The Cupel Recruits

by Willshire, Susan

  “If I am able,” Brett’s tone conveyed a sincerity that betrayed his feelings.

  “If you find out anything, will you tell me, even if it’s not cleared yet?”

  “Okay,” he agreed, hoping he wouldn’t have to operate without clearance for the first time in his career.

  “Promise?” she pressed. Her light green eyes were still a bit watery and beseeched him.

  “I promise, Lela.”

  Chapter 13

  “It feels so nice to have some downtime,” Chandra said to the others as they stood outside in the small courtyard surrounded by a four foot concrete wall. Juliet, Gabriel and Jack all stood in a row next to Chandra, leaning forward against the wall and staring out at the landscape as the sun started its slow descent of muted colors in the sky.

  “I’ve never been in any sort of training program where you only have two or three hours each day to yourself. It’s intense,” Juliet commiserated.

  “You should try filming a movie,” Jack teased. “You only get six or seven hours sleep time, that’s it.”

  “Only ‘cause you’re the star!” Chandra said, framing the sky boldly with her hands as if putting his name up in lights. Jack turned red.

  “How can you be so easily embarrassed when you’re an actor?” she teased.

  “It’s not about me. I mean, it is, but it’s this abstract concept of me. Like, “me”- the product. Not, “me”- the person. Actually, they mostly don’t even look at me like a real person.”

  “Is that why you got involved with the Africa project?” Juliet asked.

  “Partly,” he replied.

  Just beyond the wall were the paths heading to the woods straight ahead, but off to the left was another path heading to an open field with a track and obstacle course.

  “It’s just great to be outside. After learning about the nature of my soul all day, I can tell you, I feel like running. Anybody wanna do the course with me?” Gabriel asked his teammates.

  “Are we allowed over there?”

  “We were allowed all the way out in the woods. That’s just a few feet past the patio!” Gabriel reassured. He hopped the wall deftly and turned back to the others, “Loser has to do my genetics assignment!” he joked and took off.

  “I’ll race you for your soul map” Juliet joked and Chandra looked at her disconcertingly. The three quickly followed Gabriel and in a few short minutes, all stood expectantly at the start of the obstacle course. They had changed into casual clothes following class, but not athletic gear. Gabriel, Juliet and Chandra all had on sneakers, but Jack had worn hiking sandals and was at a decided disadvantage. The foursome began cursory stretches, just enough not to get hurt, when they saw Wood walking across the grass toward them. They stopped their stretching and watched his approach. He carried water bottles and a small bag.

  “Does Saraceni know you’re out here?” Wood inquired before he even reached them.

  Gabriel responded for the group: “He said we could go to any area to which we had access. This is just a few feet beyond a waist-high wall, so I assumed that wasn’t actually expected to be a barrier. Besides, we need exercise. We sit inside all day!”

  “I remember,” Wood muttered, pulling a bottle from the small sack he carried.

  “You were a trainee?” Juliet asked, curious to learn more about Wood.

  “A recruit, yes, but that’s not why I’m here,” Wood replied. Gabriel noted the use of the word “recruit” instead of “trainee” and made a mental note to discuss with his father and Enam. “I came here to bring you medication, since I saw you outside. You’re lucky I saw you.”

  ”I thought that was just the first time we came outside,” Juliet answered.

  “No, it’s every time. Just for a while, until you….acclimate,” he looked pointedly at Gabriel, “but that is why you are not supposed to go beyond the wall without informing someone.”

  “Sorry, we really thought it was okay,” Juliet smiled at him warmly and he acquiesced through silence. They each took the pill quickly with a swig of water and resumed their stretching. “So, can you join us?” Wood didn’t know if this was prohibited or not. He stood for a pensive moment and then concluded that there should be no conflict of interest. He, too, needed exercise after all. He’d not spent so much time sitting in one place as in the training room since he himself was a recruit.

  The five flew from the starting point like horses out of their gates at the Kentucky Derby. They ran a long stretch down a gently sloping hill before reaching the first obstacle. Gabriel felt the cooler evening air fill his lungs refreshingly and breathed deeply in and out as he ran, enjoying the soft orange and pink color in the sky. Returning from his distraction, he tackled the first obstacle, hearing the breathing pace of a competitor close on his heels. Wood, as it turned out. The two men grabbed the ropes one after another, hands flying quickly past one another with the rhythm of a boxer. Jack, Juliet and Chandra were all behind them by a short distance and Gabriel noted how fast the women were. On the next turn, Wood passed Gabriel and left him behind by at least ten feet. Chandra, who had run track in college, caught up and ran pace with Gabriel, followed by Jack and Juliet not too far behind. The four were still running a fairly tight formation as they did legwork and Chandra pulled ahead slightly due to her smaller feet and dancer’s agility, but Gabriel soon caught up and was running by her side. Wood had pulled significantly ahead and disappeared behind a short thicket of bushes, emerging out from the other side and running back in their direction down a parallel path to their right. He passed Gabriel and Chandra and slapped hands with Chandra in passing, as athletes will out of habit. Jack had just cleared the legwork and began his next stretch of run when Juliet began the legwork. As Wood approached Juliet, she glanced, losing sight of her intricate stepping and tripped. She fell hard, one foot still hooked in the apparatus and then pulled her leg out, lying motionless for a moment. She sprawled thinking only of what a loud thud she had made and nothing else for a moment or two. Wood arrived at her side, kneeling on the ground beside her, and put his hand behind her head, checking her pupils for dilation level.

  “I told you I’m a klutz,” she smiled briefly at him before realizing the intensity of the pain in her leg, thus vanquishing her smile. She winced and closed her eyes for a moment. The other team members fell in quickly beside Wood.

  “Juliet, are you alright?” Chandra exclaimed. Juliet opened her eyes and sat up.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she assured, “just clumsy. Have I wowed you enough with my athletic prowess?” she asked.

  “Yeah, it’s getting dark anyway,” Gabriel noted the orange glow growing more and more faint with every passing moment. Chandra assisted Juliet in rising to her feet. Wood looked at Juliet’s slight limp and realized his own error in judgment.

  “Yeah, we’d better get in. If any of you get hurt, there will be hell to pay,” he said. He observed as her limp improved with each step. ‘Tough to shake that off so quickly’ he thought to himself.

  “But it’s okay for you to get hurt?” Juliet asked him jokingly.

  “I’m not one of you.” His tone was even.

  “So that makes you expendable?” she pursued.

  “More so than you. Look, I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff.” He trotted ahead and opened a swinging section of the wall with an unfamiliar, almost invisible locking mechanism. The group paused on the patio as the last bit of light disappeared completely from the sky and they were enveloped in darkness and an abundance of stars that could only be seen in the country. ‘Low light pollution’ Gabriel again noted mentally, figuring they must be at least a distance of 100 miles or more from any major urban area. Three shooting stars struck through the sky, one leaving a purplish trail behind it. All were enraptured with the sight, and in another moment, another one went by.

  “We need to get in,” Wood concluded and ushered them along.

  “What a beautiful meteor shower!” Chandra exclaimed, “Looks like Jack’
s not the only star around here,” she teased.

  The complement, including Wood, returned to the common area of the media room, grabbed some chips and sodas from the bar-like counter next to the stereo and flopped on the two semicircular sofas, facing one another. Juliet crossed her ankle over her knee, rubbing it absentmindedly, then removed her shoe and put her foot up on the coffee table in front of her, sinking back into the soft cushions as they enveloped her. Wood sat next to her, falling in naturally with the group, thoughts of any lines between them lost along with the last light of the faded sunset. All remained silent for two or three minutes as they turned over the events of the day in their mind and enjoyed the brief respite. Gabriel was slightly annoyed when Chandra broke the silence and kept with his head back and eyes closed.

  “So, if our soul maps’ matching was right, how is that possible? I mean, if they’re programmed right into our bodies the way Ruth Fielding said.”

  “It’s more like your soul is independent and your body overlays it, getting instructions from the DNA on how it should act in that body. So, as the DNA instructs your molecules to build the body out through mitosis, it instructs the soul to build out with the map it should follow while in that body,” Wood clarified. He knew he hadn’t gone beyond what Ruth had said, just summarized.

  “So our path is predestined as much as our eye or hair color?” Chandra asked.

  “Sure, but with some option of variability, like how your nutrition and environment also plays a role in your body’s development.” he replied. Gabriel’s head arose and his eyes opened.

  “The care and feeding of my soul,” he mused under his breath, but all could hear.

  “Potential,” Wood confirmed. “Still up to everyone to reach it. And, believe me, not everyone does.”

  “I never thought I’d say this in my life, but I’m so tired of learning,” Jack declared decidedly and flipped on the stereo while browsing through the video games nearby. Mostly math puzzles and flight training, he observed. Nothing fantastical, which was his preference. He reluctantly returned to the sofa, still having energy to burn since their exercise was unfortunately cut short. Chandra popped up and began dancing . She held out her hand to Jack in a sisterly fashion.

  “C’mon Jack, I saw you dance in ‘Film Noir’.” He shook his head.

  “That was a stunt double,” he bantered.

  “They showed your face!” she retorted.

  “Creative editing?” he tried a second avoidance.

  “Get your ass out here,” she directed, and he complied. The remainder stayed seated, Juliet because her leg still hurt.

  “Real men don’t dance. Hollywood over there is just too nice to say no,” Gabriel said loudly, so Jack could hear his ribbing, though he did not mean it. Wood laughed heartily, for the first time in weeks. He, too, needed this respite from the pressure they had been under.

  “Is there any alcohol around? This feels like a small party,” Juliet asked Wood.

  “No, not here,” he replied very adamantly.

  “You mean because we’re in training?” she asked.

  “I mean here at all. It weakens the mind and poisons the body,” he informed.

  “It’s not allowed at all?” she asked.

  “It’s not really a prohibition. Let’s just say it’s not desired at all,” he explained. She and Gabriel looked at one another in disbelief. She’d never been a big drinker anyway, but found it odd to have an entire community of people where it was a nonissue. The song ended and Chandra and Jack, as if someone turned off their power switches, felt their energy drained by the slow song that followed. Chandra turned off the stereo.

  “We’d better crash. It’s almost lights-out.” The group broke up and moved toward their rooms. Juliet, still slowed by her hobbled foot, was the slowest. As soon as she cleared the room, Wood used his key and turned off the lights to the common area except for a small side lamp. He and Juliet turned in opposite directions down the hallway, as he returned to his world and she to hers.

  “Goodnight,” he said under the cover of darkness, knowing they would return to their previous roles in the morning.

  *********************

  “Good morning,” Wood said to a groggy Gabriel in the kitchen the next morning.

  “Good God, man, weren’t you just here?” Gabriel asked and Juliet and Jack laughed. Stone looked at Wood inquisitively but did not comment on the exchange.

  “Saraceni said you should report to the patio for class this morning. Class will be held outside today, since you all seem to like it out there,” Stone advised. David Running Wolf stared blankly, but the five from the prior night exchanged glances.

  “Fresh air will be nice,” David said, missing the jab. Molior assembled on the patio, where a simple white board and some comfortable chairs had been arranged. Saraceni was drawing a grid of 0’s and 1’s on the whiteboard, showing possible combinations of zeroes and ones in a four digit number progression, for demonstrative purposes: 0001, 0011, 0111, 1111, 0110, 0101, 1001, 1010, 1110, 1100, 1000, 0000. Wood walked to Saraceni at the board and stood silently shifting his weight from foot to foot, waiting to be addressed. After a few moments, he broke the silence.

  “You asked to see me?” he broached tentatively.

  “Yes, I was wondering if you gathered any useful information from your extra time spent with the recruits yesterday?” Saraceni asked.

  “Actually yes, sir,” Wood began in a very formal tone, “Gabriel is starting to demonstrate signs of his expected leadership role. Also, I’m not sure, but I think George may be starting to recover his memory. I’ll be watching him closely over the next few days.” Saraceni nodded assent as he put down the whiteboard marker he’d been using and, with that, Wood turned on a quick heel and made his way to his empty chair next to Stone in the back.

  “That wasn’t that bad,” Stone confirmed. Wood nodded and raised his eyebrows, grateful for the light treatment.

  Saraceni easily garnered the attention of Molior and began his lesson with little introduction. “Today we’re going to continue with our discussion of quantum computing. Through our discussion, we established the ability of a quantum bit, or qubit, to be in superposition, that is, in a state of 0 or 1 or anything in between all at once. This allows massive, nonlinear calculations exponentially faster than in a traditional computer. However, entanglement is also required to achieve these calculations. I’m not doing all the talking today. Who has heard of entanglement?”

  A few hands rose including, surprisingly, George’s.

  “George?”

  “Einstein referred to a concept he called “spooky action at a distance”, which today is commonly referred to in scientific circles as entanglement, and it’s just that - entangling two particles in a way where they continue to interact with one another across any distance, even across galaxies.”

  “That is spooky,” Jane added.

  “Yeah, real trip for Einstein,” Juliet agreed.

  Saraceni expounded on the concept , “So, using one of a variety of methods, which we’ll discuss in a moment, particles are entangled and thereafter, until disrupted, communicate with and behave in a way tied to one another. What “disrupts”?” Saraceni waited patiently, but no one volunteered. “George? Juliet? Gabriel?” but each looked at him blankly.

  “Observation! That’s the hitch, we can gather amazing information by seeing how they interact, but observation breaks the entanglement. Cryptography is a good example-that’s how you can tell when your security has been broken. If the particles aren’t still entangled when they reach the other end, if someone tapped in along the way, it would have “halted” before end state and you’d be able to see exactly how far it got before halting, before some third party interfered. See, the 0s and 1s are encoded with the properties of photons, like spin. If someone intercepts a photon-based message, the spins change and the receiver knows the message has been compromised.”

  Saraceni continued and the class watched hi
m attentively, focusing on his every word, “So, how do we get around this problem of using qubits for quantum computing if they breaks down in quantum decoherence (basically like a program halting) when observed? Turns out, to come at it in a sideways fashion. The trick is not to measure it until just the right moment and in just the right manner. By performing a very weak measurement, then when the particle is only partially collapsed, one alters certain properties of the particle and performs the same weak measurements again, thus returning the particle to its original state before it decoheres. This concept hinges upon the fact that there is not a distinct line between the quantum world and the classical world, and rather plays on the grey area between.”

  Alexander jumped into the conversation. His sheer enthusiasm was evident, “I read about this! See, classical particles behave one way, in accordance with classical physics. Quantum particles behave in very different ways that from our traditional experience seem virtually impossible. In many ways, they have more wave-like properties and can exist in many places at once.”

  “Well, classical principals have already been shown not to hold at the mesoscopic level,” his good friend Enam joined in.

  “Yes. Your scientific community has only begun to scratch the surface of the value of distant particles speaking to one another. The potential is enormous.” Saraceni was glad to see the class not only absorbed the concepts, but also seemed genuinely excited.

  “But also scary-didn’t the idea that distant particles could basically ‘talk’ to each other really trouble Einstein?” Kyle asked. Juliet and Gabriel exchanged an odd look.

  “Yes, but Einstein didn’t know everything we know today,” Saraceni answered.

  “For example?” Juliet probed.

  “For example…that we can control the entanglement. So, let’s talk about how you’d actually build a quantum computer, to control that entanglement in a way that you harness the computing capability without releasing uncontrollable scenarios.” Saraceni uncapped his marker and began drawing once again on the flip chart. He was no artist in this venue. “So if I gave you an assignment to build a quantum computer, where would you start?” he asked the class.