The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. Nicole Galland

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СКАЧАТЬ floor was a flat circular pillow upholstered in red velvet that had become permeated with cat hair down to the molecular level. A tiny saucer of spun stainless steel sat next to it, a thin disk of brown residue congealed in its bottom. I needed no forensic analysis to know that it had once contained cream.

      Tristan had a look on his face as if all this was exactly what he’d been expecting. I confess, it mystified me.

      “Call me stupid,” I said, “but I don’t understand the connection to photography.”

      “Photography?” Oda asked, puzzled. As if I had just wandered into the wrong eccentric professor’s basement.

      “There’s a connection,” Tristan reassured him. “I give you my word I’ll explain it—once you have completed certain paperwork that, I regret to say, is mandatory. In the meantime, I wonder if you could explain the ODEC to us.”

      Oda-sensei shrugged. “In a nutshell,” he said, now entirely immersed in the science of the moment, “here is the premise. You insert living nerve tissue. You close the lid, creating a sealed environment. You pump in the liquid helium . . .”

      “Wait, wait!” Tristan protested. “This is the first you’ve mentioned cryogenics.”

      “You freeze the cat?” I exclaimed, aghast.

      “No, no,” Oda scolded us. “That would just be mean. See for yourself, the box itself is super-insulated! And it has its own air supply, enough to keep a cat alive for an hour.” He was directing my attention to the thick foam mounted to the outer surface of the plywood. Then he moved his hand a couple of inches outward and patted the inner surface of the enclosing fiberglass tub. “The inner box is completely surrounded by a bath of liquid helium, chilled to a few Kelvins above absolute zero.”

      “Cold enough,” Tristan hazarded, “to form a Bose-Einstein condensate?”

      “I love it when you talk dirty,” Oda said, so perfectly deadpan that I did a double take. “Yes, we begin by isolating the subject—”

      “Within a jacket of matter that all exists in the same quantum state,” Tristan said.

      “You’re completing each other’s sentences. Great,” I said.

      “I’ll explain later,” Tristan returned.

      “Conveniently, the low temperature also brings some of the coils down to the point where they become superconductors,” Oda added, tapping a fingertip against some of the things that I had identified as big magnets. “A continuously recirculating and self-reinforcing current pattern establishes itself in these. Its state can be read continuously by analog-to-digital converters at a sampling rate of about a megahertz. Which we used to think was fast.”

      “So you’re reading the cat’s mind?”

      “Not so much that,” Oda said, “as looking for the signatures of nascent wave collapse events.”

      Tristan stood frozen for a few moments, then shaped his hand into a blade and whooshed it past his head. Good, I thought. Have a taste of what I’m experiencing.

      “I lost you?” Oda inquired.

      “Yes, sir.”

      “I’m messing around with renormalization.”

      “Oh.”

      “That’s what determines what the wave function is most likely to collapse into. By messing around with it, I can alter the probabilities.”

      “You can do magic,” I blurted.

      “Sort of,” Oda said. Then, in a curious, polite tone, he asked, “Is that what you’re here to talk about? Magic?”

      “Classified,” Tristan said, and gave me the stink-eye. Then he turned to Oda. “Under normal circumstances we can make educated guesses about what is likely to happen when the wave function collapses. You’re screwing around with that.”

      Oda nodded ruefully. “But only sometimes. And I can’t account for the variations. That’s why the patent was rejected. Why DARPA didn’t renew my grant.”

      “What’s the computer doing?” Tristan asked.

      Oda sighed. “Not enough, unfortunately. As I said, it was a fine machine for its time. Even so—despite a lot of code optimization—it wasn’t up to the job, even when it was running flat-out.”

      “So it’s of the essence. It’s not just a data logger.”

      “It is very much in the control loop,” Oda said. Glancing at me, he explained: “For the ODEC to work, it has to take in sensor data, perform certain calculations that are highly non-trivial, and make decisions about how to alter the current flowing through the coils. It has to do so quickly, or else the whole project fails. And it wasn’t quick enough.”

      “What are the specs on that Indigo?” Tristan asked.

      Oda sighed. “I don’t even want to tell you.”

      “Why not?”

      “Because you’re going to laugh.”

      “I won’t laugh.”

      “One processor; 175 megahertz; 512 megabytes of RAM.”

      Tristan laughed.

      “I told you,” Oda said.

      Tristan stood there a moment, eyeing the contraption. “With modern computers . . . or a cluster of them . . . some GPUs cranking the numbers . . . faster clocks . . . all of your problems on that front would be solved.”

      “Possibly,” said Oda with a nod. “But I had neither the funds nor the space for that, and the Howler article pretty much made me a laughingstock in the academic community, so I’ll never get funding again.”

      “Sorry to hear that,” I said, “especially if the theory is sound.”

      “No one funds theories. They fund results,” said Oda. “The results were not reliably reproducible. Using cats was a mistake; the premise was very easy to mock among lay people.”

      “What if you were given the funding to rebuild this the way I just described it, room-sized?” Tristan said.

      Oda gave him a cautious, wise-old-man smile. “Scaling issues would become huge. The amount of computational power required goes up as the square of the cavity’s volume.”

      Tristan made a quick mental calculation. “So, as the sixth power of the box’s size. That’s okay. We’ll make it a small room. Moore’s law will take care of the rest.”

      “Don’t even suggest this in Rebecca’s hearing or she will chase you out of the house with her gardening shears. It was a very draining and humiliating period. She would never endure it being brought back to life.”

      “This would all happen under a cloak of secrecy. The Howler would never hear about it. Nobody would.”

      Oda pondered it.

      “If СКАЧАТЬ