The cab turned onto Innovation Boulevard and headed toward the glass-fronted building that housed the Light Source, but the driver came to a stop a hundred meters shy of the circular driveway. Four Saskatoon police cars, their roof lights blinking, were blocking the way. I told the cabbie to wait and got out. A uniformed officer approached me.
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “No one gets in.”
It was only then that I became conscious of a helicopter overhead. “My girlfriend is in there. What’s happening?”
“No one’s in there,” corrected the officer. “The building’s been evacuated.”
“What? Why?”
“Bomb threat.”
I pulled out my phone—and saw that it was still in airplane mode. I turned that off, and I hit the speed dial for Kayla.
“Jim, thank God,” she said. “I tried calling you, but—” Her next few words were bleeped out by the sound of my voice-mail indicator going off. “—about forty minutes ago.”
“Are you safe? Where are you?”
“At home.”
“I’m on my way,” I said, hurrying back to the taxi. As we drove out, we passed the bomb-disposal van lumbering its way in.
I’d come to Saskatoon because I needed comforting after what Namboothiri had uncovered. But the moment I saw Kayla, I wanted instead to comfort her. I held her tightly in the entryway for a time, then she led me into the kitchen, where she had a drink—amber liquid over rocks—going. She took a gulp, winced, then waved the glass vaguely at the liquor cabinet by way of offering me something. Instead, I opened the fridge and took out a can of beer.
“Why the bomb threat?” I asked as I pulled the tab, a small geyser going up from the opening.
“We’ve been having a lot of protests lately.”
“Why?”
“Remember when people were picketing the Large Hadron Collider because they thought it was going to create a black hole? Some mindless jerks got it into their head that the same thing could happen here.”
“Ah,” I said, shaking my head.
“Anyway, how are you? You came all this way; what’s wrong?”
I took a swig of beer. “I know I did some horrible things to you in 2001, and to Dave Swinson—the guy who became an optometrist. But I found out today that I’d done even worse things. The memory-specialist I’ve been working with helped me recall them.”
I’d expected her to ask, “What things?” Certainly that would’ve been my first question. But she didn’t. She simply swirled her glass, the ice cubes clinking, and said, looking only generally in my direction, “We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of. It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters is who we are now.”
“Yes, but—”
“You literally weren’t yourself back then. You weren’t anybody. Just a philosopher’s zombie.”
“I was for most of it, but…”
“Yes?”
“But at the end of June, Menno knocked me out again, and I came back as a Q2 psychopath—a real psychopath—and then, I… I…”
“What?”
“I gouged out Menno’s eyes.”
She was quiet for a time, then, finally, she said simply, “Oh.”
“God knows what else I would have done, but he managed to knock me out again, and when I woke up from that, I was back to my old Q3 self, I guess, but confabulating memories to trowel over the missing time.”
“So, wait, wait, you’re saying you were knocked down into a coma three times?” She sounded excited, as if this all confirmed something for her. “Once—what, New Year’s Eve 2000, right? Then twice more at the end of June 2001? And you changed your quantum state each time you rebooted?”
“I guess, yes.”
“Coma, coma, coma, chameleon,” Kayla said.
I was clearly having an effect on her.
“I’m here all week,” she added, but her grin was way wider than her joke deserved. She started toward her study down the hall. “Come with me.”
“Look,” Kayla said, gesturing at her large desktop monitor. “That’s the simulation Victoria and I have been developing.” She had taken the seat in front of the computer, and I was crouching next to her.
“Yes?” I said.
“See? It’s looping.”
I thought that was a bad thing, from the handful of Word macros I’d tried to debug over the years; I was proud all out of proportion to the actual achievement of my one that turned MLA citations into APA format. “You mean it doesn’t terminate? It just keeps running?”
“No, no, no, the simulation stops just fine whenever we want it to. It’s not the program that’s looping; it’s the output.”
“What?”
She hit some keys, and a chart appeared on her screen. “Okay, look. These are the three possible quantum-superposition states: Q1, Q2, and Q3.”
“Right.”
“Well, Vic and I have been trying to solve that problem you discussed with her: you said my brother Travis started as a Q2—a quantum psychopath—got knocked down into a coma, and then came back up as a Q3 quick, right?”
“Right. He leveled up.”
“Exactly. But you started as a Q3, and, after being knocked into a coma back on New Year’s Eve 2000, you revived as a Q1—you leveled down, in other words; the exact opposite of Travis, right?”
“Right.”
“And I couldn’t square what the simulation was showing with the reality you’d reported. I had thought you’d gone Q3 to Q1 then bounced straight back to Q3—but you just told me that wasn’t what happened. You actually went Q3 to Q1, then to Q2, and then to Q3, one step at a time. And that’s exactly what the simulation predicts. See, what happened to you isn’t the opposite of what happened to Travis, it’s the same thing: each time you go down to the classical-physics state, you reboot, if you reboot at all, one level higher up—but the levels wrap around!” She pointed at her screen. “The math proves it: the change vector is a modulus, an absolute value. It statistically prefers being positive but, if that’s not possible, a negative delta occurs.”
“Um, so if you started as a Q1—”
“If you started as Q1, you’d come back from a coma as a Q2; if you were a Q2, like Travis, you’d come back as a Q3; and if you were originally a Q3, like you, you’d wrap around to being a Q1!”
“That’s—wow.”
“Wow indeed. But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother and to…” She trailed off.
“That’s fabulous, baby! You’re a genius.”
“Thanks,” she said, but she was frowning. “There’s still one problem, though. Somehow, while Trav was in a coma, the value of his previous superposition state had to be stored for nineteen years. For him to revive as a Q3, somewhere the fact that he’d previously been a Q2 had to be retained even when he was no longer in superposition.”
I’d been trying to come up to speed on all this. “Don’t almost all cells in the body have microtubular scaffolding? Not just brain cells? The ones in neurons are the ones Penrose and Hameroff implicated in consciousness, but maybe regular body cells might retain a degree of superposition even when neuronal tissue doesn’t. Kind of like muscle memory.”
I meant that last bit as a pun, but she nodded as if I were more clever than I really felt just then. “Maybe, maybe.” She shrugged a little. “Who knows? The bottom line is, whatever the mechanism, there clearly is such a memory.”