Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  It sounded a depressingly familiar story. Get politicians and businessmen interested in a flaky idea – be it Star Wars, cold fusion or the Millennium Dome – and soon there’s so much money riding on it that no one is prepared to admit it’s a turkey.

  Don said, ‘Power generation is still decades away – but there’s another application we’re working on right now that could prove even more significant. When vacuum energy is drawn from the nickel-tantalum array, negative energy remains trapped between the leaves. If two separate arrays are in an entangled quantum state, tapping one produces a corresponding change in the other. Do it carefully enough and you have a linked pair of quantum computers. So vacuum energy could provide the perfect communication technology: error-free and totally secure. I’ve seen it for myself. They sent a recording of piano music across a distance of ten metres; the reception was excellent.’

  ‘What was the piano piece?’ asked Ringer. ‘Schumann, by any chance?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Don. ‘I’m not a fan of that classical stuff. Anyway, the hope now is to get the same effect at a more practical scale.’

  ‘I can see why. Half a ton of mirrors strapped to your ear would look a lot less stylish than a mobile phone.’

  Don’s imperviousness to irony was further evidence of the vertical career trajectory he’d followed. ‘The biggest problem is setting up the quantum entanglement in the first place,’ he continued. ‘You could say we’re in the same situation as Logie Baird, trying to make television work using spinning discs. What we’re looking for is a quantum equivalent of the cathode ray tube.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Lots,’ said Don. ‘The technical issues are largely to do with heat control.’

  ‘And what if your hot bubble of negative energy caught between some mirrors should happen to inflate at the speed of light and eat up the world?’

  ‘According to our calculations, that won’t happen.’

  ‘I hope you’ve double-checked your calculations,’ said Ringer.

  ‘We have,’ said Don. ‘In a full-scale array, we have to allow for virtual particles going inadvertently on-shell at energies up to 1000EeV.’

  ‘You mean, if somebody happened to let a speck of dust drift between those mirrors?’

  ‘Contamination is one possibility; imperfect geometry is another. We really don’t think such an energy surge could ever happen; it’s the sort of hypothetical scenario one merely has to make allowances for.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ said Ringer. ‘Even a very small chance of destroying the solar system is the sort of thing I’d prefer to insure against.’

  ‘The important thing is what this technology could do,’ said Don. ‘Imagine a global network of identical arrays: entangled quantum computers communicating instantaneously. It’ll make the Internet look like pigeon post.’

  Ringer was unimpressed. ‘The Internet already looks like pigeon post. At least pigeons are fast. And what catchy acronym have they dreamed up for this new network?’

  ‘Casimir Entanglement Transfer Instrument,’ Don announced. ‘CETI for short. Once it’s fully operational it’ll revolutionize telecommunications. You’ve heard of Q-phones?’

  ‘My wife bought me one,’ Ringer told him. ‘And I’ll probably need another PhD before I can figure out how to use it. Either that, or I need to be twenty years younger.’ Then Ringer remembered the text message. Call me: H. Did someone else know about CETI? Were they trying to tell him something?

  ‘As you realize,’ said Don, ‘Q stands for quantum.’

  ‘That’s only a sales gimmick.’

  ‘Initially, yes,’ he agreed. ‘But everyone knows that quantum computation is the future. Q-phones are already being produced that will be compatible with the CETI network once it’s up and running. Let me see your phone, I’ll tell you if it’s a P-Quad.’

  Ringer didn’t feel like entering into some laddish tech-talk that would only give Don another opportunity to look smart. Don might even trace the text message in Ringer’s phone and find it came from some spook in his own research station. Ringer wanted to get there first, as soon as he could wade through a user manual fatter than his Hoffmann novel, and even harder to follow. ‘Never mind about my phone,’ he said, keeping it in his pocket. ‘When is the great changeover due to happen?’ Ringer was fully confident it would never occur.

  ‘I can’t discuss that,’ said Don. ‘But I want you to appreciate that this is the future, John. The smartest people have already given up on superstrings and black holes: they’re doing vacuum energy now; only they aren’t allowed to publish it. Haven’t you noticed how quiet some of the big names have become in the last year or two? Sure, they maybe do a popular science book or a magazine article, but where’s their research? The best brains know that TV appearances don’t win Nobel Prizes. No; the smart guys have gone inside the wire.’

  ‘Free, I presume, from inconveniences like peer review.’

  Don leaned forward, conspiratorially, in a gesture that only made him look even more like a time-share salesman. ‘My advice to you, John, is to come in too. Do it now. Get in on the ground floor. Believe me, this is the biggest thing since the Manhattan Project.’

  ‘If you’re not careful,’ said Ringer, ‘it could also make the biggest bang in fourteen billion years.’

  Don sat back and shook his head. ‘The technology is perfectly safe. Do you honestly think the world’s leading scientific institutions would give this the go-ahead if there were any danger?’

  Behind Don, through the slatted blind of the office window, Ringer could see the dome of the nuclear reactor. ‘I suppose not,’ he said.

  ‘I want you to be part of this,’ Don told him. ‘I want you to be with me, not against me. That’s why I’ve worked so hard to bring you here. That’s why you’ll be giving a talk in front of some of the most senior executives on the project.’ He glanced down at Ringer’s research paper, still open on his desk. ‘And that’s why we need to discuss this. Section five: Non-collapsible wave functions could exhibit themselves at energies as low as 500EeV. A bit like saying motor cars will never go faster than a walking man, don’t you think?’

  ‘No,’ said Ringer. ‘More like warning that if you pump energies higher and higher, you might one day bump into some new physics you never expected. There could be grave risks if you run your machine at the level you’re talking about.’ Then he added, ‘Fortunately, I’m totally convinced that your trick with mirrors will never work, and the people of Scotland can sleep safely in their beds.’

  Don shrugged. ‘Fine. Your talk’s cancelled.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I’m hardly going to let you air groundless quibbles like these in front of our biggest financial backers. They’re not specialists in the field; they aren’t equipped to separate airy speculation from hard science.’

  ‘Ideal backers, then,’ Ringer said sourly.

  ‘It appears our meeting is at an end.’ Don stood up. Ringer remained seated.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Ringer asked him.

  ‘Absolutely. I know you can be trusted to keep this conversation completely secret. Naturally, any attempt on your part to divulge what you’ve learned here would be severely dealt with. I’m willing’ to reconsider if you change your mind; but unless we can discuss the errors in your paper in a free and candid way, I’m afraid we can’t pursue any kind of collaboration. Nor will I allow you to express unsubstantiated hypotheses that could undermine the progress we’re making here.’

  It wasn’t from being Ringer’s PhD student that Don had learned to talk this way. He’d obviously sat round too many tables, with too many suit-wearers accustomed to getting whatever they wanted.

  Ringer stood up too. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Call me tomorrow,’ he said curtly.

  Ringer added, ‘Under the circumstances, I’d better turn down your offer of accommodation. If you don’t mind, I’ll go and find myself a bed and breakfast for
the night.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Don said stiffly. ‘If you change your mind and decide to work with us on the project, naturally you’ll be most welcome at my home. Susan would love to see you again.’

  She and Don were young sweethearts when Ringer first knew them. He wondered how she felt about the way her husband had changed. She probably didn’t even know.

  ‘Give her my regards,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Don. I’ll call tomorrow.’

  Don went to open the office door. ‘And remember,’ he said. ‘Not a word about this to anyone. I’ve already risked a great deal for your sake, John. Don’t let me down.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Ringer promised, then said he’d find his own way out. As Ringer walked along the corridor, he didn’t look back. All he heard was the closing of Don’s door again, as he retreated into the safety of his office.

  The receptionist made Ringer sign several forms before releasing him; and when he got back in his car and drove to the gate, the two armed guards didn’t bother with their clipboard this time, but instead made him get out while they searched both Ringer and the car. He wondered if this little piece of theatre was Don’s idea, meant to intimidate him in a way that Don himself had been unable to manage.

  Soon, though, Ringer was driving along the main road again, in winter sunshine whose long shadows heralded daylight’s early end at such northerly latitudes. He was trying to make sense of everything Don had said, and just as urgently trying to find a place to stay. Craigcarron itself was a characterless village serving only as the plant’s dormitory. Ringer thought it best to put some distance between himself and Don, and so drove in the opposite direction, expecting to see a B&B sign at any moment. A quarter of an hour later, he’d counted only sheep on the moorland beside him, and seeing a turn-off for Ardnahanish, figured that if all else failed he could at least throw himself on the charity of Findlay McCrone. So Ringer headed inland, as the sign directed. The sea – a thin grey line in his rear-view mirror – was soon out of sight, and the rugged moors grew rapidly more mountainous, with snow piled thickly on rocky peaks. It was still the middle of the afternoon, but the light was already fading.

  He thought about the vacuum energy device. At best it sounded like wishful thinking by over-eager scientists; at worst, it reminded Ringer of countless hoaxes that have fooled gullible investors and governments over the years. Don had staked his career on a glorified perpetual motion machine. And it wasn’t even meant to generate electricity – what Don proposed instead was a quantum computer.

  Suppose Don was right, though; and suppose too, that his vast array of mirrors were one day to be intruded upon by a stray housefly or forgotten strand of hair, creating the sudden enormous energy surge he anticipated. Would there be any real danger? A thousand exa-electron-volts is no worse than the energy of a falling rock. Concentrate that at a point, however, and you get particles ten times more energetic than anything ever seen in nature.

  What might happen? Ringer had already given a possible answer in the paper left lying on Don’s desk. At such uncharted energies, quantum theory itself might be altered.

  With his puzzle about a cat, Schrödinger’s aim had been to reveal the absurdity of Bohr’s Copenhagen compromise. Yet many have seen Schrödinger’s parable as anything but absurd. That was the view taken by Hugh Everett when in 1957 he proposed what became called the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.

  When the box is opened, the universe splits in two: there is a world in which the cat survives, and another in which it is dead. Which is real depends only on your frame of reference; like seeing a train in motion or at rest according to your own velocity. The forking paths of nature are then part of a greater labyrinth in which every possibility is actual; a multiverse of parallel worlds. Everett came up with the idea in his PhD thesis; it was the only thing he ever published. He went to work at the Pentagon and pursued the rest of his career behind closed doors – leading to amusing suggestions that he was involved in attempts to make parallel universes interact with each other in the hope of steering our world into one where the Russian Revolution never happened. More realistically, Everett’s idea provides a way of understanding quantum computation.

  To speed up a calculation, several computers can be made to do it simultaneously in parallel. A quantum computer would do the same thing, except there would be one machine effectively working in many parallel universes. The hard part is ensuring that nothing disturbs it before the calculation is finished and the wave function of possibilities collapses, gently returning an answer to the universe we live in. Don Chambers appeared to think this problem could be solved using his new vacuum array.

  What if the waves should refuse to collapse when required? At very high energies they might prove stubborn, vacillating, recalcitrant. Drive the vacuum array hard enough, and the particles trapped between its mirrored faces could then be cats that never decide which world they’re meant to be in: that of the living, or of the dead. These orphaned shreds of matter would be neither real nor virtual. If Ringer’s troublesome section five were right, then Don’s computer would not know which universe to send its output to. Nor could its users even be sure which world they’d started out from. If Ringer’s fears were justified, then Don’s immaculate hall of mirrors would be a device not for global communication, but for universal confusion. Its trapped, rebounding particles would be ghosts and vampires, oscillating eternally between one universe and the next, bridging worlds and confounding them.

  What would it take, to lead to disaster? A glimpse inside the mirrors, perhaps. A lifting of the lid by a foolish trainee; the inadvertent tumbling of a screwdriver in a shaft, or the pulling of a lever that wiser men would have left unpulled. A flash as someone vaporizes in the heat; and another flash as Craigcarron becomes another Craigcarron, Scotland becomes another Scotland, the world becomes another world. No one would even notice at first. For all we know, it might already have happened.

  We would all be like Schrödinger’s cat: an unresolved mixture of possibilities, in a box from which no power of heaven or earth could ever free us. It might take no more than a poor alignment of those nickel-tantalum mirrors to cause the fatal leak of doubt. Then once it spread, there would be no more truth or falsehood; no fact or fiction. No; the earth – instead of being swallowed by a black hole, or pulverized into the quark consommé of physicists’ eternal dread – would have suffered a more terrible misfortune; the greatest, most laughable fate of all. Don’s hellish contraption – if such a thing could even be envisaged beyond the dreams of madmen – would have turned the planet, perhaps the very cosmos itself, into make-believe; into a joke, which God alone might laugh at, were he not instead to weep at mankind’s folly. Just as well then, that people like Don, and the EU technology commissioner, and countless heads of industry, were merely pumping money into the clever light-show of a fairground huckster. Just as well, that none of this could ever happen.

  Would that make a good performance for the parishioners of Ardnahanish? No, thought Ringer, they’d probably prefer birdwatching. He was approaching the place now and could see its feeble huddle in the valley beneath the hill his vehicle clung to; a village swathed in smoke and mist condensed upon it like a shroud, the grey vapour tainting the air of a few houses, a church, a pub. Streetlights glowed, a score or two like dying orange stars, enough to bind the little town in all the sickly light it needed. It looked an uninviting place; one you’d only visit if a guidebook said you must.

  As he drove down and entered it, a brown tourist sign immediately caught his attention. Burgh House Hotel, up a road to the right, might lift him back out of the despondent valley. He imagined better views, a decent restaurant. A woman was walking on the pavement; Ringer slowed, wound down his window and called to her.

  ‘Is it far to the hotel?’ he asked.

  She was wearing a thick coat, carried a shopping bag, and looked puzzled.

  ‘The Burgh House Hotel,’ he said. ‘Is it far?�
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  ‘Closed three year ago,’ she said bluntly, as though he ought to have known.

  ‘But there’s a sign,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘Aye, well nobody thought to take it down. Place was meant for winter sports. Skiing and the like. But there’s no skiing round here. Never enough snow, or not the right kind. That’s why the hotel closed. They’ve made it a mental hospital now, so I wouldn’t drive up there if I were you.’

  It appeared Ringer would have to take his chances here in the village. The way things were looking, he feared he might end up on a pew of Mr McCrone’s church. ‘Thanks,’ he said to her; but she was already walking on. He parked and began his search on foot. The village pub – the Pepperpot – looked the obvious place to start; but it wasn’t open yet, and Ringer hoped for something a little more domestic. Some kind old lady who’d cook him a decent breakfast in the morning, while he decided what to tell Don.

  In the dying daylight, he walked up and down Ardnahanish’s main street and its adjoining lanes. Though the village was far from any obvious tourist route, there were a few houses offering B&B. He rang the bell of one.

  The lady who answered looked to be in her seventies, friendly in appearance, her unkempt hair and broad smile giving her a reassuringly relaxed look.

  ‘I don’t normally get anyone wanting a room this time of year,’ she said apologetically. ‘But I can make one up for you.’ She invited Ringer inside and showed him the house: photographs of children and grandchildren on every available surface. The room would be fine, once the bed was made.

  ‘I’ll come back in an hour,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll be ready before, if you like. You can wait here and I’ll make you a pot of tea.’ She didn’t want to lose a customer.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back.’ He’d decided he might as well use the time to exhaust the village’s every possibility. The pub would be opening soon, and he’d need a meal. ‘See you in an hour,’ he told her.

  ‘All right,’ she said, showing him out. ‘I hope so.’