George and the Unbreakable Code

by Stephen Hawking

  “Whoa,” whispered Annie. “He thinks he’s a sort of God.”

  “In a onesie,” added George.

  “But why?” said Annie out loud. “I don’t understand why you have to do these things… . Why can’t you just live on your space station and leave Earth behind, if you think it’s all such a disaster?”

  “Because he wants power over everyone else,” chipped in George. “He’s not being nice. He’s messing up the world so he can step in and save it afterward. His robots take over, and no one will be able to stand against them—and then he will rule from the space station because he has control of all the computers on Earth!”

  “I’m so misunderstood!” said Merak, making a sad face. “I thought you ‘got’ me, George—not like your illiterate little friend over there. We had to offer some goodies to the people of the world; then, once they’ve gorged themselves on an overdose of everything they thought they wanted, they’ll be ready for a kind and compassionate but firm leader. Perhaps you’re just not mature enough to appreciate the finesse of my plan.”

  “And this ‘great leader’ … that’s you, is it?” asked George.

  “You weren’t very compassionate to the penguins!” said Annie hotly.

  “Well, that was an accident… .” Merak coughed. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “Hang on … ,” said George slowly. “I AM is not the only set of letters we’ve come across. There’s QED as well. That’s what your robot was trying to say when it came after us on the Moon. What does QED mean, and why did your robot want to kidnap Eric?”

  “I know!” Annie declared. “I know now what it stands for.”

  “Do you?” sneered Merak. “Is it ‘Definitely Quell Excitement’?”

  “No!” she shouted. “It stands for ‘Quantum Error Detection’!”

  “It does!” said George, realizing his friend was right. “Quantum Error Detection! That’s what Eric does on the quantum computer—which is why you wanted him.”

  “You can’t work it, can you?” said Annie in sudden delight. “It’s just like Dad said—you can make a quantum computer but you can’t control it. Dad is the only person on Earth who could help you, so you tried to capture him so that he would control the quantum computer for you!”

  Merak looked mutinous. He folded his arms.

  Annie stepped closer to George and whispered, “If he twitches his tail, run!”

  George nodded. They needed to get away, but where would they run to? Suddenly he realized something even more important … Annie must think that the control for the quantum computer was located in the tail of Merak’s onesie—that’s why he’d been twitching it. Aha! he thought. So that’s what we need to get hold of.

  “Maybe,” said Merak defiantly. “Maybe you have a point. So what? What are you going to do about it? Whose spaceship is this anyway?”

  “It’s not just the quantum computer that’s out of control,” muttered Annie.

  Her words were suddenly written in huge glowing dots on the curved inner surface of the globe. Out of control flashed up in red, green, and blue.

  “Well, tell me what you really think, why don’t you?” said Merak unpleasantly, his words scrawled in loopy script against the dark backdrop of space.

  “Did you mean it to do that?” asked George innocently as his words scrolled out in a pattern around him, like writing with a sparkler, only permanent.

  “No!” said Merak. “I did not. I did not order this to happen. Turn it off!” he shouted. “Turn it off!” He grabbed his tail and twitched it several times. But it made no difference. His words kept appearing in great graceful curving arcs. “The audio receptors have switched themselves on somehow!”

  “Here’s what I really think … ,” said Annie, ignoring him. As she spoke, her words flashed up in crazy squiggles, whirling around the globe. “You don’t want to help people at all. You’re just pretending you do because in your fried little brain it means that you can justify taking over the world. If you tell yourself enough times that you’re doing the right thing, you start to believe it. But that still doesn’t make it okay. Because we know the truth—we know that what you really want is to be the only person who gets to say what happens. You used the quantum computer to break every code on Earth so that you could get into all the different systems, read all the messages, change all the commands—a sort of massive cyber-terrorism attack. You did this so that you and only you would know everything. But we’re not going to let you get away with it. I know you think I’m stupid and George is just a geek, but we’re going to stop you,” she finished. If she hadn’t been floating, she would have stomped her foot for emphasis.

  By the time she stopped speaking, the whole sphere was alive with words, shining in an infinite maze of patterns and swirls. George watched with respect—Annie’s speech was way better than the one he’d been getting ready for I AM. And she’d delivered her version with complete clarity and force. She was, he realized, pretty unique.

  George wasn’t the only one who was impressed by Annie’s speech. While she was talking, the fierce-looking robots looked around, fascinated by the kaleidoscopic effect of the glowing words. Instead of standing guard, monitoring the chamber, alert to any threat to their leader, they had relaxed their rigid stances and simply gazed at the illuminated surface.

  There was a loud crash, and George realized that two of the robots had been so entranced by the word trail of Annie’s speech that they had crashed into each other. The expressions on the faces of the others seemed to have softened in the multicolored glow from the spherical screen.

  “The robots have been hypnotized!” squeaked Annie to George. “Look! They’ve gone into a trance!”

  Brian floated in from the corridor, dancing around the spherical room like a robot fairy.

  “When I say now,” George whispered to Annie (he was no longer worried about his words showing up on the screen—there were so many crisscrossing each other, it was impossible to make out an individual phrase), “grab his tail and pull as hard as you can. You’re right—it’s got the control for the quantum computer in it: we need to rip it off his onesie.”

  George snapped his fingers in his right haptic glove and was pleased to see Ebot come to life again. The android looked around, understandably surprised to find himself suspended in midair in a glowing glass globe floating in space.

  Alioth Merak noticed the movement and, just as George hoped he would, headed quickly over toward Ebot to see how he had managed to wake up without his say-so.

  While Merak peered at the android, George drew back his hand and punched the air very, very hard. Just a nanosecond afterward, Ebot, receiving the command from the remote-access glove, mirrored his movement and punched Alioth Merak in the face.

  Merak reeled backward, unconscious, and as he did so, Annie grabbed his tail and tugged until it came away from the thin fabric of his onesie.

  George and Annie looked at each other. They were longing to go home, but they knew they couldn’t leave until they had, at least temporarily, closed down the quantum computer. But they had no idea how!

  Annie grabbed Ebot’s face and gazed into his eyes, wanting to attract the attention of Old Cosmos back on Earth.

  “Cosmos!” she whispered, hoping her message would reach him. “Help us! We need you! Come in, Cosmos!”

  George and Annie waited anxiously for the antique computer back in Foxbridge to respond. Around them, the brainless robots tumbled and danced, entranced by the lights playing across the crystal sphere.

  “How long have we got?” George muttered to Annie.

  “Not long,” she said. “Look—the pattern that hypnotized them is fading!”

  For reasons known only to itself, the quantum computer was getting bored of its game. The colored words it had been displaying across its crystal surface were gradually growing dimmer, and as they did so, the robots started to emerge from their trance.

  “They’re waking up,” said Annie urgently. T
his time her words didn’t appear on the screen.

  “But he’s still out cold.” George watched Alioth Merak floating horizontally between them and their view of the Earth. “He’s the real problem.”

  “He’s not dead, is he?” said Annie fearfully. She didn’t like him, but she didn’t want him to be dead.

  “No, just knocked out by Ebot’s punch,” George replied. “He’ll come round in a minute, though. He may not be able to control the quantum computer without the switch, but I bet he can still give orders to those robots. And he’s got that cell phone in his head—there’s no knowing how much damage he could still do.”

  “Should we kidnap him and take him home with us?” Annie had taken Alioth Merak’s stripy tail out of her pocket and was pressing the switch hidden in the end to see if she could work the quantum computer. But nothing seemed to be happening.

  “No way!” said George. “I don’t want him back on Earth!”

  “C’mon, Cosmos …” Annie gazed into Ebot’s eyes as she pressed the switch in the tail time and time again. “Get us out of here!”

  “Oh, no! Look at the Earth!” George saw that the space station’s orbit was taking it over an area where night had fallen. There were only a very few pinpricks of light shining out. “Most of the world must be without electricity! It’s never normally that dark.” He turned to Annie. “How are you doing with that control?”

  “I’m trying!” Annie was now performing all sorts of movements with the detached tail—swinging it around her head and stretching it between two hands to see if she could get it to communicate with the quantum computer. “I have no idea how a quantum computer works,” she cried.

  “Can we get in touch with your dad somehow?” George wondered. “After all, Cosmos might not know … He might be too old. Can we call Eric?”

  “How would we do that?” asked Annie. “It looks like the only phone round here is installed inside I AM’s brain!”

  “Let’s try Boltzmann,” said George. “After all, it’s supposed to be very user-friendly. Maybe it will help us.”

  “Oh, Boltzmann”—Annie acted on George’s suggestion at once—“can you help me?”

  Boltzmann perked up. “I would love to! I was created for the exact purpose of helping people! What may I do for you?”

  “We need to call Annie’s father,” explained George. “We need his help. Can you make a call for us—like, an ordinary telephone call?”

  “I most certainly can!” said Boltzmann proudly. “Do you know his number?”

  Annie reeled off a string of digits.

  Boltzmann dialed the number on a keypad located in the palm of its robotic hand. They heard a phone ring, followed by a click as Eric answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Dad!” squeaked Annie joyously. Helpfully, Boltzmann held out a hand so that she could speak into it.

  At the sound of Eric’s voice George felt a lump come to his throat. Around them, the colored lights in the quantum dome sparkled and then resolved themselves into an image of Eric, picked out in red, blue, and green.

  “Dad!” said Annie again. “We can see you!”

  “Annie!” cried Eric. “Where are you?”

  “We don’t really know,” she admitted. “We’re somewhere in orbit around the Earth, although I’m not quite sure which part we’ve reached.”

  “What do you mean you’re in orbit?” Eric’s face, displayed across the quantum computer, which was now functioning as a giant circular screen, looked worried.

  “We’re on a spaceship,” George chipped in, finding his voice. “We found the quantum computer! The one that’s broken all the codes on Earth.”

  “You found a quantum computer? In space?”

  “It’s on a space station,” George confirmed. “Belonging to a person called Alioth Merak—although we know that isn’t his real name.”

  “Alioth Merak … ,” Eric repeated, and he seemed to be looking over his shoulder, as though talking to other people in the same room. “Get checking, guys.”

  He turned back to the kids. “How did we not know there was a rogue space station in orbit around the Earth?” he asked in confusion.

  “He’s cloaked it—made it invisible,” said George. “We saw it, just briefly, when I was trying to take a photo of Saturn and snapped the ship instead. We showed it to you—do you remember?”

  “Oh yes … Oh, I wish I’d taken it more seriously!” Eric said. “You guys”—again he turned to the unseen people behind him—“use this transmission to trace the location of the space station! Annie, George, we need to get you off that ship!”

  “Dad, first you’ve got to tell us how to shut down the quantum computer,” said Annie urgently. “We can’t leave without stopping it—even Alioth Merak, who made it, can’t control it. He’s been trying to get your help all along. It might do something terrible—like cause nuclear missiles to blow up.”

  “I just want you kids out of there.” Eric was ignoring her. “Don’t try to shut down the computer. I want you to leave the space station now. How did you get there in the first place?”

  “We came through Old Cosmos,” said George. “We used Ebot as our router to get us here.”

  “Then you must come back the same way,” said Eric. “Summon the portal—immediately. I think your transmission is allowing us to get a lock on your position, and then we can target the space station.”

  “Target?” asked Annie.

  “Yes. That’s why I need you to leave straightaway. We have some computer systems restored now… . They’ve gotten a missile lock on your location while we’ve been speaking. You must leave. They want to fire at the space station, so you must get off it, right now!”

  “Cosmos!” George grabbed Ebot’s head and stared into his eyes. “We need the portal! And we need it now.”

  As he spoke, Eric’s face started to dissolve in the quantum dots on the screen. “I’m losing you!” He sounded fainter now.

  “Dad!” cried Annie, throwing herself toward the part of the globe where her father’s image had been. “Don’t go!”

  “Leave the ship!” Eric’s voice echoed around the chamber.

  Boltzmann snapped the phone closed. “The connection has been interrupted.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Annie muttered to George. “We just need to leave. Dad’s found the spaceship now, so he can deal with it. We need to get out of here.”

  But before they could go anywhere, the unconscious figure in the onesie woke up. He stretched like a cat, opened his eyes, and tossed back his head with an evil smirk. Alioth Merak had come back to life again. And not just Merak … his robot army also seemed fully functional; they were looking menacing again as they surrounded the two friends and their android. They closed ranks so that there were no gaps for the kids to squeeze through and escape.

  Boltzmann, the one helpful robot that Alioth Merak had created, still floated outside the circle, bleating, “Does anyone need my help?”

  “I think you’ve done quite enough already,” said Merak. “Boltzmann—later, I will destroy you. You are a useless piece of malfunctioning machinery.”

  “No I’m not!” cried Boltzmann. “I’m a useful robot! I’m a friendly robot! I’m going to help humanity!”

  “Humanity!” spat Merak. “It doesn’t deserve to be helped. Not yet, anyway. Not until they admit the error of their ways and beg me to make things better.”

  “Not so kind now,” Annie taunted, “are you?”

  “TBH,” said Merak. “Or BHT, as you would probably have it, my little dyslexic friend. I don’t care what you think. You will give me back the controls for my computer. And then you will be ejected from the space station by my robots, where you will instantly explode!”

  “What about me?” said George, hoping he could deflect some of Merak’s attention—or at least keep him talking long enough for Cosmos and Ebot to create the portal, which was now their only hope of escape.

  “Oh, I’m keeping you!”
said Merak. “I’m fond of you.” George shivered. “After all, you want to live in a world without people, a world of robots. You’re just like me.”

  The full horror of what Merak had just said hit George like a steamroller. Why did Merak think he was like him? There was no conceivable connection between the two of them.

  “How do I know that about you?” Merak gave a little smile. “You made that comment when you were close to Cosmos, after I had penetrated the supercomputer. Your words resonated with me… . You and me—we’re the same. Clever. Good at technology. Able to work out complex problems. We don’t like people. With my help and tuition, you could become my heir. Every great leader needs someone to pass the torch to… . You will be mine. My second in command. You and I will rule the world.”

  “Noooooooooo!” screamed George. “I’m not like you!”

  “Are you so sure of that?” asked Merak slyly. “If I were you, I’d agree with me anyway. Because if you don’t, I’ll eject you from this spaceship with your little friend and you’ll meet the same fate as her.”

  “Then I’ll do you a deal,” said George, hoping desperately that the portal was about to materialize. “Either you keep us both—or you throw us both out. Whatever it is, we do it together.”

  “Impressive!” Merak raised an eyebrow. “And unexpected, I must admit. I thought you loved technology to such a degree that you wanted nothing more than to surround yourself with it, cutting out all human interaction.”

  “I never said that,” George replied defiantly. He thought about his mom and his dad—they might be annoying and embarrassing sometimes, but he wouldn’t be without them for a second. And his sisters—so they tried to follow him everywhere he went … It was irritating, but they only did it because they adored him. If it came to a straight choice between machines and his family, he would choose his family and friends over any piece of technology, no matter how amazing it might be.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Well, I might have said it,” George conceded, “but I didn’t mean it. Not like this. I didn’t mean I wanted to live on a space station with just robots for company!”