Accidental Gods

by Andrew Busey

  Ajay nodded thoughtfully, conceding. “Our observations can’t change anything. They are, therefore, truly independent. Hmm.”

  It amused Thomas that Ajay actually rubbed his chin.

  Stephen laughed and surprised both Thomas and Ajay by saying, “Your beloved Hawking went so far as to say, ‘We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals.’” Stephen took a second to gloat before continuing, “To the esteemed Professor Hawking, I say, ‘I beg to differ, such models of the universe are of quite a lot of interest to us.’ Either that or we’ve just declared ourselves something beyond ordinary mortals.”

  Ajay appeared flummoxed, obviously pissed that Stephen had rebutted him with, of all things, a Hawking quote. Of course, Thomas knew Stephen had probably been saving this one for just the right moment and had, thus, played it perfectly.

  “Where did you get that quote?” Ajay finally asked, probably more to calm down than to get an answer.

  “A Brief History of Time,” Stephen said. “I had to at least get the basics on my own.” He chuckled.

  “Bah!” Ajay sniffed. “I don’t read popular physics.”

  Thomas and Stephen snickered.

  “So,” Ajay said while straightening the lapels of his jacket. “In our model, as observers of the system, we can watch and get accurate, detailed results too.”

  “Yes,” Stephen said. “Which means we can be certain of what we’re observing, which means we can predictably reconstruct skipped ticks.”

  “It definitely changes the game,” Ajay conceded, “and reopens the question of preordination…”

  “Don’t,” Stephen cut Ajay off while shaking his head disapprovingly.

  Thomas grinned. “Catherine will kill herself for missing this conversation.”

  ***

  A month later, Larry and Bleys were running new cables up, down, and between the many racks of the universe-processing supercomputers. Larry stopped, holding a fresh bundle of cables for Bleys to bind with cable ties and clip off the excess.

  Bleys stood a head shorter than Larry and frequently sipped a Mountain Dew, the condensation-sweating green-and-yellow can notable due to the fact it was virtually the only part of him that had any measure of color. Bleys’s hair was black; his long-sleeved T-shirt was black; his pants, his belt, his cell phone and holster—all black. His skin, however, was as white as waxed butcher paper, and the toes and heels of his jungle boots showed brown where the leather dye had been worn and scuffed during his countless crawls around, beneath, and behind huge banks of hardware.

  “Last night,” Larry said as he bunched up another bundle of cables, “I was reading some random article about using quantum computing for security. It mentioned using diamonds to parse single photons as a mechanism for supersecure transmissions. Seemed like an interesting idea, so it got me thinking. A diamond is a very well structured crystal, right?”

  “Yep. A very expensive, beautiful one.” Bleys laughed. He checked where one particularly long cable led around the side of the corner of the rack and nodded approvingly. “I’m not sure people go to jewelry stores looking for a ‘very well structured crystal,’ but then again, I’m not the marketing type.”

  “Or the diamond-buying type.” Larry laughed.

  Bleys frowned.

  “What if you could store photons in the crystal lattice of a diamond? I bet you could store a lot of information in a diamond.”

  Bleys sipped from his Mountain Dew again, lowered it back to the floor, and worked his tongue around his teeth behind tightly sealed lips, as if bits of Mountain Dew had lodged there like crumbs.

  Then he said, “That’s not a bad idea. If you could figure it out, it would also be blazing fast, since it would be optical by nature…You think you can make it work?”

  “Maybe, but the trick is, we would need very large diamonds.”

  “Very large diamonds?” Bleys sipped his Mountain Dew again.

  “Huge. Like a thousand carats or more.”

  Bleys spit Mountain Dew across the bundle of cables as he laughed. “Kilocarats.”

  Larry cracked a smile. “Very clever.”

  “What the fuck, Larry? Are we planning to rob a museum or something? Aren’t all the big diamonds behind glass and a lot of security?”

  “Seriously,” Larry said, “I think it could solve our storage problem. I need you to go on a scavenger hunt.”

  “What do you need?”

  Bleys switched to his serious, all-business mode. On these so-called “scavenger hunts,” he got to run around the web—and sometimes the world—buying up expensive, obscure things. Some people liked to shop for Prada but not Bleys; he had more specific tastes, and he loved the hunt.

  Larry said, “I’ll need at least ten diamonds of varying carats, from about one half up to about three to start. They need to be cut as cubes, though. That will be the hard part. You might have to go to Amsterdam.”

  Bleys looked giddy.

  “And lasers,” Larry said. “You’ll need lasers.”

  “Laser beams. Pew-pew-pew.”

  They both chuckled.

  “World of Warcraft,” Larry reminisced. “Good times.”

  “Man,” Bleys said. “You believe how long ago that was? Kids today would laugh at a piece of software like Vent.” He shook his head. “It was a conference call, basically.”

  Larry shrugged. “We thought it was cool.”

  “I still do.” Bleys grinned widely. “Though, I think maybe we played it way too much.”

  Larry nodded toward the racks and racks of servers. “Hard-core—but man some of that stuff was seriously tough and required real teamwork. I think it was good practice for reality.”

  “Made some good friends, too.”

  With the bottom edge of his T-shirt, Larry wiped Bleys’s Mountain Dew from the bundle of cables. He wiped his palm on another part of his T-shirt, the excessive sugariness of the liquid making his hand sticky.

  “Some?” he asked Bleys.

  “OK. One. One really good one.”

  Larry nodded and smiled. “You still read Zelazny? Princes of Amber?”

  “Hah!” Bleys rolled his head back and turned his eyes almost back behind him. He looked back at Larry. “Pulled one off the shelf just the other day, for kicks, you know?” He shook his head. “Weird to see my name in there. Zelazny’s Bleys seems counterfeit now.” He pointed at his chest. “I’m the real Bleys, damn it!”

  Larry nodded knowingly. “Definitely good times.”

  Bleys said, “Good times, now, too. Are you sure I can buy these diamonds? Seems like kind of an abnormal purchase.”

  “This is the biggest technical challenge we have right now—the storage capacity problem. We’re way past terabytes and petabytes here.” He nodded once at the servers. “We need to figure out something new if we’re going to make this thing work. Thomas basically gave me carte blanche on this.” Larry chewed his lower lip. “So, go to Amsterdam. Buy them uncut, and then have someone cut them as cubes. It’ll be cheaper that way.”

  “Amsterdam. Definitely good times now.” Bleys chuckled. “And I don’t mean the Van Gogh Museum.”

  “Hey, whatever you do in your spare time is up to you.” Larry winked. “Just don’t put it in your expense report.”

  “No problem. The lasers shouldn’t be an issue either.” Bleys let the cables go and picked up his Mountain Dew again. “OK. I’ll head home, grab some clothes, and then catch the next flight.”

  He turned to leave.

  “One more thing,” Larry called after him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Find out everything you can about creating synthetic diamonds, including who the experts are.”

  “I’ll make sure my plane has Internet. I assume business class is OK?”

  “I
’m obviously paying you too much.”

  ***

  Larry, Stephen, Thomas, and Bleys watched multicolored laser beams dissect a three-carat diamond cut as a perfect cube mounted on a vertical rod over the table.

  Three months, involving several intercontinental trips, diamonds, lasers, arguments, and cans of Mountain Dew, had passed quickly. Bleys had flown to Amsterdam so much that Larry had begun to suspect that he had seduced a flight attendant…or more likely, become hooked on a “special” someone in the red-light district.

  “There are some limitations,” Larry said, “including that the cube is write-once, but that’s all we need. And it writes fast and reads even faster—faster than RAM actually.” He chewed his lower lip and nodded. “This should work great.”

  Thomas seemed pretty excited. He asked, “How do you focus the beams?”

  “How do you do that?” Stephen asked.

  “Do what?” Thomas replied quizzically.

  “Always zoom in on the big problem.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just what I do.”

  Larry said, “Regardless, you got it. That’s the other problem. It seems like we should be able to use every empty space in the crystalline structure—at the atomic level—as a bit. If we were able to, it would give us a huge amount of storage.” He chuckled. “Kilocarats.”

  “Kilocarats,” Thomas said and laughed. “Catchy. Have you thought of nanotubes?”

  Larry said, “What is it with you guys and your nanotechnology?”

  “Hey,” Thomas said, “I’m a skeptic, too. No nanobots or any other nano-thing has ever materialized as a spectacularly interesting business. It’s just a commodity item for strengthening materials. But if you made a grid of nanotubes, you might be able to use them to focus the laser at the molecular level. You’d have to be careful to avoid diffusion, but it might work. And besides, for our use, the nanotech doesn’t have to do anything but sit still and be a filter. This could be a nanofirst.”

  Bleys snickered at the idea of a nanofirst. He mumbled, “Would that be a very small first?”

  Larry glanced at Bleys but decided to ignore him. “Worth a shot. Any of these nanotech companies would fall over itself to sell us some nanotubes. Hell, they might give them to us, they’re so desperate.”

  “What about larger diamonds?” Thomas asked.

  Stephen interjected, “I have some ideas, but I need experts—specifically, a geologist and a plasma physicist.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what are you thinking?”

  “I think we can grow large diamonds.”

  “Grow diamonds?”

  “Shhh. You don’t want the geologists to hear that. Or De Beers, for that matter.”

  “Well?”

  “If I can get some guys banging away on it, we might be able to get a process that works within a year. Until then, we’re buying the biggest diamonds we can find that are vaguely reasonable and using them to test. The problem is we really need the high-clarity diamonds, which are, of course, the most expensive. These diamond guys seem to get irritated when we want them cut as cubes. They should be happy we’re taking a few high-quality rocks out of circulation.”

  “OK. Get whoever you need…” Thomas then paused for a moment. Security was always a priority of his, but storage was a far bigger concern right now. “But if you think this process is going to work and if you think we’re going to need these experts on an ongoing basis, make sure you actually hire them and move them here.”

  “No problem.”

  Claire said, “Make sure they sign the NDA before you tell them anything.”

  Everyone turned, surprised, toward Thomas’s ever-present though seemingly ever-invisible patent attorney. Even Thomas seemed surprised when she had spoken, but that was possibly due to the fact she had basically just read his mind.

  Thomas cleared his throat and asked her, “Everything good on the patents?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve gotten this all down. Well documented. A very clean set of patents, sir.”

  “Great. File some trademarks on the variations of Kilocarat as well.”

  “I’ll get it taken care of.”

  “Thanks, guys,” Thomas said. “Glad this is exciting enough to pull Bleys out of his shell.”

  Bleys grinned but after seeing all the eyes turn toward him, seemed to shrink without budging a limb, like a trapped animal drawing itself in tight.

  “One more thing, boss,” Larry said. “In the open market, it’s pretty hard to get large diamonds. But I’ve done some research, and there are several very large diamonds that we could potentially buy. To really test this stuff, we probably need a thirty-plus-carat diamond. You can’t just pick that up at the mall.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “This guy, Robert Mouawad, has been buying up diamonds for years now. He has several of the world’s largest. While it is difficult to get prices, it seems like we’re probably talking in the ten to twenty mil range to get a hundred-carat diamond.”

  “Who?”

  “Mouawad. Some rich guy. He has stores kind of like Tiffany or Cartier, although I guess his stuff is even rarer and more expensive. They do have an e-commerce jewelry site, though. They also make those fantasy bras for the big Victoria’s Secret shows. You’ve probably seen those.” He winked. “You know, made of diamonds and rubies and such with price tags of fifteen million dollars.”

  “Where do you dig up this stuff?”

  “The Internet? Anyway, the two largest diamonds that I could find that have meaningful transaction histories are the Taylor-Burton…” Larry snickered. “…which apparently Richard Burton bought for Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a sixty-nine-point-four-two-carat pear-cut diamond. After they were divorced, it ended up being sold for almost five mil. It was bought six months later by Robert Mouawad, but I can’t find a price for that transaction. I am not entirely sure, but if we cut it to a cube, it would probably be thirty-five carats or so.

  “Mouawad also owns the Queen of Holland, which is one hundred and thirty-five point nine two carats and is a cushion cut. This might be more suitable for us. Cut as a cube, it would probably still be around eighty carats. This one has a long history of royalty and was bought and sold by Cartier several times. The last transaction with a value was in 1990 when it sold for around seven mil.

  “Though…” Larry sighed. “…given the way the price of all luxury goods have skyrocketed since 1990, I expect prices to have at least doubled.”

  Thomas said, “I think I’d rather wait six months and spend the money hiring the ten best people we can find to help us to figure out how to make synthetic diamonds large enough to meet our needs and for creating the production process to make them.” He paused, lost in thought, and then said, “I have a feeling we’re going to develop a voracious appetite for storage.”

  Chapter 7

  Year 3

  If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

  —Albert Einstein

  Larry fired up the revised system with the nanogrids wrapped around the diamond. The light from the lasers was slightly muted by the nanogrids, but the glow still highlighted Larry’s, Thomas’s, and Stephen’s faces in blue.

  “Holy crap!” Larry said. “The nanogrids idea actually worked. That was the best, uhm, let’s see…” His eyes rolled up, and he ticked off the fingers on one hand as if counting. “…zero dollars we’ve spent.” He chuckled. “I suckered them into giving me a lot of free samples.”

  “I liked the idea so much I bought the company!” Thomas laughed.

  “No shit?” Larry asked.

  Stephen’s white T-shirt peeked out from beneath his wrinkled blue button-up and reflected the blue glow more than their faces did. Stephen didn’t even bother to tuck in his shirt these days. His mussed hair was now halfway over his ears despite his gradually receding hairline, though he apparently took the time to shave every day.

  “Well,” Thomas said, “actually, since y
ou were looking at their stuff, I went ahead and negotiated an option to buy them. So I haven’t officially bought them yet, but I will now. I figured if this worked, we could sell nanotubes to whoever we license the patents to.”

  Claire nodded. “Good thinking, sir.” She stood behind them, just barely outside the reach of the blue light.

  Larry laughed. “Always the entrepreneur. I guess that’s why you’re in charge.”

  “So how big is this one?”

  Larry looked over at a monitor. “OK. It’s online.”

  He hit a few keys. Words appeared on the screen.

  72,000,000 yottabytes available

  “That’s seventy-two thousand trillion gigabytes,” Stephen added helpfully.

  “So what is this based on?” Thomas asked.

  “It’s a real diamond, nine carats, cube-cut.”

  Thomas whistled. “Nine carats? What did that cost?”

  Larry looked nervous. “Um, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Yes. It’s actually cheaper on a dollars-per-byte basis than any other storage available anywhere.”

  “Explain how it works.”

  “OK. This diamond is nine carats and can store seventy-two yottabytes of data—that’s eight yottabytes per carat. Yeah, yeah, I had to say it. So each yottabyte is one million exabytes or one billion petabytes or a trillion terabytes or a thousand trillion gigabytes.”

  Stephen added, “That’s a little over one and a half million years.”

  “That should work for us,” Thomas said. “For now.”

  “They’ll look cool in a data center, too. They glow.” Larry stifled a laugh. “And, well, there are lasers too.”

  “OK, so what about the synthetic ones?”

  “I’m getting to that. I think we can grow them to the size of a refrigerator or maybe even a little bigger.”

  Thomas coughed. “Really?”

  “Yeah. They’ll technically be diamonds, but you won’t be able to cut them up or make rings or anything like that. If you try to cut them, they’ll shatter. But they’ll work for us.”