They were being evicted, politely but firmly. Compson’s World and the skies above it no longer belonged to them.
Li blew on the cold viruflex until it frosted, then pressed her forehead against it. Her eyes felt hot and dry. She kept thinking she should do something, but there was nothing to do, nothing anyone needed her for. And there would be weeks, months of this nothing before they reached Alba and what was left of her life started up again.
She should care more about it than she did—should be able to muster curiosity, if nothing else, about whether she would return home to a new assignment or a court-martial or worse. But what was the point of thinking that way? You cared, or you didn’t care. The rest was mere survival.
She shook her head irritably, prodding malfunctioning wetware back into silence. <4280000pF>
She sighed and rubbed her temples. A pair of skinny brown legs appeared in her peripheral vision. Dusty. Barefooted.
Hyacinthe?
She tried to focus on the vision. Lost it. Then something flashed pale on the edge of sight, and she looked, and she could just make him out, faintly, as if he weren’t quite there. But the eyes were there. And couldn’t she feel him hacking the ship’s net, pirating its VR programs. Or was she just fooling herself?
For God’s sake, say something!The thought ripped out of her like flesh being torn away.
Sorry. I’m a little shaky. But it’s me this time. Most of me, anyway. He climbed onto the platform, very carefully, holding on with both hands, and sat beside her.
She felt something come alive in her chest, testing the wind, opening strong wings. She took a deep breath and realized it was the first time in days she hadn’t felt that weight on her chest. He filled up her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look at him. She turned without speaking and looked out the viewport toward the dying station. “Funny how it still looks more or less okay from the outside,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll be able to salvage anything when they come back.”
“I don’t think they’re coming back. They may come back to fight, but even then … I don’t think they can face it.”
“What about the AIs?”
“We’ll be back. We have to come back. This is our future. Or one of our possible futures.” “What was it like down there?”
“It’s what Sharifi said: a chance to look into the shuffle. Everything is possible, and everything that’s possible is. It was wonderful. Terrifying. I almost forgot to come back.”
Li felt a flare of anger shoot through her. He could have come back anytime? Days ago? Hadn’t he even thought about what Nguyen would think? What Bella and the rest of them would think? What she would think?
You know I came as soon as I could.
The thought brushed along the edges of her mind, soft and tickling. Asking for forgiveness without quite asking. Butterfly kisses, she thought with a flash of child’s memory. But when she fished for the memory, she couldn’t get it back, couldn’t tell whether it was hers or Cohen’s. A shiver went through her at the thought that she could confuse the two. Then the fear drifted into … something. Something she could live with, even if she didn’t understand it yet.
“Why did you come back?” she asked.
“You promised to think about something. I wanted to know what you decided.”
She couldn’t feel him, couldn’t read him the way she had during those hours in the mine. But he had to know. How could he touch her, how could he look at her without knowing?
“I told you,” she said.
“Feeling something doesn’t mean you can follow through on it.” “No,” she said. “It doesn’t, does it?”
He had drawn back from her a little as they spoke. Now he reached out and touched her hand and looked into her eyes. “What do you want now, Catherine?”
She looked back at him, feeling the warmth and the pull of him, the something in his smile that lived beyond and below words, that she no longer had to pin down or put a name to. The image of a rose took shape in her mind. A real rose, a little hurt in its spines, a little rot in its redness. A rose and its thorns.
“Everything.” She smiled. “All of it.”
FURTHER READING
Readers who follow what Lee Smolin has called the spectator sport of quantum physics will recognize the long shadows cast in this story by the theories of John Stuart Bell, Charles Bennett, David Deutsch, Hugh Everett, Chris Isham, Roger Penrose, John Smolin, Lee Smolin, John Archibald Wheeler, and others. The professional literature on quantum information theory, quantum gravity, spinfoam, the ManyWorlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and associated concepts is, of course, vast. What follows is a brief list of books and articles that were particularly helpful during the writing of Spin State.
These sources range from popular introductions to professional literature. I hesitate to steer readers toward one end or another of the spectrum; there are many concepts (quantum-teleportation comes to mind) for which the clearest and simplest explanation really is in the professional literature. For incorrigible mathophobes, however, I have marked equation-free texts with an asterisk (*).
Quantum Physics Generally 1
John Stuart Bell. Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
M. Bell, K. Gottfried, M. Veltman, eds. John S. Bell on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2001.
*Jeremy Bernstein. Quantum Profiles. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991.
*Barbara Lovett Cline. The Questioners: Physicists and the Quantum Theory. New York: Crowell, 1965.
*Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann. The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in TwentiethCentury Physics. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
Ian Duck, E. C. G. Sudarshan. 100 Years of Planck’s Quantum. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2000.
David K. Ferry. Quantum Mechanics: An Introduction for Device Physicists and Electrical Engineers, 2nd Ed. Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2001.
*Richard P. Feynman. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985.
*Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.
P. French, P. J. Kennedy, eds. Niels Bohr, A Centenary Volume. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
*Murray Gell-Mann. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1995.
*Adrian Kent. “Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist,” in Visions of the Future: Physics and Electronics, ed. J. Michael T. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
*Gerard Milburn. Schrödinger’s Machines: The Quantum Technology Reshaping Everyday Life. New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1997.
L. Van der Waerden. Sources of Quantum Mechanics. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1967.
Quantum Information Theory
(EPR, Quantum Cryptography, and Quantum Computing)2
*Amir D. Aczel. Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002.
A. Aspect, J. Dalibard, and G. Roger. “Experimental Test of Bell’s Inequalities Using Time-Varying Analyzers,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 49 (25), 1804 (1982).
J. S. Bell, “On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” Physics, 1–3, 195 (1964).
H. Bennett, “Classical and Quantum Information: Similarities and Differences,” Frontiers in Quantum Physics, eds. S. C. Lim, R. Abd-Shukor, K. H. Kwek. Singapore: Springer-Verlag, 1998.
C. H. Bennett, “Quantum Cryptography Using Any Two Nonorthogonal States,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 68(21), 3121 (1992).
C. H. Bennett, S. J. Weisner, “Communication via One- and Two-Particle Operators on EPR States,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 69(20), 2881 (1992).
C. H. Bennett, G. Brassard, C. Crépeau, R. Jozsa, A. Peres, and W. K. Wootters, “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and EPR Cha
nnels,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 70(13), 1895 (1993).
*C. H. Bennett, G. Brassard, C. Crépeau, R. Jozsa, A. Peres, and W. K. Wootters, “Quantum Cryptography,” Scientific American, Oct. 1992, p. 50.
C. H. Bennett, “Quantum Information and Computation,” Physics Today 48(10), 24 (1995).
C. H. Bennett, D. P. DiVicenzo, J. A. Smolin, “Capacities of Quantum Erasure Channels,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 78(16), 3217 (1997).
N. Bohr, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” Phys. Rev. 48, 696 (1935).
*Michael Brooks, ed. Quantum Computing and Communications. London: Springer-Verlag, 1999. *Julian Brown. Minds, Machines and the Multiverse. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Cohen, Horne, Stachel, eds. Potentiality, Entanglement and Passion-at-a-Distance: Quantum Mechanical Studies for Abner Shimony (Vol. 2). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.
Alexander Giles Davis, “Quantum Electronics: Beyond the Transistor,” in Visions of the Future: Physics and Electronics, ed. J. Michael T. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
David Deutsch, Patrick Hayden, “Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems.” Oxford, UK: Center for Quantum Computation, Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, June 1999.
*David Deutsch. The Fabric of Reality. New York: Penguin, 1997.
David Deutsch, “Quantum Theory: The Church-Türing Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer,” Roy. Soc. Lond. A 400, 97 (1985).
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” Phys. Rev. 47, 477 (1935).
Richard P. Feynman, “Quantum Mechanical Computers,” Between Quantum and Cosmos: Essays in Honor of John Archibald Wheeler, eds. W. H. Zurek, A. van der Merwe, W. A. Miller. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Richard P. Feynman, “Simulating Physics with Computers,” Int. J. Theor. Phys. 21, 467 (1982).
L. Grover, “Quantum Mechanics Helps in Searching for a Needle in a Haystack,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 325 (1998).
L. Grover, “Quantum Computers Can Search Rapidly By Using Almost Any Transformation,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 4329 (1998).
N. David Mermin, “A Bolt from the Blue: The E-P-R Paradox,” in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, eds. A. P. French, P. J. Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
*Gerard Milburn. The Feynman Processor: Quantum Entanglement and the Computing Revolution. Malibu, CA: Perseus Books, 1998.
*M. Mosca, R. Jozsa, A. Steane, and A. Ekert, “Quantum-Enhanced Information Processing,” in Visions of the Future: Physics and Electronics, ed. J. Michael T. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
B. Schumacher, “Sending Entanglement Through Noisy Channels,” Bose-Einsteinint, quant-ph/9604023 (1996).
*Tom Siegfried. The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory—the New Physics of Information. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000.
*Colin P. Williams and Scott H. Clearwater. Ultimate Zero and One: Computing at the Quantum Frontier. New York: Copernicus, 2000.
*Michale Zeise, “Spin Electronics,” in Visions of the Future: Physics and Electronics, ed. J. Michael T. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
W. H. Zurek, “Decoherence, Chaos, and the Physics of Information,” in Frontiers in Quantum Physics, eds. S. C. Lim, R. Abd-Shukor, K. H. Kwek. Singapore: Springer-Verlag, 1998. (See in particular C. H. Bennett, “Classical and Quantum Information: Similarities and Differences,” p. 24.)
W. H. Zurek, “Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical,” Physics Today 44, 36 (1991).
Spinfoam, Wormholes, Time, and Other Strange Beasts …
Andersen, B. De Witt, “Does the Topology of Space Fluctuate?” Between Quantum and Cosmos: Essays in Honor of John Archibald Wheeler, eds. W. H. Zurek, A. van der Merwe, W. A. Miller. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988.
De Witt, N. Graham, eds. The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Hugh Everett, “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Rev. Mod. Phys. 29(3), 454 (1957) 3
Rodolfo Gambini, Jorge Pulin. Loops, Knots, Gauge Theories and Quantum Gravity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Chris J. Isham. Modern Differential Geometry for Physicists, 2nd Ed. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co, 1999.
Chris J. Isham. Lectures on Quantum Theory: Mathematical and Structural Foundations. London: Imperial College Press, 1995.
Chris J. Isham, Roger Penrose, eds. Quantum Concepts in Space and Time. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1986.
W. Misner, K. S. Thorne, J. A. Wheeler. Gravitation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman Co., 1973.
Roger Penrose, Wolfgang Rindler. Spinors and Space-Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
B. G. Sidharth, “Quantum Mechanical Black Holes: An Alternative Perspective,” in Frontiers in Quantum Physics, eds. S. C. Lim, R. Abd-Shukor, K. H. Kwek. Singapore: Springer-Verlag, 1998.
*Lee Smolin. Life of the Cosmos. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996.
L. Smolin, “The Future of Spin Networks,” in The Geometric Universe, eds. S. A. Hugget et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
*Lee Smolin. Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. UK: Spartan Press, 2001.
K. S. Thorne, “Closed Timelike Curves,” in General Relativity and Gravitation 1992: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, 295. Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1993.
Matt Visser. Lorentzian Wormholes from Einstein to Hawking. New York: American Institute of Physics, 1995.
John Archibald Wheeler. Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
J. A. Wheeler, “Assessment of Everett’s ‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Theory,” Rev. Mod. Phys. 29(3), 463 (1957).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Moriarty was born in 1968 and has lived in the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Chris has worked—though not necessarily in the following order—as a ranch hand, horse trainer, backcountry guide, freelance editor, and lawyer.
A Bantam Spectra Book / October 2003
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2003 by Chris Moriarty
Interior art by Hadel Studio
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Moriarty, Chris, 1968–
Spin state / by Chris Moriarty.
p. cm.
“Further reading”: p. 479
eISBN 0-553-89826-4
1. Artificial intelligence—Fiction. 2. Mine accidents—Fiction. 3. Quantum theory—Fiction. 4. Women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.O749S68 2003 813'.54—dc21
2003044303
Published simultaneously in Canada v1.0
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