“I lied,” I said, taking the paper from him. “And you caught me. We made the world’s first quantum lie detector — a divination tool made of light.” I looked at the paper. The interference pattern lay in dark bands across the white surface. “Some mathematicians say there is either no such thing as free will, or the world is a simulation. Which do you think is true?”
“Those are our choices?”
I crushed the paper into a ball. Something slid away inside of me; a subtle change, and I opened my mouth to speak but what came out was different from what I intended.
I told Satish about the breakdown, and the drinking, and the hospital. I told him about the eyes in the mirror, and what I said to myself in the morning.
I told him about the smooth, steel “erase” button I put against my head — a single curl of an index finger to pay for everything.
Satish nodded while he listened, the smile wiped clean from his face. When I finished speaking, Satish put his hand on my shoulder. “So then you are crazy after all, my friend.”
“It’s been thirteen days now,” I told him. “Thirteen days sober.”
“Is that good?”
“No, but it’s longer than I’ve gone in two years.”
We ran the experiment. We printed the results.
If we looked at the detector results, the screen showed the particle pattern. If we didn’t, it showed an interference pattern.
We worked through most of the night. Near morning, sitting in the semidarkness of the lab, Satish spoke. “There once was a frog who lived in a well,” he said.
I watched his face as he told the story.
Satish continued. “One day a farmer lowered a bucket into the well, and the frog was pulled up to the surface. The frog blinked in the bright sun, seeing it for the first time. ‘Who are you?’ the frog asked the farmer.
“The farmer was amazed. He said, ‘I am the owner of this farm.’
“‘You call your world farm?’ the frog asked.
“‘No, this is not a different world,’ the farmer said. ‘This is the same world.’
“The frog laughed at the farmer. He said, ‘I have swum to every corner of my world. North, south, east, west. I am telling you, this is a different world.’ ”
I looked at Satish and said nothing.
“You and I,” Satish said. “We are still in the well.” He closed his eyes. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“You do not want to drink?”
“No.”
“I am curious, what you said with the gun, that you’d shoot yourself if you drank…”
“Yeah.”
“You did not drink on those days you said that?”
“No.”
Satish paused as if considering his words carefully. “Then why did you not just say that everyday?”
“That is simple,” I said. “Because then I’d be dead now.”
Later, after Satish had gone home, I ran the experiment one final time. Hit “print.” I put the results in two envelopes without looking at them. On the first envelope, I wrote the words “detector results.” On the second, I wrote “screen results.”
I drove to the hotel. I took off my clothes. Stood naked in front of the mirror.
I put the enveloped marked “detector results” up to my forehead. “I will never look at this,” I said. “Not ever, unless I start drinking again.” I stared in the mirror. I stared at my own gray eyes and saw that I meant it.
I glanced down at the other envelope. The one with the screen results. My hands shook.
I laid the envelope on the desk, stared at it. Keats said, Beauty is truth, truth beauty. What was the truth? Will I drink again? The envelopes knew.
One day, I would either open the detector results, or I wouldn’t.
Inside the other envelope there was either an interference pattern, or there wasn’t. A “yes” or a “no.” The answer was in there. It was already in there.
I waited in Satish’s office until he arrived in the morning. He put his briefcase on his desk. He looked at me, at the clock, then back at me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Waiting for you.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since 4:30.”
He glanced around the room. I leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind my head.
Satish just watched me. Satish was bright. He waited.
“Can you rig the detector to an indicator light?” I asked him.
“How do you mean?”
“Can you set it up so that the light goes off when the detector picks up an electron at the slit?”
“It shouldn’t be hard. Why?”
“Let’s define, exactly, the indeterminate system.”
Point Machine watched the test. He studied the interference pattern. “You’re looking at one-half the wave particle duality of light,” I said.
“What’s the other half look like?”
I turned the detectors on. The banded pattern diverged into two distinct clumps on the screen.
“This.”
“Oh,” Point Machine said.
Standing in Point Machine’s lab. Frogs swimming.
“They’re aware of light, right?” I asked.
“They do have eyes.”
“But, I mean, they’re aware of it?”
“Yeah, they respond to visual stimuli. They’re hunters. They have to see to hunt.”
“But I mean, aware?”
“What did you do before here?”
“Quantum research.”
“I know that,” Point Machine said. “But what did you do?”
I tried to shrug him off. “There were a range of projects. Solid state photonic devices, Fourier transforms, liquid NMR.”
“Fourier transforms?”
“They’re complex equations that can be used to translate visual imagery into the language of wave forms.”
Point Machine looked at me, dark eyes tightening. He said again, very slowly, enunciating each word, “What did you do, exactly?”
“Computers,” I said. “We were trying to build a computer. Quantum encryption processing extending up to twelve qubits. We used the Fourier transforms to remodel information into waves and back again.”
“Did it work?”
“Kind of. We reached a twelve-coherence state then used nuclear magnetic resonance to decode.”
“Why only ‘kind of? So then it didn’t work?”
“No, it worked, it definitely worked. Even when it was turned off.” I looked at him. “Kind of.”
It took Satish two days to rig up the light.
Point Machine brought the frogs in on a Saturday. We separated the healthy from the sick, the healthy from the monsters. “What is wrong with them?” I asked.
“The more complex a system, the more ways it can go wrong.”
Joy was next door, working in her lab. She heard our voices and stepped into the hall.
“You work weekends?” Satish asked her.
“It’s quieter,” Joy said. “I do my more sensitive tests when there’s nobody here. What about you? So you’re all partners now?”
“Eric has the big hands on this project,” Satish said. “My hands are small.”
“What are you working on?” she asked. She followed Satish into the lab.
He shot me a look, and I nodded.
So Satish explained it the way only Satish could.
“Oh,” she said. She blinked. She stayed.
We used Point Machine as a control. “We’re going to do this in real-time,” I told him. “No record at the detectors, just the indicator light. When I tell you, stand there and watch for the light. If the light comes on, it means the detectors picked up the electron. Understand?”