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

by Jonathan Strahan

  We were historic.

  Two days later, after our staff meeting and our third round of press interviews, I took another morning drive to the perimeter warehouse, trying to silence my inner alarms. I whistled aimlessly, hopelessly tangled in wondering what I would look like as a female. Weird encounter, I thought. But just how weird? And how connected to the spate of anonymous Post-it Notes?

  No one had been at the warehouse since Tiflin and I last visited. Cate had put it in lockdown to all but team members, not to jinx success by letting in the press – hot bodies and electronic interference.

  Security grudgingly allowed me back in. The counter on the display by the cage read 8. That, of course, had to be wrong. Eight meant I had visited the site four times since Tiflin and I had last gone through. I wondered if we could get access to the security tapes. There might be imposters on the campus, right? But really, I did not want to know.

  Everything in the warehouse looked fine. I was supposed to be happy, but none of this felt right. I could not help but think that some day, despite our success, the cage would refuse to open and I’d know my time in the division was over – best to light out for the territories and find smarter people elsewhere.

  Why didn’t Tiflin call another meeting to plan the next cycles?

  I turned away from 8 Ball and experienced another dizzy spell – too many Boses in one body. And what the hell did that mean?

  When I got out to the parking lot and my VW, I saw a sheet of paper in the passenger seat. In the upper right corner, a lab intranet library reference announced these were scint results from the last week, and below that was a graphic representation of 8 Ball’s inner vacuum.

  On the upper left corner, beside the reference number, someone had written, using my print style, Thought you should see this. And do take a look at the soft drink coolers. They’re empty most of the time now.

  I had had quite enough.

  I drove back to Building 10 and found Tiflin in his office. “We need to look at building security videos.”

  “Why?” Tiflin said.

  “Someone may be trying to mess with us. Humor me,” I said.

  We approached the security office and made our request. We were both placed high enough that the head of security allowed us into the inner sanctum, a dark room fronted by two tiered banks of monitors and staffed by five guards.

  Two of them relinquished their seats to make room.

  I scrawled notes on a sheet of legal paper as we went through the videos for the last four days. The cameras in the warehouse were separate from the lab system, and not accessible from this center, but we still had a clear view of all the rooms, offices, and corridors in three big buildings – a lot to process, and I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Lots of people, lots of team members wandering around, going to the cafeteria, sitting in their cubicles sucking down Soylents or Pepsis or Mountain Dews or Snapples –

  I thought I saw Mickle in a hallway, then, under the same time stamp, working in his office. “Look at that,” I said. “The times are off.”

  “That could explain the numbers at the warehouse. Why is it important?” Tiflin yawned.

  “OK,” I told the security chief, “show our offices right now.”

  The chief worked over his keyboard and we saw my office and Tiflin’s office in Building 10, in real time, just a few cubicles apart. My office was empty. Empty – just me, I wrote on my little pad.

  We looked into Tiflin’s office.

  “Wait,” Tiflin said.

  Tiflin’s in his office, I wrote and noted the time, the room number, and the chair beside me.

  Tiflin no longer sat in the chair.

  And his office was empty.

  The head of security bent to look over my shoulder. “Looks like the boss is off campus,” he said.

  I felt a spreading wave of dismay.

  And then, I think I simply forgot.

  A few hours later, back in my own office, behind the locked door, I reviewed my notes, not at all sure where I had been or why – and wondering how I had just lost so much time. The last thing I had recorded was, Tiflin’s gone! He just vanished, and I’m forgetting –

  I unlocked my door, clutching the diagram I’d found in my car, and checked the soft drink coolers in the adjacent hallway. Mountain Dew and Pepsi were in very short supply – just a few cans.

  With real trepidation, I passed down the hall to Tiflin’s office. There he was, sitting at his desk, on the phone. He looked up and lifted an eyebrow – go away, he was busy.

  I turned and left.

  What the hell had just happened?

  I STOOD BEFORE 8 Ball again, my neck hair on end, looking on it not with pique or adoration, but with genuine fear. This time, my visit numbers were consecutive.

  “What the fuck are you up to?” I whispered at the black sphere.

  The warehouse security gate clicked with the insertion of another key. Mickle entered and spent a number of seconds staring at the counter. From this angle I could not see his number, but he hesitantly answered the cage’s questions, then walked across the concrete floor to where I stood by the rail.

  He tipped me a salute. “It says I’ve been out here fourteen times in the last twenty-four hours,” he said.

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Just what are we worried about?” I asked. “What could possibly be going wrong?”

  “Nothing, really.” Mickle assumed an expression like a little boy who has just bottled a weird bug. “We’re famous. We’re making headlines around the world.”

  “So why are we standing here looking so anxious?” I asked.

  Wong entered next and joined us by the rail. “We need to see the building security videos,” he said with a squint.

  Before I could answer, Mickle said, “Been there, done that. I took Dieter with me to the security center. His wastebasket kept filling up with Pepsi cans – his favorite. So we asked to see who had been visiting his office.”

  “Looking for what?” I asked.

  “To count how many Dieters there were in the universe.”

  “Why should there be more than one?” I asked.

  Mickle shook his head. “Dieter said something more than a little weird. He said every program had to have a programmer. Since 8 Ball was running trillions of programs, how many programmers would it need to import to satisfy causality?”

  “How many Dieters.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “Not just Dieters. We’ve all contributed code over the years. We’ve all noodled and made suggestions. So we’re all potential dupes.”

  “As in suckers?”

  “More like duplicates. We played the video until we saw Dieter enter his office. And then – I don’t remember all of it. But there was no Dieter standing next to me in the security center. And there was no Dieter in his office, either. Both had vanished, or at least that’s what I wrote down right after it happened – on a napkin.” Mickle held up the napkin. In his loose scrawl, a black marker message read, Two Dieters canceled.

  “Why would they cancel each other out?”

  “Because they’re non-Abelian,” Mickle said. “Like fermions. They can’t occupy the same universe at the same time – and become aware of it.”

  “That is nuts!” Wong said.

  “I agree,” Mickle said. “What shall we tell Tiflin?”

  “Let me decide that,” I said. “We should make sure nobody’s playing a joke. I wouldn’t even put it past Tiflin. Make sure we’re not being deceived.”

  “That is not the right word,” Mickle said, tapping the rail with his finger. “They wouldn’t be deceptions. They’re just as real as you and me. They even fool the counters. But if we’re going to take this any further, we have to avoid looking for ourselves. Because, gentlemen, if we find us, we’ll just fucking vanish.”

  “Tiflin hates multiverses or mystical interpretations,” I said.

  “So do I, rememb
er?” Wong said.

  “Don’t search for yourself,” Mickle said, poking Wong’s shoulder. Wong shrugged him off with a resentful scowl. “And we won’t look for each other – not when we’re together. You look for me, alone, and I look for you. Alone.”

  “Can we look for the others, too?”

  “I think so,” he said. “But maybe we shouldn’t tell them we saw them.”

  “That might be allowed,” I said, thinking back to the Post-it Notes and my wife telling me about my ‘sister.’ “But we should be cautious.”

  “What’s the point, then?” Wong asked.

  “Maybe they won’t believe us and they’ll stick around regardless,” Mickle said.

  8 Ball kept patiently cycling.

  I ASKED TIFLIN to meet me in the lobby of a nice hotel where we put up our international guests. I wanted to be away from the campus, away from our colleagues – away from anyone or anything that might make Tiflin feel stubborn. It was too early for a beer, so he and I took seats in the small bar and sipped cappuccinos.

  “We’ve still got a lot to do,” Tiflin said, fidgeting. I was too important and connected to ignore, but he seemed to know he wouldn’t like what I had to say.

  “8 Ball’s not working the way we thought it would,” I told him.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s working. We’ll figure out how later – before they give us our Nobel.”

  I rather thought he would mention that at some point.

  “What I’m saying is, the scint may have given us an answer.” I unfolded the printout tracking the photon trails in 8 Ball’s central vacuum. I was still unsure how to read the scint’s numbers, but I’d spent several hours in my office studying the graphic representation: four splash-ripples at the corners of an otherwise smooth pond. Four dropped pebbles creating regular, rather pretty disturbances. As expected.

  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. “Mill
ions 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.

  “Yeah. And then – I think – when you saw him on the video feed, you both vanished.”

  “You think?”

  “I made a note to that effect on my phone,” Mickle said. “Because I don’t remember.”

  “Me, too, with Tiflin,” I said.

  “Cool!” Dieter said, looking feverish. “If we could pin this down, make some real experiments, we’d know something tremendous, wouldn’t we?”

  Tiflin got out of his chair and went to the door.

  I held out my hand to stop him. “My dupe told me to check the Pepsi supply. Most of us drink Pepsi or Mountain Dew.”