Vernor Vinge: The Cookie Monster

Dixie Mae thought for a second. "Victor really didn’t want us to get this far. Maybe–" Maybe, somehow, we can make a difference.

They passed a cross corridor, then a second one. A half-opened door showed them an apparent dormitory room. Fresh bedding sat neatly folded on a mattress. Somebody was just moving in?

Ahead there was another doorway, and from it they could hear voices, argument. They crept along, not even whispering.

The voices were making words: "–is a year enough time, Rob?"

The other speaker sounded angry. "Well, it’s got to be. After that, Gerry is out of money and I’m out of time."

The Ellens waved Dixie Mae back as she started for the door. Maybe they wanted to eavesdrop for a while. But how long do we have before time ends? Dixie Mae brushed past them and walked into the room.

There were two guys there, one sitting by an ordinary data display.

"Jesus! Who are you?"

"Dixie Mae Leigh." As you must certainly know.

The one sitting by the terminal gave her a broad grin, "Rob, I thought we were isolated?"

"That’s what Gerry said." This one–Rob Lusk?–looked to be in his late twenties. He was tall and thin and had kind of a desperate look to him. "Okay, Miss Leigh. What are you here for?"

"That’s what you’re going to tell me, Rob." Dixie Mae pulled the email from her pocket and waived the tattered scrap of paper in his face. "I want some explanations!"

Rob’s expression clouded over, a no-one-tells-me-what-to-do look.

Dixie Mae glared back at him. Rob Lusk was a mite too big to punch out, but she was heating up to it.

The twins chose that moment to make their entrance. "Hi there," one of them said cheerily.

Lusk’s eyes flickered from one to the other and then to the NSA ID badge. "Hello. I’ve seen you around the department. You’re Ellen, um, Gomez?"

"Garcia," corrected NSA Ellen. "Yup. That’s me." She patted grader Ellen on the shoulder. "This is my sister, Sonya." She glanced at Dixie Mae. Play along, her eyes seemed to say. "Gerry sent us."

"He did?" The fellow by the computer display was grinning even more. "See, I told you, Rob. Gerry can be brutal, but he’d never leave us without assistants for a whole year. Welcome, girls!"

"Shut up, Danny." Rob looked at them hopefully, but unlike Danny-boy, he seemed quite serious.

"Gerry told you this will be a year-long project?"

The three of them nodded.

"We’ve got plenty of bunk rooms, and separate ... um, facilities." He sounded ... Lord, he sounded embarrassed. "What are your specialties?"

The token holder said, "Sonya and I are second-year grads, working on cognitive patterning."

Some of the hope drained from Rob’s expression. "I know that’s Gerry’s big thing, but we’re mostly doing hardware here." He looked at Dixie Mae.

"I’m into–" go for it "–Bose condensates." Well, she knew how to pronounce the words.

There were worried looks from the Ellens. But one of them piped up with, "She’s on Satya’s team at Georgia Tech."

It was wonderful what the smile did to Rob’s face. His angry expression of a minute before was transformed into the look of a happy little boy on his way to Disneyland. "Really? I can’t tell you what this means to us! I knew it had to be someone like Satya behind the new formulations.

Were you in on that?"

"Oh, yeah. Some of it, anyway." Dixie Mae figured that she couldn’t say more than twenty words without blowing it. But what the heck–how many more minutes did the masquerade have to last, anyway? Little Victor and his self-terminating thread ...

"That’s great. We don’t have budget for real equipment here, just simulators–"

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Ellens exchange a fer sure look.

"–so anyone who can explain the theory to me will be so welcome. I can’t imagine how Satya managed to do so much, so fast, and without us knowing."

"Well, I’d be happy to explain everything I know about it."

Rob waved Danny-boy away from the data display. "Sit down, sit down. I’ve got so many questions!"

Dixie Mae sauntered over to the desk and plunked herself down. For maybe thirty seconds, this guy would think she was brilliant.

The Ellens circled in to save her. "Actually, I’d like to know more about who we’re working with," one of them said.

Rob looked up, distracted, but Danny was more than happy to do some intros. "It’s just the two of us. You already know Rob Lusk. I’m Dan Eastland." He reached around, genially shaking hands. "I’m not from UCLA. I work for LotsaTech, in quantum chemistry. But you know Gerry Reich. He’s got pull everywhere–and I don’t mind being shanghaied for a year. I need to, um, stay out of sight for a while."

"Oh!" Dixie Mae had read about this guy in Newsweek. And it had nothing to do with chemistry. "But you’re–" Dead. Not a good sign at all, at all.

Danny didn’t notice her distraction. "Rob’s the guy with the real problem. Ever since I can remember, Gerry has used Rob as his personal hardware research department. Hey, I’m sorry, Rob.

You know it’s true."

Lusk waved him away. "Yes! So tell them how you’re an even bigger fool!" He really wanted to get back to grilling Dixie Mae.

Danny shrugged. "But now, Rob is just one year short of hitting his seven year limit. Do you have that at Georgia Tech, Dixie Mae? If you haven’t completed the doctorate in seven years, you get kicked out?"

"No, can’t say as I’ve heard of that."

"Give thanks then, because since 2006, it’s been an unbendable rule at UCLA. So when Gerry told Rob about this secret hardware contract he’s got with LotsaTech–and promised that Ph.D. in return for some new results–Rob jumped right in."

"Yeah, Danny. But he never told me how far Satya had gone. If I can’t figure this stuff out, I’m screwed. Now let me talk to Dixie Mae!" He bent over the keyboard and brought up the most beautiful screen saver. Then Dixie Mae noticed little numbers in the colored contours and realized that maybe this was what she was supposed to be an expert on. Rob said, "I have plenty of documentation, Dixie Mae–too much. If you can just give me an idea how you scaled up the coherence." He waved at the picture. "That’s almost a thousand liters of condensate, a trillion effective qubits. Even more fantastic, your group can keep it coherent for almost fifty seconds at a time."

NSA Ellen gave a whistle of pretended surprise. "Wow. What use could you have for all that power?"

Danny pointed at Ellen’s badge. "You’re the NSA wonk, Ellen, what do you think? Crypto, the final frontier of supercomputing! With even the weakest form of the Schor-Gershenfeld algorithm, Gerry can crack a ten kilobyte key in less than a millisecond. And I’ll bet that’s why he can’t spare us any time on the real equipment. Night and day he’s breaking keys and sucking in government money."

Grader Ellen–Sonya, that is–puckered up a naive expression. "What more does Gerry want?"

Danny spread his hands. "Some of it we don’t even understand yet. Some of it is about what you’d expect: He wants a thousand thousand times more of everything. He wants to scale the operation by qulink so he can run arrays of thousand-liter bottles."

"And we’ve got just a year to improve on your results, Dixie Mae. But your solution is years ahead of the state of the art." Rob was pleading.

Danny’s glib impress-the-girls manner faltered. For an instant, he looked a little sad and embarrassed. "We’ll get something, Rob. Don’t worry."

"So, how long have you been here, Rob?" said Dixie Mae.

He looked up, maybe surprised by the tone of her voice.

"We just started. This is our first day."

Ah yes, that famous first day. In her twenty-four years, Dixie Mae had occasionally wondered whether there could be rage more intense than the red haze she saw when she started breaking things. Until today, she had never known. But yes, beyond the berserker-breaker there was something else. She did not sweep the display off the table, or bury her fist in anyone’s face.