Chris Jordan - Measure of Darkness

When we’re all seated, and the first wine course has been poured, boss lady makes an announcement. “Alice has your reports, and the events of the day have been duly noted. We won’t be discussing any specifics of the case over dinner, in deference to our special guest.”

We mutter assent. Obviously we don’t share the details of any case with any guest not specifically employed-and therefore vetted-by Naomi Nantz. This young gentleman has not only not been vetted, he apparently has an aversion to showers and shampoo, if the dandruff dust on his narrow shoulders is any indication.

All such derogatory and no doubt unfair thoughts vanish as soon as the kid opens his mouth. A character reevaluation is in order: Sherman has the deep, resonant voice of an old-time radio broadcaster, and that kind of confidence in his speaking ability.

“Allow me to apologize,” he begins. “I’ve spent the last four days sleeping on a friend’s couch in a damp basement. With a large German shepherd named Adolph. I left my own apartment without a change of clothes, or my own phone, and the term ‘sleep’ is an exaggeration because I haven’t really slept, not since Professor Keener died. Was killed is the more accurate term, I suppose, because I wouldn’t have had to run away if he’d just, you know, died of natural causes.”

Sherman pauses to take a sip of his wine. Unlike his voice, his smile is shy, unassuming.

“No doubt you’ll think I’m being paranoid-I think that myself, when I’m not being afraid-but Professor Keener warned me about them, the men who were out to get him, and once I saw them, I knew he was speaking the truth.”

“And what men would those be?” Naomi asks, by way of prompting him.

“The men who came through the lab the morning he was killed.”

“The lab at QuantaGate?” Jack asks.

“No, at MIT. Keener’s teaching lab. Where he keeps the electron gun.”

“Electron gun? Is that a weapon?”

Sherman smiles a little sadly. “I wish. No, Professor Keener used it in his lectures. There’s nothing special about an electron gun, anyone can buy one. Any school, I mean, they’re pretty expensive. The lab is where we keep all of the toys. The electron gun, a couple of lasers and the single-photon generators. It’s all gone. They took everything. He told me they’d be coming but I didn’t believe him.”

“Who came, Sherman, can you give us a description?”

He shrugs. “Dudes in uniform. Security guards from his company, they showed up after hours, when nobody was around but me. They marched into the lab and took everything there. Papers, files, personal computers. Seized for evidence, they said. They packed everything in boxes and took it away. And then one of them, this dude who acted like it was all very amusing, he comes up to me in the lab and he says they’ll be wanting to ask me a few questions, and that I’d better tell the truth or I’d end up in Gitmo, and nobody would ever know I was there. And I said I thought Gitmo was closed and he just laughed. That’s what really scared me, the way he laughed.”

“A security detail from QuantaGate,” Naomi tells us. “I checked with the university and also with Quanta Gate. Gama Guards security detail was dispatched to seize all computers and equipment associated with Keener’s research. Evidence was sealed and placed in the secure labs at QuantaGate, where it remains. Nobody is disputing Mr. Elliot’s version of events, except for the part about threatening him with rendition, which they say must have been a misunderstanding.”

“Not the FBI,” Jack says. “This was initiated by the company itself?”

Naomi nods. “Apparently by instruction of the Department of Defense. That’s yet to be confirmed, but it sounds right. They’d have been concerned the professor might have brought sensitive materials from the company lab to the university, and wanted to round it all up and keep it in one place, under lock and key.”

“Standard procedure, more or less,” Jack says. “Except I would have expected the FBI to be tasked, not corporate rent-a-cops.”

Sherman pipes up in his resonant voice. “That’s who he was afraid of, the professor. He said his own company was spying on him, that they didn’t believe him.”

“This is the interesting part,” says Naomi. “Go ahead. Tell us what he said.”

“They didn’t believe him about the research. That he’d got it wrong. It was never going to work, you see, because there’s no practical application for the theory, that’s what he discovered. Not now and maybe not ever.”

Jack puts down his glass of wine, a look of surprise passing over his handsome face. “You’re saying that whatever QuantaGate is trying to make for the Defense Department, it isn’t working?”

Sherman Elliot nods eagerly. “Exactly,” he says. “Professor Keener managed to pull off an experimental version in the lab, using paired photons over a long distance, but when it comes to a full stream of gated photons, which is what you need for real communication, there’s just no way. The method has an inherent flaw that simply can’t be overcome, without changing the laws of physics, and no one can do that, not even Joseph Keener.”

Jack puts up a hand, as if stopping traffic. “Hold on there, son. If you’re about to divulge secret information, we’d rather you didn’t. We’re not in the spy business here.”

Young Sherman smiles for the first time in our company, and it’s a rather splendid smile. Handsome, almost. “No worries, mate. Isn’t that what the Aussies say? Look, I’m a grad student at a university lab. I never worked for QuantaGate, I don’t have security clearance and everything I’m telling you has already been published. It’s out there. Except the part about it not working. Is that a top secret, if something doesn’t work?”

“Actually, it might be,” Jack says. “You already know about this part, right, Naomi?”

“I do,” she says. “The information is not confined to Mr. Elliot. It’s been a matter of open speculation on various scientific forums, dating back several months. Go ahead, Mr. Elliot, explain. As if you’re teaching not-very-bright students.”

“Really? Okay. Let me see. You guys know about binary computer language, right? Ones and zeros? When you boil it down to the basics, that’s how all software is written, in a string of ones and zeros. Dots and dashes is another way to think about it. No matter how complicated the message, it can be translated into dots and dashes, like in Morse code. Anyhow, the professor had this idea for a practical application, using quantum dots, a particular type of photon. That probably sounds complicated, but really it isn’t, not in concept. The laws of quantum physics predict that two photons that have interacted together are somehow bonded forever, by a phenomenon known as ‘entanglement.’ That means that if you observe one of the paired photons, the other photon will collapse into the same state as the first, no matter how far away it is.”

“Totally lost,” Jack says. “What’s a photon again? Is it like a little flashlight?”

Sherman begins to giggle. A deep giggle, but a giggle just the same. “Sure, why not?” he says. “Like a very small flashlight. The smallest flashlight that can possibly exist. A single quantum of light. Look, you don’t have to understand that part, all you have to know is that Keener’s Theorem predicts a way to use a stream of entangled photons to communicate over a long distance, without resorting to fiber optic cables, or satellites, or radio waves. According to the theorem, if you typed a message into a quantum computer here in this room, the identical message would appear in an identical quantum computer, a ‘paired’ computer, on the other side of the world. Or the other side of the universe, for that matter. In real time. There would be no possible way to intercept the message. No need for encoded messages or firewalls. Perfect, instantaneous communication that can never be hacked.”