Cate smiled again, all sunlight and cheer—but behind her brown eyes, all tiger.
Tiflin instructed the screen to drop and the data in the ceiling projector to show 8 Ball’s and Max’s interposed display. “Here we go,” he said, betting the bank—betting our bank.
This was going to be my Waterloo. I could smell it.
Dieter sent the instructions to Max. “First strings are loaded,” he announced.
“What scale?” Cate asked.
“All qubits,” Dieter said. “Two to the one thousand and twenty-fourth power.”
Tiflin looked at me. I looked at Cate. She watched the display.
Programming in a QC consists of designing and controlling how the qubits are entangled—essentially, the topological nature of the braids—and then maintaining or collapsing those entangled states, opening gates from which we could presumably receive our answers. Once set in motion, a quantum computer is autonomous—the program either fails or succeeds. A QC cannot be debugged while it is working. The program cannot be halted or even completely understood while the QC is busy. Only if the results are interesting and useful can we hope that what we did was a success. And they must also be fast.
The display twinkled over our heads. And what do you know?
We got back numbers—long strings of integers, flanked by Max’s instant scorecard analysis. 8 Ball was delivering a select list of exceedingly large primes—the kind of unique and difficult primes used to encode high-level passwords. The kind that could break banks and even worry Uncle Sam.
“Wow,” Cate said. “These are real? You haven’t suckered Max?”
“No suckers here,” Tiflin said, leaning back deeper into the shadows.
8 Ball didn’t choke or even sneeze. For the first time, our newest QC was cooking.
And it was fast.
“Next up,” Tiflin said, as Dieter’s fingers flew over the keyboard, “the complete Icelandic chromosome database for mutations in BRCA 1 and 2 over the last forty years.”
And that worked, too. Our evolving machine had analyzed and understood contemporary human evolution, at least in two important oncogenes.
“The third problem is very big,” Dieter said. “We’re collating the proof of the classification of the theorem of finite simple groups. It’s known as the Enormous Theorem. Tens of thousand of pages of proofs, scattered in several hundred journals, all loaded into Gödel strings, cross-referenced, and logically filtered. The QC should find any contradictions. We’ll get results in four or five minutes.”
“That alone should get us a Fields Medal,” Tiflin said.
Cate reached out to pat Tiflin’s shoulder. “Let me know how that turns out,” she said. “Good work, gentlemen. I’ve seen enough for now.” She stood and left the room.
Inside the hour, the Enormous Theorem was proven consistent, our contracts were extended, and our funding was renewed.
That evening, I went home to the square gray stone and steel apartment where my wife and I had lived for nine months. She had just returned from Beijing and a conference on newer, more inclusive versions of Unicode. We spent our first evening together in three weeks, beginning with sushi from our favorite restaurant and progressing to brandy and cigars—a sin we allowed ourselves every few months.
Then we exercised our marital prerogatives. I managed almost to forget both our team’s troubles and successes. I could not tell her about any of them. Cate would decide how and when to release the story.
Why couldn’t I just accept the fact that Tiflin had triumphed? Cate had messaged Tiflin at the end of the day that maybe we could support doubling the number of qubits. 8 Ball was designed to be scalable, wasn’t it?
My wife rolled over on the flannel sheets and asked, “Do you have a sister?”
She knew I had only brothers, all in India.
“There was this woman in Beijing who looked exactly like you,” she said, “only pretty. Same color skin, same hair. She came up to me and asked how you were doing.”
“And?”
“I said you were fine. She knew your name. She knew where you worked. She touched my cheek with the back of her hand and smiled, the way you used to do. And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you!” She grinned, raised herself over me, and twirled her finger on my chest. “It gave me a thrill—perverse, you know? Like if I went to bed with her, it wouldn’t be cheating on you. And not just because of the girl-girl thing. Does that make any sense? I’ve never seen anything like it, Bose. Are you cloning people now?”
I said we most certainly were not cloning people and hugged her, mostly to shut her up.
“Right,” she said. “You’d have to have been cloned forty-one years ago. How about a transporter malfunction?”
We laughed, but the thought made me both queasy and a little horny—so many bells being rung on my nerd pinball machine, after such a complicated and important day.
A few hours later, I showered, got dressed, and walked into my home office to look over the new morning’s schedule. I found another Post-it Note stuck to my rosewood desktop. This one, again in my distinctive print style, read,
Check out the Pepsi supply.
I looked around the small room. My armpits were soaking. We needed to reset our security system.
And I needed another shower.
Coming into our building, I avoided the soft drink coolers, just because looking, checking, would be utterly ridiculous.
Gina made the rounds of our glassed-in cubicles, delivering a basket of fruit and wine to each of us with compliments from Cate and our CEO as well. Later that day came a message of congratulations signed by the company’s founder. Cate wasn’t wasting time. The news was now global—we had the first successful, large-scale quantum computer, and it was already making major advancements in math and physics.
We were historic.
Two days later, after our staff meeting and our third round of press interviews, I took another morning drive to the perimeter warehouse, trying to silence my inner alarms. I whistled aimlessly, hopelessly tangled in wondering what I would look like as a female. Weird encounter, I thought. But just how weird? And how connected to the spate of anonymous Post-it Notes?
No one had been at the warehouse since Tiflin and I last visited. Cate had put it in lockdown to all but team members, not to jinx success by letting in the press—hot bodies and electronic interference.
Security grudgingly allowed me back in. The counter on the display by the cage read 8. That, of course, had to be wrong. Eight meant I had visited the site four times since Tiflin and I had last gone through. I wondered if we could get access to the security tapes. There might be imposters on the campus, right? But really, I did not want to know.
Everything in the warehouse looked fine. I was supposed to be happy, but none of this felt right. I could not help but think that some day, despite our success, the cage would refuse to open and I’d know my time in the division was over—best to light out for the territories and find smarter people elsewhere.
Why didn’t Tiflin call another meeting to plan the next cycles?
I turned away from 8 Ball and experienced another dizzy spell—too many Boses in one body. And what the hell did that mean?
When I got out to the parking lot and my VW, I saw a sheet of paper in the passenger seat. In the upper right corner, a lab intranet library reference announced these were scint results from the last week, and below that was a graphic representation of 8 Ball’s inner vacuum.