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.
We began with the primates most distantly related to humans.
We tested lemuriforms and New World monkeys. Then Old World monkeys. Finally, we moved to the anthropoid apes. On the sixth day, we did the chimps.
“There are actually two species,” Point Machine told us. “Pan paniscus, commonly called the bonobo, and Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee. They’re congruent species, so similar in appearance that by the time scientists caught on in the 1930s, they’d already been hopelessly mixed in captivity.” Zoo staff maneuvered two juveniles into the room, holding them by their hands. “But during World War Two, we found a way to separate them again,” Point Machine continued. “It happened at a zoo outside Hellabrunn, Germany. A bombing leveled most of the town but, by some fluke, left the zoo intact. Or most of it, anyway. When the zookeepers returned, they expected to find their chimps alive and well. Instead, they found dozens of them dead, lying in undamaged cages. Only the common chimps had survived. The Bonobos had all died of fright.”
We tested both species. The machine hummed. We double-checked the results, then triple-checked, and the interference pattern did not budge. Even chimps didn’t cause wave function collapse.
“We’re alone,” I said. “Totally alone.”
Later that night, Point Machine paced the lab. “It’s like tracing any characteristic,” he said. “You look for homology in sister taxa. You organize clades, catalogue synapomorphies, identify the outgroup.”
“And who is the outgroup?”
“Who do you think?” Point Machine stopped pacing. “The ability to cause wave function collapse is apparently a derived characteristic that arose uniquely in our species at some point in the last several million years.”
“And before that?” I said.
“What?”
“Before that Earth just stood there as so much un-collapsed reality? What, waiting for us to show up?”
Writing up the paper took several days. I signed Satish and Point Machine as coauthors.
Multiple studies have revealed the default state of all quantum systems to be a superposition of both collapsed and un-collapsed probability wave forms. It has long been known that subjective observation is a primary requirement for wave function collapse. The goal of this study was to identify the higher-order taxa capable of inciting wave function collapse by act of observation and to develop a phylogenetic tree to clarify the relationships between these major animal phyla. Species incapable of wave function collapse can be considered part of the larger indeterminate system. The study was carried out at the Boston Zoo on multiple orders of mammalia. Here we report that humans were the only species tested which proved capable of exerting wave function collapse onto the background superposition of states, and indeed, this ability appears to be a uniquely derived human characteristic. This ability most likely arose sometime in the last six million years after the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.
James read the abstract. He came to my office.
“But what do the results
“They mean whatever you think they mean.”
Things moved fast after that. The paper was published in
Satish worked on perfecting the test itself. He worked on downsizing it, minimizing it, digitizing it. Turning it into a product. It became the Hansen double-slit, and when he was done, it was the size of a loaf of bread — with an easy indicator light and small, efficient output. Green for “yes,” and red for “no.” I wonder if he knew then. I wonder if he already suspected what they’d use it for.
