Free Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer

time the warmth was unmistakable. “That’s exactly what you said all those years ago when I first used it.”
    “So, forgive me, but . . . we were . . . we were in love?”
    Her eyes tracked across the room again even though there wasn’t anyone to follow. “Oh, who knows? I thought we were, back then, but, well, we were just kids.”
    I took another sip of my beer. “Yeah.”
    The server came to take our orders—which was a case of opportune knockers, as it helped break the awkward moment. “What’ll it be?” she asked.
    “Steak sandwich,” said Kayla. “Rare. With the Caesar, please.”
    “And for you?”
    “The vegan wrap,” I said.
    “Very good,” she said, and sashayed away.
    Kayla’s eyebrows arched up. “The vegan wrap? You used to love a good steak.”
    She was right, but that had been before I’d read Peter Singer. The best-known modern utilitarian, Singer was the author of, among others,
Animal Liberation,
which had kick-started the whole animal-rights movement. Given humans can be perfectly healthy eating only plants, the minor increase in our happiness that we might get from the taste of chicken or beef in no way offsets the pain and suffering of animals raised or slaughtered in cruel conditions. “I’ve changed,” I said affably.
    She narrowed her eyes, as if that were still somehow an open question. “You don’t mind that I’m having steak?”
    “I’m from Calgary. If I couldn’t stand being around people eating beef, I’d never be able to go home again.”
    “Ha.” She took another sip of her wine.
    We chatted for the next half hour, during which our meals came, and, slowly but surely, she seemed to get comfortable with me, in part due, I liked to think, to my charm, and in part perhaps to a second glass of wine. She mentioned our dates from all those years ago that stood out in her mind, including a road trip one weekend down to Fargo; attending Keycon, Winnipeg’s annual science-fiction convention; seeing the Blue Bombers play; hanging out at Aqua Books and Pop Soda’s—both sadly now defunct—and going to a traditional Cree sweat-lodge ceremony. I’d hoped something would ring a bell, but I couldn’t remember any of them.
    Kayla finally fell silent; it’s doubtless no fun reminiscing with someone whose only responses are, “Really?” and “We did?” and “Wow, that sounds like it must have been fun.” To fill the void, I delicately broached another topic. “So, um, you’re a New Ager?”
    She practically did a spit-take with her wine. “What?”
    “Well, I only glanced at your Wikipedia entry, but it said you were with something called the Canadian Enlightenment Centre.”
    She had a wonderfully warm laugh. “You mean the Canadian Light Source. It’s a synchrotron, Canada’s largest particle accelerator; just under three gigaelectronvolts. It’s on the grounds of the University of Saskatchewan.”
    “Oh! But it said you ‘explore consciousness.’”
    “I do. Psych was your major, but just an elective for me; I was doing physics. But Warkentin’s course really got me interested in the mind, which is how I ended up working on the quantum mechanics of consciousness. After graduating from U of M, I headed off to the University of Arizona to study under Stuart Hameroff.”
    “Who is?”
    “An anesthesiologist. He was fascinated by exactly what he was doing when he deprived people of consciousness. Roger Penrose, a physicist who sometimes collaborates with Stephen Hawking, wrote a book that said consciousness had to be quantum mechanical; it couldn’t be just classical physics because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Stuart read it and got in touch with him, oh, almost twenty-five years ago now. That’s why I’m at the Light Source; there’s a synchrotron specialist I’m working with there who’s got a technique for detecting superposition without promoting decoherence.”
    “Ah,” I said. “Well, one must.”
    She smiled warmly.