Quantum Night is a 2016 science-fiction thriller novel written by Canadian novelist Robert J. Sawyer. Set in 2020, the book touches on themes of quantum physics, psychology, current politics and ethics.
Plot
Professor Jim Marchuk is an experimental psychologist at the University of Manitoba and a subscriber to utilitarianism. He is asked to testify at the sentencing hearing of a convicted murderer in Atlanta, using his new technique for identifying psychopaths from lack of saccadic eye motion, which he claims outperforms the Hare checklist. While in the United States, he learns that the recently elected President Quentin Carroway has overturned Roe v. Wade and enacted several measures to reduce the rights of illegal immigrants. While being cross-examined in court, Jim is shocked to discover that he is missing six months of memory from early 2001.
Returning to Winnipeg, Jim consults with his colleague and mentor Menno Warkentin, whom he describes as an elderly professor who was blinded in a car accident. They attribute Jim's memory loss to the trauma of a stabbing at the hands of a stranger that Jim remembers from a New Year's Eve 2000 trip to visit his parents in Calgary. A physicist named Kayla Huron contacts Jim and informs him that her research is also related to psychopathy. As they agree to meet, Jim learns that Kayla is his former girlfriend from the lost period. Over dinner Kayla reveals that she ended their relationship because Jim was abusive towards her, but she believes that he has changed.
Kayla introduces Jim to her collaborator Victoria Chen at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) in Saskatoon. They use the beam to perform a measurement on Jim's brain cells and find that they have three microtubules in a quantum superposition. This is revealed to be part of a taxonomy which they call Q1-Q2-Q3: four-sevenths of all humans have one quantum microtubule in superposition, two-sevenths have two and one-seventh have three, with these numbers only changing as a result of a coma or general anaesthetic. By observing behavioural traits of their test subjects, Kayla and Victoria hypothesize that Q2s are psychopaths, while Q1s are philosophical zombies: non-conscious humans who lack free will and become susceptible to mob mentality. Only Q3s are seen as having critical thinking ability and empathy. Jim and Kayla become romantically involved once again, but Victoria breaks up with her boyfriend after the test identifies him as a Q1.
Meanwhile, Jim begins to reconstruct his past and discovers that his memory of being stabbed is a confabulation. He learns that, along with spending that New Year's Eve in Winnipeg, he participated in a Pentagon-funded study run by Menno and engineering professor Dominic Adler. The study, called Project Lucidity, aimed to create an EEG-like helmet to read articulated thoughts and aid battlefield communication. To overcome the 'background noise' of Jim's inner voice – his conscience – they accidentally caused him to enter a Q1 state during which his memories were indexed differently. Menno reveals that Jim returned to a fully conscious state six months later, and that he and Dominic decided to go their separate ways and maintained secrecy due to a non-disclosure agreement, moral issues due to Menno's Mennonite religion, and concerns that their research could be used to justify discrimination. As Jim continues therapy, he gains access to a memory from the end of his lost period when he had become psychopathic. He is shocked to learn that he killed Dominic in cold blood and blinded Menno before a laboratory device 'rebooted' him into a Q3 state.