by Ian McDonald
‘Here, querida, for you, have this.’ The kid is wasted already, but Edson wants him so far away that he can’t scare anyone else. How rude. ‘Go on, it’s yours, run on there.’
Senhors, Senhoras, PJ Raul Glor-ee-aaaaaah! G-g-g-gloriiiia! Another win for Petty Cash.
‘Hooo honeys!’ Efrim cruises in, hips waggling samba-time, looking their style up and down, down and up. ‘My, what shocking bad shoes.’ Fia and her girlfriends whoop and cheer. Efrim lets the TalkTalk roll, swaggers up and down in a mock military inspection of each in turn. ‘Honey, has no one told you pterodactyl toes are no no no? Oh my sweet Jesus and Mary. Pink and orange? Efrim shall pray for you, for only Our Lady of Killer Shooz can save you now. Now you, you need a workout. Make an effort. Efrim is the one has to look at you. Telenovela arms, darling. Yours sag like an old priest’s dick. And as for you, honey, the only thing can save you is plastic. I’ll have a little whip round. I know a couple of cheap guys - don’t we all wish?’ He stops in front of Fia. The Habbajabba is crooked over her arm, comfortable as a sleeping cat. You don’t know who I am. But I know who you are. Efrim loves the anonymity of the mask.
‘But for you, I do some travesti magic. You don’t believe me? We all have the magic, the power, all us girls. You give me that bag and I will tell you magic things.’ Laughing at the damn effrontery of Efrim, Fia hands over the Habbajabba. Efrim rubs his hands all over it, sniffs it, licks it. ‘Ah now: this bag says to me that it was given to you, not bought with money. A man gave this to you: wait, the bag tells me he is a businessman, he is a man with contacts and connections and people.’ Efrim puts the bag up to his ear, pouts, eyes wide in mock shock. ‘The bag says the man gave it to you because you did him a big favor. You saved his dumb-ass brother from the seguranças.’
Efrim has been carefully steering Fia away from her girlfriends. They think it is funny - they wave, they kissy-kiss - and she is willing to be steered on this gafieira night. Edson holds the bag up and whispers to it, nods his head, rolls his big big eyes.
‘The bag says, the man of business still owes you. After all, it was his brother, and he may be useless but he is still worth more than a bag. Even this bag.’
Fia laughs. It is like falling coins bouncing from a sidewalk.
‘And how does this big businessman want to treat me?’
‘He is about to do a deal on an Arabic lanchonete. Their kibes just slay you. He would like you to be the first to try what will surely be Sampa’s hottest food franchise and make him a rich rich man with an apartment on Ilhabela.’
That has always been Edson’s great dream: a house by the sea. Someday, before he is too middle-aged lazy to enjoy it, he will have a place down on Ilhabela where he can wake every morning and see the ocean. He will never visit it until it is built, but when it is he will arrive by night so all he can sense is the sound and the ocean will be the first thing he sees when he wakes. Santos is half an hour away by the fast train, but Edson has never seen the sea.
‘Flowers are cheaper. And prettier,’ says Fia.
‘Flowers are already dead.’
‘The bag told you all this?’
‘With a little travesti magic.’
‘I think you’ve worked enough magic tonight, whatever your name is.’
Efrim’s heart jumps.
‘Tonight, I am Efrim.’
‘So what other little secrets have you got, Efrim/Edson or whoever else you are?’
Only one, says Edson/Efrim to himself, and not even my mother knows that. He flounces, shaking his big Afro wig, because Efrim can get away with it.
‘Well, you made the gafieira, so now I think you have to do the kibes. The bag says.’
‘Do you remember what I said last time?’
‘“Don’t push it.”’
He can see Fia run through all the reasons why she should say no again and dismiss them. It is only lunch. A call comes through on the peripheral vision of her Korrs. Her face changes. Efrim can hear a tinny, trebly man’s voice cut through the seismic bass of the pod-battles. He wants to stab that man. Fia opaques her I-shades, concealing her caller’s image. Her mouth sets hard. Frown lines. This is not a good call. She glances around to two men standing on the edge of the gafieira. She touches his hand.
‘I got to go.’
‘Hey hey honey, don’t leave me now. What about that little lanchonete?’
She turns back before the crowd can take her away, touches her Korrs. A com address flicks up on Efrim’s I-shades.
‘You be careful, now. There are killers out there.’
‘I know,’ she calls. ‘Oh, I know.’
Gone.
Dona Hortense at her Book of Weeping knows it. The dead and the abandoned and the ill and the down-in-heart and dispossessed and debt-haggard and wives of feckless husbands and mothers of careless children she remembers in her book know it. Useless Gerson, back home now and swinging his afternoons away in his brother’s hammock, knows it. All the living brothers know it, including number four son Milson out with the Brasilian UN peacekeeping force in Haiti. Décio, who shaves Edson under the araça tree in his black leather chair, smooth and soft as a vagina, knows it. His broker knows it, his dealer knows it, the brothers who maintain his Yam know it, the kids who play futsal behind the Assembly of God, all his old irmãos from the Penas know it, all his alibis and his alibis’ alibis know it.
Edson’s in love.
The only one who doesn’t know it is Mr Peach. And, dressed as Miracle Boy, Edson is trying to find a way of telling him.
It’s a slow crime day in Great São Paulo, so Captain Superb and Miracle Boy just lie on their bed in the fazenda. Miracle Boy smokes maconha; exhaling small, miraculous smoke rings up to the ceiling. His cape and mask hang on the knob of the carved, heavy mahogany bed. He keeps his boots on. Captain Superb likes that.
Sometimes it’s hero and villain. Sometimes it’s villain and hero. Sometimes, like today, it’s hero and hero. The super-man and sidekick. Miracle Boy’s spandex costume is split green and yellow, head to toe. The left side, the yellow side, is emblazoned with a wraparound knee-to-chin blue six. Big six, little six. Sextinho. He’s been that nickname to Mr Peach - sorry, Captain Superb - half his life. This particular costume is cut a little cheap and digs into his ass crack. Miracle Boy has the mother of camel-toes.
Miracle Boy’s glad it’s hero on hero. Hero/villain- villain/hero tends to involve more bondage. There’s a lot of old slave-days stuff down in the basements of this fazenda, including an iron slave-mask for gagging unruly peças that scares him. The house is full of old stuff that Mr Peach keeps giving to Edson; but he’ll never have anyone to pass it on to. Edson could make more online, but he prefers his cash quick and secretive and vends through the guy at the Cidade de Luz Credit Union. De Freitas Global Talent is built on Alvaranga antiques.
In this scenario, it’s the gym and a lot of mutual appreciation in front of the mirrors. He passes the spliff to Captain Superb, who takes a little tentative puff through his mask, leaks aromatic smoke through his nostril-holes. Captain Superb is in titanium and black: boots, pants, belt, gloves, full-head mask. Even afterwards, in the chill, he likes to wear the mask. Seen, not seen. Lying on his back his belly doesn’t show. Edson doesn’t mind the belly as much as Mr Peach thinks he does. He loves the old fuck.
‘Hey hero.’
‘What?’
‘What do you know about quantum computing?’
‘Why are you asking?’
Hero passes spliff back to boy wonder.
‘I was talking to someone.’
‘You were talking to someone about quantum computing?’
‘It was business. Don’t give me a hard time. So: how does it work?’
Captain Superb’s civilian aspect is Mr Peach, a semiretired professor of theoretical physics at the University of São Paulo, last heir of the former coffee fazenda of Alvaranga, superhero fetishist and Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas’ mentor and afternoon delight.
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‘Well, do you remember when I told you about shadows and frogs?’
Edson/Sextinho wriggles in his costume and presses up against Mr Peach. Ever since the first tentative, apologetic fumble - Mr Peach much less comfortable than teenage, cocky Sextinho - every session has been paid for with a story. Like a superhero, Edson feels he can fly, high and vertiginous, on what physics tells him about the real.
The story of the shadows and the frogs is one of the best, simple yet confusing, moving from the mundane to the extraordinary, weird yet of profound importance. Edson is not sure he has worked out all the philosophical and emotional implications of it yet. He suspects no one can. Like all the best stories, it starts with a blindingly obvious question: what is light made of? Not so simple a question, not answerable by the simple razor of chopping it finer and finer until you reached fundamental units that could not be split any further (though Edson had learned, in his superhero sessions, that even that was correct; the fundaments had fundaments, and even those might be made up of vibrating strings like guitars, though Mr Peach did not hold with that interpretation of reality.) For what fundamental units of light - photons - were seemed to differ depending on what you did with them. Fire a single photon at certain metals and they would kick out debris, like when Edson would watch his older brothers practice on the road signs with the airgun. Fire one through two tiny, tiny slits, and they do something very different. It makes a pattern of shadows, dark and bright lines, like two sets of waves on a puddle meeting. How can a single photon go through both slits? One thing cannot be two things at the same time. Physics, Mr Peach always says, is about physical reality. So what is the photon; wave or particle? This is the question at the heart of quantum physics, and any answer to it means that physical reality is very very different from what we think it is. Mr Peach’s answer is that when the single photon goes through, the real photon goes through one slit but a ghost photon goes through the other slit at the same time and interferes with it. In fact, for every real photon that goes through, a trillion ghosts go with it, most of them so wide of the mark they never interfere with the this-worldly original. Of course Edson wanted to know what was so special about photons that they had ghosts. To which Mr Peach said, Nothing. In physics the laws apply everywhere, so if photons have ghosts, so does every other particle (and these they had covered in Physics 101, years before) and everything made from those particles. A trillion ghost Sextinhos. A trillion ghost Fazenda Alvarangas, a trillion ghost Brasils and ghost worlds and ghost suns. Ghost everythings. And there is a word for a physical system of everything, and that is a universe. A trillion and more, vastly more, universes, as real to their Sextinhos and Mr Peaches, their Miracle Boys and Captain Superbs, as this. To which Edson thought, head frying, Maybe somewhere I never took the peach from the bag the driver offered when he didn’t have any change for the thirteen-year-old car-minder. Physical reality is all these ghost universes stacked beside each other: the multiverse and - on the very smallest, briefest, weakest scales - the doors between the universes open. Edson’s still thinking about that; more real to him now he’s obsessed with a girl who works in ten to the eight hundred universes. But what about the frogs?
Oh, that’s easy, Mr Peach had said. A frog’s eyes are so sensitive it can see a single photon of light.
‘Frogs see on the quantum level; they can see into the multiverse, ’ says Miracle Boy as Captain Superb moves his gloved hands over the firm curve of his ass. ‘That’s why they sit around with their eyes wide.’
‘So what’s the sudden interest in quantum computation?’ asks Captain Superb. The slatted light beaming through the shutters fades. The room goes dark. A gust of wind rocks the hanging flower baskets on the verandah. Sudden rain rattles on the roof tiles. ‘You’ve met someone, haven’t you? You bitch! Who is she, go on, tell me!’ Captain Superb sits up, fingers raised to tickle Miracle Boy into submission. There is no bitch or bitterness in his voice. It’s not that kind of affair; it’s not that kind of city. Here you can lead many lives, be many selves. Mr Peach has seen many half-heartbreaks pass through Sextinho’s life, but none ever touch what they have in the fazenda up on the hill. There are whole provinces of Edson’s life he barely knows, many he suspects he never will.
‘Just tell me, and maybe then I might tell you,’ Miracle Boy says, springing out from beneath the tormenting fingers, the stub of the maconha in his hand. Someday Edson hopes to graduate from being something Boy to something Man, or even Captain something.
‘Okay. Come on back to bed, but you tell me, right?’ He cups his hands over Miracle Boy’s semierect cock and begins the story.
Says Captain Superb, there are two classes of computations: the doable and the budget-busters. Time is money in computing as in any enterprise, so you need to know how long it’s going to take to do your computation: now, or longer than the universe has left to run. A surprising number of everyday problems fall into that latter category and are called NP problems. The most common problem is factorizing into prime numbers.
Miracle Boy says, ‘I know about prime numbers. They’re the magic numbers from which all the others are built. Like the chemical elements for mathematics.’
‘That’s a good analogy, Sextinho,’ says Captain Superb. ‘It’s easy and quick to multiply two prime numbers - doesn’t really matter how big, even up to a hundred thousand digits - together. What’s not so easy is to take that number apart again - what we call factorization. There are a number of mathematical tricks you can pull to eliminate some obvious no-contenders, but at some point you still have to divide your original number by every odd number until you find a result that divides evenly. If you add a single extra digit to your original number, it triples the amount of time a computer needs to run through all the calculations. A two-hundred-and-fifty digit number would take our fastest conventional computers over ten million years. That’s why very large primes are code-makers’ best friends. It’s easy to take two-thousand-digit primes as your keys that unlock your arfid chip and multiply them together. But to take that million-digit product down into its prime factors, there literally isn’t enough time left in the universe for a single computer to crank out that sum. But quantum computers can crack a problem like that in milliseconds. But what if you divided a number that would take ten billion years to factor up into chunks and farmed them out to other computers?
‘Ten computers, it would only take a billion years to solve. A million computers, a thousand years. Ten million computers would be a hundred years; a hundred million . . .
‘There is at least that number of processors in São Paulo. But with modern crypto, you’re looking at computation runs at least ten billion times that. There aren’t enough computers in the world. In fact, if every atom of the Earth was a tiny nanocomputer, there still wouldn’t be enough.’
‘But there are ghost universes,’ Miracle Boy says. The rain lashes hard on the roof, then eases. The eaves drip. Sun breaks through the shutter slats.
‘Correct. At the smallest level, the quantum level, the universe - all the universes of the multiverse - display what we call coherence. In a sense, what seem like separate particles in the other universes are all the same particle, just different aspects of it. Information about them, about the state they’re in, is shared between them. And where you have information, you have computing.’
‘She’d said ten to the eight hundred universes. There was this glowing thing, they had to keep it cold.’ He thinks about the frogs that can see into quantum worlds.
‘That sounds like a high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in one uniform quantum state. An array like that could do computations in, let me see, ten to the hundred thousand universes. That’s a lot for a handbag. It’s approaching what we’d call a general-purpose quantum computer. Most quantum computers are what we call special purpose - they’re algorithm crackers for encryption. But a general-purpose QC is a much more powerful and dangerous beast.’