Rodney McKay hadn't forgotten his and Dex's first encounter, and he wasn't inclined to forgive it anytime soon. At the moment, however, some clarification might be in order, else they'd still be sitting here tomorrow morning. Unacceptable, because a) he was starving, and b) he fully intended to be back in that lab long before tomorrow morning to make sure nobody, but absolutely nobody, laid a hand on that computer.
"Rodney? You did say that virus was artificial intelligence, didn't you?" Weir kept digging.
Why did people insist on quoting him on explanations that weren't quite… accurate? "I, uh, may have got carried away a little at the time," he offered.
"You'? Carried way? Never!"
"In the heat of battle." He shot Sheppard a scathing glance. "The malware on the Daedalus was sophisticated, and yes, I suppose it had heuristic components in that it was able to learn from our reactions and predict our likely next steps, which of course could also have been an advanced form of fuzzy logic that allowed it to respond according to preprogrammed parameters, not dissimilar-"
"Rodney," Elizabeth interjected. "Your point?"
"I exaggerated, okay? It was impressive, but it lacked one vital defining element of true A.I. Fact of the matter is HAL doesn't exist."
"Hal?" Across the table from him, Teyla looked confused. "You mean Sergeant Walker?"
"Cultural reference, Teyla." Sheppard grinned. "HAL is short for Heuristic Algoritlun, and it-he-was a supercomputer running a spaceship in a movie."
"HAL also killed the entire crew of the spaceship," Radek added dolefully. Trust the Slav soul to put a joyous spin on things. "Similar to what the virus on the Daedalus tried to do."
"As the good colonel was saying," Rodney cut in, wishing he'd never made the reference in the first place, "it's a movie. Not real. In real life we're decades — possibly centuries-away from developing AT. Even the Asgard haven't got it, and that should tell us something."
"Why? I mean, why haven't they got it?" asked Sheppard.
"I can only tell you why we haven't got it. True artificial intelligence requires consciousness- self-awareness- and the only computer capable of producing it that we know of is the human brain. Now, if you put the storage and processing ability of an average three-pound brain in I.T. terms, you'd be talking random access memory in the order of a couple hundred terabytes. A state-of-the-art computer with this kind of RAM capacity would be the size of a house, and it'd run hot enough to bum itself out in seconds.
"I'm fairly certain that the Asgard, for instance, could get around that quite easily, which brings me to the second issue, and that's-"
"Never mind, Rodney." Apparently Elizabeth wasn't interested in issues. "What makes this computer you found different?"
Squinting at Rodney, Sheppard, who up to now had been poured in his chair, suddenly sat up very straight. "You mentioned quantum computing."
"That is what I suspected looking at the configuration of the device, and, if anything, your juvenile look-alike confirmed it."
"Oh, it did, huh? How?"
Rodney wondered if anybody else could hear the edge of distrust in the colonel's voice. The surprise wasn't the fact that it irked, but the fact that it irked so much.
That might take a while.
The echo of that unpleasant memory was drowned out by a voice that insisted to know why Dr. Rodney McKay, of all people, should care whether some glorified flyboy trusted him. Too right! Two years of diligent-no, faithful-service in the face of incomprehension and ridicule, and then one mistake and they crucified him. One single mistake! Okay, the mistake had taken out five sixths of a solar system. He was a great man. Great men made great mistakes. So there!
Only, the real problem lay on a different, altogether less cosmic level; all but dismissing the death of one of his scientists, not to mention Zelenka's warnings, he'd gone to John Sheppard and asked for his trust. And the colonel had given it, run interference with Elizabeth Weir, just so that Rodney could satisfy… what? Curiosity? An itch to get a ticket to Stockholm? Perversely, somewhere, in an unacknowledged corner of his psyche, he'd known that having Sheppard's trust meant more than winning the Nobel Prize. And he'd promptly gone and rewarded it by damn near killing the man…
"Rodney?"
"What?" he snapped, then regained his bearings. "Oh. What was the question again?"
"Not sure I can remember that far back." Sheppard shot him an odd look and sighed. "The question was how a hologram that, uh, bears some vague resemblance to me would confirm that the thing in that lab is a quantum computer."
"The, uh, speed of it. The speed," stuttered Rodney, scrambling to recover a train of thought he'd lost somewhere among pointless regrets.
"It didn't strike me as any faster or slower than any other computer here." Elizabeth sounded skeptical.
Et tu, Brute?
At age three he'd explained to his kindergarten teacher how Fibonacci numbers worked. The woman had had the nerve to punish him for lying. This kinda felt the same. And by the way, just because you're paranoid, McKay, doesn't mean they're not out to get you…
Zelenka jumped in the breach. "Rodney is right," he said. "It was the way the hologram responded. For it to react the way it did to Colonel Sheppard, the computer had to perform a vastly complex situational analysis and recognize the fact that the colonel is the spitting image of its hologram." He frowned. "Why would an image spit?"
"I think it actually is spit and image," Elizabeth offered. "Can we get back to the subject?"
"Ah." Zelenka looked utterly unenlightened and picked up his thread again. "The recognition of oneself, say, in a mirror or as similar to somebody else is an ability exclusive to"-he'd probably been about to say humans and remembered the presence of Teyla and Dex-"intelligent, self-aware life. Primates, for instance, can't do it. A child will need approximately two years to learn it. For computers as we know them, it's out of the question. Even assuming they were capable of such a task, it would take considerably longer than it did for the computer in the lab.
"You see, conventional computers work with bits, with each bit holding a one or a zero. The computer transports these ones and zeros to logic gates and back. A quantum computer on the other hand operates with a vector of qubits, which can hold a one, a zero, or, a superposition of these…" Radek petered out, staring at Dex who'd begun to pick his teeth and inspect the booty. He sighed, defeated, and groped for the lowest common denominator. "Fundamentally it means that quantum computing is instantaneous. That's what makes it so attractive. To begin with, it would revolutionize communications. Encryption would become both unnecessary and pointless, because-"
"I think we're getting off track again," Rodney said abruptly.
"I think we're very much on track." Trust Sheppard to pick up on a diversion. "I'm starting to get interested. Why would encryption be unnecessary?"
"Because a quantum computer can crack any code in a heartbeat. Plus, in theory, your message is received the instant it's sent." Part of Rodney wanted to hedge, but there really was no point. If he didn't say it, Radek would. "Meaning it's impossible to intercept. If something's got no gap, you can't drive a wedge in it."
"In other words, if we'd had a quantum computer three weeks ago, the Wraith wouldn't have gotten the jump on the Daedalus." John Sheppard projected the intimidating enthusiasm of a used car dealer, which was out of character. As a rule he had the military fixation on grabbing hold of every piece of new and improved technology-likely-to-be-turned-into-a-tactical-advantage well under control.
Unfortunately, recent events justified his enthusiasm. The Wraith had figured out a way to intercept and decrypt Atlantis's communications with Earth and had promptly dispatched two hive ships to the coordinates where Daedalus was set to emerge from hyperspace on her last trip to the Pegasus galaxy. What had saved Colonel Caldwell and his crew's collective bacon was sheer fluke. The hive ships' timing had been off by a shake, allowing Daedalus to escape back into hyperspace with only minor damage. Of course codes had been changed immediately, which was roughly as effective as sticking a Band-Aid over a leak in the Hoover Dam. If the Wraith had done it once, they could do it again, and the next time the Daedalus or whoever else happened to come their way might not be so lucky. If the Atlantis expedition was to safeguard lives and vital supply lines, communications had to be protected. A quantum computer could do just that.