"Uh, excuse me," I interrupted, not sure if it was okay to do so.
"Yes, Mr. Montana." Lieutenant Ames cocked her head and smiled. She looked surprisingly like the general when she was "trying to get Jim's goat" I noticed.
"Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but, did you mean to say the data information, uh . . . falls through there?" I leaned forward in my chair, bumping into Larry's leg. "Sorry," I whispered to him.
"That is what I said and that is what I meant to say." She paused for effect. "Now as I was . . ."
"Uh, excuse me, sorry, but what do you mean falls through?" I interrupted her again.
Lieutenant Ames turned to General Clemons, "Ma'am?"
General Clemons turned to Phillip. "Well, Phillip?"
"No!" he said.
"Hold on a minute," Dr. Daniels interjected. He turned to me. "Steven, right?"
I nodded.
"Listen, it's just a figure of speech we've been using. Skip it. Just assume the data goes through an I/O port there in the center of the cube, okay?" Daniels was trying to give me a hint.
"Anne Marie, please continue," General Clemons said, attempting to put the questions behind them quickly.
"Yes, ma'am. Uh let's see . . . yes, here we are. The RAM appears to be continuously changing and we believe that it's encrypted in more than machine code. Decryption never seems to take place as far as we can tell."
The big fat bald gentleman sitting in the back finally acted as though he was awake and that the last statement startled him.
"It's encrypted?"
"Yes, Senator. We believe that the data sequence here that is continuously changing is encrypted data." Anne Marie paused for his response.
"Jesus Christ Almighty! It could be a listening device. How do you know that those damned things aren't eavesdropping on us right now?" He seemed almost frightened and looked around the room as if to see somebody hidden there that he hadn't noticed before.
"Okay, okay," Phillip interrupted. "That's far enough for a second. Mr. Montana, would you mind stepping outside please? We will call you back in a bit when we can. Just wait outside." He nodded and an aide beside him led me to the door.
"Carrie, see that Mr. Montana here is taken care of please. We will call for him in a bit," the aide told the young lady at the desk outside the SCIF door.
"Sure thing, Bill," she said. The aide returned through the SCIF door back to brown-nose, uh, support his boss, and I was beginning to worry if my future was going with him. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked so many questions.
But, there was a senator in there? Who was this Phillip fellow and who were all of those people in there? The most intriguing thing was that emerald cube that had data "falling" through it and the ever-changing continuously encrypted data. And just what in the hell did the senator mean by "those damned things could be eavesdropping on us"? What damned things? I was beginning to think that not only was I falling deeper into the rabbit hole, but that I was on the other damn side of the planet from the looking glass as well.
I sat there in the reception area of the conference room, the SCIF, for some time and nobody came for me. After about an hour and a half I was getting nervous, anxious, and I was afraid I would get depressed if something didn't happen soon. Another hour later the door opened and the senator and his staffer came plowing through the lobby, signed out, and were out the door. But they jabbered the entire time.
"Bill, get me a meeting set up with the 'sissy' tomorrow. I don't care if they have to fly in from the far side of the Moon. I want them here tomorrow. I mean it. Senators you hear me, not staffers."
"Yes, Senator. I'll make sure of that."
"I'm here to tell you, Bill, this is bad news . . . bad news. I never believed the threat was this big. The general needs more men and money and by God she better get them for all our sakes!" They finished signing out of the SCIF and trailed off down the hallway still jabbering.
Fifteen minutes later Larry came and got me. "Okay, Steve, you can come in now, but son, please, for your own sake, just keep your mouth shut and only speak if you're asked a question. You with me on this?" He patted me on the shoulder and fiddled with his tie as he always does.
"Okay, Larry. Sorry, I hope I didn't cause problems."
"Only for yourself, son." He pressed his hand against my back and led me through the SCIF door.
"Mr. Montana, we appreciate you having patience with us today. Please be seated." Phillip nodded to a chair.
I tried to make myself comfortable.
Dr. Daniels was at the screen, "So anyway, we think the material these orange things are made of is something like lithium niobate and perhaps some KD star P in the I/O port portion in the center. The black bands between the gaps are probably some sort of an optical phenomenon, but without breaking the thing open there is little way to tell. And, of course, we wouldn't want to do that, even if we knew how. The main part of the cube—well, all of our spectral analyses suggest no particularly known compound or substance, although it is possible that we are having problems making the measurements because of the quantum phenomena inside the cube."
"And go ahead and tell us your wife's theory, Jim," General Clemons said.
"Okay, 'Becca believes that the reason we can't find any particular spectra for the materials this thing is made of is because there is a fairly significant expansion of spacetime within the cube. And, worse than that, the expansion is not linear but following some polynomial expansion in the radial dimension from the center. Therefore, there would be no standard fluorescence spectra for any particular substance due to the nonlinear gravity red, uh, blue shifting inside the thing."
I couldn't resist. "What do you mean an expansion of spacetime inside the thing and why would a computer have such a thing in it?" Larry elbowed me in the ribs. I ignored him.
"Good question, Steven. Have you ever seen the ancient television show called Dr. Who?" he asked me.
"Never heard of it."
"Oh well, okay. Have you ever read any science fiction books by a fellow named Robert Heinlein?"
"Which one?" I returned the elbow back to Larry's ribs.
"It was the one where the little guy carried a pack around that was infinitely big on the inside, uh, what was that one called . . . oh man, would Anson ever kill me if he knew I couldn't remember that. . . ."
"Glory Road!" replied Larry, Lieutenant Ames, Bill the support contractor, and General Clemons all together.
"Ah yes, Glory Road is the one. Well, this guy had a backpack that was the size of a backpack on the outside, but the inside was large enough to place all sorts of weapons, food, medical supplies, tables and chairs, you name it. Now what if we could create a RAM chip that is expanded like that on the inside. I mean, if the RAM was the size of a normal memory chip on the outside but was huge on the inside. Wouldn't that allow you to store much more data on the inside than a normal chip? Wouldn't that be cool?" He paused for air.
I had to admit two things: one) that would be cool and two) I hadn't read Glory Road yet. I had given Larry an unwarranted elbow to the ribs, but I would rectify that sometime tonight. He never did tell me what Dr. Who had to do with it.
Not long after this conversation we were pretty much brain fried. All of the technology of this "cube" was way advanced and almost magical. It was obvious that these people were reverse engineering it, but then, who had built it? Did we steal it from the Russians or the Chinese? They would be the most likely candidates, but expansions in spacetime seemed too fantastic. And the biggest problem I had with this thing all day was the fact that there was only one major QCCPU. Where was its connected twin, its entangled counterpart? The board I'd worked on had to have two QCCPUs to function; it only makes sense. One fax machine just doesn't do, there must be another one . . . somewhere.