“I do. When is a human life a human life? That is always what this particular argument has been about, has it not? Now we’ll finally be able to prove that abortion is murder, and who could argue? I sense that you don’t like me very much.”
“I like you fine. But there’s an old saying, ‘Never trust a man with only one book.’”
“One book is all a man needs if it’s the right book.”
“Have you considered what you’ll do if you’re proven wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if wave function collapse doesn’t occur until the ninth month? Or the magical moment of birth? Will you change your mind?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I guess now we find out, don’t we.”
The night before the experiment, I called Point Machine. It was call or drink. And I didn’t want to drink. Because I knew if I drank again, even a single sip, I’d never stop. Not ever.
He picked up on the fifth ring. Faraway voice.
“What’s going to happen tomorrow?” I asked.
There was a long pause. Long enough that I wondered if he’d heard me. “Not sure,” he said. The voice on the other end was coarse and weary. It was a voice that hadn’t been sleeping well. “Entogeny reflects phylogeny,” he said. “Look early enough in gestation and we’ve got gills, a tail, the roots of the whole animal kingdom. You climb the phylogenetic tree as the fetus develops, and the newer characteristics, the things that make us human, get tacked on last. What Robbins is testing for is only found in humans, so my gut tells me he’s wrong, and wave collapse comes late. Real late.”
“You think it works that way?”
“I have no idea how it works.”
The day of the experiment came and went.
The first hint that something went wrong came in the form of silence. Silence from the Robbins group. Silence in the media. No press conferences. No TV interviews. Just silence.
The days turned to weeks.
Finally, a terse statement was issued by the group which called their results inconclusive. Robbins came out a few days later, saying bluntly that there had been a failure in the mechanism of the tests.
The truth was something stranger, of course. And of course, that came out later, too.
The truth was that some of the fetuses did pass the test. Just like Robbins hoped. Some did trigger wave function collapse.
But others didn’t.
And gestational age had nothing to do with it.
Two months later, I received the call in the middle of the night. “We found one in New York.” It was Satish.
“What?” I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the words.
“A boy. Nine years old. He didn’t collapse the wave function.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing. He’s normal. Normal vision, normal intelligence. We tested him five times, but the interference pattern didn’t budge.”
“What happened when you told him?”
“We didn’t tell him. He stood there staring at us.”
“Staring?”
“It was like he already knew. Like he knew the whole time it wouldn’t work.”
Summer turned to fall. The testing continued.
Satish traveled the country, searching for that elusive, perfect cross-section and a sample size large enough to prove significance. He collected data points, faxed copies back to the lab for safekeeping.
In the end, it turned out there were others. Others who couldn’t collapse the wave function — a certain consistent percentage of the population who looked like us, and acted like us, but lacked this fundamental quality of humanity. Though Satish was careful not to use the term “soul” in his late night phone calls, we heard it in the gaps between the words. We heard it in the things he didn’t say.
I pictured him on the other end of the line, sitting in some dark hotel room, fighting a growing insomnia, fighting the terrible loneliness of what he was doing.
Point Machine sought comfort in elaborately constructed phylogenies and retreated into his cladograms. But there was no comfort for him there. “There’s no frequency distribution curve,” he told me. “No disequilibrium between ethnographic populations, nothing I can get traction on.”
He pored over Satish’s data, looking for the pattern that would make sense of it all.
“Distribution is random,” he said. “It doesn’t act like a trait.”
“Then maybe it’s not,” I said.
He shook his head. “Then who are they, some kind of empty-set? Nonplayer characters in the indeterminate system? Part of the game?”
Satish had his own ideas, of course.
“Why none of the scientists?” I asked him one night, phone to my ear. “If it’s random, why none of us?”
“If they’re part of the indeterminate system, why would they become scientists?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like a virtual construct,” Satish said. “You write the code, a series of response algorithms. Wind them up and let them go.”
“This is crazy.”
“I didn’t make the rules.”
“Do they even know what you’re testing them for, when they look at your little light? Do they know they’re different?”
“One of them,” he said. He was silent for a moment. “One of them knew.”
And then days later, the final late night call. From Denver. The last time I’d ever speak to him.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do this,” he said, voice strangely harsh.
I rubbed my eyes, sitting up in bed.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to build this kind of thing,” he said. “The flaw in reality that you talked about… I don’t think we were expected to take advantage of it this way. To make a test.”
“What happened?”
“I saw the boy again.”
“Who?”
“The boy from New York,” he said. “He came here to see me.” And then he hung up.
Ten days later, Satish disappeared, along with his special little box. He got off a plane in Boston, but didn’t make it home. I was at the lab when I got the call from his wife.
“No,” I said. “Not for days.”
She was crying into the phone.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I lied.
When I hung up, I grabbed my coat and headed for the door. Bought a fifth of vodka and drove home to the hotel.
Stared in the mirror. Eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal.
I spun the cap off the bottle and smelled the burn. Music filtered through the thin walls, a soft melody, a woman’s voice. I imagined my life different. I imagined that I could stop here. Not take the first drink.
My hands trembled.
The first sip brought tears to my eyes. Then I upended the bottle and drank deep. I tried to have a vision. I tried to picture Satish happy and healthy in a bar somewhere, working on a three-day binge, but the image wouldn’t come. That was me, not Satish. Satish didn’t drink. I tried to picture him coming home again. I couldn’t see that either.
Do they know they’re different, I’d asked him.
One of them, he’d said. One of them knew.
When the bottle was half empty, I walked to the desk and picked up the envelope marked “screen results.” Then I looked at the gun. I imagined what a .357 round could do to a skull — lay it open wide and deep. Reveal that place where self resides — expose it to the air where it would evaporate like liquid nitrogen, sizzling, steaming, gone. A gun could be many things, including a vehicle to return you to the implicate. The dream within a dream.