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

But at the center of the four points of vibration, there rose a prominent hump – where nothing should be.

Tiflin looked over the printout with an expression almost of dread. So much to lose , I thought. So careful not to sink the boat. Right now, he was the most famous man in computing. His name was on every news show, headlining every major science and tech journal. He was trending big on Twitter – #Masterofchaos.

“You didn’t trump this up?” he asked. There was an odd sidewise look in his eye, as if he had already seen these results but had ignored them.

“Of course not,” I said. “You installed the scint. That’s the latest report from Max, based on data you asked to be collected.”

“Well, did we really need it, in the end?”

“The ripples at the corners represent our topological braids and their echoes,” I said. “They’re real – but they may not explain the speed.”

“Then what does?”

I tapped the hump. “You tell me,” I said. “What do you think that represents?”

“It could be a standing wave,” he said. “Maybe a collaboration or combination of all the others. What’s it doing there?”

“8 Ball may be compounding the entanglements,” I said. “The standing wave could represent a huge mountain of computational power, more number crunching than there will ever be numbers. More numbers than there are universes. God himself can’t think that fast. And there could be consequences we did not anticipate.”

“What sort of consequences?” he asked.

I noted that he did not object to the metaphysics, the mysticism, and almost felt sorry for him. “When we got together at the warehouse five days ago, you were feeling all of your pockets. What were you looking for?”

“My gum,” he said. “I’ve been chewing gum ever since I quit smoking. You know that.”

“Did you find it?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What did you find?” I asked.

“A pack of cigarettes,” he said. “And a lighter.”

“Did you put them there?” I asked.

“No.” So far he was being honest – which meant he had already been having doubts. “Did you?”

I didn’t give that the dignity of a response. “Like somebody else was wearing your clothes, right? Someone a lot like you – but someone who still smoked. Did your wife notice a difference?”

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“How long have you been having these lapses back into old habits?”

“We’ve all been working too hard,” he said, looking away.

“I think you tested 8 Ball before the big meeting. I think you and Dieter had been running the QC with the new protocols for at least three weeks before our first demo.”

He looked defiant. “So I’m a cautious fellow,” he said. “What’s that got to do with any of this?”

“I have a ghost. Mine’s a female version of myself. Looks a lot like me, and has been here long enough to figure things out. My wife saw her in Beijing – before we made our demo to Cate.”

Tiflin flushed that beautiful titration pink. “That’s ridiculous,” he said not very forcefully.

“8 Ball had already begun its journey, weeks before – right?”

“Bullshit,” Tiflin said, but it was no more than a whisper.

“Guess who clued me about these graphs?”

“Haven’t the slightest.”

“My other. My ghost. She left the printout where I would find it – in our car.”

“That is just sad. Sad and sick.”

“You drink Mountain Dew, don’t you? How many cans a day?”

This jerked him up straight. He stood, spilling his coffee, and spun around to leave. The graphed ripples drifted to the floor, where I pinned the paper with my shoe.

I called after him, “We have to tell everybody. And then we have to shut it down!”

“Go to hell!” Tiflin said over his shoulder as he fled through the lobby.

THE ENTIRE TEAM sat around the conference table.

I got Tiflin to attend by threatening to tell Cate about our concerns. The curtains had been drawn and the lights dimmed. The ceiling projector showed a montage of intersecting waves in 8 Ball’s vacuum – the nowfamiliar four splashes surrounding the imposing central hump. 8 Ball was still running – who knew how many cycles?

Dieter told us he had loaded only fundamental operations the last few days, keeping the qubits powered up and working but doing nothing in particular, at least nothing too complicated. Just housekeeping – making sure all was well, all was healthy.

“Are we sure the standing wave is even in our system?” I asked. “And is it in fact at the center of the vacuum, or is that all just a mathematical fiction?”

“The detector is working!” Mickle said. “It’s not defective.”

“Then how can 8 Ball not be a lump of slag?” Wong asked. “According to the scint, the microwave temperature inside our quantum computer is well over a trillion degrees.”

“Virtual microwave temp,” Tiflin said. “Virtual doesn’t affect the real. The helium is still cold. That counts for something.”

“We should have been told about this right away,” I said to nobody in particular. “This is for the theorists to understand and explain, not just engineers.”

Dieter, despite having a foot in both camps – theory and engineering – sounded defensive. “It’s not a sign of failure. We just don’t know what’s going on, yet.”

“Entangled and braided photons that do not exist echo back on world lines that are mathematical fictions,” I said, “leaving trails in the vacuum that produce virtual microwaves, and they don’t exist either. None of it is remotely real!”

“That’s a load of crap,” Tiflin said. “We’re successful. You just don’t want to acknowledge how successful we are.”

“You don’t remember, do you?” I asked Tiflin, then looked at Dieter.

Mickle lowered his eyes as if in guilt. Dieter ignored us both.

“That hump, that so-called standing wave, is a massive reservoir of computation,” I said. “Millions or even trillions of programs running at once. 8 Ball is a nexus for the work of I don’t know how many programmers, all like us –”

Tiflin rapped his knuckles hard on the desk. “Let’s not draw stupid conclusions,” he said.

“For a time, 8 Ball was running trillions of programs – you said so yourself.”

“A metaphor,” Tiflin insisted.

“Those programs originated in millions of other universes,” I continued. Mickle watched me with morbid fascination, as if I were digging my own grave. “They had to have programmers behind them. And yet, here they are – trillions of lines of code running without a causal beginning. What does that force the machine to do? What does it force the universe to do?”

“In theory –” Mickle said.

“Screw theory,” said Tiflin. “We’ve worked too hard and spent too damned much time and money not to know what’s happening with our own apparatus.”

“Has anybody else looked at the security videos?” I asked.

Silence. Mickle looked away.

“Soft drink machines?”

“They’re usually empty,” Wong said.

“The cafeteria staff is slacking off,” Tiflin said.

I was stubborn. “One by one, we should all look at the building security videos.”

“What the hell would that tell us?” Tiflin asked, standing. Clearly he’d had enough.

“That there’s more than one Dieter walking around Building 10,” I said. “And more than one Tiflin.”

“Christ,” Tiflin said.

“I met Dieter in his office, then I saw him in Room 57,” Mickle said. “He couldn’t have got there ahead of me.”

“Did he look like me totally – same clothes, same hair?” Dieter asked, fascinated.