“Okay,” said Kayla, bringing up a chart she’d used before, “there are three quantum cohorts, right? Each with half the number of people in it as the one before—a 4:2:1 ratio. Call the cohorts alpha, beta, and gamma, in descending order of size. Round numbers, there are four billion people in alpha, the current crop of Q1 p-zeds; two billion in beta, the Q2 psychopaths; and one billion in gamma, the Q3 quicks, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you want to boost them all one state, right? The four billion people in cohort alpha go up to being Q2 psychopaths; the two billion in cohort beta go up to being Q3 quicks, and the one billion in cohort gamma—the cohort you were born into and I’m now part of—wrap around to being Q1 p-zeds.” She moved things around with her mouse until her chart reflected those shifts.
“Exactly. The greatest—”
“No, it’s not.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s not the greatest good for the greatest number, at least not by any normal person’s reckoning—no offense.”
“Um, none taken.”
“The right answer,” Kayla said, “isn’t to boost everybody up one state—it’s to boost them two states. Push all of cohort alpha—the largest group—from Q1 right up to Q3, giving them both consciousness and conscience. You end up with the largest number of quicks possible: for the first time ever, the majority of the human race will finally be firing on all cylinders.”
“My God, yes! And then—”
“And everyone’s moving in quantum lockstep, right? So if cohort alpha goes up two states, so does beta: all the current psychopaths—Quinton Carroway, Vladimir Putin, and all the other assholes who are ruining it for the rest of us—shift two levels, as well, right? They go up to being Q3s then wrap around, ending up as Q1s. That essentially deactivates them, turning every last quantum psychopath into a p-zed.” She lifted a hand. “We can’t go back in time and assassinate Hitler, but we can stop every despotic leader, every heartless banker, every evil person on the planet.”
She paused, then: “Now, yes, there do have to be some psychopaths. But think about it: cohort gamma will move by two steps, too, wrapping around first to Q1 p-zeditude and then settling in at Q2 psychopathy. Since gamma is the smallest cohort, you end up with the fewest psychopaths possible.”
She was in a swivel chair; I was in a regular one—but I leaned it back, balancing on its two hind legs, and thought. I had no desire to be a quantum psychopath, which is what I’d become if I shifted twice, but yeah, Kayla’s plan would cut the number of psychopaths in half, while quadrupling the number of quicks. “And,” I said, it suddenly coming to me, “as Namboothiri explained it to me, most Q2s and Q3s index their memories verbally, so at least this smaller crop of newly minted psychopaths will remember having had a conscience, remember what it was like to have given a damn about others. Hopefully, that’ll take some of their edge off.”
“Hopefully,” Kayla said.
She sounded dubious, but I seized on the word. “Exactly!” I was giddy now, the way one can be when past the point of exhaustion. “Literally. Full of hope. True, the new Q2s perhaps won’t be, but think about all those new Q3s! For the first time since we stood erect on the savanna, there will be billions and billions of humans full of hope.”
I’d hoped Kayla would match my grin, but she didn’t; her eyebrows came together and her mouth turned down. “But,” she said, harshing the buzz, “even if it were technically possible—even if we could do this, I mean…”
“Yes?”
“I mean, come on, Jim, do we have the right to do it? We’d be playing God.”
I leaned forward again. “The role of God has gone unfilled for too long,” I said. “It’s high time someone got the part.”
44
We finally hauled ourselves upstairs to the bedroom as Sagittarius was setting in the south—you had to stay up awfully damn late in summer to see that.
I’d used the little downstairs washroom, but as I lay in bed, I could hear Kayla in the en suite splashing literal, and, as it turned out, figurative, cold water on her face.
She emerged in the doorway, a toothbrush hanging from her mouth. “But,” she said, “you know, even if we shift everyone now, what about the future? What if the 4:2:1 ratio between superposition states remains constant as new children are born? We’d end up back where we’d started.”
“Eventually, maybe,” I said. “But in the developed world, people live the better part of a century or more now, and that figure just keeps going up. It’s 2020; so, yeah, maybe by the year 2120, left unattended, things might cycle back to p-zeds predominating, assuming we don’t start doing quantum-superposition testing in utero. But that still gets us through the rest of this century. Hell, quantum physics is barely a hundred years old now; who the heck knows what level of control we’ll have over it a hundred years hence? I’m content to solve the problem for the foreseeable future.”
She swiped her brush up and down a few times, then, “Okay, forget about the future. What about the present? What about the people in your own life, Jim?”
“Well,” I said, propping my head up on a bent elbow, “there’s my sister Heather. I’m sure she’s a p-zed now; she’ll go up to being a Q3.”
Kayla did a little more brushing. “That’s fine, but you don’t have any children. I do.” She returned to the washroom, and I heard her expectorate the toothpaste, then a little more running water, and then she came to bed, facing me.
During that short break, I’d taken a deep breath and let it out slowly. It wasn’t that I’d been hiding it from Kayla, but although we’d talked about so many things—ethics and science and culture, movies and music and morality—the right moment for this had never come up.
“Actually,” I said softly, “I do.”
“Do what?” said Kayla, having lost the thread.
“Do have a child. A boy. He’s two.”
Even in the dark, I could see her eyes go wide. “When the hell were you going to tell me that?”
“I never see him.” And then, as if it were exculpatory, “I pay child support. But I never see him. Anna-Lee has sole custody.”
And, if saying I was still with the university I’d done my undergrad at was a red flag for academics, that was a red flag for just about everyone. “Why?”
I rolled on my back. “It’s what Anna-Lee wanted. He has Down syndrome, and…”
I trailed off and looked at the simplicity of the plain square ceiling. But just as I’d refused to be Penny to Kayla’s Leonard, immersing myself in quantum physics so I could keep pace with her, so, too, had Kayla been reading up on utilitarianism. “And if Anna-Lee is about your age, you might well have had prenatal screening, right? So you knew while she was pregnant.”
I said nothing.
Kayla shook her head, a rustling sound against the pillow. “I don’t know. I won’t presume to put myself in your place, or Anna-Lee’s, but… but, damn it, Jim, it’s different. It’s supposed to be different. I’m not just talking about utilitarians; I’m talking about all human beings. When it’s you and yours, all the calculus in the world is supposed to go out the window.”
“I know that,” I said. “And, believe me, I do love my son, and want the very best for him. I’m always wondering how he’s doing, what he’s up to.”