The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  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.

  “Tell them what’s different about our new strings,” Tiflin coached, treating Dieter like a prodigy – or a puppet.

  “We’re going to compound and re-insert our apparent errors,” Dieter said. “My new thinking is, they may not be errors. They may actually be offphase echoes between our braided qubits. The braids crossing the vacuum aren’t loops or even knots. Using the scint, we’ve learned they take a halfphase twist –”

  “You’ve already sampled the scint?” I asked Tiflin, wondering when it had been activated, and why he had asked me to meet him at the warehouse.

  He nodded and dismissed my question with a wave of his hand.

  Dieter looked sternly at us, then got up to scrawl matrices and factors and many strange, magical symbols on the whiteboard. He did not like to be interrupted. “A half-phase twist means we’re not dealing with loops, not even with knotted loops, but with Möebius loops.” He spoke that name with reverence. Möebius had astonished all of us when we were kids with his one-sided piece of paper – a simple half twist, run your finger around what appears to be a torus, and behold! Infinity.

  “Oh, that,” said Mickle, resting his elbows on the table and putting his chin in his cupped hands.

  “Four spatial tracks and two time tracks,” Dieter continued. “Our socalled thermal errors, maybe even the phase-flips, are really signals out of phase – essentially, signals that convey key functions in a program very much like our own. Functions we can parasitize and use for ourselves.”

  “A program like our own?” Mickle asked, lifting his head.

  “From the multiverse,” Dieter said.

  “The multiverse?” Mickle seemed taken aback, and then amused. He chuckled and looked at Wong.

  “More of Dieter’s mystical bullshit,” Wong said, rising to the bait. Wong was a dogmatic pragmatist, a surprisingly common type among quantum physicists. “All our crimes come back to haunt us.”

  “There’s nothing mystical about any of this,” Tiflin insisted.

  Dieter went on, unperturbed, “We need to feed these so-called errors back into our raw strings, to replace the parts of our strings that are riddled with errors. Whenever a Gödel number arises that is even vaguely wellformed, the loader will do a checksum, and if it finds congruence, insert an echoed string. For each so-called error, we’ll correct the phase, then load the recompiled numbers.”

  “What the hell does that really mean?” Mickle asked. He was lost. I was also lost. “Evolving code, or succotash?”

  “If we just reform and reload the strings, we’ll fill the bit bucket over and over,” Wong said. “And even if 8 Ball works once or twice, we’ll have no idea what it’s doing for millions of cycles, maybe not even then.”

  “If we reload?” Tiflin asked with that patented savage grin – lip above canines.

  “When,” Dieter said, his face firming to a fine resolve.

  “Our problem isn’t too few cycles,” Tiflin insisted. “8 Ball can supply us with trillions upon trillions of cycles – however large the strings. It can supply us with every number that ever was, every string that ever was, every program that ever was – in our universe and at least a quadrillion quadrillion other universes.”

  Mickle laid his head on the table.

  “I keep telling everyone, the multiverse is bullshit,” Wong muttered.

  Tiflin shrugged. “It’s a metaphor.” His face was turning shell pink, like a perfect titration in high school chemistry. And now, most dangerous of all, he dropped his voice into its lowest register. “Numbers and cycles aren’t the problem. Results and answers are the problem, and so far, having expended three hundred million dollars, none of our efforts has had more than primary school success.” He stared hard at Mickle and Wong. “We need to take a chance.”

  “A really big chance,” Wong said.

  “I hate genetic coding,” Mickle said.

&nb
sp; “It’s not ‘genetic,’ and it’s not random. It’s topologically unexpected echoes,” Dieter said. “I call them topopotent recidivist code, or TRC.”

  “Oh, brother,” Wong said.

  I tried to find a cherry on top of this surprise pile of crap. With Tiflin, that was often my job. “You’re saying you’ll allow 8 Ball’s qubits to compute using mirror strings, alternate strings – strings written in no kind of code we’ve thought of, and never encountered before.”

  “The code will almost certainly be familiar, Bose. Think of it as sampling from another spin around the loops – a true quantum echo,” Tiflin said.

  “8 Ball will be taking advice from its own cousins,” Dieter said, then added, at Tiflin’s frown, “metaphorical cousins, of course.”

  “Christ, zillions of 8 Balls,” Wong said.

  “Who knows what sort of creativity is just waiting to be discovered out there?” Dieter waved at the ceiling, the walls – really, at everything around us.

  Mickle made a raspberry sound and dropped his head again.

  Looking at Tiflin and trying to read his expression, I realized that theory and desperation had finally trumped our own project manager. Despite Tiflin’s objections, Dieter – mystical and multiversed Dieter – was in charge of our quantum computer.

  “What – or who – is going to judge and select the strings?” I asked. “We don’t want to do parsing in the QC. That’ll slow it to a crawl. 8 Ball isn’t made for that!”

  Dieter raised his hand. “We already have a working subroutine to perform that function.”

  “In Max or in 8 Ball?” I asked. We had named 8 Ball’s traditional interpreter – an interposed supercomputer – Max Headroom. Max used to be named Mike, from Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, until I pointed out that Mike vanished and was never heard from again.

  Mickle had suggested Max.

  “In Max, and then in 8 Ball,” Tiflin said. “We leave the rough parsing to Max and the large numbers to 8 Ball. They can be raw, even partly malformed, because we’ll grind through so many of them so quickly.”

  “Max says it’s slick,” Dieter added stubbornly.

  “Gentlemen, let’s face the truth. This is a done deal,” Mickle said. “We’ve finally jumped from the bridge into a deep, dark river of sloppy thinking. We’re screwed.” He took a long sip from a bottle of beige Soylent liquid, his frequent substitute for breakfast, lunch, and even dinner.

  Tiflin said quietly, pointedly, “It’s done. We’re already loading.”

  A long pause.

  “A string infested with quantum errors we’ve spent most of our careers trying to weed out!” Wong exclaimed, making weak gestures of frustration and surrender. “I am flabbered. I am gasted.”

  Emotions crossed Dieter’s hairy face like clouds over a prairie.

  “Have a little faith,” Tiflin said, and leaned back in his chair. “If we’re wrong and this crashes 8 Ball over and over again, to be sure, we’re all screwed, but the fact is, minus results, the division is set to cut its losses and clean house. That’s why Cate called us together this morning. Results, or we get booted out of here.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Wong said.

  Then the door clicked and Cate Riva entered, flashing a sunny expression and a big smile. “Good morning, all,” she said with a quick scan around the conference room. “Why so serious?”

  “We’re loading new strings, recombined Gödel strings,” Tiflin said, with all the confidence he could fake.

  “Wasn’t that the plan?” Cate asked innocently.

  “We’re inserting the worst phase-flip errors back into the strings,” Wong said. We all wished he’d just keep quiet.

  “Proof of pudding?” Cate asked, still standing. “Because despite my pleasant demeanor, I’m not here to listen to more bullshit.”

  A brief silence.

  “Take a seat,” Tiflin said. “We’re about to begin. Genius is in the air.”

  Cate smiled again, all sunlight and cheer – but behind her brown eyes, all tiger.

  Tiflin instructed the screen to drop and the data in the ceiling projector to show 8 Ball’s and Max’s interposed display. “Here we go,” he said, betting the bank – betting our bank.

  This was going to be my Waterloo. I could smell it.

  Dieter sent the instructions to Max. “First strings are loaded,” he announced.

  “What scale?” Cate asked.

  “All qubits,” Dieter said. “Two to the one thousand and twenty-fourth power.”

  Tiflin looked at me. I looked at Cate. She watched the display.

  Programming in a QC consists of designing and controlling how the qubits are entangled – essentially, the topological nature of the braids – and then maintaining or collapsing those entangled states, opening gates from which we could presumably receive our answers. Once set in motion, a quantum computer is autonomous – the program either fails or succeeds. A QC cannot be debugged while it is working. The program cannot be halted or even completely understood while the QC is busy. Only if the results are interesting and useful can we hope that what we did was a success. And they must also be fast.

  The display twinkled over our heads. And what do you know?

  We got back numbers – long strings of integers, flanked by Max’s instant scorecard analysis. 8 Ball was delivering a select list of exceedingly large primes – the kind of unique and difficult primes used to encode high-level passwords. The kind that could break banks and even worry Uncle Sam.

  “Wow,” Cate said. “These are real? You haven’t suckered Max?”

  “No suckers here,” Tiflin said, leaning back deeper into the shadows.

  8 Ball didn’t choke or even sneeze. For the first time, our newest QC was cooking.

  And it was fast.

  “Next up,” Tiflin said, as Dieter’s fingers flew over the keyboard, “the complete Icelandic chromosome database for mutations in BRCA 1 and 2 over the last forty years.”

  And that worked, too. Our evolving machine had analyzed and understood contemporary human evolution, at least in two important oncogenes.

  “The third problem is very big,” Dieter said. “We’re collating the proof of the classification of the theorem of finite simple groups. It’s known as the Enormous Theorem. Tens of thousand of pages of proofs, scattered in several hundred journals, all loaded into Gödel strings, cross-referenced, and logically filtered. The QC should find any contradictions. We’ll get results in four or five minutes.”

  “That alone should get us a Fields Medal,” Tiflin said.

  Cate reached out to pat Tiflin’s shoulder. “Let me know how that turns out,” she said. “Good work, gentlemen. I’ve seen enough for now.” She stood and left the room.

  Inside the hour, the Enormous Theorem was proven consistent, our contracts were extended, and our funding was renewed.

  THAT EVENING, I went home to the square gray stone and steel apartment where my wife and I had lived for nine months. She had just returned from Beijing and a conference on newer, more inclusive versions of Unicode. We spent our first evening together in three weeks, beginning with sushi from our favorite restaurant and progressing to brandy and cigars – a sin we allowed ourselves every few months.

  Then we exercised our marital prerogatives. I managed almost to forget both our team’s troubles and successes. I could not tell her about any of them. Cate would decide how and when to release the story.

  Why couldn’t I just accept the fact that Tiflin had triumphed? Cate had messaged Tiflin at the end of the day that maybe we could support doubling the number of qubits. 8 Ball was designed to be scalable, wasn’t it?

  My wife rolled over on the flannel sheets and asked, “Do you have a sister?” She knew I had only brothers, all in India.

  “There was this woman in Beijing who looked exactly like you,” she said, “only pretty. Same color skin, same hair. She came up to me and asked how you were doing.”

  “And?”<
br />
  “I said you were fine. She knew your name. She knew where you worked. She touched my cheek with the back of her hand and smiled, the way you used to do. And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you!” She grinned, raised herself over me, and twirled her finger on my chest. “It gave me a thrill – perverse, you know? Like if I went to bed with her, it wouldn’t be cheating on you. And not just because of the girl-girl thing. Does that make any sense? I’ve never seen anything like it, Bose. Are you cloning people now?”

  I said we most certainly were not cloning people and hugged her, mostly to shut her up.

  “Right,” she said. “You’d have to have been cloned forty-one years ago. How about a transporter malfunction?”

  We laughed, but the thought made me both queasy and a little horny – so many bells being rung on my nerd pinball machine, after such a complicated and important day.

  A FEW HOURS later, I showered, got dressed, and walked into my home office to look over the new morning’s schedule. I found another Post-it Note stuck to my rosewood desktop. This one, again in my distinctive print style, read, Check out the Pepsi supply.

  I looked around the small room. My armpits were soaking. We needed to reset our security system.

  And I needed another shower.

  COMING INTO OUR building, I avoided the soft drink coolers, just because looking, checking, would be utterly ridiculous.

  Gina made the rounds of our glassed-in cubicles, delivering a basket of fruit and wine to each of us with compliments from Cate and our CEO as well. Later that day came a message of congratulations signed by the company’s founder. Cate wasn’t wasting time. The news was now global – we had the first successful, large-scale quantum computer, and it was already making major advancements in math and physics.