“Well, you weren’t interested—”
“I told you not to try this. I told you what would happen to my daughter, for God’s sake. And you’re still pursuing it?”
“Just, you know, hypothetically.”
“Jesus,” said Kayla. “Jesus Christ.”
“Did you hear the news today?” I asked. “More rioting, not just here in Canada but all across Europe, the US, and now in Asia, too. And things are really heating up between the Americans and the Russians. One of the Russian subs has made it all the way into Hudson Bay, for God’s sake. Carroway has demanded that Putin withdraw; for his part, Putin is claiming the Russians are coming to liberate us.” I tipped my head toward the TV set. “Fox News, which doesn’t know the difference between Canadian socialism and Russian communism, is spewing that Nenshi’s election was the work of a fifth column, paving the way for the Soviets—yes, they called them Soviets today!—to seize everything north of the US border.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” said Kayla.
I spread my arms. “But we—you and I, us and Vic—we can destabilize the situation. We can deactivate the psychopaths, before they start lobbing nukes at each other.”
“You’ve got to leave,” Kayla said.
“But I just want what’s best—”
“Get out, Jim. Get your stuff and get out.”
“Kayla, please.” My eyes were stinging. “I just…”
“Get out.”
I didn’t remember the first time Kayla and I had broken up—all I knew about it was what was in that ancient email. But this time, well, I couldn’t imagine the memory would ever fade. It hurt like the way I’d imagined that knife to the heart had hurt, but going on and on, twisting, slicing. I would have almost welcomed becoming a p-zed; there’s something to be said for not really feeling.
But right now I was still capable of feeling, of thinking. What had started as an abstraction—a thought experiment about maximizing the total potential happiness on this ball of dust—had transitioned, it seemed to me, into the game changer that might save everybody. For whatever reason, the tipping point had now come, just as it had in Europe in 1939. But there was one way in which the comparison was not apt: World War II had ended with nuclear weapons being used; World War III would begin with them. Talk about tumbling into the abyss; talk about following Lucifer into the very fires of hell.
But Kayla couldn’t see that. She never looked up, never contemplated the stars. Hers was the realm of the minuscule; mine, the cosmologically vast. Why couldn’t she widen her perspective? As Bogart said in Casablanca, crisply making the utilitarian case, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” But where I had to go, Kayla couldn’t follow; what I had to do, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be any part of.
No, I needed somebody who understood, who really understood. I needed Menno Warkentin.
I could have phoned him, but what I wanted to discuss amounted to overthrowing the current government; if US tanks were on Canadian soil, you could be sure as hell that the NSA was monitoring Canadian telephone calls. And so, a little after 6:00 P.M., I walked out Kayla’s front door for what was probably the last time, got in my repaired car, put the pedal to the metal, and began the long drive to Winnipeg.
It took a couple of hours to get to Regina. Being the Saskatchewan provincial capital, it had been secured from rioting by US forces, and I managed to pass through that city without incident. Still, once I was on the other side of it, I found my heart racing as I continued along the highway—flashing back to when I’d recently been run off the road here, to the attack, to killing that p-zed. My palms were slick with sweat on the steering wheel, and I felt nauseous. I turned on the radio to drown out the voice in my head.
The CBC was used to defying the government in Ottawa and seemed no more cowed now by the one in Washington; Carol Off was on a tear about what she was calling “Carroway’s Anschluss.” No doubt some asswipe—maybe Jonah Bratt, the Carleton psych prof—was commenting right now on the CBC website that Godwin’s law meant she was wrong, but Carol’s words rang true to me. When Hitler had annexed Austria in 1938, it had been, in part, to unify all the German-speaking people of Europe under one government. With the toxin of the McCharles Act already having spilled beyond Texas, perhaps Carroway likewise had been motivated by a desire to pull all of English Canada into the Union while simultaneously letting the mob purge Latinos in the lower forty-eight, the distinction between ones illegally in the US and those legally there having already fallen by the wayside. The six million French Canadians, if they impinged upon the president’s consciousness at all, were doubtless merely an irritation; Washington would surely give Quebec none of the special treatment it was used to receiving from Ottawa.
If, that is, there was a Washington, or an Ottawa, or any damn city at all left. The news came on next, and it was not good.
“Although the White House has issued no confirmation, sources close to the Pentagon contend that Russian President Vladimir Putin today issued an ultimatum directly via the hotline to American President Quinton Carroway, insisting that US troops immediately withdraw from what Putin called ‘Occupied Canada’…”
As I drove on, the sun—the one and only thermonuclear blaze I ever wanted to see—dropped down in my rearview mirror, and soon darkness was gathering.
I called Menno when I made a pit stop. He had a 9:00 A.M. appointment tomorrow with his diabetes specialist, so we agreed I’d come by his place at eleven. That meant I’d have a little time to kill first thing in the morning, and so I arranged to meet Dr. Namboothiri. I didn’t think I could handle unlocking any more of my old memories, but I did desperately need his advice.
“Hello, Bhavesh. Thank you for making time for me on such short notice.” I’d gotten to Winnipeg about 2:00 A.M. and was now operating on only five hours’ sleep.
Namboothiri ushered me into his strange, wedge-shaped office. “No problem. You said it was urgent.”
“It is. When I first came to see you, you knew what I was talking about when I mentioned philosopher’s zombies.”
He sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Sure; of course.”
“Welllll,” I said, the syllable drawing out as I thought about how to phrase this. “Let me ask you a, y’know, a hypothetical. Suppose a bunch of people who had been philosopher’s zombies since birth were to wake up, what do you imagine they’d be thinking? If they’ve never been conscious before, not really, what would be going on now between their ears?”
“You tell me,” said Namboothiri.
I couldn’t help smiling as I sat down. His academic technique was similar to my own.
“Well, I’m assuming it would be the same thing that happened to me after being a p-zed. I’d started confabulating memories, making shit up, filling in the blanks. Presumably they’d do the same thing, too, and, as they compared notes, I presume they’d converge on a consensus reality, right? Homo narrans: Man the Storyteller. And they’d have Wikipedia and the rest of the World Wide Web to tell them what’s gone down before.”
“God help us,” said Namboothiri with a grin. But then he shook his head. “But, you know, it wouldn’t be like that. You lost your memories of being a philosophical zombie because you switched indexing schemes. But someone who had always been a zombie and only woke up as an adult can’t switch indexing schemes, because there’s nothing to switch to. They don’t have a verbal index; they only have a visual one. Oh, they might initialize a verbal index, I suppose—and certainly any kids around three or four years old who suddenly cease being zombies probably will, since that’s the normal developmental step at that age. But older people? Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. But if they did, they’d switch over gradually, just as young people do.”