Being the unnamed field medic, Scott stood a little taller and some of the day’s weariness fell away. His thoughts went to the USS Harry Truman, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier that was the heart of the strike group. Truman was a floating city: 1092 feet in length and 252 feet abeam, with about 6,000 crewmembers aboard. In addition to 90 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters aboard, Truman had three radar-guided 20 mm Gatling guns; two short-range anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapon system; and two infrared homing surface-to-air systems.
No doubt, USS Harry Truman could take care of herself, but the job of USS Bulkeley, USS Mason, USS Gettysburg, and USS San Jacinto was to ensure nothing and no one got close enough to cause any actual damage to the floating city. All four warships carried a standard complement of about 350 crewmembers.
While the destroyers were 509 feet long and 66 feet abeam, the cruisers were 567 feet long and 55 feet abeam. Like the aircraft carrier, all four warships had top speeds of 30 knots or more — the equivalent of 35 miles-per-hour — which was pretty impressive considering the warships had displacements of around 9200 long tons and even more impressive when the 103,900 long-ton displacement of the USS Harry Truman was considered.
USS Bulkeley and USS Mason were Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers that carried big guns and batteries of missile systems. USS Gettysburg and USS San Jacinto were Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers that carried so many big guns and missile systems of so many different classes that they were essentially floating armories.
Scott came back from his reverie when someone near the front of the room shouted, “And Lieutenant Ansely? What about Lieutenant Ansely?”
The Command Master Chief turned to face someone who was standing behind him in the hallway and he ushered the young ensign in so that she could speak. Her hospital blues were all the introduction she needed. “The injury sustained to the external carotid—”
“In English?” someone shouted.
The young ensign’s face reddened, but the room became pin-drop quiet under the weight of the Command Master Chief’s scowl.
“The injury sustained to the external carotid artery,” the young ensign repeated, running a hand down the right side of her neck to demonstrate. The ensign stopped, swallowed hard. She looked nervously to the Command Master Chief. The chief prodded her on with his eyes.
“The injury…” she began again, but apparently was unable to continue.
As the Command Master Chief walked the ensign out of the room, Scott raised both hands to his head. Ansely had seemed okay — wounded but okay. He could hear Ansely’s voice in his head, saying “Don’t bother. Blood’s not mine.” How in the world could Cooper with a sucking chest wound be alive though still in surgery while Ansely with a gouge on his neck be dead?
Scott couldn’t help himself when he blurted out, “Edie? Is Edie okay?”
The Command Master Chief turned on his heel. “Who?”
“The civilian female,” Scott said. “The civilian from the Sea Shepherd.”
“The civilian female?” the ensign asked. “She was D.O.A.”
D.O.A. Dead On Arrival. Scott’s world spun. He had to push back against the wall to keep from falling over.
Chapter 11
A few unexpected interruptions followed by staff meetings kept Dave from his desk for hours after he applied the update to the query engine. Although the updates were live and the systems were working, he had yet to perform his final checks and his shift was nearly over.
Using the native query language, he entered DIFF “BASE X: MEDSEA -24H” & TEST.LOG. This was a standard query to give him the difference between current live activity levels in the Med and those he’d logged earlier. The baseline results would tell him whether the query engine was working as expected.
Distracted by thoughts of his quantum tests, he turned to his second screen and opened the summary document containing the results from his D-Wave tests. A lot of people in Big Data were envious of him and his research opportunity. Classical computers had been around for decades but quantum computers were new and exotic. Those working with the D-Wave were working to answer the exciting questions of the day. What would happen when computers operated under quantum rules? Could quantum computing really work? How would it work?
Traditional computers worked with information in the form of bits. Each bit could only be either 1 or 0 at any given time. The same was true about any arbitrary collection of classical bits. It was the foundation of everything mankind knew about information theory and digital computing. It ensured that whenever you asked a classical computer a question, the computer proceeded in an orderly linear fashion to obtain an answer.
But the niobium computer chips in the D-Wave relied on quantum bits or qubits. Unlike traditional bits, which were always either 1 or 0, qubits used quantum superposition, which allowed them to be 1, 0, or 1 and 0 at the same time. Because they could exist in a superimposed state, it was almost as if qubits existed in a parallel universe, for a quantum bit could simultaneously exist as two equally probable possibilities. Not only was this exceptionally strange, but it was also incredible useful for performing powerful queries and analytics.
To be effective though, qubits needed to exhibit quantum behavior. They needed not just superstition but also entanglement, which linked the states of multiple qubits together.
The power of entangled qubits was in their exponential capability to perform calculations. Because one qubit could exist in two states at the same time, one qubit could perform two calculations at the same time. When qubits were entangled, two qubits could perform four simultaneous calculations; three qubits could perform eight; four qubits could perform sixteen; and so on. The chip he was working with could perform more simultaneous calculations than there were atoms in 3 billion quadrillion universes.
That kind of processing power simply wasn’t available to traditional supercomputers no matter how big they were made. Not only did the staggering possibilities have the traditional computing community in an uproar, it was also the reason the NSA’s Penetrating Hard Targets unit had invested over $200 million into quantum computing. But PHT wasn’t even close to developing anything as sophisticated at the niobium chip he was working with.
Big Data wanted access to this technology yesterday to start applying quantum-based solutions to the exabytes of information we were burying ourselves in every single day — genomes, search queries, phone records, financial transactions, social media posts, geological surveys, climate prediction data, engineering simulations, real-time global surveillance.
While the theories behind quantum computing were clear, the actual practice was a stark contrast. No one really knew what to do with quantum computers and those with access to the technology were trying to figure it all out. It was a solution looking for the right problems.
Thinking about all this, Dave was beyond excited when he started reviewing the quantum test results. His tests were designed to confirm a fundamental theory: that the niobium chips he was working with were ideally suited to solving discrete combinatorial optimization problems, which involved finding the shortest, quickest, cheapest or most efficient way of performing a given task. More specifically, whether that power could be tapped into if one simply phrased a given question correctly. If his research was proven true, it would mean that quantum computing was the Holy Grail of Big Data.
As he reached for his coffee, he glanced at the other screen, noting with some irritation that the dataset was still generating output. Even as he started typing again, his fingers stopped dead on the keys and then he stared at the screen where the results of his earlier query were displaying. Sure there was some kind of problem with the query engine updates, he chastised himself for letting himself get swept up in the usual meetings and distractions.