AN UNIMAGINABLE DISCOVERY Read online

  Hooper gazed at her, expressionless. “Yes. Ian?”

  MacDougal nodded.

  Hooper turned to the wall screen. "How will you explain the failed messages to NASA?"

  "I’m keeping the explanation vague: ‘While instrument data transmit perfectly, text messages occasionally fail.’ I’ll go into a song-and dance about handshakes, dropped qubits and other nonsense. It will sound plausible, and unless someone knows quantum mechanics, believable. I’ll give examples of failures and corrections."

  Hooper frowned. "Examples are repeatable. That negates your spiel about dropped qubits and the other stuff."

  Jon shrugged. "Of course, but what would you have us do? I said before, this won't stand up to scrutiny once NASA begins operations."

  "I heard you the first time. This peculiarity doesn't change the fact that EntComs are revolutionary communication devices that will forever change space exploration. It’s what I promised and will deliver. Enough. You're doing well. Is there anything else I need to know?"

  Ann blinked in surprise. A compliment? "No. If we discover anything more I’ll inform you immediately."

  Hooper regarded her with an expression Ann couldn’t read. "Continue your research." He motioned with his head to Ian to follow and strode out the door.

  “Did we convince them?” Ann asked.

  Jon pointed at his EntCom’s tablet and MacDougal’s test. “I expected more reaction from our security chief. Hooper? The Press guy is on the Board, so that must be about when he became CEO.”

  “I think they got clobbered, they really didn’t believe us. This is just an act covering up their shock.”

  “Could be. You notice Hooper called your discovery a ‘peculiarity’?” Jon’s expression changed to a tired frown. “Go ahead and use the prototype. I'll be in my office working on the manual."

  Ann powered down the tablet and wall screen, left the lab and signed out.

  On her walk home she brooded over MacDougal’s comment. Whatever the EntComs were doing, it wasn’t magic, just more quantum weirdness. Wasn’t it?

  ◆◆◆

  Ian MacDougal settled back in his leather chair behind his oak desk and sipped his whiskey. Lord, he was glad to be home on this foggy night. He savored the whiskey's smoky flavor while pondering Dr. Grey's revelation. He hadn't missed the signs of nervous tension, hard as she'd tried to hide them. She was no actress, and that made her incredible claim all the more believable. She wouldn't last a second in the Service. He wouldn't today either, too old and soft. Anyway it's all electronic cyber shite now.

  And what about the show at her lab? He snorted. Absolutely mind-boggling incredible. He remembered that poor kid who’d stolen his watch, how he shook with fear when caught and dragged before him. The traditional, hudud penalty for theft was amputation of the right hand. Of course the kid had already sold the watch, so Ian let him go with a warning. Wonder if he’s alive. In Taliban territory?

  With that bleak thought Ian put down his glass and switched on his tablet. He tapped the icon for his favorite birder site and logged in. He scrolled down the latest sightings, noting with smug satisfaction no one else had reported a marbled murrelet on the Northern California coast. He had two more photos of it to upload. He hesitated. Should he sit on the intel? Roger would. The boffins? Something that momentous, well, they would want to be first and publish their discovery. Would Roger let them? Not fucking likely.

  What would it be like to have infinite knowledge, to be, in effect, a god? As a young man eager to do his duty for Queen and country, he'd followed orders, and where had it got him? Court-martialed, accused of murdering civilians. Only blind luck and his superior’s intervention exonerated him.

  Ian couldn't bring back the dead, but he could payback his superior. He did so, willingly, for years, until that fateful day he literally stumbled across Security Service documents that gave the lie to his superior’s testimony. By themselves they proved nothing yet were incriminating enough to transform his gratitude to suspicion. He vowed to get to the bottom, but to his bitter frustration that eluded him. Since retiring from the Service he’d done nothing further, other than depositing them with a trusted attorney.

  His mind made up, he transferred a murrelet photo to his customized PhotoEd. He didn't pretend to understand the programming involved in creating a steganographic message; he simply followed memorized instructions. He summarized the day’s events and stored the file. He centered the Edit cross-hairs on the shadow cast on the water in front of the black and white bird and clicked.

  To his eye nothing happened. The OK prompt acknowledged his message was embedded in the image. It was untraceable, even NSA couldn't find it. He uploaded the image to the birder site and added a brief note about its origin. Last, he deleted the revised image and logged off. He picked up his drink and took a long swallow. This pays for all.

  [Sunday, West of Petaluma]

  Ann down-shifted to the next-lowest gear for the long, shallow climb to Bodega. She was winded, her legs rubber, and the hard seat hurt her butt; she'd be sore tomorrow. She stopped across from the church. It hadn’t aged since when Hitchcock filmed The Birds. Two crows, perched on overhead phone lines, studied her with unblinking eyes. She stared back; were they in the movie? No, crows didn’t live that long.

  She leaned her bike against a wooden fence, pulled her water bottle from its cage and took a long swallow. The bucolic vista of farm houses and fields amid the low hills stretching towards Petaluma soothed her, plus the late morning sun warmed her. She sat down on a grassy spot on the road's shoulder and let her mind drift.

  What could she ask? Did God exist? She wasn't particularly religious; if anything she was agnostic or borderline atheist. How about, "Did God create the heavens and earth?" She feared any answer.

  Forget religion, what about physics? What if she could pin down the true nature of dark matter and energy? Or if dark matter didn't exist, and physics was purely information as Wheeler had proposed? That's Nobel stuff. It would be cheating, or would it? How about any science? Why not geophysics and oil and minerals? Or the stock market. She knew nothing about exchanges, and EntComs didn't predict, yet there must be smart people who could figure out the right questions. She could be fantastically rich!

  Or medicine. What if there were a cure for her inability to have children? It was too late for her, but others in her situation? The old sadness and hurt threatened to overwhelm her, and she shut it off.

  And the legal system? Guilt or innocence would be simple: Just ask. What effect would that have? She snorted. Getting the EntComs accepted as legal testimony would never happen. Politics? Misleading campaigns would be impossible. Imagine no lying in Congress or any political body. The mind boggled. International relations? The same.

  She felt drunk thinking of the possibilities. What if she were wrong? In her gut she knew she wasn't, and that was enough. To convince anyone else there had to be physical proof, hard data, much more than the tests they’d run. That meant a public demonstration, something Hooper would never allow. Would NASA? A video posted to her favorite physics blog would light a fire. What about the NDA? Did she want to risk the legal ramifications?

  Anyone who held power would have to react. Anything that threatened that power would be viewed with suspicion. Suspicion? She laughed, startling the crows, and they flew away, cawing. How about absolute fear. There wasn't anything they wouldn't do to keep that power. That was human nature, always had been and always would be.

  Then there was the hard question: why did truth, fact, checking exist? It contradicted everything she knew and believed in, dismissing quantum mechanics as so much superstition. No matter what, she would figure out how; why would inevitably follow.

  She drank from her water bottle. Time to head back.

  [Monday, London]

  The Most Honourable Member of Parliament, Jonathan Swales, stared at the marbled murrelet displayed on his tablet. Beautiful bird. He avoided thinking about the message the imag
e concealed. His mind couldn't grasp its import. Had MacDougal gone mad? That wasn't credible; neither was the message.

  He gazed at the Audubon prints covering one wall of his wood-paneled office. His favorite, the California vulture, gazed at him with the whimsical expression that had captivated him years ago. His wife didn't appreciate it, but no matter. He smiled. His opponents likened him to the bird, and he welcomed the comparison yet never acknowledged it. Today that was no comfort.

  For the first time in years he felt uneasy, almost afraid of unforeseen consequences. Once NASA realized what their communication system could do, the American government would stuff it into a security black hole. And then use its impossible ability to... He stopped in mid- thought. Do what?

  He shook his head. Don't get bogged down in speculation. Knowledge was power, and here was unlimited knowledge if only he could seize it. That was the frustrating crux of the problem; he couldn't, not by himself.

  What about his government? He snorted. Not a chance. Military? Impossible. That left the private sector. He closed the birder link and brought up his list of campaign donors. Big donors weren't necessarily the best choice. Hmm. Jeffrey Plasket, billionaire, very private, and most important, he'd scored him AA. Why? He tapped the name and reviewed the dossier. Ah yes, Plasket’s investments in telecommunications.

  Don't wait, his inner voice warned; he knew better than to ignore it. His wife kidded him about his sixth sense, however it was why he succeeded in politics. He'd trusted it when young MacDougal nearly destroyed his career. A personal contact would be best, and for once he didn't want media attention. How about church? They both attended Anglican services at Saint Mathias near Westminster. It was a natural.

  In the meantime he'd setup a newsbot to keep tabs on anything to do with Global Communication, the Jupiter Project or EntComs.

  [Monday, Petaluma]

  By early afternoon, with Farid’s help, Ann finished reorganizing the prototype’s tangled components. She stepped back and admired their work. Festooned with gray wiring harnesses, two pairs of rod-shaped lasers lay fixed in cradles at right angles, each pair focused on a cylinder of natronium. The assembly resembled a scale-model oil refinery. The flat screens, keyboards, mice, and printer sat to one side; the two computers rested on the floor.

  "Cheer up, Farid. You just have to implement Jon’s fix. It's our problem to keep things running." She turned to the wall screen. "Jon, you ready?"

  Her husband, in blue overalls, sat in front of his EntCom. "Yes. I sent Farid an email with all the details, but it’s just a Band-Aid. After the preliminary handshake I'm going to test for the qubit in the receiving register, if it's there, business as usual, if not, clear the registers and ensure the entanglement stays up. It’s pure classical electronics, no quantum weirdness. Farid, you got all the components I asked for?"

  "Yes, Dr. Grey."

  "Good. First power down the ancillary components. Make absolutely sure the lasers remain powered and focused on the natronium."

  Ann returned to her office. Hooper's instructions were explicit: Deteermine how truth-checking worked and disable it. She'd tackle the first but not the second. She wasn't going to let this opportunity go to waste; still, she didn't dare ignore Hooper. She thought of her stack of notebooks detailing twenty years dedicated to proving entangled communications wasn’t fantasy. Where to begin?

  Wait a minute. Their notes had been scanned as a condition of Global's buyout. She logged into her account and opened the Notebook directory.

  First, frame the problem. Her conceptual model of world history was a worm’s eye view looking up through an immense root system converging into the trunk of the remote past, ultimately reduced to its tip, the birth of the universe —the Big Bang. Looking to the future meant staring down into the infinite branching roots —every possible outcome of actions not yet taken. And that reminded her of Frost. She searched her memory, and softly recited:

  “I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.”

  Hours later she’d tentatively settled on the Many Worlds interpretation as a working hypothesis. It had the tantalizing property of not collapsing the quantum wave which she felt had to be the case, otherwise there’d be nothing entangled to test. There was no messy superposition, one choice led to one world, another to a second, and so ad infinitum.

  A knock on her door interrupted her thoughts. The door opened and Farid poked his head in. "Your husband wants you."

  She hurried into the lab.

  Jon had that flustered, angry expression when things didn't go his way.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I didn't remember just how different the prototype circuitry was from the EntComs. I'm afraid I'll break the entanglement before the error logic is installed. Farid thinks he sees where to insert it, but I'm not sure."

  "What do you want from me? You're the engineer."

  "I'm hoping your notebooks have what I need."

  "Why mine?"

  "We never combined our notes. Farid, show her what we're stuck on."

  "Yes, Doctor." Farid pointed to a wiring harness connecting a circuit board to a computer. A multiscope was clipped to the board, a white trace wiggling across its green screen. "We need to cut one of these wires to insert a breaker switch, but all wires show activity when we send a message."

  Jon broke in. "We rigged something by overlaying an existing circuit."

  And we didn't label or color-code the mod. Ann opened Final Tests II from the cloth-bound notebooks stacked on the table. Her hand-written notes and sketches filled the pages. Some notes were barely legible; she had to stop and decipher them.

  "Well?" Jon demanded.

  "Just a minute," she said annoyed at his tone.

  She found the page with the circuit board and studied it. She placed her finger on a gray wire. "This is it."

  "You sure?" Jon asked.

  "It looks right."

  "If you're wrong..."

  "Just cut it."

  Farid carefully snipped the wire. A small spark erupted along with a tendril of smoke. The white signal stopped, then resumed its oscillations.

  "Shit," Jon swore.

  Ann‘s pulse raced as she compared her sketch against the wires. "It's OK. We cut the overlaid circuit. It does nothing." She placed her finger on a wire next to the severed one. "This is the guy."

  Farid hesitated.

  She grabbed the cutters and snipped the wire. The white trace kept wiggling. Her pulse slowed down. That was too close.

  "See, all done. Now get on with it." She handed the cutters back and returned to her office.

  Later there was a soft knock and a muffled, "Doctor?"

  She opened the door and followed Farid into the lab. The wall screen showed an empty lab. "Where's my husband?"

  "He got a call from NASA. He'll contact you later."

  "Everything working?" she asked, noting the reassuring glow from the green lasers.

  "Yes, Doctor.” Farid pointed to the circuit board with the new toggle switch. “Your husband's mod works. When a message fails, no qubit on the receiving side, the sending side blinks, and the message won't show on the other screen. Try it."

  Ann sat at the table and sent "In 1492 Christopher Columbus did not discover the Americas."

  The message began blinking; the receiving screen remained blank.

  "Toggle the breaker switch."

  She pressed once, nothing. "What's wrong?"

  Farid frowned. "Toggle it again."

  She did and both screens flickered; her message stopped blinking. She deleted "not” and pressed F1; the second screen repeated her message.

  She grinned, delighted. "Excellent." She was tired. A hot bath and food and wine sounded irresistible. "That's enough for today. I'll see you tomorrow."

  "Yes, Docto
r. Have a good evening."

  [Tuesday, Petaluma]

  Bundled in her terrycloth robe, Ann sat at the kitchen table, gazing out the window at the scraggly rose bush glistening in the rain. Friday's revelation had left her with an uneasy sense of impending catastrophe, even doom. She had to talk to someone, screw the non-disclosure crap. Who would believe her, much less understand the implications? Jon had his moon girl and welcome to her. Over the years she'd lost track of friends due to distance, relationships, and just plain laziness. There must be someone.

  Anyway, she didn’t think non-disclosure applied. Her discovery was fundamental physics, like gravity, and not subject to patents or copyright. That issue had been settled years ago with the advent of commercial DNA services when companies tried patenting chromosomes. Hooper might disagree. Might? She snorted.

  Of all her old friends, she missed the dojo and the camaraderie the most. Aikido had been the most difficult yet rewarding physical and mental discipline she'd ever attempted. Her doctoral thesis had been exhausting, but in a different, intellectual way.

  She closed her eyes, remembering. She was back in the dojo twisting in midair before slapping the tatami mat, breaking her fall. If she tried that today she'd break her neck.

  That reminded her of Isaac. He’d saved her sanity when she so badly needed help; but she hadn't spoken to him in years. Was he still the righteous “save the world” Isaac? He'd always been able to ask uncomfortable questions that made her think about her place in society. He'd dropped off her radar after she began dating Jon. He might not even know she'd married. Last she'd heard he was involved with some NGO that dealt with nuclear disarmament.

  She booted her tablet, linked to the APS portal and entered his name in the Member Search box. A Google map popped up with an orange balloon pointing to Rome’s center. Rome? She expanded the map. The location resolved to Vatican City with an email address: [email protected]. What on earth was he doing there? She didn't dare email.