Ian McDonald - Brasyl

Edson’s in love.

The only one who doesn’t know it is Mr. Peach. And, dressed as Miracle Boy, Edson is trying to find a way of telling him.

It’s a slow crime day in Great São Paulo, so Captain Superb and Miracle Boy just lie on their bed in the fazenda. Miracle Boy smokes maconha; exhaling small, miraculous smoke rings up to the ceiling. His cape and mask hang on the knob of the carved, heavy mahogany bed. He keeps his boots on. Captain Superb likes that.

Sometimes it’s hero and villain. Sometimes it’s villain and hero. Someetimes, like today, it’s hero and hero. The superman and sidekick. Miracle Boy’s spandex costume is split green and yellow, head to toe. The left side, the yellow side, is emblazoned with a wraparound knee-to-chin blue six. Big six, little six. Sextinho. He’s been that nickname to Mr. Peach — sorry, Capptain Superb — half his life. This particular costume is cut a little cheap and digs into his ass crack. Miracle Boy has the mother of camel-toes.

Miracle Boy’s glad it’s hero on hero. Hero/villain-villain/hero tends to involve more bondage. There’s a lot of old slave-days stuff down in the baseements of this fazenda, including an iron slave-mask for gagging unruly peças that scares him. The house is full of old stuff that Mr. Peach keeps giving to Edson, but he’ll never have anyone to pass it on to. Edson could make more online, but he prefers his cash quick and secretive and vends through the guy at the Cidade de Luz Credit Union. De Freitas Global Talent is built on Alvaranga antiques.

In this scenario, it’s the gym and a lot of mutual appreciation in front of the mirrors. He passes the spliff to Captain Superb, who takes a little tentaative puff through his mask, leaks aromatic smoke through his nostril-holes. Captain Superb is in titanium and black: boots, pants, belt, gloves, full-head mask. Even afterward, in the chill, he likes to wear the mask. Seen, not seen. Lying on his back his belly doesn’t show. Edson doesn’t mind the belly as much as Mr. Peach thinks he does. He loves the old fuck.

“Hey hero.”

“What?”

“What do you know about quantum computing?”

“Why are you asking!”

Hero passes spliff back to boy wonder.

“I was talking to someone.”

“You were talking to someone about quantum computing?”

“It was business. Don’t give me a hard time. So: how does it work?”

Captain Superb’s civilian aspect is Mr. Peach, a semiretired professor of theoretical physics at the University of São Paulo, last heir of the former coffee fazenda of Alvaranga, superhero fetishist and Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas’s mentor and afternoon delight.

“Well, do you remember when I told you about shadows and frogs?” Edson/Sextinho wriggles in his costume and presses up against Mr. Peach. Ever since the first tentative, apologetic fumble — Mr. Peach much less comfortable than teenage, cocky Sextinho — every session has been paid for with a story. Like a superhero, Edson feels he can fly, high and vertiginous, on what physics tells him about the real.

The story of the shadows and the frogs is one of the best, simple yet confusing, moving from the mundane to the extraordinary, weird yet of profound importance. Edson is not sure he has worked out all the philosophical and emotional implications of it yet. He suspects no one can. Like all the best stories, it starts with a blindingly obvious question: what is light made of? Not so simple a question, not answerable by the simple razor of chopping it finer and finer until you reached fundamental units that could not be split any further (though Edson had learned, in his superhero sessions, that even that was correct; the fundaments had fundaments, and even those might be made up of vibrating strings like guitars, though Mr. Peach did not hold with that interpretation of reality). For what fundamental units of lightwere seemed to differ depending on what you did with them. Fire a single photon at certain metals and they would kick out debris, like when Edson would watch his older brothers practice on the road signs with the airgun. Fire one through two tiny, tiny slito, and they do something very different. It makes a pattern of shadows, dark and bright lines, like two sets of waves on a puddle meeting. How can a single photon go through both slits? One thing cannot be two things at the same time. Physics, Mr. Peach always says, is about physical reality. So what is the photon: wave or particle? This is the question at the heart of quantum physics, and any answer to it means that physical reality is very very different from what we think it is. Mr. Peach’s answer is that when the single photon goes through, the real photon goes through one slit but a ghost photon goes through the other slit at the same time and interferes with it. In fact, for every real photon that goes through, a trillion ghosts go with it, most of them so wide of the mark they never interfere with the this-worldly original. Of course Edson wanted to know what was so special about photons that they had ghosts. To which Mr. Peach said, Nothing . In physics the laws apply everywhere, so if photons have ghosts, so does every other particle (and these they had covered in Physics 101, years before) and everything made from those particles. A trillion ghost Sextinhos. A trillion ghost fazenda Alvarangas, a trillion ghost Brasils and ghost worlds and ghost suns. Ghost every things. And there is a word for a physical system of everything, and that is a universe. A trillion and more, vastly more, universes, as real to their Sextinhos and Mr. Peaches, their Miracle Boys and Captain Superbs, as this. To which Edson thought, head frying, Maybe somewhere I never took the peach from the bag the driver offered when he didn’t have any change for the thirteen-year-old car-minder . Physical reality is all these ghost universes stacked beside each other: the multiverse and — on the very smallest, briefest, weakest scales — the doors between the universes open. Edson’s still thinking about that; more real to him now he’s obsessed with a girl who works in ten to the eight hundred universes. But what about the frogs?

Oh, that’s easy, Mr. Peach had said. A frog’s eyes are so sensitive it can see a single photon of light.

“Frogs see on the quantum level; they can see into the multiverse,” says Miracle Boy as Captain Superb moves his gloved hands over the firm cutve of his ass. “That’s why they sit around with their eyes wide.”

“So what’s the sudden interest in quantum computation?” asks Captain Superb. The slatted light beaming through the shutters fades. The room goes dark. A gust of wind rocks the hanging flower baskets on the verandah. Sudden rain rattles on the roof tiles. “You’ve met someone, haven’t you? You bitch! Who is she, go on, tell me!” Captain Superb sits up, fingers raised to tickle Miracle Boy into submission. There is no bitch or bitterness in his voice. It’s not that kind of affair; it’s not that kind of city. Here you can lead many lives, be many selves. Mr. Peach has seen many half-heartbreaks pass through Sextinho’s life, but none ever touch what they have in the fazenda up on the hill. There are whole provinces of Edson’s life he barely knows, many he suspects he never will.

“Just tell me, and maybe then I might tell you,” Miracle Boy says, springing out from beneath the tormenting fingers, the stub on the maconha in his hand. Someday Edson hopes to graduate from being something Boy to something Man, or even Captain something.

“Okay. Come on back to bed, but you tell me, right?” He cups his hands over Miracle Boy’s semierect cock and begins the story.

Says Captain Superb, there are two classes of computations: the doable and the budget-busters. Time is money in computing as in any enterprise, so you need to know how long it’s going to take to do your computation: now, or longer than the universe has left to run. A surprising number of everyday problems fall into that latter category and are called NP problems. The most common problem is factorizing prime numbers.