Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Surf beat around them. Li walked beside Sharifi on a narrow slip of starlit sand between two boundless oceans. Stars shone overhead in a bright, clear sky that no unprotected human being had seen for over two centuries.

“This,” Sharifi said, “is the Great Barrier Reef. It is, or was, the largest single life-form on pre-Migration Earth.”

She walked out into the surf, beckoning for Li to follow, and Li saw that she and Sharifi were both wearing wet suits and diving gear. They dove, passing swiftly though the surf and into the quiet water below. Sharifi brushed by Li on the way down, bare thigh against bare thigh, and Li wondered just how personal this program was designed to get. They came to rest in still, bright water half a dozen meters below the surface. A coral reef ran away like a broad road on either side of them.

It was night; the reef was active. Technicolor fish slipped around and through it. The coral itself waved a million glowing arms below them. As Sharifi guided Li along the great wall of the reef, a realtime story unfolded before them. The coral grew, hunted, colonized new territory. Li saw that the entire reef was a single organism, a single primitive mind.

Then she saw humans come, and with them shipping lanes, motorboats, oil spills, chemical contamination. The reef sickened, shrank, died long before anyone unlocked its secrets or plumbed the immense colonial mind’s inner workings.

The water glowed and shifted. Suddenly Li was floating not in water but in featureless darkness.

“The Great Barrier Reef is gone,” Sharifi said. “Anything we could have learned from it is lost forever. However, when humanity moved out into the galaxy, we discovered another colonial organism. One built on an even larger scale. The Bose-Einstein strata of Compson’s World.”

Light seeped into the world, and Li saw an immense, glassy honeycomb structure stretching around and above her.

“This is what a typical Bose-Einstein deposit would look like if you removed the coal and rock surrounding it,” Sharifi told her. “The condensates draw energy from the surrounding coal. We don’t understand how they function, or how their constituent strata communicate with each other. Nonetheless, each deposit appears to form a single colonial organism. Each Bose-Einstein bed is, in effect, an immense, landlocked coral reef, growing in an ocean of coal and rock.”

The stratum faded, and the lab reappeared around them.

“Bose-Einstein strata are too different from terrestrial carbon-based life for us to draw any direct conclusions,” Sharifi said. “Still, the analogy is a fruitful one. The strata display many of the characteristics of a primitive colonial intelligence. Stimuli pass from one segment of each stratum to other segments. More intriguing, several experiments have established that the condensates pass interstratal as well as intrastratal messages by quantum replication, leading to the supposition that all of Compson’s strata may have originated in a single organism, and that the ability of their component condensate beds to maintain pure entanglement supplies with only minimal decoherence is an evolved survival trait. Whatever the explanation, it is this organism that we need to understand in order to culture live condensate.

“We are now a century into the quantum era, but despite all our advances, we are primitives. We use condensates, but we don’t control them, don’t understand them. In quantum terms, we are little better than prehistoric cave dwellers who nourish a lightning-sparked flame, knowing they lack the power to rekindle it. I am asking you to help us step into a new era—an era in which we will take control of this extraordinary resource, understand it, master it, use it to unite our species as we have not been united since the Evacuation.”

Sharifi moved in to close the sale. She started talking practical applications, patents, proprietary data. She alluded to the potential profits without ever quite putting hard numbers to them. This was sexy science, buffed, polished, and carefully wrapped for consumption by corporate donors.

“Any questions?” Sharifi asked after the wrap-up.

“Yes.” Li kept her voice deliberately flat. “How the hell did you convince the Secretariat to waive the Zahn Act restrictions and clear a genetic to work on this project?”

Sharifi blinked and stiffened, looking genuinely insulted. “Forgive me,” she said coolly. She sounded as if she were working hard to stay polite. “I can’t say that’s a question I expected. We have of course obtained all the necessary TechComm clearances. However, if you have concerns about security issues, I can refer you to the appropriate officials.”

The program was good. Sharifi had laid out the money to get an AI with enough power and personality to sell the simulation. She must have needed big money, and needed it fast. And she’d gotten it, or she’d never have made it to Compson’s in the first place.

“What do you think?” Li asked two hours later, sitting at an outdoor table just off the Calle Mexico.

Cohen shrugged—a shrug that Li felt in the numbers even as she saw it. “I think Sharifi needed money. Badly.”

He had put on a ’face for the meeting that Li imagined he thought was inconspicuous. But of course Cohen’s idea of inconspicuous was a few spins off-norm by most people’s standards, and half the singles in the place had been glancing surreptitiously at their table for the last ten minutes.

“And how much of the sell do you buy?” Li asked.

Cohen grinned. “Not a word of it.”

“You think there’s a sideline? Some other way she was making money off it?”

“Not money. It would never have been about money. You have to understand, Sharifi wasn’t an experimental physicist. She was all about theory, structure. Metaphysics for want of a better word. She wouldn’t have gone to Compson’s World, wouldn’t have raised money and jumped through hoops for anything that was merely technical. She hunted big game. And whatever she was after down there, it was about a hell of a lot more than just making space travel cheaper for the average monkey.”

“Which still leaves us with the question of what exactly she was after.”

“My guess?” Cohen crossed long legs and Li glanced away as his shorts rode up to bare a breathtaking stretch of thigh. “I think it had something to do with mapping interference patterns.”

“Meaning?”

“Ah!” He leaned forward, showing the kind of enthusiasm that usually meant he was about to talk math to her. “Interference patterns are the riddle that kicked off the whole enterprise of quantum physics. Basically, we’re talking about the two-slit experiment.”

“Oh,” Li said as her oracle summoned up a long-forgotten picture from an introductory physics textbook. “The thing where you put one photon through a screen and it interferes with itself, right? And then you get to watch the physicists jump up and down and argue about whether it’s a wave or a particle. Or both. Or neither. I never really saw what that had to do with Sharifi, though.”

“That’s where Coherence Theory comes in. How much do you know about it?”

Li shrugged. “You mean like the Everett-Sharifi Equations, the Coherent Worlds Theorem, that stuff?”

“Exactly. And like Sharifi said in her sales pitch, the answer was in our past, on Earth. It goes all the way back to the twentieth century in fact. To an American named Hugh Everett, who studied the wave theory of quantum mechanics and came up with this crazy idea that there was nothing theoretical about quantum mechanical wave functions at all. That they were actual manifestations of multiple worlds, multiple possible histories. In short, that the mathematical formalism of wave mechanics—and this is the part Hannah really loved, of course—that the mathematical form itself gave us the key to understanding the nature of the physical universe.