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.