I STOOD BEFORE 8 Ball again, my neck hair on end, looking on it not with pique or adoration, but with genuine fear. This time, my visit numbers were consecutive.
“What the fuck are you up to?” I whispered at the black sphere.
The warehouse security gate clicked with the insertion of another key. Mickle entered and spent a number of seconds staring at the counter. From this angle I could not see his number, but he hesitantly answered the cage’s questions, then walked across the concrete floor to where I stood by the rail.
He tipped me a salute. “It says I’ve been out here fourteen times in the last twenty-four hours,” he said.
“Have you?”
“No.”
“Just what are we worried about?” I asked. “What could possibly be going wrong?”
“Nothing, really.” Mickle assumed an expression like a little boy who has just bottled a weird bug. “We’re famous. We’re making headlines around the world.”
“So why are we standing here looking so anxious?” I asked.
Wong entered next and joined us by the rail. “We need to see the building security videos,” he said with a squint.
Before I could answer, Mickle said, “Been there, done that. I took Dieter with me to the security center. His wastebasket kept filling up with Pepsi cans – his favorite. So we asked to see who had been visiting his office.”
“Looking for what?” I asked.
“To count how many Dieters there were in the universe.”
“Why should there be more than one?” I asked.
Mickle shook his head. “Dieter said something more than a little weird. He said every program had to have a programmer. Since 8 Ball was running trillions of programs, how many programmers would it need to import to satisfy causality?”
“How many Dieters.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Not just Dieters. We’ve all contributed code over the years. We’ve all noodled and made suggestions. So we’re all potential dupes.”
“As in suckers?”
“More like duplicates. We played the video until we saw Dieter enter his office. And then – I don’t remember all of it. But there was no Dieter standing next to me in the security center. And there was no Dieter in his office, either. Both had vanished, or at least that’s what I wrote down right after it happened – on a napkin.” Mickle held up the napkin. In his loose scrawl, a black marker message read, Two Dieters canceled.
“Why would they cancel each other out?”
“Because they’re non-Abelian,” Mickle said. “Like fermions. They can’t occupy the same universe at the same time – and become aware of it.”
“That is nuts!” Wong said.
“I agree,” Mickle said. “What shall we tell Tiflin?”
“Let me decide that,” I said. “We should make sure nobody’s playing a joke. I wouldn’t even put it past Tiflin. Make sure we’re not being deceived.”
“That is not the right word,” Mickle said, tapping the rail with his finger. “They wouldn’t be deceptions. They’re just as real as you and me. They even fool the counters. But if we’re going to take this any further, we have to avoid looking for ourselves. Because, gentlemen, if we find us, we’ll just fucking vanish.”
“Tiflin hates multiverses or mystical interpretations,” I said.
“So do I, remember?” Wong said.
“Don’t search for yourself,” Mickle said, poking Wong’s shoulder. Wong shrugged him off with a resentful scowl. “And we won’t look for each other – not when we’re together. You look for me, alone, and I look for you. Alone.”
“Can we look for the others, too?”
“I think so,” he said. “But maybe we shouldn’t tell them we saw them.”
“That might be allowed,” I said, thinking back to the Post-it Notes and my wife telling me about my ‘sister.’ “But we should be cautious.”
“What’s the point, then?” Wong asked.
“Maybe they won’t believe us and they’ll stick around regardless,” Mickle said.
8 Ball kept patiently cycling.
I ASKED TIFLIN to meet me in the lobby of a nice hotel where we put up our international guests. I wanted to be away from the campus, away from our colleagues – away from anyone or anything that might make Tiflin feel stubborn. It was too early for a beer, so he and I took seats in the small bar and sipped cappuccinos.
“We’ve still got a lot to do,” Tiflin said, fidgeting. I was too important and connected to ignore, but he seemed to know he wouldn’t like what I had to say.
“8 Ball’s not working the way we thought it would,” I told him.
“I don’t care,” he said. “It’s working. We’ll figure out how later – before they give us our Nobel.”
I rather thought he would mention that at some point.
“What I’m saying is, the scint may have given us an answer.” I unfolded the printout tracking the photon trails in 8 Ball’s central vacuum. I was still unsure how to read the scint’s numbers, but I’d spent several hours in my office studying the graphic representation: four splash-ripples at the corners of an otherwise smooth pond. Four dropped pebbles creating regular, rather pretty disturbances. As expected.
But at the center of the four points of vibration, there rose a prominent hump – where nothing should be.
Tiflin looked over the printout with an expression almost of dread. So much to lose, I thought. So careful not to sink the boat. Right now, he was the most famous man in computing. His name was on every news show, headlining every major science and tech journal. He was trending big on Twitter – #Masterofchaos.
“You didn’t trump this up?” he asked. There was an odd sidewise look in his eye, as if he had already seen these results but had ignored them.
“Of course not,” I said. “You installed the scint. That’s the latest report from Max, based on data you asked to be collected.”
“Well, did we really need it, in the end?”
“The ripples at the corners represent our topological braids and their echoes,” I said. “They’re real – but they may not explain the speed.”
“Then what does?”
I tapped the hump. “You tell me,” I said. “What do you think that represents?”
“It could be a standing wave,” he said. “Maybe a collaboration or combination of all the others. What’s it doing there?”
“8 Ball may be compounding the entanglements,” I said. “The standing wave could represent a huge mountain of computational power, more number crunching than there will ever be numbers. More numbers than there are universes. God himself can’t think that fast. And there could be consequences we did not anticipate.”
“What sort of consequences?” he asked.
I noted that he did not object to the metaphysics, the mysticism, and almost felt sorry for him. “When we got together at the warehouse five days ago, you were feeling all of your pockets. What were you looking for?”
“My gum,” he said. “I’ve been chewing gum ever since I quit smoking. You know that.”
“Did you find it?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What did you find?” I asked.
“A pack of cigarettes,” he said. “And a lighter.”
“Did you put them there?” I asked.
“No.” So far he was being honest – which meant he had already been having doubts. “Did you?”
I didn’t give that the dignity of a response. “Like somebody else was wearing your clothes, right? Someone a lot like you – but someone who still smoked. Did your wife notice a difference?”
“You’re crazy,” he said.