Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

Outside the warehouse, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by feet on gravel. A key clicked in the outer lock. Tiflin entered the security cage and muttered his own answers to the cage’s questions. The inner gate opened. He seemed even more distracted than I was. As he approached 8 Ball, he patted all of his pockets – shirt, pants, leather jacket – as if he’d forgotten something.

I crumpled the Post-it into a ball and hid it in my pants pocket.

When Tiflin came within a few steps, he glanced up at me, startled, and stopped patting, head cocked like a cat considering where to lick next. He broke that off with a long wink, meant to reassure me that Dr. Hugh Tiflin was indeed still in the building, then smoothed his hands down his coat.

At forty-two, Tiflin was a slender man whose upper torso was taller than average and whose legs were shorter. His neck was pale and swanlike, with distinct cords and veins that revealed frequent changes of emotion. His head was large and well-formed, with a chiseled chin and handsome eagle nose, topped by ebullient wavy brown hair. He wore a signature quilted black leather jacket over a cotton shirt, usually green or pink – green today – tucked into cotton-duck hiking pants. His running shoes were cheap and gray. He replaced them every two or three weeks, but somehow they always looked dirty. He was eldest in our team – older than me by a year. He was a genius, of course, or I’d never have worked with him.

“Good morning, Bose. How’s the scint?” he asked.

Four weeks ago, he had decided to eavesdrop on the qubits’ secret communications using a scintillation detector scavenged from a defense division CubeSat. The detector had originally been designed to monitor radiation from orbit over Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan. Tiflin had personally tuned the device to detect disturbances in 8 Ball’s vacuum – bursts of virtual radiation provoked by the passage of our qubits’ entangled photons. New stuff, amazing stuff. Who knew that a vacuum could act like a cloud chamber in a science museum? Tiflin knew – or knew people who knew. That’s why he was Tiflin.

I stooped again to peer at 8 Ball’s lower belly. A wide concrete platform between the main supports – the fins – steadied a stainless steel tube that poked up through 8 Ball’s shell and deep into its central vacuum. “Rudely intrusive,” I said.

Tiflin chuckled. “Right up the ass. We need to wake up this beast.” He looked for himself. “Seems good,” he said, sucking on his cheeks. “Should help us track our progress.” He rose, gripped the rail with both hands, and looked on 8 Ball with pique mixed with adoration. I understood completely. I, too, regarded the black sphere with both love and dread. 8 Ball was beyond doubt the strangest human construct on Earth, and if Tiflin’s plans were all that he hinted, it was about to go through a sea change of procedure and programming.

“We’re due to meet with Cate in thirty minutes,” he said, again patting his pockets. Was he looking for his phone? A pen? A lighter? “Dieter’s got the strings ready to load. Need a ride?”

I didn’t, but the VW could wait. Tiflin and I needed time to reintegrate our states, to normalize . He sounded reasonably cheerful, but I knew the stress he was under. For a year, tough minds whose job it was to decide which funds should go where had been circling our project like sharks. They were far from convinced 8 Ball was in the division’s best interests. Other groups, however, were still making plans that assumed our success. Both were pressing hard on Tiflin.

The absurd level of continuing, tooth-grinding investment showed how sexy the whole idea of quantum computing was, and how much everyone wanted to completely overturn the world’s security, expose all its secrets, and find deep answers to life’s simple questions before our enemies did – or at least before our competitors in Mumbai or Beijing.

But we had yet to run a long-term, successful session. We seemed to be always smoothing the course, pulling out obstacles – preparing over and over for the first big test. We both knew that could not continue.

Tiflin drove his Tesla back toward our offices with a look of fascinated fury, like a child behind the wheel of a bumper car. I clung to the armrests as we squealed into the concrete garage beside Building 10.

“Today will change everything,” he said, climbing out of the bucket seat. “Today will be 8 Ball’s first birthday.” He smiled his feral smile, upper lip rising over prominent canines. He was looking to see if I shared his conviction, if I would offer my full support.

That’s why I was here.

“We should bring a cake!” I said.

OUR FIVE QUANTUM computing team members gathered in a small conference room for the first time in weeks. Tiflin fussed with the ceiling-mounted projector. The rest of us sat around the oval table, slumped or yawning, picking our fingernails, studying our cell phones before the cage was locked – hardly a picture of joy.

Cate Riva, director of research, overseeing the entire division, had asked for this get-together the day before. It was crunch time for the entire project – and for everyone on the team.

Facilitator and event coordinator Gina Marsh, small, slender, red-haired and blue-eyed, had just made sure we were all present, that we were who we said we were, that our security profiles were up to date – and that we all looked reasonably clean.

“Cate will be here in a few minutes,” Tiflin said. The others looked his way with heavy-lidded eyes. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

At Tiflin’s nod, chief of software Dieter Langmeier – tall, bald, bushybearded, and a certifiable genius at both systems design and higher-level mathematics – took over. “We’re loading new strings,” he began. “Gödel strings as before, but we’re going to drastically resample the braids. I’ve adjusted the strings to reflect a new understanding.”

“The braids are fine – it’s the processing that’s hanging us,” insisted Wong Poh Kam, senior physicist. Wong was mid-twenties, six feet tall, and slightly stooped, with small, intense eyes on the outer margins of a broad face. “The strings are too damned long.”

“The whole mess is too big,” said Byron Mickle, chief design engineer. Mickle was stocky, big-shouldered, five feet six, with a pleasant, moon-pale face. He dressed and looked like a plumber, and reliably insisted at each meeting that we should have been able to run Mega and Mini for years without exceeding their theoretical capacity. 8 Ball, to Mickle, was grossly excessive.

“Braids, strings, loops, knots – nothing I hear in this room ever makes sense,” Gina said.

Dieter said, with a peeved expression, “Once you absorb the maths, it’s all perfectly clear. We’re simply reflecting a new understanding. The new topology will be much more inclusive and robust.”

“Right!” Gina said. “That makes it so much clearer. I have to key in the Cloaking Device before Cate arrives. Are we good?”

“All good,” Tiflin confirmed. He clearly planned to surprise Cate – perhaps to surprise us all.

The glass door closed and clicked behind Gina. We were now inside the cage – a Faraday cage. No signals in or out, except those that passed through the very tight funnel of building security – and the signals from Max, the supercomputer that spoke to 8 Ball.

“Dieter, before Cate gets here, tell them more about what you’re up to,” Tiflin said.

“I’ve finished compiling the recidivist strings,” Dieter said, too quickly, without taking time to think. He had been rehearsing. The rest of us looked at each other warily. Something was up, and none of us had been clued in.

“What the hell are those?” Mickle asked.