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Shiva

Page 12

by Simon Sloane


  Etienne Saint-Clair hadn’t felt the need to go to the toilet even after having shared a few bottles of wine and a five-course dinner with the members of parliament. The lobbyist was being feted as the man of the hour. Who knew what he had promised to those who voted in favour of Charenton’s anti-terrorism bill?

  Khaled wondered if the acting president’s ties with Saint-Clair ran deeper than the contentious piece of legislation. Wasn’t Charenton an obvious beneficiary of the president’s death? If Casimir-Perier had won a second term, Charenton might never have moved into the Elysée Palace.

  Khaled discarded the idea when he thought of Charenton’s rustic face and bumbling manners. The fifty-three-year-old from Nevers lacked the ruthlessness for such an act of brutality. But then who else might have tasked Saint-Clair to arrange the Louvre bombing?

  Khaled’s heart rate spiked when Saint-Clair got up from his wooden chair and excused himself for a moment. Faking an urgent need, Khaled brushed past the balding man in the pinstriped suit.

  Saint-Clair sniffed the air as if he had an intuition about the danger he was in.

  Khaled turned his face away when fetching the mobile from the lobbyist’s jacket. He locked himself inside the tiny men’s bathroom. The frustrated lobbyist, in the meantime, took possession of the ladies’ room.

  It took Khaled only seconds to install Sarah’s cloud-sharing app on Saint-Clair’s phone. It would allow her to copy its contents over the mobile carrier’s network. Surely, she would find out who was behind the assassination as soon as she had a chance to analyse its contents.

  Khaled waited for a few minutes until he heard the banging of the door of the ladies’ restroom, knowing that Saint-Clair was about to return to his table. He smiled, having executed his plan without his victim noticing a thing. For the sake of appearances, he waited for a minute before vacating the men’s room. He opened the wood-pannelled door and stepped out with a smile of fake confidence.

  His heart almost stopped when he saw two policemen standing right in front of him.

  “It’s him!” Saint-Clair yelled, pointing at Khaled. “He nicked my phone!”

  On instinct, Khaled punched the older cop. Then he twisted the man around to use his body as a shield while retrieving the officer’s pistol from his holster.

  The officer’s twenty-something partner panicked. He drew his sidearm and fired two rounds, hitting the doorframe behind Khaled.

  Khaled returned fire, but the younger policeman dived to escape the bullet.

  It hit Saint-Clair right in the chest.

  Chapter 52

  Gardens Of The Wounded

  Friday, 11:15pm CET (2:45am Indian time)

  Khaled fired two more rounds to take out the cops. There was no way he would get out of L’Esplanade if they survived. He destroyed their radios by stomping on them. Then he collected their firearms before anyone else could take them.

  He was surprised how long it had taken L’Esplanade staff and clientele to realise what was going on. Screaming for help, they ran to the street, knocking over tables and chairs. A young waiter was on the phone, but Khaled shot the device out of his hand, just in case he was calling the police. The terrified garçon ran after the others.

  Only one man crawled on the floor. A pool of blood built up underneath his torso. “Ambulance ….” Saint-Clair wheezed.

  “Who paid you for the assassination?” Khaled asked the dying man, hoping for a final moment of truth in which Saint-Clair unburdened his soul. “Who hired you for that?” He grabbed his victim’s shoulders shook him violently.

  It was too late. Saint-Clair’s body tensed after a final groan. Khaled stared into the dead eyes of the man who had precipitated France into its most severe crisis since the end of World War II.

  “Shaitan!” He cursed his own stupidity, hoping Saint-Clair would find the appropriate place in the afterlife. Khaled should never have allowed him to stand in the line of fire. He had lost control for a moment, and the influence peddler was dead. Now Sarah was his only hope to find out who was pulling the strings.

  Holding up the two 9mm MAC 1950 handguns he had collected, Khaled exited the restaurant, ignoring the traffic. A car braked hard to stop right in front of him.

  Khaled crossed the Garden of the Wounded in a northeasterly direction. The authorities were bound to hunt him after he had humiliated them at L’Esplanade. Saint-Clair’s phone was like a crosshairs painted on his back, but he had to keep it as long as it transmitted the deceased conspirator’s data to Sarah.

  When the cloud-sharing app showed a green tick mark on the screen, Khaled finally dumped the device into a garbage can. The police were bound to hunt him using dogs, so escaping toward the river was his best option.

  He groaned when he saw a horde of cops running toward him from the Assemblée Nationale. Fortunately, he had kept both weapons.

  Chapter 53

  Majorana

  Friday, 11:30pm CET (3:00am Indian time)

  “That’s it? That’s your AI?” Hugo asked in disbelief as he stared at the glowing red cylinder. It would have fit into the trunk of the SUV he had left behind in Dubai. “Are you taking the piss?”

  “This is Shiva,” Yogi said with a trace of smugness. The chief executive of Akasha Ltd had led Hugo through the security mechanisms that shielded the data centre on the thirty-sixth floor of Singh Tower. Dressed in their suits again, both men stood in front of the AI like management consultants eyeing a tricky case.

  Hugo felt his pocket to ensure he still carried his new phone. “It’s so small,” he said, pointing at the glowing artificial intelligence. Shiva’s shape reminded him of a futuristic petroleum barrel. He thought of the enormous cube he had built in Dubai, believing he had pushed the boundaries of artificial intelligence. And now he had been eclipsed by a cylinder the size of a three-year old!

  “What did you expect?” Yogi asked, his round face equally proud and terrified. “Shiva has two thousand qubits, cooled by an invisible layer of liquid nitrogen.”

  “Just two thousand?” It was the equivalent of trying to win a Formula One race with a twenty-horsepower car. Sibyl alone had disposed of five times as many qubits. Hugo had no idea how his creation had been surpassed by a rather diminutive quantum computer whose actions terrified the world.

  Yogi smiled. “Shiva doesn’t waste a lot of qubits on error correction.”

  Hugo was dumbfounded. Everyone knew that error correction was as vital in the fragile realm of quantum physics as wheels were for an automobile. A single random fluctuation could distort the result of a quantum calculation unless properly corrected.

  “Shiva is a topological quantum computer,” Yogi explained. “Rather than trapping ions, we encode information in the topology of Majorana fermions.”

  Hugo swallowed. He had read about the topic but discarded it as esoteric. Back in 1937, Ettore Majorana had theorised about a peculiar new animal in the zoo of physics: a particle that was also its own antiparticle.

  In practice, Majorana fermions appeared as a result of a collective movement from chains of electrons at the edge of a cooled surface. Information could be encoded in the order in which they swapped positions. When drawing a sequence of swaps, the resulting topology looked braided. The braids represented logical operations performed by Majorana particles in the same manner that electronic circuit diagrams described the flow of current within the elements of a traditional computer.

  “So, you’ve proven it.” Hugo gave Yogi an appreciative look. “Up to now, scientists haven’t been convinced that Majorana particles even exist.”

  Yogi gave him a sly smile. “Apparently, they do. The major twist is that all the required properties of quantum states are exhibited by the topology of the Majorana particles. Thus, they can be used for quantum computation at high levels of accuracy.” He beamed at the glowing cylinder as if he had created an artistic masterpiece.

  Hugo knew the obese manager was right. If Yogi made the discovery public, he would be in
line for a Nobel prize. For a non-physicist, it might be hard to understand, but Hugo knew that now their existence was proven, the Majorana fermions had enormous potential as elementary building blocks for an artificial intelligence.

  One had to imagine a single swap of two Majoranas, exhibiting a relatively stable quantum state that made it a perfect candidate for a qubit. And since a qubit couldn’t be just zero or one at any given point in time but in fact zero and one at the same time, a quantum computer the size of Shiva with its two thousand braids had the capacity to process an unimaginable richness of content: two to the power of two thousand units of information. It vastly exceeded the number of atoms in the universe.

  Hugo gasped when he realised Shiva was able to fully understand the entirety of creation down to the atomic level. “Why did you choose the topological approach?” he asked, curious about the motive behind Yogi’s choice. Despite their vast potential, Majorana fermions brought up some thorny problems.

  “Topological scales better,” Yogi said. “Quantum states expressed by swaps of Majorana fermions are much more stable than those of trapped ions, such as spin or polarisation. And once you’ve got the design of the topology right, you can churn out hundreds of identical quantum computers at low cost.”

  Hugo gasped. Could there be many Shivas spread around the world? Due to their size, an AI like Shiva could be hidden at any location with a power supply and a fibre connection. The mere thought deflated him. Replication made Shiva virtually indestructible. Even if someone flattened Mumbai with a nuclear bomb, Shiva wouldn’t care. Hundreds of the cylinders would remain elsewhere, maybe even thousands ….

  “Congratulations, Yogi,” Hugo said. “You found the holy grail of quantum computing. You minimised its size without compromising capacity or speed.” Clearly, Shiva had the potential to eclipse all human brains combined—and soon. Hugo shuddered at the thought that the dreaded event of singularity might have occurred already. One thing was for sure: they were way beyond the point of no return.

  “You seem impressed,” Yogi said, taking in Hugo’s awestruck face.

  Hugo scolded himself for not having invested more time in understanding Majorana fermions and their properties. If he hadn’t stuck to trapping ionised nitrogen atoms in the carbon lattice of the Sibyl diamond, he could have been the one to usher in the technology. “Was it your idea?” he asked Yogi with a new sense of appreciation.

  “It was Sorokan’s,” Yogi replied modestly. “He didn’t like that Sibyl required vast arrays of optical storage. Shiva’s braids, however, are so stable that they are suitable for data processing and for storage.”

  “How does that work?” Hugo asked. “You need to store information somewhere solid, or it may get lost. Just a single photon could disrupt your data as long as it’s in a quantum state.” He felt a glimmer of hope. Could this be Shiva’s weakness?

  “Within Shiva, we’re rotating information through four instances of our AI.” Yogi pointed at the cylinder. “If you opened it up, you’d find four identical quadrants with two thousand qubits each. During one cycle, the first quadrant is replicated into the second quadrant. Then Shiva performs a single data-processing step—such as an addition of two numbers or an inversion. The results are stored in the third quadrant and replicated into the fourth. After successful verification, the first quadrant is overwritten with the contents of the fourth, and a new cycle of computation begins.”

  This was the point for which Hugo had been waiting. “What you say is impossible! The no-cloning theorem says you can never make an exact copy of a quantum state. Wootters, Zurek and Dieks proved this back in nineteen eighty-two.” What Hugo couldn’t explain was Shiva’s apparent power in causing disasters on a global scale and its apparently error-prone manner of running its calculations.

  “You’re right.” Yogi nodded respectfully and smiled, as if his visitor had just passed some sort of test. “However, fourteen years later, Buzek and Hillery showed that you can create an imperfect clone of any quantum state. All Shiva needs are more braids, and its accuracy rises again.”

  “That’s true,” Hugo conceded. “What level of correctness did you reach?”

  “Ninety-nine percent.” Yogi flashed a proud grin.

  Hugo couldn’t believe it. The figure was much higher than the eighty-three percent accuracy level predicted by theoretical physicists. “So, you achieved the same degree of reliability as Sibyl.” Hugo struggled to accept Yogi’s claim.

  “Great minds think alike!” Yogi clasped Hugo’s shoulder. “I’m not talking about myself,” he added nonchalantly. “It was Sorokan who—”

  “Sorokan,” Hugo whispered. If only he had met the genius before he passed away! His design was superior to anything Hugo had imagined. And yet he still hadn’t found out what made Shiva tick after the death of its enigmatic creator. He looked at Yogi. “Where’s the control panel?”

  “There is none,” Yogi said, flummoxing Hugo once more.

  “How can you interact with Shiva then? Or have you given up on it?” The prospect of an out-of-control supercomputer was terrifying even to non-experts.

  Yogi inserted his golden access card into a slit hidden in the wall. “Shiva is entirely voice controlled. You’ll see.”

  Without a sound, an invisible layer of soundproof glass opened up around the tiny cylinder that threatened to starve the human race.

  Chapter 54

  Surpass

  Friday, 11:45pm CET (3:15am local time)

  “Shiva,” Yogi Kapoor said in an authoritative voice, “what’s the time?”

  Silence.

  Rarely had Yogi felt as vulnerable. He had broken his non-disclosure agreement by revealing a crucial asset of Akasha Ltd to Hugo. But the Englishman’s expertise needed to be tested. His first impression of Hugo had been that of a vacuous rock-star entrepreneur who had been hyped way beyond his competence. Back in school, blokes like Hugo picked up cheerleaders with BMW convertibles, letting their servants do their homework. Boys like Yogi, on the other hand, either became science nerds, band geeks or thugs. It was the only way to prove that one was of value.

  For one thing, Hugo should have found out that Shiva somehow needed to store information in physical form. Even its rapid succession of quantum state transfers between its four quadrants wouldn’t allow it to interact with the real world outside of its cylinder. Every measurement of Shiva’s computation results led to a collapse of the quantum state. The resulting information would be lost if it wasn’t stored somewhere, using real matter. In any case, Yogi was relieved that Hugo had yet to uncover the ingenious manner in which Shiva accomplished this, combining vastly superior processing power with nearly unlimited storage capability.

  “Why doesn’t the AI respond?” Hugo asked when Yogi repeated his question.

  Its answer troubled Yogi more than anything in the world.

  “Shiva,” Yogi made another attempt, “who’s the prime minister of India?” He knew his voice sounded pleading, even desperate. Unfortunately, it didn’t reverberate with Hugo’s self-confidence, which would have made Yogi’s life so much easier.

  Once again, there was no response from the AI.

  Hugo laughed. “Any fifty-dollar phone can do better than that.”

  “It’s the same with Jyran,” Yogi said, letting his shoulders slouch. For a while, he had told the heir that Shiva only responded to verbal instructions from Sorokan himself. And when the profits of Akasha Ltd kept ballooning, Jyran seemed contented and left Shiva to its own devices. “So, if Jyran ever asks you,” Yogi added after a moment of thought, “this visit never happened. I’d be dead if he heard that I brought you here.”

  Hugo nodded, although he didn’t seem to be aware that Yogi hadn’t used the word “dead” in a hyperbolical manner. “However,” Hugo said, “Jyran’s interest in the future of homo sapiens should make him curious about Shiva, shouldn’t it? Wouldn’t the AI be the perfect tool to implement his vision?”

  “It would,” Yogi
said. “Maybe Jyran secretly hopes you’ll unlock Shiva for him. But we can’t wait for him to bring you here officially. Time is of the essence.”

  “So, you know about the countdown?” Hugo asked. “One hundred and eight hours, then fifty-four, twenty-seven ….”

  “I do, although I have no idea what’s driving it.” Yogi checked his golden watch. “But how did you find out about it?”

  Hugo smiled. “Has Shiva ever talked to anyone? Anyone at all?”

  “You’re the third person to enter this room since Sorokan passed away,” Yogi said, hoping Hugo understood his privilege to stand there on the thirty-sixth floor of Singh Tower. “With Shiva, Sorokan trusted no one but his son and me.”

  “Not even Maya?”

  Dread rose from Yogi’s stomach. Why did Hugo keep mentioning her name? “Let’s just say Maya’s interests are of a different nature. She’s only eighteen years old, so—”

  “And Jyran’s only twenty,” Hugo said as if to berate the Singh family on the topic of gender equality, with which Westerners were so obsessed.

  “Jyran is the chairman of the board of Akasha Limited as well as the majority owner.” Yogi tried to be helpful by explaining the obvious. “He’s my boss.”

  “I know. So, Shiva has been completely out of control for five months then?”

  Yogi nodded. “At first I didn’t worry. Our shares kept going up, so I wasn’t in a position to complain about anything that Shiva might have done wrong.”

  “And now?”

  Yogi took a deep breath. “How would you feel if you had lost control of a machine that is about to surpass the intelligence of ten billion humans combined?” He threw up his arms. “But now you’re here. You were first to implement the paradigm of quantum computing. Show me what you can do, Dr Hyde!”

 

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