The Machine Starts
by Greg Bear
Though I am otherwise relentlessly normal, I have one peculiarity: I get along well only with people who are smarter than me. My wife, for example, is smarter than me. I am happy in my marriage.
In my present employment I should be very happy, because everyone around me is smarter and often at pains to prove that fact. It is my duty to reinforce their positive opinions, but at the same time to exert, now and then, small course corrections. Nothing shores up a fine self-opinion better than success.
So far, five years into our project, we had known nothing but failure.
The first thing you saw as you approached the perimeter site was the warehouse, large, square, and painted a brilliant titanium white. Surrounded by two high hurricane fences topped with glittering rolls of razor wire, it looked like the kind of place where you might store an A-bomb. Access to the site was on a strictly controlled, need-to-go basis. Parking was several hundred yards away, on a small lot covered with pulverized rubber. You were told not to drive a loud car, not to cut out your exhaust or rev your engine, not to sing or even shout, upon penalty of being fired.
On the morning of the test, I drove into the lot and parked my white VW, old and shabby. I had owned it since college. My colleagues favored Teslas or Mercedes-Benzes. I liked my Rabbit.
In the lane between the fences, small robots rolled night and day—nonlethal, but capable of shooting barb-tipped wires that carried a discouraging shock. The robots inspected me with their tiny black eyes and, bored by my familiarity, rolled away.
The warehouse was made entirely of wood, no nails or brackets. It covered half an acre and sat on a thick pad of cement reinforced with plastic rebar and mesh. Beneath the pad lay a series of empty vaults that discouraged ground water, rodents, or anything else that might disturb the peace. No pipes or wires were allowed, except for those that fed directly into the warehouse.
After I passed through the fences, a single thick oak door gave access to the warehouse interior. I was scheduled to meet Hugh Tiflin, project manager and chief researcher. He was always prompt, but I was deliberately early. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the architecture, the atmosphere, the implications—to feel the place again.
I summoned up my image of Alan Turing. It is my habit to sometimes talk to the founder of modern computing, hoping for a reflection of his peculiar, sharp wisdom. What we were in the final stages of creating (we all hoped they were the final stages!) could transform the human race. A machine that would end all our secrets. What would Mr. Turing think of such a New Machine?
He never answered, of course. But then, so far, neither did our machine.
I entered the security cage and listened to questions spoken by a soft, automated voice—personal questions that were sometimes embarrassing, sometimes sad, sometimes funny. I answered each of them truthfully enough and the cage opened.
Next to the cage, a small illuminated counter revealed the number of my recent visits: 4. In the last month, I had only been here twice. The counter reset every day. I take it as a personal affront when automated systems make mistakes.
A soft rain began to fall on the high, hollow roof, adding to my damp mood and the penetrating chill in the building. The warehouse was dark, except for a light in the far corner that glowed like a pale sun. I approached a low wood rail and stood in the long, curved shadow of a big black sphere, bloated and shiny, rising on tiny fins almost to the ceiling, silent but for the low hum of the power that kept it alive. A bank of heavily insulated pipes passed under the rails and through the wooden wall to dedicated generators and a refrigeration complex outside.
Early in its development, Tiflin had named the sphere Magic 8 Ball, soon shortened to 8 Ball because, as Tiflin insisted, there was nothing magical about our machine—just good solid physics. It retained a window on one side, however, like the old toy. Tiflin had asked it to be painted on after we finished the first phase.
The window’s message: TRY AGAIN LATER.
Reading that, I experienced an odd sort of dizzy spell, as if there were too many of me in one place—a symptom of stress and hard work, I presumed.
8 Ball was our third major attempt at a fully operational and manageable quantum computer. No doubt you’ve heard something about quantum computing. The underlying ideas are spooky and new, so a lot of what you’ve heard is bound to be wrong. A quantum computer works not with bits but with qubits, or quantum bits. A classic bit, like a light switch, is either on or off, one or zero. A quantum bit can be kept in superposition, neither on nor off, nor both, nor neither—like Schrödinger’s cat until you open its very special box.
Off in far corners, two other big spheres peered from the shadows: 8 Ball’s defunct siblings, Mega and Mini. Mini was ten meters across and had once contained 128 qubits. In its scavenged condition—white insulation peeling, surrounded by a tangle of pipes and wires leading nowhere—it resembled a giant golf ball. We had turned it off—killed it—three years ago. Standing in the opposite corner, Mega was eleven meters wide and resembled a moldy Florida orange. It had contained 256 qubits, all niobium or aluminum circuits bathed in liquid helium. It had sort of worked, for a time—and then it didn’t. Thumbs-down on Mega.
Filling the expanded north end of the building, 8 Ball was twelve meters in diameter and contained 1024 qubits, each a two-dimensional electron cloud clamped between plates of gallium arsenide and cooled to just a femto-fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The qubits lined the sphere’s penultimate outer layer, and each one communicated, if that’s the right word, through braided world lines across a central vacuum to an entangled twin on the other side of the sphere. Entanglement meant the paired qubits duplicated each other’s quantum state. If one was changed or measured, the other would reflect that interference, no matter how far apart they were. They would be superposed.
Each electron cloud became a new variety of matter, known as an anyon, confirmation of the existence of which we were particularly proud. The qubits’ spooky vacuum jive would, we hoped, help make 8 Ball the most stable quantum computer yet.
But despite a promising beginning, 8 Ball refused to work as designed. Sampling its output caused a catastrophic early collapse of the program strings, which themselves seemed to have been turned into useless nonsense. That had forced us to take a radically new approach. It seemed very possible that if this effort failed, 8 Ball would soon join Mega and Mini as little more than another archaeological curiosity.
Tiflin had asked me to meet him at the warehouse to help check out the newest part of our installation. I was about to stoop to look underneath the black sphere when I noticed a small yellow piece of paper stuck to the rail—a Post-it Note. Other than me, nobody in the lab used Post-its, and I only used them in my office. I pulled up the note. Written on one side in my squared-off printing was, Don’t try to find me. I did not remember either writing this message or sticking it on the rail. Maybe I had simply forgotten. Maybe someone was messing with me and had put it there to screw with my day. There were plenty of smart-asses in our division capable of playing mind games. Work had been painfully difficult the last few weeks. Pressure on our entire team was intense.
I tried to think back and retrace my steps. Parking, walking, answering the absurdly personal questions, my little talk with Mr. Turing—
Plus the dizzy spell.
I had never written a note.
Outside the warehouse, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by feet on gravel. A key clicked in the outer lock. Tiflin entered the security cage and muttered his own answers to the cage’s questions. The inner gate opened. He seemed even more distracted than I was. As he approached 8 Ball, he patted all of his pockets—shirt, pants, leather jacket—as if he’d forgotten something.