Read Online The Omega Theory by Mark Alpert - Free Book Online

drained out of him. “Excuse me. I need to go to the men’s room.”
    Lucille pointed at him. “Go ahead. Just don’t take too long.” She went to the office door and threw it open for Bennett. As he passed through the doorway, she gave another signal to the two agents who were waiting in the hall. Both of them followed Bennett down the corridor. Then she slammed the door shut.
    David was surprised. “Why’d you let him go?”
    “He’ll talk once he gets back.” She went to the chair that Bennett had vacated and sat down with a grunt. “He’s worried about something. Why else would he come down here in the middle of the night? It’s something embarrassing, and because the guy’s a mucky-muck in the federal bureaucracy, he knows he has to tell us about it before we find out from someone else. But he’s also a chickenshit, see? So he has to go to the bathroom and look in the mirror for a few minutes and work up his courage. It’s standard chickenshit behavior. I’ve seen it a million times.”
    Shaking her head, she reached into her bright red jacket and pulled out a pair of latex gloves from the inside pocket. Then she rolled her chair closer to the desk and started inspecting the contents of its drawers. She rummaged through a file cabinet and a drawer containing circuit boards and miscellaneous bits of hardware. David watched her, fascinated. She gave everything a quick look, her eyes keen and darting.
    After a while she opened another drawer and pulled out a shiny metal canister about the size of a soup can. It had wires coming out of the bottom and a circular pane of glass at the top. Through the glass top David could see two parallel rows of electrodes inside the device. A dark groove ran between the rows, about three inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. Lucille grabbed the reading glasses that hung from her beaded necklace and peered into the device. “Okay, here’s your first chance to do some consulting. What the hell is this thing?”
    Monique went to the desk and looked over Lucille’s shoulder. It took her less than three seconds to identify the object. “That’s an ion trap. It’s the heart of the quantum computers that Jacob was building. Remember what I said in the car? About what makes quantum computers different from ordinary PCs?”
    During the long drive from New York to Maryland, Monique had started to explain the basics of quantum computing. Luckily, Agent Parker was a quick study. “Yeah, I remember,” she said. “Quantum computers use atoms to do the calculating. Unlike ordinary computers, which use electrical currents. But what’s with the ions?”
    “An ion is an atom with an electrical charge. If you add an extra electron to an atom, you make a negatively charged ion. If you strip away an electron, you make it positively charged. The advantage of using ions is that you can move them around easily. You can put positive ions in a vacuum chamber and keep them suspended between positively charged electrodes.” Monique took the container out of Lucille’s hands and pointed at the dark groove inside. “The positive ion goes here, into the gap between the positive electrodes. Positive repels positive, right? So the repulsion on both sides traps the ion, keeps it in a stationary position. Then you can trap more ions in the gap and arrange them in a line, perfectly spaced. Like a row of beads in an abacus.”
    “Why would you want to do that?”
    “Each ion has a magnetic orientation that can point up or down, like a switch. So it’s similar to a bit in an ordinary computer. You know what a bit is, right? As in megabit, gigabit?”
    Lucille nodded. “Of course. That’s how much data you can put in your computer.”
    Monique smiled. She loved to explain these kinds of things. “That’s right. A bit is a single unit of data, and it has two possible values, zero or one. Putting eight bits together makes a byte, and each byte represents one of the characters on a