The Flicker Men (20 page)

“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.

Stuart lowered his shotgun from his shoulder. “Shall we kick the tires?” he asked.

“Please.”

Stuart went to the wall of dials and knobs. “Watch the sphere,” he said. Then he leaned his shotgun against the console and sank into a swivel chair.

I watched the sphere. I stared into it. Clear as an empty Scotch glass, until you shifted your head, and then the shape appeared.

“You ready?” Stuart called out. “Touch it.”

“What?”

“Touch the sphere.”

I placed my hand on the smooth surface.

“Here goes nothing,” he said.

A moment later there was a flash—a pulse of light that was more than light, and my head started to throb. For a moment, I felt a twinge, a slight glow to my vision, like a migraine halo, but it faded quickly and was gone.

“You okay?” Stuart asked.

“My head.”

“The side effects only last a second,” Stuart said.

“Side effects?” But it was true. My head cleared, and fuzziness faded. My vision returned to normal.

“Now look,” Stuart said.

I turned and saw myself in the sphere. A crystal clear image, like high-def TV. My hand frozen, reaching forward to touch the surface.

“Holy shit.”

“It's a perfect re-creation,” Stuart said. “Right down to the threads in your socks.”

“So that's a 3D picture?”

“Watch,” he said.

And then I saw the scene shift—the perspective changing, as the image in the sphere rotated, getting smaller, as if the camera had pulled back. I turned and looked around the room, looking for the lens that could have taken such a shot, but there was none.