“Yeah, I get it,” Point Machine said.
Satish hit the button. I watched the screen, an interference pattern materializing before my eyes — a now-familiar pattern of light and dark.
“Okay,” I told Point Machine. “Now look in the box. Tell me if you see the light.”
Point Machine looked in the box. Before he even spoke, the interference pattern disappeared. “Yeah,” he said. “I see the light.”
I smiled. Felt that edge between known and unknown. Caressed it.
I nodded at Satish, and he hit the switch to kill the gun. I turned to Point Machine. “You collapsed the probability wave by observing the light, so we’ve established proof of principle.” I looked at the three of them. “Now let’s find out if all observers were created equal.”
Point Machine put a frog in the box.
And here it was, the stepping-off point — a view into the implicate, where objective and subjective might be experimentally defined.
I nodded to Satish. “Fire the gun.”
He hit the switch and the machine hummed. I watched the screen. I closed my eyes, felt my heart beating in my chest. Inside the box, I knew a light had come on for one of the two detectors; I knew the frog had seen it. But when I opened my eyes, the interference pattern still showed on the screen. The frog hadn’t changed it at all.
“Again,” I told Satish.
Satish fired the gun again. Again. Again.
Point Machine looked at me. “Well?”
“There’s still an interference pattern. The probability wave didn’t collapse.”
“What does that mean?” Joy asked.
“It means we try a different frog.”
We tried six. None changed the result.
“They’re part of the indeterminate system,” Satish said.
I was watching the screen closely, and the interference pattern vanished. I was about to shout, but when I looked up, I saw Point Machine peeking into the box.
“You looked,” I said.
“I was just making sure the light worked.”
“I could tell.”
We tried every frog in his lab. Then we tried the salamanders.
“Maybe it’s just amphibians,” he said.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“How is it that we affect the system, but frogs and salamanders can’t?”
“Maybe it’s our eyes,” Point Machine said. “It has to be the eyes — coherence effects in the retinal rod-rhopsin molecules themselves.”
“Why would that matter?”
“Our optic nerve cells can only conduct measured information to the visual cortex; eyes are just another detector.”
“Can I try?” Joy interrupted.
I nodded. We ran the experiment again, this time with Joy’s empty eyes pointed at the box. Again, nothing.
The next morning, Point Machine met Satish and me in the parking lot before work. We climbed into my car and drove to the mall.
We went to a pet store.
I bought three mice, a canary, a turtle, and a squish-faced Boston terrier puppy. The sales clerk stared at us.
“You pet lovers, huh?” He looked suspiciously at Satish and Point Machine.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Pets.”
The drive back was quiet, punctuated only by the occasional whining of the puppy.
Point Machine broke the silence. “Perhaps it takes a more complex nervous system.”
“That shouldn’t matter,” Satish said. “Life is life. Real is real.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “What’s the difference between mind and brain?”
“Semantics,” said Point Machine. “Different names for the same idea.”
Satish regarded us. “Brain is hardware,” he said. “Mind is software.”
The Massachusetts landscape whipped past the car’s windows, a wall of ruined hillside on our right — huge, dark stone like the bones of the earth. A compound fracture of the land. We drove the rest of the way in silence.
Back at the lab, we started with the turtle. Then the mice, then the canary, which escaped, and flew to sit atop a filing cabinet. None of them collapsed the wave.
The Boston terrier looked at us, google-eyed.
“Are its eyes supposed to look like that?” Satish said. “In different directions?”
I put the puppy in the box. “It’s the breed, I think. But all it has to do is sense the light. Either eye will do.” I looked down at man’s best friend, our companion through the millennia, and harbored secret hope. This one, I told myself. This species, certainly, of all of them. Because who hasn’t looked into the eyes of a dog and not sensed something looking back.
The puppy whined in the box. Satish ran the experiment. I watched the screen.
Nothing. There was no change at all.
That night I drove to Joy’s. She answered the door. Waited for me to speak.
“You mentioned coffee?”
She smiled, and there was another moment when I felt sure she saw me.
Hours later, in the darkness, I spoke. “It’s time for me to go.”
She ran a hand along my bare spine.
“Time,” she whispered. “There is no such beast. Only now. And now.” She put her lips again on my skin. “And now.”
The next day, I had James come by the lab.
“You’ve made a finding?” he asked.
“We have.”
James watched us run the experiment. He looked in the box. He collapsed the wave function himself.
Then we put the puppy in the box and ran the experiment again. We showed him the interference pattern.
“Why didn’t it work?” he asked.
“We don’t know.”
“But what’s different?”
“Only one thing. The observer.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“So far, none of the animals we’ve tested have been able to alter the quantum system.”
He brought his hand to his chin. His brow furrowed. He was silent for a long time, looking at the setup. “Holy shit,” he said finally.
“Yeah,” Point Machine said.
I stepped forward. “We want to do more tests. Work our way up through every phylum, class, and order. Primates being of particular interest, because of their evolutionary connection to us.”
“As much as you want,” he said. “As much funding as you want.”
It took ten days to arrange. We worked in conjunction with the Boston Zoo.
Transporting large numbers of animals can be a logistical nightmare, so it was decided that it would be easier to bring the lab to the zoo than to bring the zoo to the lab. Vans were hired. Technicians were assigned. Point Machine put his own research on hold and assigned a technician to feed his amphibians in his absence. Satish’s research also went on hiatus. “It seems suddenly less interesting,” he said.
James attended the experiment on the first day. We set up in one of the new exhibits under construction — a green, high-ceilinged room that would one day house muntjac. For now, though, it would house scientists. Satish worked the electronics. Point Machine liaisoned with the zoo staff. I built a bigger wooden box.
The zoo staff didn’t seem particularly inclined to cooperate until the size of Hansen’s charitable donation was explained to them by the zoo superintendent. After that, they were very helpful.
The following Monday we started the experiment. We worked our way through representatives of several mammal lineages: Marsupialia, Afrotheria, and the last two evolutionary holdouts of Monotremata — the platypus and the echidna. The next day we tested species from Xenarthra, and Laurasiatheria. The fourth day, we tackled Euarchontoglires. None of them collapsed the wave function; none carried the spotlight. On the fifth day, we started on the primates.