“Christ, zillions of 8 Balls,” Wong said.
“Who knows what sort of creativity is just waiting to be discovered out there?” Dieter waved at the ceiling, the walls—really, at everything around us.
Mickle made a raspberry sound and dropped his head again.
Looking at Tiflin and trying to read his expression, I realized that theory and desperation had finally trumped our own project manager. Despite Tiflin’s objections, Dieter—mystical and multiversed Dieter—was in charge of our quantum computer.
“What—or who—is going to judge and select the strings?” I asked. “We don’t want to do parsing in the QC. That’ll slow it to a crawl. 8 Ball isn’t made for that!”
Dieter raised his hand. “We already have a working subroutine to perform that function.”
“In Max or in 8 Ball?” I asked. We had named 8 Ball’s traditional interpreter—an interposed supercomputer—Max Headroom. Max used to be named Mike, from Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, until I pointed out that Mike vanished and was never heard from again.
Mickle had suggested Max.
“In Max, and then in 8 Ball,” Tiflin said. “We leave the rough parsing to Max and the large numbers to 8 Ball. They can be raw, even partly malformed, because we’ll grind through so many of them so quickly.”
“Max says it’s slick,” Dieter added stubbornly.
“Gentlemen, let’s face the truth. This is a done deal,” Mickle said. “We’ve finally jumped from the bridge into a deep, dark river of sloppy thinking. We’re screwed.” He took a long sip from a bottle of beige Soylent liquid, his frequent substitute for breakfast, lunch, and even dinner.
Tiflin said quietly, pointedly, “It’s done. We’re already loading.”
A long pause.
“A string infested with quantum errors we’ve spent most of our careers trying to weed out!” Wong exclaimed, making weak gestures of frustration and surrender. “I am flabbered. I am gasted.”
Emotions crossed Dieter’s hairy face like clouds over a prairie.
“Have a little faith,” Tiflin said, and leaned back in his chair. “If we’re wrong and this crashes 8 Ball over and over again, to be sure, we’re all screwed, but the fact is, minus results, the division is set to cut its losses and clean house. That’s why Cate called us together this morning. Results, or we get booted out of here.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Wong said.
Then the door clicked and Cate Riva entered, flashing a sunny expression and a big smile. “Good morning, all,” she said with a quick scan around the conference room. “Why so serious?”
“We’re loading new strings, recombined Gödel strings,” Tiflin said, with all the confidence he could fake.
“Wasn’t that the plan?” Cate asked innocently.
“We’re inserting the worst phase-flip errors back into the strings,” Wong said. We all wished he’d just keep quiet.
“Proof of pudding?” Cate asked, still standing. “Because despite my pleasant demeanor, I’m not here to listen to more bullshit.”
A brief silence.
“Take a seat,” Tiflin said. “We’re about to begin. Genius is in the air.”
Cate smiled again, all sunlight and cheer—but behind her brown eyes, all tiger.
Tiflin instructed the screen to drop and the data in the ceiling projector to show 8 Ball’s and Max’s interposed display. “Here we go,” he said, betting the bank—betting our bank.
This was going to be my Waterloo. I could smell it.
Dieter sent the instructions to Max. “First strings are loaded,” he announced.
“What scale?” Cate asked.
“All qubits,” Dieter said. “Two to the one thousand and twenty-fourth power.”
Tiflin looked at me. I looked at Cate. She watched the display.
Programming in a QC consists of designing and controlling how the qubits are entangled—essentially, the topological nature of the braids—and then maintaining or collapsing those entangled states, opening gates from which we could presumably receive our answers. Once set in motion, a quantum computer is autonomous—the program either fails or succeeds. A QC cannot be debugged while it is working. The program cannot be halted or even completely understood while the QC is busy. Only if the results are interesting and useful can we hope that what we did was a success. And they must also be fast.
The display twinkled over our heads. And what do you know?
We got back numbers—long strings of integers, flanked by Max’s instant scorecard analysis. 8 Ball was delivering a select list of exceedingly large primes—the kind of unique and difficult primes used to encode high-level passwords. The kind that could break banks and even worry Uncle Sam.
“Wow,” Cate said. “These are real? You haven’t suckered Max?”
“No suckers here,” Tiflin said, leaning back deeper into the shadows.
8 Ball didn’t choke or even sneeze. For the first time, our newest QC was cooking.
And it was fast.
“Next up,” Tiflin said, as Dieter’s fingers flew over the keyboard, “the complete Icelandic chromosome database for mutations in BRCA 1 and 2 over the last forty years.”
And that worked, too. Our evolving machine had analyzed and understood contemporary human evolution, at least in two important oncogenes.
“The third problem is very big,” Dieter said. “We’re collating the proof of the classification of the theorem of finite simple groups. It’s known as the Enormous Theorem. Tens of thousand of pages of proofs, scattered in several hundred journals, all loaded into Gödel strings, cross-referenced, and logically filtered. The QC should find any contradictions. We’ll get results in four or five minutes.”
“That alone should get us a Fields Medal,” Tiflin said.
Cate reached out to pat Tiflin’s shoulder. “Let me know how that turns out,” she said. “Good work, gentlemen. I’ve seen enough for now.” She stood and left the room.
Inside the hour, the Enormous Theorem was proven consistent, our contracts were extended, and our funding was renewed.
That evening, I went home to the square gray stone and steel apartment where my wife and I had lived for nine months. She had just returned from Beijing and a conference on newer, more inclusive versions of Unicode. We spent our first evening together in three weeks, beginning with sushi from our favorite restaurant and progressing to brandy and cigars—a sin we allowed ourselves every few months.
Then we exercised our marital prerogatives. I managed almost to forget both our team’s troubles and successes. I could not tell her about any of them. Cate would decide how and when to release the story.
Why couldn’t I just accept the fact that Tiflin had triumphed? Cate had messaged Tiflin at the end of the day that maybe we could support doubling the number of qubits. 8 Ball was designed to be scalable, wasn’t it?
My wife rolled over on the flannel sheets and asked, “Do you have a sister?”
She knew I had only brothers, all in India.
“There was this woman in Beijing who looked exactly like you,” she said, “only pretty. Same color skin, same hair. She came up to me and asked how you were doing.”
“And?”
“I said you were fine. She knew your name. She knew where you worked. She touched my cheek with the back of her hand and smiled, the way you used to do. And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you!” She grinned, raised herself over me, and twirled her finger on my chest. “It gave me a thrill—perverse, you know? Like if I went to bed with her, it wouldn’t be cheating on you. And not just because of the girl-girl thing. Does that make any sense? I’ve never seen anything like it, Bose. Are you cloning people now?”