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.
23
Victoria Chen had to know for sure.
She was waiting for Ross in the Light Source’s glassed-in entryway. She became even more nervous than she already was when 11:00 A.M. passed and there was still no sign of him; another researcher had the beamline at 11:30. But at ten after, he finally arrived. Vic got him signed in, had him clip on a dosimeter, and took him on the long walk down to the SusyQ beamline.
“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked as she fussed with her equipment.
Ross was his usual amiable self. “No, of course not. I’d do anything for you, my love. You know that.”
She tapped a series of commands on her keyboard. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a good man. Now, if you’ll just lie down here…” She indicated the gurney.
Ross smiled. “Fancy a nooner?”
“Not today, dear,” she said, making a show of waggling her eyebrows, “but there’s always tonight.”
“Indeed there is,” he said, and he lay down on his back. That was either supine or prone—she could never remember which was which—but, either way, his lean form, in dark-blue cotton slacks and a light-blue dress shirt, looked fine. He really was a good boyfriend: attentive to her but low-maintenance himself; even-tempered; and an absolute machine in the sack.
“Thanks for doing this, hon,” she said as she affixed the head strap. “I think there’s a really good paper in it.”
“My pleasure.”
“Just relax. As the doctors like to say, this won’t hurt a bit.” She used her mouse to click an on-screen button, and the process began. Initially, her monitor showed a plain horizontal line—no superposition—but it did that for everyone; it took about ten seconds to gather the data, and—
Ah, and there it came. The line undulated and then a huge peak appeared at the left side, showing a single superimposed electron. She waited anxiously for the second peak to appear, and then the third one, and—