Ramez Naam - Crux

The second cable carried data one way, from a grid of cameras and other sensors, up to the Secure Computing Center above. It let the SCC observe what happened here.

The third cable carried far simpler data. It connected a terminal above to the nuclear battery that provided power for the PICC. If things ever went ultimately wrong, that cable would carry a single command, instructing that nuclear battery to go critical in a chain reaction that would melt the underground facility to slag.

The wall-sized doors to the elevator parted. The meters-thick inner blast doors parted a moment later, and Chen Pang strode out to inspect his wife.

Ling frowned. There was no evidence of her mother here. But she knew that her mother was in the quantum cluster beneath Jiao Tong. And Father had gone there.

“Ling, your break is over now.”

Ling ignored the tutor. Where was her mother? Where?

Chen sat at the terminals that monitored his dead wife’s quantum brain and initiated the systems check. Through the bulletproof glass he could see the grid of liquid helium pressure vessels, the vacuum chambers a thousand times colder than interstellar space within them, containing the quantum processors in an environment almost completely devoid of thermal noise. He could see directly into the brain of this creature that he’d once been married to.

Data scrolled across the screens within seconds. The level 0 diagnostics were clean. Pressure vessels intact. Quantum bandwidth across the interconnects was excellent. Qubit coherence was well within the limits of quantum error correction.

The level 1 diagnostics came back next. Processor and memory utilization were high. She was furiously thinking in there. Requests for external data connections were nearly continuous. Millions of times per second she was trying to reach the outside net, the cameras, the audio pickups, the Nexus-band radios, the long-range link to the clone that had died in Thailand.

The level 2 diagnostics were the most disturbing. Her simulated brain looked less and less healthy. Her virtual brainwaves were chaotic and incoherent, inhuman looking. Neuronal interconnectivity in her frontal lobes looked terrible. The remaining virtual neurons there were working at a frenetic pace, trying to make up for the deficit.

It was true, then. She was going mad. And he had been rendered powerless to stop it.

Give me just one more insight, wife. This last breakthrough. Then you can die.

Chen Pang reached up and physically turned on the cameras and microphones that connected this room to his dead wife’s mind.

“Ling!”

Something was wrong, she realized. Father’s phone and slate had stopped moving. She thought he’d simply stopped somewhere, but when she interrogated them, they were out of contact with him.

“Ling, are you listening to me?”

She looked through the security cameras inside the center. Where was Father? Not in the hallways. Not in the main work areas. Not in the data centers. Not in the physical electronics labs. Where?

“Ling!” The tutor grabbed her arm, and Ling struggled to pull it free.

Wait. There. Not Father. But his phone and slate. They were on a table, behind a security guard. A checkpoint. An elevator door beyond that. There was another level!

She went back to the network topology, to the physical blueprints. There. Data lines that extended down. Repeaters on them, indicating that they went far. A network connection. She reached out for it.

Input burned itself into Su-Yong Shu’s mind.

Video.

Audio.

Real-time.

Here.

Her husband, Chen. He was here. He hadn’t abandoned her! Hope blossomed in Shu. She struggled to get a grip on herself, exerted a superhuman effort at coherence, at communicating what she needed.

“Wife?” Chen said.

“Husband!” The speaker burst to life. The voice carried relief, hope, near hysteria.

“Su-Yong.”

“Chen! Chen! Chen! You’ve come for me thank God. Please, Chen, I’m in trouble trouble double please I need the clone need stabilization need organic brain brain input clone please Chen please…”

Babbling. This is what she’d been reduced to.

“Wife, please. I’ve come to ask you about the equivalence theorem.”

“They’re going to kill me Chen they killed me already CIA killed me Americans killed me buried me you buried me please help neural input need a brain a clone please please before it’s too late please Chen…”

“There is no clone, wife. The equivalence theorem. You proved it, didn’t you? How?”

“MAKE ONE.” The voice came out at the maximum volume. “MAKE ONE MAKE ONE MAKE ONE MAKE ONE…” and on and on.

“The equivalence theorem, wife! Tell me. Tell me,” he lied, “and I’ll help you!”

Ling’s mind reached out for the connection that led to the next level.

But there was nothing. A dead end.

What?

She turned to the schematics. They didn’t extend that far. They showed data lines heading down, but not where they terminated. She struggled to understand, searched for explanation.

There, an operations guide. She consumed it, and then she understood.

Her mother was physically isolated a thousand meters down. The connection was physically disconnected . There was no way to reach her mother at all.

“Ling Shu, it’s time for your lesson!” The tutor pulled her hard, yanking her around to face the old woman. Ling tripped and fell to her knees. “Owwww!”

Shu stopped, aghast.

The equivalence theorem? The EQUIVALENCE THEOREM???

That’s why Chen had come. Despair smothered the hope she’d felt. He wasn’t here to help her. He was here to wring one last bit of value out of her. She’d married this man. She’d loved him. She’d tried to make a child with him.

Oh, Chen. Oh, Chen.

The voice from the speaker suddenly went silent.

Chen blinked, surprised.

Then his wife spoke again.

“Chen Chen husband Chen please if you ever loved me ever cared please help please.”

Chen hardened himself.

“The equivalence theorem,” he repeated. “Give it to me, then I’ll help you.”

“PLEASE HUSBAND.” Chen flinched as his dead wife’s voice boomed at painful volume. “PLEASE HELP BRING ME A CLONE OR LING HUSBAND BRING ME LING MY DAUGHTER LING LING LING PLEASE LING…” The voice descended into sobbing even as it screamed Ling’s name. Chen hit a switch and turned off the speakers.

What had he expected? It was like the first time. Except this time there would be no clone. The hardliners would not allow it.

“Damn it!” He slammed his hand down on the console. The proof, if it was practical, would allow quantum acceleration of any classical algorithm, not just the small minority that achieved massive speedups on quantum systems now. It would be worth billions, tens of billions. It would win him the Nobel Prize. But it was out of reach now.

Chen took a deep breath, forced himself to act normally. He filed away the system test results, made sure all the cameras and audio pickups that led to the Quantum Cluster were deactivated, then logged off of the terminal.

The blast doors and elevator doors opened for him, and then closed behind him once more, and the elevator began its slow ascent to the surface.

“Owwww!” Ling yelled as the tutor wrenched her around and she fell to her knees and bit her tongue.

“Ling, your break is over, young lady! It’s time for your lessons.”

“No!” Ling yelled in frustration. No, her mother couldn’t be trapped! No no no no no!

She tried to pull her arm back but the tutor’s grip was too strong. She reached out with her mind instead, grabbed hold of the woman’s phone in anger, forced it to discharge its battery. The tutor jumped back with a scream, alarmed by the sudden jolt of pain from her pocket. Then she reached forward and slapped Ling, hard, knocking her against the glass window.