Windows Out

by Michael Galloway

  “We started our work with a small grant from the University of Minnesota,” Winslow began. “About two or three years ago. I had just finished up grad school and Devon was working on his master’s thesis. And so we started building our first quantum computer.”

  Mitch took hasty notes. “Uh huh. And are you still working on that?”

  “Yes, there are a couple of prototypes here in the lab. Devon, please wheel one out here for Mr. Tavis to examine.”

  Devon nodded and left the room. He soon wheeled in a tall black cylinder on a squeaky metal dolly. The cylinder was the size of a household water softener and a half-dozen braided copper-colored cables sat on top. The phrase Atlas-Q was written on the side in giant green neon letters. Devon untangled the cables and plugged them into a laptop computer on the coffee table. He fired up the laptop and waited.

  “So what are you planning on using this machine for?” Mitch said as he drummed the pen on his legal pad. He was skeptical of the device since previous interviews with other researchers involved room-sized machines, superconductors, and huge cooling support systems.

  Winslow crossed his arms and his eyebrows dipped in suspicion. “Mr. Tavis, do you know much about quantum mechanics?”

  “I’ve written a handful of articles about it. But I’m no expert by any means. By the way, you can call me Mitch.”

  “Mr. Tavis, what we are doing here is nothing short of groundbreaking research. It’s taken us years of work to get to this point. What we are about to demonstrate is the latest in quantum superposition.”

  Mitch held the pen between his teeth and waited for Winslow to continue.

  “Superposition, as I’m sure you know, is when a substance or particle is capable of existing in multiple states at once. In the digital world it would like a bit existing as a one, a zero, or a one and a zero at the same time. Ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat?”

  Mitch knew about Schrödinger’s paradox but it seemed that every scientist he talked to had their own take on the matter. “A little. Enlighten me.” He started to take notes again and drew a quick picture of a cat to stay focused.

  “It was a thought experiment. It goes like this: you lock a cat inside of a box with a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter, and a flask of poison. If the radioactive substance emits a particle, it sets off the Geiger counter. That in turn triggers a hammer that breaks the flask of poison and kills the cat. Only at any given time one is unsure if the cat is alive or dead or is both at the same time. What’s more, making an observation can affect the results and collapse it into one state or another.”

  “You mean if someone goes and checks in on the cat?”

  “Correct. Let’s say you put a window on the box. If you looked inside, the cat might default to one state or the other. But if you leave it alone, it could be both.”

  Mitch took notes. “Sounds like my job.”

  “I don’t follow.” Winslow said, truly puzzled.

  “Well, if I’m at my work desk and someone is watching over my shoulder, I can’t write. It’s like I have the ideas but I can’t put them down until I’m left alone. I’ll just start to get a handle on the problem and bam! My boss walks in. And it always defaults to the state of “no pay” if I don’t find a way to get things done. Maybe I should have been a novelist.”

  Mitch stood up to examine the machine on the cart. “Can you open this thing up?”

  “I suppose,” Winslow said sounding annoyed. “Devon, take the cover off.”

  Devon removed the cover and set it on the floor. Inside the cylinder there was another cylinder and inside of that there were several disc-shaped objects with a handle at the top. Devon pulled up on the handle to reveal a series of discs built like an inverted Tower of Hanoi. The discs shrank in size from top to bottom and inside each disc was a tiny circuit board.

  “What are you cooling this thing with?” Mitch said.

  “Liquid helium,” Winslow replied.

  “And how many qubits?”

  “One hundred and ten.”

  Fascinated, Mitch circled the device. He motioned for Devon to put the cover back onto the machine. Devon then hit the power switch, punched a few commands on the laptop keyboard, and waited. Once the system was up and running, he looked up at the clock on the wall and hurried off into the room with the ping-pong table as if he was late for a match.

  Winslow then turned the laptop toward him and waved Mitch over to his side. He pointed at the screen. “This is where all the action happens. I’ll run a sample test for your article.”

  Devon waltzed back into the lounge with a cereal bowl full of cat food. He set it onto the floor and whistled twice. When nothing happened he turned to Winslow. “Have you seen the cat?”

  “Not today,” Winslow said in a curt tone of voice.

  Devon looked beneath the coffee table, checked the tops of the cabinets, and then opened each kitchen cabinet one by one. He whistled the entire time.

  “Can you do that somewhere else? It’s distracting me,” Winslow said.

  “But what if the cat got out?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Goodness…or what if…what if it got caught in the entangler?”

  “The entangler?” Mitch said as he wrote the word down on his legal pad.

  Winslow shot Devon a burning look. He turned back to face Mitch. “Perhaps another time, Mr. Tavis. Here, watch the graphics on the screen.”

  The graph listed the qubit numbers across the bottom and their states on the side. The graph bounced around wildly at first until it settled on a solution. Mitch tried to follow the demonstration but found himself distracted by Devon’s cat quest.

  “Mr. Tavis. Please direct your attention back here. This graph illustrates the state of the qubits in our quantum machine and…” His voice trailed off. “Mr. Tavis. You are here to learn, correct?”

  Mitch nodded. “I am. I am.” He scribbled notes but when he wrote the word “entangler” again Winslow exploded.

  “Devon,” Winslow snapped. He lifted his hands in the air in mock surrender. “Go on. Show him the entangler.”

  “Over here,” Devon said with giddy excitement. “It’s how we make the crystals.”

  Mitch followed him over to the corner near the coffee maker. On the countertop were two devices that looked like a set of microwave ovens. The front of each had a sliding door, a control panel, and indicator lamps.

  Devon slid one of the doors open. “See, we put some of the crystals in the first chamber here, and then others in the right chamber here.” He then stepped over to point out several bowls of white crystals on the counter. All of the crystals looked like sugar. “Here’s the next batch we’re going to process overnight. Oh and here are some other crystals we are experimenting with.”

  Mitch reached out to pick up a few light purple crystals in a nearby bowl. “This looks like rock candy.”

  “Oooh. Don’t touch that. Those ones are unstable.”

  “How about those over there?” Mitch said pointing to the beaker of crystals next to the coffee maker. They were the crystals he put into his coffee.

  “I wonder how those got moved over there?” Devon reached over and slid the beaker across the counter next to the bowl of light purple crystals.

  Mitch glanced at his coffee cup back on the table. He cleared his throat and took furious notes. “So, what, exactly does this entangler do?”

  “Entanglement is where two sets of particles become related to each other, but at a distance,” Winslow said. “Here, let me show you on the screen.” He waved Mitch back over to the laptop on the coffee table. He changed the graphics and switched to another view. “See here, we have a quantum scanner hooked up. This scans the crystals in the machine on the left and then reports on their state. But if those crystals are connected through entanglement with the ones in another bowl…say in the machine on the right…then the states will be shared between the bowls. If we then change the states of the crystals in the b
owl on the right the changes will show up onscreen.”

  Mitch again took furious notes. “And you’ve verified this…how?”

  Winslow’s voice intensified. “We have multiple means of verifying the states of the crystals.”

  “So…help me understand. What would you use this for?” Mitch said. He stopped writing.

  “Oh, you could use it for teleportation, for example,” Devon said.

  Mitch looked up. His hands tingled. “So you can transport things across the room?”

  “Oh, no. Just information,” Devon said with a laugh. He stepped back over to the coffee table. “We did make some attempts at teleporting objects a few months ago but there were too many accidents.”

  “Accidents?” Mitch said, sensing he was drawing near to the real story now.

  “Oh sure. We had vortices open up in the floor, the ceiling, the walls…”

  “Oh never mind those. Can we stay focused on the results here?” Winslow said. He pulled his hands through his hair and his cheeks became flush. “I’m sure Mr. Tavis wants to focus on our achievements and not our setbacks. Can’t you see the future in this?” Winslow jabbed a finger at the laptop screen. He hit a few keys and the display switched back to his first demonstration. “Let’s go back to the quantum computer graphs. See here…”

  “I don’t see them as setbacks. Tell me more about the accidents,” Mitch said with a lift in his voice. He leaned in to listen and at the same time looked on at his coffee cup and hoped a vortex would open up at a random time. “So you think your missing cat climbed into one of the entanglement machines? Maybe took a nap in there one night?”

  Devon rubbed his chin. “I hadn’t thought of that. He does like to sleep in warm places.” Devon turned again to locating their missing cat. “Schrödinger? Where are you?” He wandered off.

  “A missing cat. Accidental vortices. Anything else I should know?” Mitch said without looking up.

  “We have some missing crystals, too. That happened last week,” Devon said from an adjacent room.

  “Missing crystals,” Mitch said as he wrote the words on his legal pad. He had filled an entire page with notes and now turned it over to a fresh page.

  Winslow growled. “Mr. Tavis. We did not invite you here today to talk about accidents. If you look here at the screen as I pointed out before, you can see there are some incredible uses for this technology.”

  “Like…?”

  “Encryption. Decryption. In record time. That could be a game changer for our industry.”

  “Uh huh.” Mitch was bored by the whole idea because there would always be companies endlessly trying to one-up each other in the field of technological security. “So just security uses?”

  “No, no. I imagine being able to communicate over long distances.”

  Mitch reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “We have that already.”

  “No. Imagine some crystals on the Moon or on the other side of the world. If I tweak one set of crystals in my lab I could alter the states of the others halfway around the planet.”

  Interesting, Mitch thought. But was it enough? He had heard this idea before but nobody could figure out how to turn it into a practical device. Holes in the floor? Now that would sell magazines.

  “Did anything ever fall into one of the vortices? Or come out of them?” Mitch said.

  Winslow rose up from his chair and rammed his hands into his pants pockets. He paced back and forth on the wooden floor and steamed.

  Devon continued to call out for the cat. He soon returned to the main room. “Still can’t find him. You don’t think he got entangled with something do you?”

  “Maybe you should come back another time,” Winslow said in a calm but bitter voice. He slammed the laptop screen closed.

  “But it was just getting interesting,” Mitch said and he reached over and cradled his coffee cup. He did not dare take a sip. He stashed away his legal pad and pen and stood up. “I’m going to be blunt. When you called me up, I was sure this whole operation…” He gestured around the lounge. “…was just an attempt to raise money for another scam.”

  Winslow exploded with rage. “A scam! You’re calling our work a scam? How dare you.”

  Mitch put his hands in the air and pleaded for calm. “No, no. I’ve just seen enough of these types of things and I’ve seen a lot of phony demos. I’m not saying your demos are phony. It’s just…”

  “Just what? Tell me plainly.”

  Mitch’s mind raced through a range of possible answers. “I can’t figure out what angle to take with the story. Normally I pride myself on being able to figure out a good angle. But this time I’m stumped. Do I write about the quantum computer or the entangler? Although the accidents would sell better.”

  “Good day, Mr. Tavis!”

  “You can call me Mitch…”

  “Devon, show Mr. Tavis the door.”

  Devon escorted Mitch out of the laboratory and back into the hallway. Devon gushed with apologies.

  Mitch put up a hand. “No worries. I have everything I need.”

  “Are you still going to write up something for us? Winslow can get to be a little stubborn sometimes.”

  “I’ll run it by my editor.”

  Devon sighed but held onto a hopeful look in his eyes. “If you don’t run the story, could you still do me a favor? It’s my son, Evan. He’s always wanted to work for your magazine. I know it’s a lot to ask but he’s got a tech background and he can write.”

  All Mitch wanted to do was to move on, but he could see sincerity in Devon’s eyes. “I’ll see what I can do. But could you just tell me about one of the accidents? I won’t publish it.”

  Devon looked over his shoulder. He directed Mitch into another hallway out of sight of the front door of Atlas-Q.

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Just last week, I was washing dishes in the sink and I splashed some water onto one of the bowls. The crystals started to foam after a few minutes so I ran outside and dumped them in the snow.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “A vortex opened up and sucked down a no-parking sign. Whoosh! Right into the ground.”

  “Is the hole still out there?”

  “Oh no. It closed up a few seconds later.”

  Mitch fought the urge to take notes and smiled instead. “Thanks.”

  He returned to his car and eyed the space where the no-parking sign should have been. He opened the lid of his coffee cup and swirled its contents around. It looked like normal coffee. He brought the cup up to his nose but did not smell anything unusual.

  He set the cup back into his car’s drink holder. His cell phone rang. It was his editor.

  “Did you find out anything?” Mr. McConnell asked in a husky voice.

  “They showed me a few machines and a few graphs but not much else. Then they claimed the bowls of white crystals and rock candy on the counter were quantum crystals and they could teleport things across their lab.”

  “Rock candy? Teleportation? Did they demo that?”

  “Not unless you count the pretty graphs on the screen. I just can’t figure out the angle to take or if they’re lying. Most quantum computers take up whole rooms. Their machine fits on a small cart. I think the real story is the accidents, but they don’t want me to discuss those. If you ask me this story is as good as dead.”

  Mr. McConnell mumbled on the other end of the line. “When you get back in the office, I have another assignment for you.”

  Mitch ended the call a few seconds later. As he drove off, he hit a pothole and jostled the contents of the coffee cup. At the next stoplight he heard a hissing noise coming from the cup. He peered inside to find the coffee foaming with bubbles. The foam continued to rise and in panic he rolled down his window. He dumped the coffee onto the street. He clicked the lid back into place and tossed the cup onto the floor of the passenger side of his car.

  At the next red stoplight he gazed into his rear view mirror to see
if a vortex opened up in the road behind him. When nothing happened he did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  He peeked again at the coffee cup. It was silent and still on the floor mat. When the light turned green he glanced up. A black cat with white paws and a white-tipped tail pounced onto the hood of his car, stared at him, and bounded off into a nearby snow bank. He rolled down his window and yelled, “Schrödinger?” The cat stopped, turned back to look, and then ran in between a pair of houses.

  He wanted to chase down the cat, but thought better of it. After all, if he put the cat in a box and brought it back to the lab, who knew what state it would be in.

  Numbers Game

  “It's a matter of time before most of us are replaced,” Dr. Nick Caldwell said in a dry but hopeful voice as he took a long drink of hot green tea. The famed robotics engineer had a wistful look in his eyes as he put his elbows onto the black marble tabletop. He was a tall man with a slender build, a receding hairline, and wire-rimmed glasses. He continued, “But that will mean we can finally get to solving the real problems at hand.”

  Francis Beam stared on at his own cup of green tea before taking a sip. The tea tasted funny as if it was really made from cardboard steeped in water. He set his cup into a white ceramic saucer and twirled the cup around to pass the time. “You really think so?” He said. “You can only replace so many human jobs with robots.”

  “Not really. Most jobs are repetitive in nature. Once you break down all the essential patterns it’s child’s play to automate the boring bits away. Take the wait staff here for example.” Dr. Caldwell gestured toward the kitchen.

  Francis panned around the restaurant. He saw two other tables with chefs at their teppanaki grills entertaining a total of six customers. A tiny crowd for a Thursday night in the suburbs, but nowhere did he see a server. “There isn’t any wait staff here.”

  “That’s precisely my point. Their job is quite repetitive. Hence ripe for automation.”

  “But when all the people are gone out of the restaurant what’s the point of going out anymore? Sometimes I appreciate a little company when I’m out alone.”