Triggers

“I think the one when the character said, ‘The peanut is neither a pea nor a nut’ was funnier.”

Singh nodded slightly. “Perhaps. But the point is, if I tell you to remember something that you don’t actually have memories of, but I do, you remember it, too. So, let me give you a topic—but don’t discuss it. Think about it; recall it. Okay?”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Quantum entanglement,” he said.

Her first impulse was to pull a Linda Richman and say, “…is neither quantum nor entangled,” but she didn’t even know if that made sense, and—

And it didn’t make sense. Quantum entanglement was a property of quantum mechanics, and it did involve entangling things, and—

And it was weird. She’d never heard of anything like it. When pairs of particles are created simultaneously under the right circumstances, they can become linked in such a way that they continue to be connected no matter how far apart they become.

“Wow,” said Susan.

“Wow indeed,” said Ranjip. “Okay. Another topic—well, not really; it’s the same topic, but a different way of looking at it. Ready?”

Susan nodded.

“Spooky action at a distance,” Ranjip said.

Susan was startled that she knew this was something Einstein had said. And, yes, it was spooky. Change the spin of one entangled particle, and the spin of the other changes instantaneously; they are bound together in an almost magical way—again, no matter how far apart they get from each other.

“Got it,” said Susan, and then she surprised herself by asking a question. “But if it’s quantum entanglement, why aren’t the linkages symmetrical? I mean, if A can read B, why can’t B read A?”

“The linkages probably are symmetrical,” Singh replied. “That is, either A or B could change any specific shared memory for both of them—the shared memories are entangled, and changes to them at one location would change them at both. But symmetry doesn’t imply reciprocity. A and B have symmetrically shared memories that happen to have originally belonged to A. Meanwhile, B and C have symmetrically shared memories that happened to originally belong to B. And so on.”

“Ah,” said Susan. “I guess.”

“Okay,” said Singh. “New topic, sort of: Penrose and Hameroff.”

And that came to her, too: physicist Roger Penrose—a sometimes-collaborator with Stephen Hawking—and the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff had proposed that human consciousness was quantum mechanical in nature.

It was astonishing: to know something so complex and yet never have even heard of it before. It wasn’t like university lectures were running through her head at high speed, and it wasn’t like playing Trivial Pursuit, where she had to dig deeply to find the answers; these were things that Singh knew well, and so she knew them well, too, and they came effortlessly to mind as soon as he said the trigger words.

“Got it,” she said again.

“Okay, new topic: the design of my apparatus.”

And she now knew all about that, too: a device that used tuned lasers—which emitted photons, which were a type of particle that could indeed be entangled—to selectively excite neurons. His design actually displaced the photons that were already there and substituted new ones.

Then…

“Cytoskeleton.”

And:

“Microtubule.”

And:

“Bose-Einstein condensate.”

She shook her head, as if somehow that would get the pieces to sift out of the swirling jumble they were in and fall into place. And, after a moment, they did. “And this is legit?” Susan said at last.

“Well, it’s a legitimate theory,” replied Singh. “Penrose and Hameroff say the actual seat of consciousness, which, of course, must somehow interact with memory, is not in the chemical synapses but rather in quantum effects in the microtubules of the cytoskeleton—the internal scaffolding—of brain cells. Their theory has its passionate advocates—and passionate detractors. But if we are dealing with quantum entanglement, that could explain why the linkages don’t weaken over distance.”

“And does it suggest how to break them?” asked Susan.

“Well, um, no—no, I don’t have a clue how to do that. Entanglement is a tricky thing, and normally it’s quite fragile. But I’ll keep trying to find the answer.”

“Do that,” Susan said.

“I will. What about you? Any progress?”

Susan shook her head. “I still don’t know who’s reading the president.”

“What are you going to do if you can’t identify who it is?” Singh asked.

Susan said nothing.

“You can’t keep all the people here prisoner indefinitely.”

Again: nothing.

“They’ve committed no crime!” said Singh.

“One of them has in his or her possession classified information.”

“Not deliberately.”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Possession of such information is a felony, and they’re all suspects.”

“You’d like to…” Singh began, and then, not able to give voice to it, he tried again: “You’d like to have them disappear, wouldn’t you?”

Susan lifted her eyebrows. “It’s an option.”

“They’ve done nothing wrong!”