Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  “But there’s a problem,” Sharifi said, tracing the wheel-shaped pattern of the network, lighting up the radiating spokes with digital fireworks. “The system only works as long as we can maintain our banks of pure entanglement at the relay stations. Streamspace, the spinstream, the whole interstellar ecopolitical infrastructure depends on Compson’s World’s ability to keep supplying live Bose-Einstein condensates. And Bose-Einstein condensates are a nonrenewable resource. A nonrenewable resource that we are fast exhausting.”

  Sharifi turned away from the display to pace a short circuit along the tile floor of the laboratory. As if in response to the muted echo of her footsteps, the map gave way to a long-distance probe image of a planet half-cloaked in night. Li took in the blood-and-rust hue of the landmasses, the cloudlike swirls of algae bloom on the northern steppes, the primitive geometry of tailings piles big enough to be seen from high orbit. Compson’s World.

  “Coal. Oil. Uranium. Water. This is not the first time humanity has depended on a nonrenewable resource. And, as past ages have discovered, there are only two ways out of this dependence. Either you learn to do without the nonrenewable resource—or you learn to make more of it.”

  Gradually, so gradually that it seemed to be no more than the rising of Compson’s World’s distant sun, a pair of Bose-Einstein crystals took shape on the screen, superimposed on the brooding image of the planet.

  “So,” Sharifi said, turning away from the screen again. “How do we make more of it? And what, if we can allow ourselves to dream a little, would UN space look like with a cheap, unlimited supply of artificial condensate?”

  The holodisplay rippled, shifting through the color spectrum. Suddenly Li was in the middle of it. New transmission lines formed around her, zipping through empty air, linking previously isolated relays, stringing a thick, star-bright spider’s web through and beyond UN space. The web pulsed, grew solid, wove itself into a single, bright veil that shimmered over the whole expanse of the human worlds.

  “No unequal distribution of transport technology,” Sharifi said. “No information ghettos. No technological backwaters. Just a single entanglement field linking all UN space—and eventually all human space. A metalink, if you will, that provides direct, economical, one-shot superluminal replication from any point in UN space to every other point.”

  The holo shifted again, this time to realtime footage of suspiciously clean-looking Bose-Einstein miners working at an underground cutting face.

  “All we need,” Sharifi said, “is the technology to culture Bose-Einstein condensates and format them to our specifications in a laboratory setting.”

  Now Sharifi began the sales pitch in earnest. The feed of the cutting face gave way to images of condensates being assayed, cut, polished, and formatted. And, finally, to the finished product: cleaned, cut, paired, and formatted communications-grade Bose-Einstein condensate. “Of course, in order to culture condensates,” she said, “we must understand them. And the key to understanding lies not in our future, but in our past.”

  A glowing image of Earth appeared on the holodisplay. The image swelled as the display zoomed in on blue ocean. Sharifi looked at Li, smiled, and stepped into the screen.

  Surf beat around them. Li walked beside Sharifi on a narrow slip of starlit sand between two boundless oceans. Stars shone overhead in a bright, clear sky that no unprotected human being had seen for over two centuries.

  “This,” Sharifi said, “is the Great Barrier Reef. It is, or was, the largest single life-form on pre-Migration Earth.”

  She walked out into the surf, beckoning for Li to follow, and Li saw that she and Sharifi were both wearing wet suits and diving gear. They dove, passing swiftly though the surf and into the quiet water below. Sharifi brushed by Li on the way down, bare thigh against bare thigh, and Li wondered just how personal this program was designed to get. They came to rest in still, bright water half a dozen meters below the surface. A coral reef ran away like a broad road on either side of them.

  It was night; the reef was active. Technicolor fish slipped around and through it. The coral itself waved a million glowing arms below them. As Sharifi guided Li along the great wall of the reef, a realtime story unfolded before them. The coral grew, hunted, colonized new territory. Li saw that the entire reef was a single organism, a single primitive mind.

  Then she saw humans come, and with them shipping lanes, motorboats, oil spills, chemical contamination. The reef sickened, shrank, died long before anyone unlocked its secrets or plumbed the immense colonial mind’s inner workings.

  The water glowed and shifted. Suddenly Li was floating not in water but in featureless darkness.

  “The Great Barrier Reef is gone,” Sharifi said. “Anything we could have learned from it is lost forever. However, when humanity moved out into the galaxy, we discovered another colonial organism. One built on an even larger scale. The Bose-Einstein strata of Compson’s World.”

  Light seeped into the world, and Li saw an immense, glassy honeycomb structure stretching around and above her.

  “This is what a typical Bose-Einstein deposit would look like if you removed the coal and rock surrounding it,” Sharifi told her. “The condensates draw energy from the surrounding coal. We don’t understand how they function, or how their constituent strata communicate with each other. Nonetheless, each deposit appears to form a single colonial organism. Each Bose-Einstein bed is, in effect, an immense, landlocked coral reef, growing in an ocean of coal and rock.”

  The stratum faded, and the lab reappeared around them.

  “Bose-Einstein strata are too different from terrestrial carbon-based life for us to draw any direct conclusions,” Sharifi said. “Still, the analogy is a fruitful one. The strata display many of the characteristics of a primitive colonial intelligence. Stimuli pass from one segment of each stratum to other segments. More intriguing, several experiments have established that the condensates pass interstratal as well as intrastratal messages by quantum replication, leading to the supposition that all of Compson’s strata may have originated in a single organism, and that the ability of their component condensate beds to maintain pure entanglement supplies with only minimal decoherence is an evolved survival trait. Whatever the explanation, it is this organism that we need to understand in order to culture live condensate.

  “We are now a century into the quantum era, but despite all our advances, we are primitives. We use condensates, but we don’t control them, don’t understand them. In quantum terms, we are little better than prehistoric cave dwellers who nourish a lightning-sparked flame, knowing they lack the power to rekindle it. I am asking you to help us step into a new era—an era in which we will take control of this extraordinary resource, understand it, master it, use it to unite our species as we have not been united since the Evacuation.”

  Sharifi moved in to close the sale. She started talking practical applications, patents, proprietary data. She alluded to the potential profits without ever quite putting hard numbers to them. This was sexy science, buffed, polished, and carefully wrapped for consumption by corporate donors.

  “Any questions?” Sharifi asked after the wrap-up.

  “Yes.” Li kept her voice deliberately flat. “How the hell did you convince the Secretariat to waive the Zahn Act restrictions and clear a genetic to work on this project?”

  Sharifi blinked and stiffened, looking genuinely insulted. “Forgive me,” she said coolly. She sounded as if she were working hard to stay polite. “I can’t say that’s a question I expected. We have of course obtained all the necessary TechComm clearances. However, if you have concerns about security issues, I can refer you to the appropriate officials.”

  The program was good. Sharifi had laid out the money to get an AI with enough power and personality to sell the simulation. She must have needed big money, and needed it fast. And she’d gotten it, or she’d never have made it to Compson’s in the first place.

  RingServ: 17.10.48.

  “What
do you think?” Li asked two hours later, sitting at an outdoor table just off the Calle Mexico.

  Cohen shrugged—a shrug that Li felt in the numbers even as she saw it. “I think Sharifi needed money. Badly.”

  He had put on a ’face for the meeting that Li imagined he thought was inconspicuous. But of course Cohen’s idea of inconspicuous was a few spins off-norm by most people’s standards, and half the singles in the place had been glancing surreptitiously at their table for the last ten minutes.

  “And how much of the sell do you buy?” Li asked.

  Cohen grinned. “Not a word of it.”

  “You think there’s a sideline? Some other way she was making money off it?”

  “Not money. It would never have been about money. You have to understand, Sharifi wasn’t an experimental physicist. She was all about theory, structure. Metaphysics for want of a better word. She wouldn’t have gone to Compson’s World, wouldn’t have raised money and jumped through hoops for anything that was merely technical. She hunted big game. And whatever she was after down there, it was about a hell of a lot more than just making space travel cheaper for the average monkey.”

  “Which still leaves us with the question of what exactly she was after.”

  “My guess?” Cohen crossed long legs and Li glanced away as his shorts rode up to bare a breathtaking stretch of thigh. “I think it had something to do with mapping interference patterns.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Ah!” He leaned forward, showing the kind of enthusiasm that usually meant he was about to talk math to her. “Interference patterns are the riddle that kicked off the whole enterprise of quantum physics. Basically, we’re talking about the two-slit experiment.”

  “Oh,” Li said as her oracle summoned up a long-forgotten picture from an introductory physics textbook. “The thing where you put one photon through a screen and it interferes with itself, right? And then you get to watch the physicists jump up and down and argue about whether it’s a wave or a particle. Or both. Or neither. I never really saw what that had to do with Sharifi, though.”

  “That’s where Coherence Theory comes in. How much do you know about it?”

  Li shrugged. “You mean like the Everett-Sharifi Equations, the Coherent Worlds Theorem, that stuff?”

  “Exactly. And like Sharifi said in her sales pitch, the answer was in our past, on Earth. It goes all the way back to the twentieth century in fact. To an American named Hugh Everett, who studied the wave theory of quantum mechanics and came up with this crazy idea that there was nothing theoretical about quantum mechanical wave functions at all. That they were actual manifestations of multiple worlds, multiple possible histories. In short, that the mathematical formalism of wave mechanics—and this is the part Hannah really loved, of course—that the mathematical form itself gave us the key to understanding the nature of the physical universe.

  “According to Everett, each point on the Schrödinger wave function that you use to calculate the possible locations of an electron around the nucleus or the possible spin orientations of a photon has a real, physical existence. Just not in this world. In another world. One of an infinite number of worlds that branch off from each other every time a thermodynamically irreversible measurement event takes place.

  “So—textbook example—you come to a crossroads, and you have to decide whether to turn left or right. Or so it seems. But actually you take both forks in the road. You just take them in different worlds. Or, depending on your terminology, in different constituent universes of the multiverse.”

  “Then… what’s the point? I mean, everything happens no matter what you do, or what path you choose? It’s crazy.”

  “Well, yes, that’s certainly the majority view of things. Or at least it was for several centuries. The Many-Worlds interpretation was one of those theories that was so absurd that Everett either had to be insane or right. And like a lot of crazy theories it took a long time to get off the ground. It got nowhere with most of Everett’s colleagues, in fact, and he left academia and eventually smoked himself to death, ignored and ridiculed.”

  “What a surprise,” Li said caustically.

  “Right. Well, Everett’s idea sat around gathering dust for the next few centuries while experimental physicists went on with their experiments. Experiments that over time, and without anyone really stopping to notice, gradually made the Many-Worlds theory look less and less crazy and more and more like it might just be a small but important piece of the truth.

  “That’s where Hannah Sharifi comes into the story. Hannah was obsessed with Everett’s work. She basically spent two decades trying to prove that the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was right, and that Everett just hadn’t had the experimental data or the computational tools to prove it.”

  “But she didn’t prove it, did she?” Li said. “She failed. The most famous failure in the history of physics, right? The biggest mistake since Columbus ran into America and called it India.”

  “Yes. She failed. Which is to say that she didn’t prove the multiverse was physically real in the way she believed it was. But—and this is important—a theory doesn’t have to be experimentally verifiable to be valuable. And what she did with Coherence Theory was in some ways far more significant than pinning down an experimental result. She gave us a new theoretical framework for thinking about quantum-level events. In essence, she proved that even if the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t actually describe the universe, it’s still the most effective way to think about the universe. Or at least the most effective way to think about the universe for now.”

  “And what does interference have to do with it? Why do you think she was looking at interference patterns in the Anaconda?”

  Cohen shook out a cigarette and lit it, smiling. “Interference is central. It’s the hat trick at the center of Coherence Theory. Basically what Sharifi saw—and this takes us into the realm of quantum information theory—is that interference is really the flip side of coherence. If you really take the concept of the multiverse seriously, then entanglement, decoherence, and interference all become interdependent. In essence, they emerge as the same phenomenon occurring in different dimensions of the multiverse.”

  “This is giving me a headache, Cohen.”

  “Quantum mechanics gives everyone a headache. That’s just how it is. But my point is you don’t have to believe Sharifi’s idea or even be able to visualize it, really. Because it works, like a lot of the watershed ideas in quantum mechanics, whether or not you believe in it. The Everett-Sharifi Equations accurately predict a whole range of quantum behavior that prior theories couldn’t make sense of. Which goes back to what I was saying about how theories don’t have to be true to be useful.

  “And Coherence Theory is beautiful, of course.” His cigarette described a delicate arc in mid-air. “Sharifi’s early papers on it were some of the most elegant pieces of reasoning in the history of modern physics. And being beautiful is almost as important as being useful.” He grinned. “More important, Sharifi would have said.”

  “So you think she was looking at live fields in the Bose-Einstein beds because there was something about the relationship between entanglement, interference, and decoherence in those fields that she thought would… what? Prove her theories?”

  “Maybe. Or she might just have hoped she could refine some aspect of Coherence Theory. But whatever she was after, it would have been primarily theoretical. A fresh direction. A big answer. A new problem. Something that meant something.”

  “Well she found something,” Li said. “We know that. But then she erased her data. So whatever she found, it was something she didn’t want people to know about.”

  Cohen shook his head decisively. “I don’t think that can be right. I don’t think Sharifi would have destroyed data. I don’t think any committed scientist could bring herself to do that.”

  “Even if she realized that the data would prove Coherence Theory was wrong?
Even if she thought it would destroy her life’s work, make her a laughingstock like Everett?”

  “Even then, Catherine. Sharifi believed in knowledge. In truth. It was about being right for her, not just having people think she was right.”

  “Maybe,” Li said. “Or maybe you just didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

  Cohen didn’t answer for a moment, and when he spoke he was looking past the Ring-side skyline at the vast glittering curve of Earth. “You’ve never been there, have you?” he asked.

  “To Earth? No. Of course not.” No one could go back anymore unless they fell under one of the religious exemptions. And constructs couldn’t go back even then; they were controlled technology, banned by the Embargo.

  “I’ve been there,” Cohen said. “I was born there.”

  “I know,” Li said, and shivered.

  She had seen old noninteractive video footage of Cohen’s programming—or rather of the development of the affective loop cognitive program that eventually grew into the Emergent phenomenon that called itself Cohen. The programmers had described their work with a frankness that was shocking to modern ears. They had talked about calling behaviors, well-being-enhancement drives, emotive manipulation. Those words mocked Li every time she began to imagine that she knew anything about what happened on the other side of the interface.

  “What was Earth like?” she asked, shaking off the memory of Chiara’s slender fingers brushing hers, of Roland standing alone in the middle of a crowded room, watching her.

  “Beautiful,” Cohen said, and his voice trembled with something the human ear could only interpret as desire. “There will never be anything as beautiful in the universe again.”

  “There’s Compson’s World,” Li said. “It’s beautiful. In its own way. What’s left of it.”

  Cohen laughed softly, as if a pleasant memory had come back to haunt him. “You’re the second person who’s told me that.”