The absurd level of continuing, tooth-grinding investment showed how sexy the whole idea of quantum computing was, and how much everyone wanted to completely overturn the world’s security, expose all its secrets, and find deep answers to life’s simple questions before our enemies did – or at least before our competitors in Mumbai or Beijing.
But we had yet to run a long-term, successful session. We seemed to be always smoothing the course, pulling out obstacles – preparing over and over for the first big test. We both knew that could not continue.
Tiflin drove his Tesla back toward our offices with a look of fascinated fury, like a child behind the wheel of a bumper car. I clung to the armrests as we squealed into the concrete garage beside Building 10.
“Today will change everything,” he said, climbing out of the bucket seat. “Today will be 8 Ball’s first birthday.” He smiled his feral smile, upper lip rising over prominent canines. He was looking to see if I shared his conviction, if I would offer my full support.
That’s why I was here.
“We should bring a cake!” I said.
OUR FIVE QUANTUM computing team members gathered in a small conference room for the first time in weeks. Tiflin fussed with the ceiling-mounted projector. The rest of us sat around the oval table, slumped or yawning, picking our fingernails, studying our cell phones before the cage was locked – hardly a picture of joy.
Cate Riva, director of research, overseeing the entire division, had asked for this get-together the day before. It was crunch time for the entire project – and for everyone on the team.
Facilitator and event coordinator Gina Marsh, small, slender, red-haired and blue-eyed, had just made sure we were all present, that we were who we said we were, that our security profiles were up to date – and that we all looked reasonably clean.
“Cate will be here in a few minutes,” Tiflin said. The others looked his way with heavy-lidded eyes. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”
At Tiflin’s nod, chief of software Dieter Langmeier – tall, bald, bushybearded, and a certifiable genius at both systems design and higher-level mathematics – took over. “We’re loading new strings,” he began. “Gödel strings as before, but we’re going to drastically resample the braids. I’ve adjusted the strings to reflect a new understanding.”
“The braids are fine – it’s the processing that’s hanging us,” insisted Wong Poh Kam, senior physicist. Wong was mid-twenties, six feet tall, and slightly stooped, with small, intense eyes on the outer margins of a broad face. “The strings are too damned long.”
“The whole mess is too big,” said Byron Mickle, chief design engineer. Mickle was stocky, big-shouldered, five feet six, with a pleasant, moon-pale face. He dressed and looked like a plumber, and reliably insisted at each meeting that we should have been able to run Mega and Mini for years without exceeding their theoretical capacity. 8 Ball, to Mickle, was grossly excessive.
“Braids, strings, loops, knots – nothing I hear in this room ever makes sense,” Gina said.
Dieter said, with a peeved expression, “Once you absorb the maths, it’s all perfectly clear. We’re simply reflecting a new understanding. The new topology will be much more inclusive and robust.”
“Right!” Gina said. “That makes it so much clearer. I have to key in the Cloaking Device before Cate arrives. Are we good?”
“All good,” Tiflin confirmed. He clearly planned to surprise Cate – perhaps to surprise us all.
The glass door closed and clicked behind Gina. We were now inside the cage – a Faraday cage. No signals in or out, except those that passed through the very tight funnel of building security – and the signals from Max, the supercomputer that spoke to 8 Ball.
“Dieter, before Cate gets here, tell them more about what you’re up to,” Tiflin said.
“I’ve finished compiling the recidivist strings,” Dieter said, too quickly, without taking time to think. He had been rehearsing. The rest of us looked at each other warily. Something was up, and none of us had been clued in.
“What the hell are those?” Mickle asked.
“Tell them what’s different about our new strings,” Tiflin coached, treating Dieter like a prodigy – or a puppet.
“We’re going to compound and re-insert our apparent errors,” Dieter said. “My new thinking is, they may not be errors. They may actually be offphase echoes between our braided qubits. The braids crossing the vacuum aren’t loops or even knots. Using the scint, we’ve learned they take a halfphase twist –”
“You’ve already sampled the scint?” I asked Tiflin, wondering when it had been activated, and why he had asked me to meet him at the warehouse.
He nodded and dismissed my question with a wave of his hand.
Dieter looked sternly at us, then got up to scrawl matrices and factors and many strange, magical symbols on the whiteboard. He did not like to be interrupted. “A half-phase twist means we’re not dealing with loops, not even with knotted loops, but with Möebius loops.” He spoke that name with reverence. Möebius had astonished all of us when we were kids with his one-sided piece of paper – a simple half twist, run your finger around what appears to be a torus, and behold! Infinity.
“Oh, that,” said Mickle, resting his elbows on the table and putting his chin in his cupped hands.
“Four spatial tracks and two time tracks,” Dieter continued. “Our socalled thermal errors, maybe even the phase-flips, are really signals out of phase – essentially, signals that convey key functions in a program very much like our own. Functions we can parasitize and use for ourselves.”
“A program like our own?” Mickle asked, lifting his head.
“From the multiverse,” Dieter said.
“The multiverse?” Mickle seemed taken aback, and then amused. He chuckled and looked at Wong.
“More of Dieter’s mystical bullshit,” Wong said, rising to the bait. Wong was a dogmatic pragmatist, a surprisingly common type among quantum physicists. “All our crimes come back to haunt us.”
“There’s nothing mystical about any of this,” Tiflin insisted.
Dieter went on, unperturbed, “We need to feed these so-called errors back into our raw strings, to replace the parts of our strings that are riddled with errors. Whenever a Gödel number arises that is even vaguely wellformed, the loader will do a checksum, and if it finds congruence, insert an echoed string. For each so-called error, we’ll correct the phase, then load the recompiled numbers.”
“What the hell does that really mean?” Mickle asked. He was lost. I was also lost. “Evolving code, or succotash?”
“If we just reform and reload the strings, we’ll fill the bit bucket over and over,” Wong said. “And even if 8 Ball works once or twice, we’ll have no idea what it’s doing for millions of cycles, maybe not even then.”
“If we reload?” Tiflin asked with that patented savage grin – lip above canines.
“When,” Dieter said, his face firming to a fine resolve.
“Our problem isn’t too few cycles,” Tiflin insisted. “8 Ball can supply us with trillions upon trillions of cycles – however large the strings. It can supply us with every number that ever was, every string that ever was, every program that ever was – in our universe and at least a quadrillion quadrillion other universes.”