“You’ve already sampled the scint?” I asked Tiflin, wondering when it had been activated, and why he had asked me to meet him at the warehouse.
He nodded and dismissed my question with a wave of his hand.
Dieter looked sternly at us, then got up to scrawl matrices and factors and many strange, magical symbols on the whiteboard. He did not like to be interrupted. “A half-phase twist means we’re not dealing with loops, not even with knotted loops, but with Möebius loops.” He spoke that name with reverence. Möebius had astonished all of us when we were kids with his one-sided piece of paper—a simple half twist, run your finger around what appears to be a torus, and behold! Infinity.
“Oh, that,” said Mickle, resting his elbows on the table and putting his chin in his cupped hands.
“Four spatial tracks and two time tracks,” Dieter continued. “Our so-called thermal errors, maybe even the phase-flips, are really signals out of phase—essentially, signals that convey key functions in a program very much like our own. Functions we can parasitize and use for ourselves.”
“A program like our own?” Mickle asked, lifting his head.
“From the multiverse,” Dieter said.
“The multiverse?” Mickle seemed taken aback, and then amused. He chuckled and looked at Wong.
“More of Dieter’s mystical bullshit,” Wong said, rising to the bait. Wong was a dogmatic pragmatist, a surprisingly common type among quantum physicists. “All our crimes come back to haunt us.”
“There’s nothing mystical about any of this,” Tiflin insisted.
Dieter went on, unperturbed, “We need to feed these so-called errors back into our raw strings, to replace the parts of our strings that are riddled with errors. Whenever a Gödel number arises that is even vaguely well-formed, the loader will do a checksum, and if it finds congruence, insert an echoed string. For each so-called error, we’ll correct the phase, then load the recompiled numbers.”
“What the hell does that really mean?” Mickle asked. He was lost. I was also lost. “Evolving code, or succotash?”
“If we just reform and reload the strings, we’ll fill the bit bucket over and over,” Wong said. “And even if 8 Ball works once or twice, we’ll have no idea what it’s doing for millions of cycles, maybe not even then.”
“If we reload?” Tiflin asked with that patented savage grin—lip above canines.
“When,” Dieter said, his face firming to a fine resolve.
“Our problem isn’t too few cycles,” Tiflin insisted. “8 Ball can supply us with trillions upon trillions of cycles—however large the strings. It can supply us with every number that ever was, every string that ever was, every program that ever was—in our universe and at least a quadrillion quadrillion other universes.”
Mickle laid his head on the table.
“I keep telling everyone, the multiverse is bullshit,” Wong muttered.
Tiflin shrugged. “It’s a metaphor.” His face was turning shell pink, like a perfect titration in high school chemistry. And now, most dangerous of all, he dropped his voice into its lowest register. “Numbers and cycles aren’t the problem. Results and answers are the problem, and so far, having expended three hundred million dollars, none of our efforts has had more than primary school success.” He stared hard at Mickle and Wong. “We need to take a chance.”
“A really big chance,” Wong said.
“I hate genetic coding,” Mickle said.
“It’s not ‘genetic,’ and it’s not random. It’s topologically unexpected echoes,” Dieter said. “I call them topopotent recidivist code, or TRC.”
“Oh, brother,” Wong said.
I tried to find a cherry on top of this surprise pile of crap. With Tiflin, that was often my job. “You’re saying you’ll allow 8 Ball’s qubits to compute using mirror strings, alternate strings—strings written in no kind of code we’ve thought of, and never encountered before.”
“The code will almost certainly be familiar, Bose. Think of it as sampling from another spin around the loops—a true quantum echo,” Tiflin said.
“8 Ball will be taking advice from its own cousins,” Dieter said, then added, at Tiflin’s frown, “metaphorical cousins, of course.”
“Christ, zillions of 8 Balls,” Wong said.
“Who knows what sort of creativity is just waiting to be discovered out there?” Dieter waved at the ceiling, the walls—really, at everything around us.
Mickle made a raspberry sound and dropped his head again.
Looking at Tiflin and trying to read his expression, I realized that theory and desperation had finally trumped our own project manager. Despite Tiflin’s objections, Dieter—mystical and multiversed Dieter—was in charge of our quantum computer.
“What—or who—is going to judge and select the strings?” I asked. “We don’t want to do parsing in the QC. That’ll slow it to a crawl. 8 Ball isn’t made for that!”
Dieter raised his hand. “We already have a working subroutine to perform that function.”
“In Max or in 8 Ball?” I asked. We had named 8 Ball’s traditional interpreter—an interposed supercomputer—Max Headroom. Max used to be named Mike, from Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, until I pointed out that Mike vanished and was never heard from again.
Mickle had suggested Max.
“In Max, and then in 8 Ball,” Tiflin said. “We leave the rough parsing to Max and the large numbers to 8 Ball. They can be raw, even partly malformed, because we’ll grind through so many of them so quickly.”
“Max says it’s slick,” Dieter added stubbornly.
“Gentlemen, let’s face the truth. This is a done deal,” Mickle said. “We’ve finally jumped from the bridge into a deep, dark river of sloppy thinking. We’re screwed.” He took a long sip from a bottle of beige Soylent liquid, his frequent substitute for breakfast, lunch, and even dinner.
Tiflin said quietly, pointedly, “It’s done. We’re already loading.”
A long pause.
“A string infested with quantum errors we’ve spent most of our careers trying to weed out!” Wong exclaimed, making weak gestures of frustration and surrender. “I am flabbered. I am gasted.”
Emotions crossed Dieter’s hairy face like clouds over a prairie.
“Have a little faith,” Tiflin said, and leaned back in his chair. “If we’re wrong and this crashes 8 Ball over and over again, to be sure, we’re all screwed, but the fact is, minus results, the division is set to cut its losses and clean house. That’s why Cate called us together this morning. Results, or we get booted out of here.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Wong said.
Then the door clicked and Cate Riva entered, flashing a sunny expression and a big smile. “Good morning, all,” she said with a quick scan around the conference room. “Why so serious?”
“We’re loading new strings, recombined Gödel strings,” Tiflin said, with all the confidence he could fake.
“Wasn’t that the plan?” Cate asked innocently.
“We’re inserting the worst phase-flip errors back into the strings,” Wong said. We all wished he’d just keep quiet.
“Proof of pudding?” Cate asked, still standing. “Because despite my pleasant demeanor, I’m not here to listen to more bullshit.”
A brief silence.
“Take a seat,” Tiflin said. “We’re about to begin. Genius is in the air.”