“But he is. And… and I’m the one who killed him.”
“Yeah.”
“I killed a man… violently, in cold blood. You’re a Mennonite, a pacifist. How could you look at me after that?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Menno said softly. “I didn’t have to.”
A flash of memory: my thumb digging into Menno’s face. I shook my head violently, but there were no adequate words.
Menno lifted his shoulders. “I was angry. Furious. But, well, nineteen years is a long time.”
“Still, it must have been awful, having to work side by side with me all this time.”
He was quiet for a moment. Perhaps he blinked behind his glasses. “Jim, I’m the reason you’re at U of M.”
“I know, but—”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m the reason. I was department head back then, remember? You’d applied to teach at three other schools. A few phones calls, a few favors called in, twisting the dean’s arm to get you tenure-tracked, and—” He shrugged affably. “Well, the names haven’t all changed since you hung around.” And then he sang, off-key, the final verse of the old TV theme song, “Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back…”
“Jesus,” I said. “Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?”
“You’re not my enemy. You’re my…”
“Subject?” I said, at last getting it.
“I may have stopped recording them, but those long discussions in my office we’ve always had… It was fascinating, what had happened to you, and how you built up a coherent history of your missing period pretty much out of nothing.”
“But, still, after what I’d done, why’d you keep it secret? Why didn’t you turn me over to the police?”
Menno’s silver eyebrows climbed above the frames of his glasses, and he spread his arms. “How could I? You know what would have happened if any of this had gone public? Milgram and Zimbardo—that was the Wild West, before informed consent; hell, it’s because of them that informed-consent rules were put in place at universities across the world. Even with tenure, my career was at risk—flagrant violations of the campus ethical guidelines—and the whole department was at risk, too. U of M could have been decertified by the American and Canadian Psychological Associations. And—you don’t know how big a deal this is, but trust me, it’s huge for a Mennonite: working for the military? I’d have never been able to show my face at my church again. Plus, Jesus God, the legal consequences! If you had decided to sue or press criminal charges for the lost six months, or for the brain damage I’d caused with the lasers, I’d be in ruins, or in jail, or both. Same thing if Travis Huron’s family had sued: that boy has been in a coma for almost twenty years, and it was my fault.”
“He’s not in a coma anymore.”
Menno’s jaw dropped, and he said, very softly, “Oh.” And then, after a moment, “When did he pass?”
“He’s not dead,” I said. “But he’s out of the coma; he’s awake.”
“God, really?”
“He doesn’t remember what you did to him.”
“Are you going to tell him?” Menno asked anxiously.
“He has a right to know.”
“Prisoner’s dilemma, Padawan. Don’t defect.”
“What?”
“You tell Travis what we did to him, and I will tell the police what you did to Dominic Adler. There’s a statute of limitations on malpractice; there’s none on murder. The only win-win scenario is for both of us to continue to keep quiet.”
I didn’t like being pushed. “I’ll get off,” I said. “I had a pre-existing condition, thanks to you.”
The obsidian convexities of Menno’s lenses faced me. “The way Devin Becker got off?”
I blew out air.
“Listen, Padawan, listen! You know the stakes are higher than either of us. If people start digging—if the truth of what Dom and I discovered all those years ago comes out…”
“Yes?”
“Slavery, human trafficking, cannon fodder, experimental test subjects, even Soylent-fucking-Green, for Christ’s sake—that’s just the beginning of the things that’ll happen if the world learns that there are countless philosopher’s zombies out there who don’t actually have feelings.”
He was right. Four billion p-zeds, two billion psychopaths, and just a billion quicks. It was a recipe for massive exploitation.
“I have to know,” I said. “Did Dominic Adler have an inner voice?”
“See!” Menno crowed triumphantly. “Even you’re doing it! If he didn’t have an inner voice, you’re off the hook, right? Yeah, you—you terminated him, but it’s not like that matters, right?” He let that sink in. “Anyway, sorry, but there’s no get-out-of-jail-free card for you: Dom had an inner voice; I saw it on the oscilloscope when we were testing our equipment.” A pause, a beat, then a softening of my old mentor’s tone: “As to whether he had a conscience to go with it, though…”
“Yes?”
“What do you think? He got me to push ahead with the experiments even after you’d lost consciousness. He didn’t seem to give a damn about what had happened to either you or Travis Huron.”
“A psychopath,” I said. Menno was right: I probably could have lived with having killed another p-zed, but even a psychopath was fully conscious: all the reasons why Devin Becker shouldn’t receive capital punishment applied equally to Dominic Adler.
But, nonetheless, I’d snapped Dom’s neck.
Judge.
Jury.
And executioner.
Of course, I’d been a psychopath when I’d done it, albeit a paralimbic one, not a quantum one, until…
Until Menno had hockey-pucked me into a brief coma and I’d fallen to the laboratory floor, only to reboot—
—to reboot, like Travis Huron eventually did, not at my previous state but—
—but at the next level up.
I’d come back as the worst-possible combination: a Q2 with amygdalar lesions; a quantum psychopath and a paralimbic psychopath all rolled into one, suddenly conscious after six months of zombiehood. Fuck yeah, such a beast might gouge somebody’s eyes out. And after that, it might—
But there was no after that, not for the quantum psychopath. Menno almost immediately knocked me back into a coma again, and when I emerged, on July 2, 2001, I had leveled up once more, becoming fully conscious with conscience—and that conscience, that inner voice, had managed to override whatever the paralimbic damage might have been urging me to do.
Just like it was overriding my urge right now to strangle the life out of Menno Warkentin for what he’d done to me—and for what that damage had led me to do.
39
I hadn’t planned to return to Saskatoon for several more days, but I needed to see Kayla, so I had my teaching assistant take my Wednesday and Thursday classes for me.
My car, finally repaired, was now at Kayla’s place; she’d picked it up from the body shop for me. That meant flying was my best option to get to Saskatoon, and, to my delight—the only good news I’d had in days—I was able to get a one-way ticket for only $300; I’d expected much more of a gouge for a same-day flight.
I called Kayla to let her know I was coming. The trip was brief enough that I didn’t have to use the john, which was good because I’d gotten stuck with a window seat and I hated asking someone to move just so I could get out. Kayla was still at work when I arrived, but, since it was after normal business hours, I didn’t feel guilty about going straight to the synchrotron; Ryan was at Rebekkah and Travis’s place, and the last thing I needed was to be on my own in an empty house.