Read Online The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka - Free Book Online Page A

first folder on the desk.
    In the closet, I knew, was a small security box mounted to the wall. I walked over and opened it. I made up a pass code—my mother’s birthday, 2-27-61—and put the folders inside.
    Keats said, Beauty is truth, truth beauty . What was the truth?
    The folders knew.
    One day, I would either drink and open the detector results, or I wouldn’t.
    Inside that second folder, there was either an interference pattern, or there wasn’t. A yes or a no.
    The answer was already printed.
    *   *   *
    I waited in Satvik’s office until he arrived in the morning. He put his briefcase on his desk, surprised to see me sitting in his swivel chair. He looked at me, at the clock, then back at me.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” he asked.
    â€œWaiting for you.”
    â€œHow long have you been here?”
    â€œSince four thirty a.m.”
    He glanced around the room to see if I’d changed anything. The same clutter of electrical equipment. To the rest of us, it was chaos, but Satvik probably had it memorized. I kicked back in his chair, fingers laced behind my head.
    Satvik just watched me. Satvik was bright. He waited.
    â€œCan you rig the detector to an indicator?” I asked him.
    â€œWhat kind of indicator?”
    â€œA light.”
    â€œHow do you mean?”
    â€œInstead of a readout, can you set up a light that goes off when the detector picks up an electron at the slit?”
    His brow knitted. “It shouldn’t be hard. Why?”
    â€œI thought before that there was nothing to prove with the two-slit experiment, but I might have been wrong.”
    â€œWhat is left?”
    I leaned forward. “Let’s define, exactly, the indeterminate system.”

 
    11
    Later that morning, Point Machine watched the test. He stood in the near darkness of room 271. The machine thrummed. He studied the interference pattern—the narrow bands of phosphorescence.
    â€œYou’re looking at one-half of the wave particle duality of light,” I said.
    â€œWhat’s the other half look like?”
    I turned the detectors on. The banded pattern diverged into two distinct clumps on the screen.
    â€œThis.”
    â€œOh,” Point Machine said. “I’ve heard of this.”
    *   *   *
    Standing in Point Machine’s lab. Frogs swimming.
    â€œThey’re aware of light, right?” I asked.
    â€œThey do have eyes.”
    â€œBut, I mean, they’re aware of it?”
    â€œYeah, they respond to visual stimuli. They’re hunters. They have to see to hunt.”
    I bent over the glass aquarium. “But I mean, aware?”
    *   *   *
    â€œWhat did you do before here?”
    â€œQuantum research.”
    â€œMeaning what?” Point Machine asked.
    I tried to shrug him off. “There were a range of projects. Solid-state photonic devices, Fourier transforms, liquid NMR.”
    â€œFourier transforms?”
    â€œComplex equations that can be used to translate waveforms into visual elements.”
    Point Machine looked at me, dark eyes tightening. He said again, very slowly, enunciating each word, “What did you do, exactly ?”
    â€œComputers,” I said. “We were working with computers. Quantum encryption processing extending up to sixteen qubits. I had a partner with a whole team under us, working at a start-up right out of college. It was all applied theory stuff. I was the theory part.”
    â€œAnd the applied part?”
    â€œThat was my friend Stuart. He was interested in dynamics-based modeling solutions. Packing more polygons into the isosurface meshwork of 3D renders.”
    â€œSo what happened?”
    â€œWe pushed model fidelity by an order of magnitude but eventually came up against the computational constraints of the system. Near the end, we used the Fourier transforms to remodel the wave information into