Quantum Night
Robert J. Sawyer
BOOKS BY ROBERT J. SAWYER
NOVELS
Golden Fleece
End of an Era
The Terminal Experiment
Starplex
Frameshift
Illegal Alien
Factoring Humanity
FlashForward
Calculating God
Mindscan
Rollback
Triggers
Red Planet Blues
Quantum Night
THE QUINTAGLIO ASCENSION TRILOGY
Far-Seer
Fossil Hunter
Foreigner
THE NEANDERTHAL PARALLAX TRILOGY
Hominids
Humans
Hybrids
THE WWW TRILOGY
Wake
Watch
Wonder
COLLECTIONS
Iterations
(introduction by James Alan Gardner)
Relativity
(introduction by Mike Resnick)
Identity Theft
(introduction by Robert Charles Wilson)
For book-club discussion guides, visit sfwriter.com
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Copyright © 2016 by Robert J. Sawyer.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63888-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sawyer, Robert J.
Quantum night / Robert J. Sawyer.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-425-25683-1 (hardcover)
1. Psychologists—Fiction. 2. Violence—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 3. Quantum theory—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.S2533Q36 2016
813’.54—dc23
2015028314
FIRST EDITION: March 2016
Cover design by Rita Frangie and Danielle Mazzella Di Bosco.
Cover art: statue of Lady Justice © Christian Mueller / Shutterstock; abstract technology background © arleksey/Shutterstock.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_1
FOR
CHASE MASTERSON
BEAUTIFUL INSIDE AND OUT
CONTENTS
BOOKS BY ROBERT J. SAWYER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EPIGRAPH
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
FURTHER READING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Canadian Light Source synchrotron, the University of Manitoba, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights all really exist. However, except for certain public figures used satirically, all the characters in this novel are entirely the product of my imagination. They are not meant to bear any resemblance to actual people who hold or have held positions with these or any other institutions.
The real public figures who feature in this novel include Canadian politicians Naheed Nenshi (the current mayor of Calgary) and Justin Trudeau (the current prime minister), as well as Russian president Vladimir Putin. Given this is a story in part about quantum physics, if they don’t like the future portrayed here, they can rest assured that in some other quantum reality they have different fates.
Although my fictional characters refer to the work of many real academics, including philosopher David J. Chalmers, consciousness-studies expert Stuart Hameroff and his collaborator physicist Roger Penrose, and psychologists Bob Altemeyer, Angela Book, Robert D. Hare, Kent Kiehl, Philip Zimbardo, and the late Stanley Milgram, the extrapolations and sometimes contradictions of the findings of those academics presented by my characters are also products of my imagination.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to David J. Chalmers, PhD, Director, Centre for Consciousness, Australian National University; Kevin Dutton, PhD, author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths; John Gribbin, PhD, author of In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat; and Stuart R. Hameroff, MD, Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson.
Thanks also to Jeffrey Cutler, PhD, Lisa Van Loon, PhD, and M. Adam Webb, PhD, of the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron, in Saskatoon, and to Matthew Dalzell, who used to work there. Thanks as well to Jeremy Maron, PhD, Researcher-Curator, Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Thanks to clinical psychologists Christopher Friesen, PhD, David Nussbaum, PhD, Jill Squyres, PhD, and Romeo Vitelli, PhD; clinical psychiatrist Norman Hoffman, MD; and neurologist Isaac Szpindel, MD.
Many thanks for stimulating conversations and wonderful feedback to Alisha Souillet, Elizabeth Cano, Nick DiChario, Vince Gerardis, Walter Hunt, James Kerwin, Kirstin Morrell, Sherry Peters, G.W. Renshaw, Don Thompson, and Matt Whitby.
Thanks, as well, to my wonderful beta readers: Robb Ainley, Ted Bleaney, Rev. James Christie, David Livingstone Clink, Shayla Elizabeth, Dan Falk, Paddy Forde, Marcel Gagné, Belle Jarniewski, Herb Kauderer, Rebecca Lovatt, Kayla Nielsen, Virginia O’Dine, Lynne Sargent, Hayden Trenholm, and Sally Tomasevic. Thanks for other assistance to Paul Bishop
, Dan Brook, John Dahms, Fingers Delaurus, Matthew Pounsett, and Jamie Todd Rubin. Thanks also to copyeditor Robert L. Schwager, PhD.
Huge thanks, as always, to the Aurora Award–winning poet Carolyn Clink, who helped in countless ways; to Adrienne Kerr at Penguin Random House Canada’s Viking imprint in Toronto; to Helen Smith, also at Penguin Random House Canada; and to Jessica Wade at Penguin Random House USA’s Ace imprint in New York (and also to Ginjer Buchanan, who commissioned this book for Ace before retiring). And, of course, many thanks to my agents: the late Ralph Vicinanza, who negotiated the contracts for this book, and Chris Lotts, who saw it through to publication.
Finally, most of all, gigantic thanks to my wonderfully patient readers. I had a twenty-year run of averaging a novel a year, but leading up to and following the death from lung cancer of my younger brother, the Emmy Award–winning multimedia producer Alan Sawyer, I took time off. It’s been three years since my last novel, Red Planet Blues; I hope you’ll think this one was worth the wait.
It may be a requirement for a theory of consciousness that it contains at least one crazy idea.
—David Chalmers
1
Several of my colleagues in the University of Manitoba’s psychology department considered teaching to be a nuisance—“the ineluctable evil,” as Menno Warkentin used to call it, resenting the time it took away from his research—but I loved it. Oh, maybe not as much as I loved bananas, or binge-watching old episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Arrested Development, or photographing globular clusters with my telescope, but as far as things that people would actually pay me to do are concerned, it was right up there.
Granted, teaching first-year classes could be overwhelming: vast halls filled with stagnant air and row after row of angst-soaked teenagers. Although my own freshman year had been two decades ago, I vividly remembered signing up to take introductory psych in hopes of making sense of the bewildering mélange of anxiety and longing that swirled then—and pretty much now, too—within me. Cogito ergo sum? More like sollicito ergo sum—I fret, therefore I am.
But on this gray morning, I was teaching The Neuroscience of Morality, a third-year class with fewer students than February had days—and that allowed for not just lecturing but dialog.
Last session, we’d had a spirited discussion about Watson and Skinner, focusing on their notion that humans were nothing more than stimulus-response machines whose black-box brains simply spit out predictable reactions to inputs. But today, instead of continuing to demolish behaviorism, I felt compelled to take a dark detour, using the ceiling-mounted projector to show the Savannah Prison photos WikiLeaks had made public over the weekend.
Some were individual frames from security-camera video, the guards caught unawares from on high. Although what those depicted was brutal, they weren’t the most disturbing images. No, the really disquieting ones—the ones that knotted your stomach, that made you avert your eyes, that you just couldn’t fucking believe—were the posed photos: the picture of the officer with her boot on a prisoner’s back while she gave a jaunty thumbs-up to whatever asshole was holding the iPhone; the still of the two uniformed men tossing a naked, emaciated prisoner so hard against the ceiling that his skull, as x-rays would later show, had fractured in three places; the snapshot of the mustachioed sergeant straddling a downed man while defecating on his chest, one hand clamped over the inmate’s mouth, the other flashing a peace sign, the image then having been run through Instagram to make it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid, white frame and all.
My stomach roiled as I stepped through the slides, one atrocity giving way to the next. It was now sixteen years after Abu Ghraib, for God’s sake, and a half century since Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment. Not only were guards supposed to be trained about situational pressures and how to avoid succumbing to them, but two of those shown in the photos were studying to be wardens. They knew about Zimbardo; they were aware of Stanley Milgram’s shock-machine obedience-to-authority experiments; they’d read summaries of the Taguba Report on the Abu Ghraib atrocities.
And yet, despite being specifically taught to recognize and avoid the pitfalls—a word that at first seemed innocuous but, if one reflected upon it, suggested tumbling into the abyss, following Lucifer into the very fires of hell—each of these men and women had dehumanized the perceived enemy, and, in the process, had lost their own humanity.
“All right,” I said to the shocked faces of my students. “What can we take from all this? Anyone?”
The first hand that went up belonged to Ashton, who still had acne and hadn’t yet learned that it was permissible to trim a beard. I pointed at him. “Yes?”
He spread his arms as if the truth were self-evident. “Simple,” he said, and he flicked his head toward the screen behind me, which I’d left on the last slide, the one showing a gangly guard named Devin Becker killing a naked prisoner by holding his head under water in a jail-cell sink. “You can’t change human nature.”
THE call had come just about a year ago. “Hello?” I’d said into the black handset of my office phone.
“Professor James Marchuk?”
I swung my feet up on my reddish-brown desk and leaned back. “Speaking.”
“My name is Juan Garcia. I’m part of the defense team for Devin Becker, one of the Savannah Prison guards.”
I thought about saying, “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” but instead simply prodded him to go on. “Yes?”
“My firm would like to engage you as an expert witness in Mr. Becker’s trial. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty. We’re likely to lose on the facts—the security-camera video is damning as hell—but we can at least keep Becker from being executed if we get the jury to agree that he couldn’t help himself.”
I frowned. “And you think he couldn’t because . . . ?”
“Because he’s a psychopath. You said it in your blog entry on Leopold and Loeb: you can’t execute someone for being who they are.”
I nodded although Garcia couldn’t see it. In 1924, two wealthy university students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, had killed a boy just for kicks. Leopold considered himself and Loeb to be exemplars of Nietzsche’s Übermenschen and thus exempt from laws governing ordinary men. Supermen they weren’t, but psychopaths they surely were. Their parents engaged none other than Clarence Darrow to represent them. In a stunning twelve-hour-long closing argument, Darrow made the same defense Garcia was apparently now contemplating: claiming Becker couldn’t be executed for doing what his nature dictated he do.
I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward. “And is Becker a psychopath?” I asked.
“That’s the problem, Professor Marchuk,” said Garcia. “The D.A. had a Hare assessment done, which scored Becker at seventeen—way below what’s required for psychopathy. But we think their assessor is wrong; our guy squeaks him into psychopathy with a score of thirty-one. And, well, with your new procedure, we can prove to the jury that our score is the right one.”
“You know my test has never been accepted in a court of law?”
“I’m aware of that, Professor. I’m also aware that no one has even tried to introduce it into evidence yet. But I’ve got your paper in Nature Neuroscience right here. That it was published in such a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal gets our foot in the door; Georgia follows the Daubert standard for admissibility. But we need you—you personally, the lead author on the paper—to use your technique on Becker and testify about the results if we’ve got any chance of having the court accept the evidence.”
“What if I show that Becker isn’t a psychopath?”
“Then we’ll still pay you for your time.”
“And bury the results?”
“Professor, we’re confident of the outcome.”
It sounded worthwhile—but so was what I did here. “I have a busy teaching schedule, and—”
“I know you do, Professor. In fact, I’m looking at it right now on your university’s website. But the trial probably won’t come up until you’re on summer break, and, frankly, this is a chance to make a difference. I’ve read your Reasonably Moral blog. You’re against the death penalty; well, here’s a chance to help prevent someone from being executed.”
My computer happened to be displaying the lesson plan for that afternoon’s moral-psych class, in which I was planning to cite the study of Princeton seminary students who, while rushing to give a presentation on the parable of the Good Samaritan, passed by a man slumped over in an alleyway, ignoring him because they were in a hurry.
Practice what you teach, I always say. “All right. Count me in.”
—
Shortly after I came off the Jetway into the international terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, I went into a little shop to buy a bottle of Coke Zero—here, in Atlanta, headquarters of Coca-Cola, there was no sign of Pepsi anywhere. Without thinking, I handed the woman at the cash register a Canadian five.
“What’s this?” she said, taking it.
“Oh! Sorry.” I dug into my wallet—I always have to carefully look at US bills to make sure of the denomination, since they’re all the same color—and found one with Abe Lincoln’s face on it.
There was no one else waiting to buy anything, and the woman seemed intrigued by the blue polymer banknote I’d handed her. After examining it carefully, she looked up at me, and said, “There’s no mention of God. Ain’t you a God-fearing country up there?”
“Um, well, ah, we believe in the separation of church and state.”
She handed the bill back to me. “Honey,” she said, “there ain’t no such thing.” She frowned, as if recalling something. “Y’all are socialists up there, right?”
Actually, until recently, Canada had had a much more conservative leader than the United States did. When Stephen Harper came to office in 2006, George W. Bush had been in the White House and, to liberal Canadian sensibilities—the kind found on university campuses—he seemed the lesser of two evils. But once Barack Obama was elected, Canada had by far the more right-wing leader. Harper managed to hold on to power for almost a decade, but Canada was now ruled by a minority coalition between the Liberal Party and the socialist New Democratic Party.
