The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  I made my way through the front doors.

  Inside was eerie. A big, open space that echoed like a mausoleum; stunted trees in wood planters—an inside courtyard meant to seem like an outside courtyard, themed vaguely Asian. There was no foot traffic. I walked across the empty anteroom and stopped in front of the placard that listed the names of the companies in the building. On the first floor were a handful of insurance and marketing companies, along with a couple of companies with names that sounded like vitamins. The second, third, and fourth floors were empty. The fifth floor listed only one company, a name I remembered well: High-throughput Technologies.

  Despite myself, I smiled. I still remembered the first time he had said the name aloud.

  “You can’t name a company that,” I’d told him.

  But he’d proved me wrong. And now here it was listed on a directory a dozen years later. High-throughput—a name with one foot in screening, the other in informatics. It was all big data when you got down to it.

  I took the elevator to the fifth floor. The elevator dinged, and the doors opened to a hallway. Unsure what to do, I stepped off the elevator and followed the hall to a set of French doors on which the word HIGH-THROUGHPUT was glazed in small black letters. I pushed the door, and it opened.

  The walls were beige. The carpet gray and industrial—the kind of dense, low carpet used in high-traffic areas like doctors’ waiting rooms. But there was no traffic here. There were no chairs. No coffee table with the latest issue of Scientific American. I expected a receptionist. Something. There was a desk, but no one behind it. Beyond the desk, another hall.

  “Anybody here?” I called out.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I followed the hall to where it came to a T, and then I took a right. Thirty feet later, the hall opened up, like the end of a train tunnel coming out of a mountain, and I suddenly found myself in a larger expanse. Where were all the people?

  Here, I realized, was the workspace. The room for the technicians and designers—the employees who actually made the company run. A cube farm that extended to the horizon. Empty. Abandoned. I kept walking.

  Beyond there, the floor space was divided into a series of smaller rooms, mostly empty. Carpet, the same high-traffic gray, gave way to tile, then farther in, raw cement. The entire set of rooms had the air of a place that had once been something but was now vacant.

  I continued on, exploring further. There were more desks, filing cabinets with their drawers left open, telephones, and computer monitors. In the corner I saw a photocopier with its paper tray removed. Paper sprawled around it like the guts of some disemboweled beast. I saw coffee mugs and a small trophy on which #1 DAD was inscribed. Second and third place were not in attendance. Here were the accoutrements of thousands of working hours. An office that had run its course, like a civilization. In the distance, I thought I heard a sound. A faint drilling.

  “Hello!” I called out. “Is somebody there?”

  The drilling went silent. I continued on, moving deeper into the maze.

  I found him in a side room, faced away from the door, standing near an apocalypse of integrated circuitry splayed out across a huge lab bench where a dozen technicians might have once worked. But now there was just him. A small drill rested on the flat surface.

  “Stuart.”

  His shoulders straightened. He turned. He had a shotgun in his hand, now pointed at my chest.

  “You came,” he said. “I knew you would.”

  27

  “He showed up two weeks ago.”

  I followed Stuart as he led me past rows of empty offices. He carried his shotgun on his shoulder with practiced ease.

  Some rooms were empty. Others still held furniture. One office was bare floor to ceiling except for a single swivel chair stationed like a sentry in the middle of the room. I wondered what had happened here. It was like walking through an Old West ghost town, everything abandoned when the gold dried up. No, I thought, when I saw a half-eaten sandwich moldering on a paper-strewn desk. This wasn’t an Old West ghost town; this was Chernobyl. Its inhabitants hadn’t left; they’d fled.

  “Satvik was here?” I said. I tried to keep my voice level, but the shock of this news seeped in.

  “Yeah.”

  “Nobody has heard from him.”

  He nodded but didn’t slow. I couldn’t see his face. “That explains it,” he said.

  “Explains what?”

  “I expected you sooner.” The shotgun switched shoulders as he walked. “He seemed to think somebody was following him,” he said.

  “Did he say who?”

  “To be honest, a lot of what he said didn’t make much sense. At least not at the time. He was jumpy. Seemed a bit troubled.”

  He hadn’t started out that way.

  We came to a steel door, and Stuart hit a series of numbers on the punch pad. There was a chime, the door clicked, and Stuart pushed it open. More empty offices. Half-finished spaces. Dozens of barren cubicles.

  I stared at the emptiness, then at Stuart and his gun. He’d always had a menacing profile—bony and projecting, like he carried a percentage or two more Neanderthal than average and it had all landed in his face. If anything, the years had served to exaggerate the tendency. His wide shoulders cut in front of me as we passed into the next room. “What the hell happened here?”

  “We grew quickly the first few years,” he said. “Maybe too quickly. We needed the room, so I leased this place. We had a hundred and thirty employees at one point.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Beaches, I hope. Lord knows I paid them enough.”

  “Paid them?”

  “Buy-out packages. They shouldn’t have to work another day unless they want to. You remember Lisa and Dave?”

  “Yeah.” Two faces flashed to mind. College seniors who’d been a part of the original team.

  “They both took their cuts and headed east. All the way east.”

  I looked around at the chaos. This didn’t look like early retirement to me. It looked like mass exodus. People running for the lifeboats.

  I tried to think of other names. Other people I might have known from the early days. I tried to imagine the company ballooning to 130 people. Boom then crash.

  “How is your wife?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  There was no bitterness in his voice. Just a simple statement of fact. I might have asked him about the weather on a day he hadn’t been outside.

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said. “How long?”

  “A year. Maybe a bit more. The lawyers finalized everything a few months back. I made it easy for them. She got everything else, and I got this.” He waved an arm at his abandoned kingdom. “And how’s your sister and mom?”

  “My sister’s doing well. Mom passed a few years back. A stroke.”

  “My condolences.” He turned to face me. “Listen, Eric, I’m sorry about the way things ended between us. I said some things … it was a difficult time.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I mean—”

  “Seriously, Stuart,” I interrupted him. “It’s fine.” I hadn’t come to pick at old scabs. I glanced around, wanting to change the subject. “When did you shut down?”

  “We haven’t.”

  Reading the confusion on my face, Stuart continued, “Oh, you thought—”

  “The place looks a bit … over the edge.”

  He laughed. “That’s one way to put it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Here,” he said. He slung his shotgun over his shoulder again and motioned for me to follow. “Let me show you.”

  * * *

  We took a staircase down.

  “How did Satvik find you?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” he said. “He said he tracked down the address from the corporate listing. It’s not like we’re off the grid.”

  “He never mentioned that he was coming here. He never said a word to me about it.”

/>   “Do you tell your friends everywhere you go?”

  “He also never told his wife.”

  I glanced at Stuart’s gun again. It occurred to me that I might be talking to the last person who’d seen Satvik. I decided to shift the conversation back toward the reason I’d come.

  “You heard of a company called Ingram?”

  “Sounds familiar. Can’t place it.”

  I stopped. I pulled out the paper and handed it to him. “The Discovery Prize ring any bells?”

  “Ah, I remember now,” he said. He scanned the paper and then handed it back. “Interesting lineup, I see.”

  “Past winners.”

  “Ingram runs the awards, right?” He kept walking, and I followed behind.

  “That’s them,” I said. “And that’s why I came. I saw they were interested in our branching transforms.”

  “Yeah, they were here. That was four years back, and it didn’t go well. An odd situation, really. They came in, a whole team in suits and ties, saying we were short-listed for an award we hadn’t applied for. Asked a lot of questions about what we’d been working on.”

  “Short-listed?”

  “Yeah, that’s what threw me off. Short-listed by who? Our work was private—or at least it was supposed to be. It was never really clear how they’d come to hear about it. After a while, it occurred to me that an award would be a great pretext to get vision on a competitor’s tech.”

  “You mean espionage.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We went along at first, but I drew a line on what we’d show them. They weren’t happy about it. In the end they went away.”

  We exited the stairwell and crossed an empty floor to the back of the building, where we came to a second stairwell. This one had the look of a recent modification—a crude metal spiral that had been dropped through a hole cut in the floor. I followed him down to the next level. It looked much like the last.

  “How many floors do you own?”

  “We’re on four floors now. We bought out the leases from most of the other companies.

  “All those floors empty?”

  He nodded. “Well, mostly. There are still other companies on the first floor.

  “Why buy out the other floors if you’re leaving them empty?”

  “We needed a buffer.”

  “For what?”

  “For this,” he said.

  We passed through a short hallway before crossing through a black door into a darkened room. There were no windows here—only the blue glare of monitors and electronics along the far wall.

  “He came just like you did,” Stuart said. “Your friend, Satvik. He took the elevator up and introduced himself. He said he knew you, so I let him talk.”

  “Why did he come?” My voice took on a hollow sound, and I realized that the room I was in was much larger than I expected.

  Stuart smiled in the faint glow of the computer screens. “The same reason as you,” he said. “Only he didn’t know it.” He hit a switch near the door, and the lights came on. “To see the sphere.”

  * * *

  “The breakthrough happened when we figured out how to read electron spin states in real time,” Stuart said. “It’s not just about charge anymore. This preserves coherence. We have nanospin circuits and the archival of process data. The process scales like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Stuart led me deeper into the room.

  The space was vast. Nearly the entire floor of the building. Along the far wall ran two parallel banks of hardware, eight feet tall, grated for airflow. Opposite that, against another wall, spread a control panel to make a jet pilot sweat—buttons and dials and diodes, screens gone black and dead, snaking across the concrete. Wires poured from empty sockets. Equipment sprawled over every surface. It was impossible to take in—too much, too chaotic, and then I noticed the glass. Shards spread across the floor like a million tiny diamonds. If the rest of the building felt abandoned and neglected, here it seemed a bomb had gone off. My feet crunched on glass as I crossed the room, until my eyes caught what was at the far side, and then I froze in place. Suddenly, I recognized what I was looking at. I’d seen the plans on the back of a napkin a dozen years ago.

  “You built it after all.”

  “Did you think we wouldn’t?”

  At the far end of the chamber, mounted atop a steel pole, was a large glass sphere, sixteen inches in diameter. Above the sphere, suspended from the ceiling, hung an enormous dish from which a single electrical cord drooped, trailing toward the wall.

  “Did you get it to work?”

  “Depends on your definition.”

  “Using your definition.”

  His eyes seemed to grow smaller beneath his meaty brows. His version of scowling. “Then it doesn’t work.” he said. “Not really.” It was a confession, I realized. Perhaps even to himself. “But it does do something. That’s why I wrote you that letter and asked you to come. I read your paper.”

  “My paper?”

  “I think it’s connected somehow.”

  * * *

  I stared into the glass sphere. A crystalline opacity. White particulate fog. The closer I looked, the more I sensed a pattern inside. I moved my head slightly, and light refracted at a different angle. Suddenly, inside the sphere, a pattern appeared, multifaceted, arising from inner fault lines in the glass. Like a lightning strike but more complex and symmetrical.

  “There’s a pattern,” I said.

  Stuart nodded. “A shatterplex,” he said. “Complex geometry in higher dimensions. An illusion, really, made from fissures inside.”

  I shifted my head slightly, and the image inside took on new, complex facets—like a cut gemstone, internally organized.

  “You manufactured this?”

  “The sphere, yes, the refraction pattern, no. It’s not really glass but a kind of quartz machined to a tolerance of micrometers. The pattern formed the first time I used it—some kind of emergent property associated with the realignment of interior molecules.”

  I moved my head again, and the interior gem disappeared, those inner fault lines hidden as I looked at the sphere from a slightly different angle. I was staring through it again.

  I circled slowly, trying to see it from other angles. “You said it doesn’t work, but it does do something.”

  He hesitated before he spoke. “It takes a picture.”

  I looked at him. “A picture. Of what?”

  “Of space. Three-dimensional space. Perfect imagery. That’s all it can do.”

  “Three-dimensional space? So it’s kind of a camera?”

  “That’s one way to think of it.”

  I moved closer and lifted my hand to the sphere. It was cool.

  “What kind of fidelity?”

  He laughed. “Even reality doesn’t bother with this many polygons.”

  * * *

  Just out of college, I had found it a freeing experience to design tech that would never be sold to the public. To me, it had been theory.

  I didn’t have to worry about good user interface or cost per unit. We could dump excess heat with bigger fans or water cooling. The solutions could be big and ugly. The question became only, do the right materials exist?

  Stuart stepped toward the sphere and stood next to me, shotgun still on his shoulder.

  “When we first started this,” he said, “I thought we were about two years away from science admitting that quantum mechanics was magic.”

  “If you study magic, does it become science?”

  “You learn it’s all science.”

  I stared into the clear quartz, looking for the flaw. “It was just an idea.” I’d been exploring the logical limits of the theory, exploiting its loopholes. A thought experiment—nothing more. The way the two-slit test was a thought experiment. Like a tongue finds a sore tooth, I was drawn to those places where theory breaks down. Pinpointing those places where things can’t really work the way they seem to.


  I heard my own words in my head: The math is dead serious.

  “What do you call it?” I asked, looking at the sphere.

  He waited a long time to answer. “The sphere is the sphere. The shape inside is the gem.”

  * * *

  The inspiration, I remembered, had come from breakthroughs in photography.

  Ramesh Raskar’s femto-photography, to be exact—a way to record light on a video feed. Images slowed to millionths of a second until even photons could be seen to crawl. And I’d wondered whether the same principles could be put to work breaking down reality into discrete packets of information. Was it possible to find the grain resolution of reality itself?

  Raskar’s genius had been to use his femto-photography to see around corners. By capturing light, slowing it down to a measurable quantity, you can analyze its bounce. You can record photons as they ricochet off solid objects, finding their way back to the sensor. The time interval is key. The farther away an object, the longer it takes for light to bounce back to the source. In the same way bats create three-dimensional landscapes with reflected sound, you can assemble maps of reflected light.

  I had seen the images. A light shines down a hall while a computer records the data. On-screen, around a blind corner, a shape resolves slowly from the static field. The return bounce of one photon in a million, or a hundred million, building an image a nanosecond at a time.

  Certain quantum messenger particles have been theorized to travel in time as well as space. By tracking a particle’s path in time, you could get a certain “bounce” pattern; and just as with Raskar’s camera, seeing around corners, reconstructing images by timing the bounce of light, you can get a bounce pattern of a moment ago. You can reconstruct it.

  Theoretically, with a strong enough particle cannon, and enough computational power, you could project all the way back to the unifications of the four forces in the universe—the big bang and everything forward of it. Being able to measure the time interval was key. Just as a good timepiece had once been required for sailors to calculate their longitude, all that was required to pinpoint your precise location in space-time was the right bit of automata. In this case, a timepiece that tracked messenger particles.