1. Gigaflop
“что ебать?”
“Наташаa, это дерьмо не смешно!”
Attila raises his hand to quiet them.
“Calm down. He’s following the protocol, or he’s lost his mind. Either way, we must try to figure out what the hell is going on.”
Attila Nagy, Vladi Alexeyev and Fyodor Tamarkin had been racing against dozens of other teams across the globe to build the first practical quantum computer. Alexeyev and Tamarkin graduated from the prestigious Lomonosov University in Moscow. They had begun planning and designing their optical lattice nanotech system seven years ago, with a generous grant from the university. Unfortunately, after four years of beating their brains out, they had still been unable to solve the problem of decoherence, errors introduced by outside quantum interference. Stuck in neutral and out of options, Alexeyev, without Tamarkin’s knowledge, contacted the Hungarian physicist Attila Nagy. Tamarkin would not have approved at all because, as everyone knew, there was something seriously wrong with Nagy. For one thing, his papers concerning quantum spookiness and infinite entanglement were beyond bizarre. Most disquieting of all, even to Alexeyev, was that Nagy had long ago declared to the world that he was turning into a chicken. His outbursts of flapping and clucking, which were likely to occur anywhere at any time, had become legendary. Colleagues called him Chicken Man, Attila the Hen, things like that, but Nagy, the consummate loner, was quite content being disregarded and laughed at. He was very much a multidiscipline sort of lunatic, always deeply involved in several diverse projects at a time, including his two favorites, genome manipulation and inter-species communication. He was simply too busy to have people bothering him all the time about lectures and papers and such.
The paper which had drawn Alexeyev’s attention put forward a radical new approach which could, in theory, virtually eliminate decoherence while at the same time increasing qubit lifespan exponentially. Alexeyev, at the end of his rope and willing to put chickens aside for the moment, invited Nagy to visit them and explain his theory in greater detail. Nagy accepted without hesitation, this being the first time in a very long time that anyone on this planet had taken him seriously about anything.
Tamarkin, of course, blew his stack when Alexeyev told him that Chicken Man was on his way. Spitting out long strings of Russian expletives, he began hiding documents and covering equipment. Alexeyev handed him Nagy’s paper and suggested that he read it first, check the math and then have his shit attack. That afternoon, when Nagy arrived, Tamarkin took one look at him and left the room, realizing that if this man clucked even once he would have no choice but to kill him. He went to the toilet and took the paper with him, thinking it would at least be good for something.
“I am Vladi Alexeyev, that was Fyodor Tamarkin; he is a bit…”
“No need to explain. I am Attila Nagy. Please, I am not used to being around people so if you would just show me how far you have gotten, then we will talk.”
Alexeyev ran through a full demonstration of the system, which they had named Boris, and the seemingly insoluble problems of qubit lifespan and extreme vulnerability to decoherence. Nagy was duly impressed and began to unravel the secret of why and how integrating a carbon 13 matrix would not only greatly reduce noise and interference but also increase qubit lifespan, currently measured in milliseconds, to seconds or even minutes. The concept was so intricately woven into quantum weirdness and infinite entanglement that Einstein himself would have been scratching his head. Just before dawn the next morning, as Nagy and Alexeyev were reviewing several possible designs, Tamarkin returned to the lab holding up Nagy’s paper.
“Vladi, this man is maybe not completely full of shit.”
“I agree. Can we make it work?”
Well, it took them another three years to answer that question, but on the fifth of June, 2017, the matrix was successfully integrated with Boris and their new system was up and running. Vladi and Fyodor immediately crashed and slept for two days straight while Attila continued working out the last remaining issues. He never slept. Or, according to him, he always slept. Another of his projects that absolutely no one understood.
Finally, following another three months of tweaking and debugging, they were all satisfied that it was time to move directly into the initial testing phase. Boris was going to do what he was built to do, calculate his qubits off, so fast and so far that he would leave the greatest supercomputers in the world drowning in his wake. Though they tried not to show it, all three were terrified, knowing full well that when quantum shit hits the fan, it goes everywhere. Literally.
They began with a standard speed and accuracy test. Boris would simply compute pi out to as many digits as he could handle, which was as yet unknown. Results would be fed directly to Natasha, a parallel filing system that would compare his results, in real time, to verified results made available to all teams by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in support of open science. Oak Ridge was the home of Titan, at that time one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The results would provide statistics on Boris’s speed in calculations per second, insure that he performed all of them flawlessly and, most important of all, quantify the range of his calculating power.
The test began extremely well, relieving their tension and generating some actual hope. Moments after Boris began his calculations, Natasha began receiving and comparing his results, which were absolutely flawless, and continued so until the forty-two-minute mark when Natasha paused and said:
“Unexpected sequence. File incomplete. Instruction please.”
The trio went into immediate collective shock. Even in the best case scenario, a malfunction of this magnitude could put them back months. In the worst case, they were dead in the water. And, oh yes, Boris had disappeared. He did not crash, or shut down, or anything even remotely understandable. He just disappeared. He went off by himself somewhere. There are no words to describe what he did.
Vladi promptly fainted while Fyodor began throwing things and screaming. Attila sat on the floor in front of the blank screen and just stared at Boris. Moments later, Natasha bleeped twice, flashed once and shut herself down. Wherever Boris was going, there was no way she could keep up.
“Mi a fasz?”, Nagy repeated again and again.
“Блядь!”, added Tamarkin, spit flying everywhere.
“Блядь! Блядь! Блядь!”
Boris, oblivious to all the ruckus behind him, just kept zooming along at ever increasing speed, clearly enjoying each and every nanosecond of his journey.
When Vladi finally pulled himself together, he sat up and stared at Boris for a minute or two then stood on shaky legs, went to the fridge and took out the three ‘special’ bottles of Zelyenay Marka from the freezer, the ones they were saving for their victory celebration. The room remained essentially silent for over an hour as they each drank and mumbled to themselves in separate corners of the room. Then Vladi came and sat beside Attila.
“Listen.”, he said, “He is doing something, yes?”
There did seem to be a barely audible hiss.
“But there is no output, no tracking data, nothing.”, answered Attila.
“Блядь!”, screamed Fyodor again.
“Is possible he is still calculating, no?” continued Vladi.
“Calculating what?”, answered Attila, “Natasha was getting garbage.”
“No. ‘File incomplete’. Maybe she mean Titan file. Boris goes beyond Titan.”
“In forty-two minutes?”, Attila threw up his hands, “Impossible!”
“Not impossible. This is new frontier; we do not know what he is capable of.”
Another long silence as they looked at each other, each considering this in his own way, then Vladi made his leap.
“His only limit was Natasha. Without the need to reformat and download, he has no theoretical limit.”
“что ебать?”, screamed Tamarkin.
“Vladi, that makes no sense at all. For one thing, his own storage capacity is severely limited.”, said Nagy.
“To Boris, make perfect sense.”, Vladi said with some degree of certainty, “It is not malfunction. Boris calculates till Boris can no longer calculate. What he do with results? Yes, this is very good question.”
Attila assumed a squatting position, put his chin on his chest and began rubbing his temples very hard. Vladi, standing behind him, noticed something yellow sticking out from under Attila’s shirt.
“It is not malfunction.”, Vladi repeated, unable to divert his gaze from what looked suspiciously like feathers.”
“No, dipshit. You are right, of course.”, hollered Tamarkin, already half in the bag, “Not malfunction, is one gigantic fucking gigaflop!”
Tamarkin, unlike Alexeyev, is a mathematician. He doesn’t deal in theory, only facts. And one fact was abundantly clear to him. Boris had lost his mind. He took the remains of his Zelyenay and returned to the toilet.
But Nagy is of a different species. He smells things, and he could definitely smell something here. He could even taste it, and feel it in the pit of his stomach. Maybe Boris had gotten lost for a while, but Vladi could be right, he had very possibly found his way again and was so far out there that measurement and tracking data were useless anyway. What good were his calculations without a place to store them? They would simply have to wait until he got back, and ask him. In the meantime, Vladi tried very hard not to look at Attila, who was trying very hard not to turn.