

“I’m happy to come in,” said Jim. “Dorm’s kinda lonely. But my parents are off on a cruise for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, so not much point in going back to Cow Town.”

Dominic Adler entered the room, carrying the Mark II. “That’s not the same helmet as before,” said Jim, but there was nothing suspicious in his tone; he was just making conversation, and it beat talking about the weather.

“True,” said Dominic. “Completely new design.” They were hoping that by using transcranial focused ultrasound—a new brain-stimulation technique the DoD was experimenting with—they could boost the phonemes enough to punch through the background noise.

“Great,” said Jim, reaching for the helmet. It had different modules attached to its surface, and, in addition to ones that looked like decks of cards, there were two—one on either side—that looked like green hockey pucks.

“Put it on,” Dominic said.

Jim pulled it over his head, and Dominic loomed in to make various adjustments. “It’s a snugger fit than the old one,” Jim offered.

“Yes. We thought maybe we were losing alignment with the previous setup.” Dom pulled on the chin strap, cinching it. “How’s it look, Menno?”

Jim glanced toward Menno, as if expecting an assessment of his appearance, but Menno was peering at the oscilloscope, which showed the thick, chaotic trace of the para-auditory scan. “I think it’s fine,” Menno said.

“Okay,” said Dominic. He glanced at his calculator watch, then: “Take your seat next door, Jim.”

Jim headed out into the corridor and went into the other room, lowering himself onto the swivel chair on the opposite side of the glass.

Menno turned on the cassette recorder, which had a little microphone on a plastic stand. “Project Lucidity, stage two, test number fourteen on thirty-one December 2000, 7:49 P.M. PIs: Dominic K. Adler and Menno Warkentin. Subject JM is in place.”