The curtains had been drawn and the lights dimmed. The ceiling projector showed a montage of intersecting waves in 8 Ball’s vacuum—the now-familiar four splashes surrounding the imposing central hump. 8 Ball was still running—who knew how many cycles?
Dieter told us he had loaded only fundamental operations the last few days, keeping the qubits powered up and working but doing nothing in particular, at least nothing too complicated. Just housekeeping—making sure all was well, all was healthy.
“Are we sure the standing wave is even in our system?” I asked. “And is it in fact at the center of the vacuum, or is that all just a mathematical fiction?”
“The detector is working!” Mickle said. “It’s not defective.”
“Then how can 8 Ball not be a lump of slag?” Wong asked. “According to the scint, the microwave temperature inside our quantum computer is well over a trillion degrees.”
“Virtual microwave temp,” Tiflin said. “Virtual doesn’t affect the real. The helium is still cold. That counts for something.”
“We should have been told about this right away,” I said to nobody in particular. “This is for the theorists to understand and explain, not just engineers.”
Dieter, despite having a foot in both camps—theory and engineering—sounded defensive. “It’s not a sign of failure. We just don’t know what’s going on, yet.”
“Entangled and braided photons that do not exist echo back on world lines that are mathematical fictions,” I said, “leaving trails in the vacuum that produce virtual microwaves, and they don’t exist either. None of it is remotely real!”
“That’s a load of crap,” Tiflin said. “We’re successful. You just don’t want to acknowledge how successful we are.”
“You don’t remember, do you?” I asked Tiflin, then looked at Dieter.
Mickle lowered his eyes as if in guilt. Dieter ignored us both.
“That hump, that so-called standing wave, is a massive reservoir of computation,” I said. “Millions or even trillions of programs running at once. 8 Ball is a nexus for the work of I don’t know how many programmers, all like us—”
Tiflin rapped his knuckles hard on the desk. “Let’s not draw stupid conclusions,” he said.
“For a time, 8 Ball was running trillions of programs—you said so yourself.”
“A metaphor,” Tiflin insisted.
“Those programs originated in millions of other universes,” I continued. Mickle watched me with morbid fascination, as if I were digging my own grave. “They had to have programmers behind them. And yet, here they are—trillions of lines of code running without a causal beginning. What does that force the machine to do? What does it force the universe to do?”
“In theory—” Mickle said.
“Screw theory,” said Tiflin. “We’ve worked too hard and spent too damned much time and money not to know what’s happening with our own apparatus.”
“Has anybody else looked at the security videos?” I asked.
Silence. Mickle looked away.
“Soft drink machines?”
“They’re usually empty,” Wong said.
“The cafeteria staff is slacking off,” Tiflin said.
I was stubborn. “One by one, we should all look at the building security videos.”
“What the hell would that tell us?” Tiflin asked, standing. Clearly he’d had enough.
“That there’s more than one Dieter walking around Building 10,” I said. “And more than one Tiflin.”
“Christ,” Tiflin said.
“I met Dieter in his office, then I saw him in Room 57,” Mickle said. “He couldn’t have got there ahead of me.”
“Did he look like me totally—same clothes, same hair?” Dieter asked, fascinated.
“Yeah. And then—I think—when you saw him on the video feed, you both vanished.”
“You think?”
“I made a note to that effect on my phone,” Mickle said. “Because I don’t remember.”
“Me, too, with Tiflin,” I said.
“Cool!” Dieter said, looking feverish. “If we could pin this down, make some real experiments, we’d know something tremendous, wouldn’t we?”
Tiflin got out of his chair and went to the door.
I held out my hand to stop him. “My dupe told me to check the Pepsi supply. Most of us drink Pepsi or Mountain Dew.”
“Tra-dition!” Mickle sang, straight out of Fiddler on the Roof.
Tiflin folded his arms.
“Some of us are fresh out of gum,” I said. “Some of us wear the same clothes for days at a time, and dirty sneakers, and wouldn’t notice if we were sharing, would we?”
“Go to hell,” Tiflin said.
“They’re out of Snapple, too,” Mickle said. Oddly, like Dieter, he seemed to be enjoying this, as if it proved something important or at least interesting. Sometimes working with smarter people is infuriating.
“If we did look at the videos, what would that do?” Dieter asked with little-boy wonder. “I mean, none of us have met…them. Us. The others. If they exist.”
“They do not exist,” Tiflin said.
“But has anyone actually seen another?” Dieter asked. “What would happen if we just looked at them?”
“Collapse the wave function,” Wong said. “Stop all this shit right in its tracks. One non-Abelian programmer can’t exist in the same space or time as another, right?”
“They’re no more real than the standing wave,” Tiflin said in a high, exhausted growl. He seemed ready to break into tears. Who could blame him?
“I think we’re way beyond being worried about 8 Ball’s success,” Dieter said. “But we could collapse it all—make all the others vanish, along with their programs. We can pull the plug.”
“That would kill our bonuses,” Mickle said.
“Cashing multiple versions of the same check will crash more than the wave function,” I said.
And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you! That’s what my wife had told me. A female version of me had to have crossed some distance in the multiverse to occupy this world line, didn’t she? She showed up first in China. I go there infrequently. And she figured it all out before I did. She somehow managed to avoid me, but still left me notes to clue me in. Notes apparently don’t flip the state. To everyone else here, I am still male, and she had to act through me if she was to exert any influence in the open—right? Maybe my others, eventually, would come from far enough across the multiverse that I would be the anomaly.
This was bending my brain big-time.
“Why aren’t we seeing hundreds of them? Thousands?” Mickle asked, clearly finding it hard to believe he was even asking the question.
Dieter was our Rottweiler when it came to pure theory. “Our spaces aren’t that big. If more than one dupe meets—however many they are in total—they all vanish!”
“So if they appear in a clump, they cancel out immediately,” Wong said, firmly in the spirit of this gedanken discussion.
“Heisenbergian crowd control,” Mickle said. “Lovely.”
Tiflin was pinking brightly now and couldn’t bring himself to speak. My remark about the gum and the clothes had shaken him. Maybe he was starting to believe.
“Sorry,” Dieter said, smiling as if at a lovely dream. “One last thought. How many 8 Balls are there? Is our machine in a superposition with all the others? And how could that possibly be stable?”
“Shoot me now,” Tiflin said, pushing past my arm toward the door.
These dupes, as Mickle calls them, are us, smart or smarter. They find themselves in roughly the same environments, covering the same or very similar world lines, attending the same meetings—if they’re not yet clued in about such things—but never more than one per meeting, one per world line. The only way to survive is to avoid meeting yourself. Both will vanish. And their programs or parts of programs, in 8 Ball, might also vanish—which could help explain some weird irregularities in the output. The better programmers you or your dupe are, the more your vanishing affects the success of the standing wave.