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?”
I said we most certainly were not cloning people and hugged her, mostly to shut her up.
“Right,” she said. “You’d have to have been cloned forty-one years ago. How about a transporter malfunction?”
We laughed, but the thought made me both queasy and a little horny – so many bells being rung on my nerd pinball machine, after such a complicated and important day.
A FEW HOURS later, I showered, got dressed, and walked into my home office to look over the new morning’s schedule. I found another Post-it Note stuck to my rosewood desktop. This one, again in my distinctive print style, read, Check out the Pepsi supply.
I looked around the small room. My armpits were soaking. We needed to reset our security system.
And I needed another shower.
COMING INTO OUR building, I avoided the soft drink coolers, just because looking, checking, would be utterly ridiculous.
Gina made the rounds of our glassed-in cubicles, delivering a basket of fruit and wine to each of us with compliments from Cate and our CEO as well. Later that day came a message of congratulations signed by the company’s founder. Cate wasn’t wasting time. The news was now global – we had the first successful, large-scale quantum computer, and it was already making major advancements in math and physics.
We were historic.
Two days later, after our staff meeting and our third round of press interviews, I took another morning drive to the perimeter warehouse, trying to silence my inner alarms. I whistled aimlessly, hopelessly tangled in wondering what I would look like as a female. Weird encounter, I thought. But just how weird? And how connected to the spate of anonymous Post-it Notes?
No one had been at the warehouse since Tiflin and I last visited. Cate had put it in lockdown to all but team members, not to jinx success by letting in the press – hot bodies and electronic interference.
Security grudgingly allowed me back in. The counter on the display by the cage read 8. That, of course, had to be wrong. Eight meant I had visited the site four times since Tiflin and I had last gone through. I wondered if we could get access to the security tapes. There might be imposters on the campus, right? But really, I did not want to know.
Everything in the warehouse looked fine. I was supposed to be happy, but none of this felt right. I could not help but think that some day, despite our success, the cage would refuse to open and I’d know my time in the division was over – best to light out for the territories and find smarter people elsewhere.
Why didn’t Tiflin call another meeting to plan the next cycles?
I turned away from 8 Ball and experienced another dizzy spell – too many Boses in one body. And what the hell did that mean?
When I got out to the parking lot and my VW, I saw a sheet of paper in the passenger seat. In the upper right corner, a lab intranet library reference announced these were scint results from the last week, and below that was a graphic representation of 8 Ball’s inner vacuum.
On the upper left corner, beside the reference number, someone had written, using my print style, Thought you should see this. And do take a look at the soft drink coolers. They’re empty most of the time now.
I had had quite enough.
I drove back to Building 10 and found Tiflin in his office. “We need to look at building security videos.”
“Why?” Tiflin said.
“Someone may be trying to mess with us. Humor me,” I said.
We approached the security office and made our request. We were both placed high enough that the head of security allowed us into the inner sanctum, a dark room fronted by two tiered banks of monitors and staffed by five guards.
Two of them relinquished their seats to make room.
I scrawled notes on a sheet of legal paper as we went through the videos for the last four days. The cameras in the warehouse were separate from the lab system, and not accessible from this center, but we still had a clear view of all the rooms, offices, and corridors in three big buildings – a lot to process, and I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Lots of people, lots of team members wandering around, going to the cafeteria, sitting in their cubicles sucking down Soylents or Pepsis or Mountain Dews or Snapples –
I thought I saw Mickle in a hallway, then, under the same time stamp, working in his office. “Look at that,” I said. “The times are off.”
“That could explain the numbers at the warehouse. Why is it important?” Tiflin yawned.
“OK,” I told the security chief, “show our offices right now.”
The chief worked over his keyboard and we saw my office and Tiflin’s office in Building 10, in real time, just a few cubicles apart. My office was empty. Empty – just me, I wrote on my little pad.
We looked into Tiflin’s office.
“Wait,” Tiflin said.
Tiflin’s in his office, I wrote and noted the time, the room number, and the chair beside me.
Tiflin no longer sat in the chair.
And his office was empty.
The head of security bent to look over my shoulder. “Looks like the boss is off campus,” he said.
I felt a spreading wave of dismay.
And then, I think I simply forgot.
A few hours later, back in my own office, behind the locked door, I reviewed my notes, not at all sure where I had been or why – and wondering how I had just lost so much time. The last thing I had recorded was, Tiflin’s gone! He just vanished, and I’m forgetting –
I unlocked my door, clutching the diagram I’d found in my car, and checked the soft drink coolers in the adjacent hallway. Mountain Dew and Pepsi were in very short supply – just a few cans.
With real trepidation, I passed down the hall to Tiflin’s office. There he was, sitting at his desk, on the phone. He looked up and lifted an eyebrow – go away, he was busy.
I turned and left.
What the hell had just happened?