Brasyl (10 page)

He flounces, shaking his big Afro wig, because Efrim can get away
with it.

"Well, you made the gafieira, so now I think you have to do the
kibes. The bag says."

"Do you remember what I said last time?"

'''Don't push it.'''

He can see Fia run through all the reasons why she should say no
again and dismiss them. It is only lunch. A call comes through on the
peripheral vision of her Korrs. Her face changes. Efrim can hear a
tinny, trebly man's voice cut through the seismic bass of the
pod-battles. He wants to stab that man. Fia opaques her I-shades,
concealing her caller's image. Her mouth sets hard. Frown lines. This
is not a good call. She glances around to two men standing on the
edge of the gafieira. She touches his hand.

"I got to go."

"Hey hey honey, don't leave me now. What about that little
lanchonete?" She turns back before the crowd can take her away,
touches her Korrs. A com address flicks up on Efrim's I-shades.

"You be careful, now. There are killers out there."

"I know," she calls. "Oh, I know."

Gone.

Dona Hortense at her Book of Weeping knows it. The dead and the
abandoned and the ill and the down-in-heart and dispossessed and
debt-haggard and wives of feckless husbands and mothers of careless
children she rememmbers in her book know it. Useless Gerson, back
home now and swinging his afternoons away in his brother's hammock,
knows it. All the living brothers know it, including number four son
Milson out with the Brasilian UN peaceekeeping force in Haiti. Decio,
who shaves Edson under the araça tree in his black leather
chair, smooth and soft as a vagina, knows it. His broker knows it,
his dealer knows it, the brothers who maintain his Yam know it, the
kids who play futsal behind the Assembly of God, all his old irmaos
from the Penas know it, all his alibis and his alibis' alibis know
it.

Edson's in love.

The only one who doesn't know it is Mr. Peach. And, dressed as
Miracle Boy, Edson is trying to find a way of telling him.

It's a slow crime day in Great São Paulo, so Captain Superb
and Miracle Boy just lie on their bed in the fazenda. Miracle Boy
smokes maconha; exhaling small, miraculous smoke rings up to the
ceiling. His cape and mask hang on the knob of the carved, heavy
mahogany bed. He keeps his boots on. Captain Superb likes that.

Sometimes it's hero and villain. Sometimes it's villain and hero.
Someetimes, like today, it's hero and hero. The superman and
sidekick. Miracle Boy's spandex costume is split green and yellow,
head to toe. The left side, the yellow side, is emblazoned with a
wraparound knee-to-chin blue six. Big six, little six. Sextinho. He's
been that nickname to Mr. Peach—sorry, Capptain Superb—half
his life. This particular costume is cut a little cheap and digs into
his ass crack. Miracle Boy has the mother of camel-toes.

Miracle Boy's glad it's hero on hero. Hero/villain-villain/hero tends
to involve more bondage. There's a lot of old slave-days stuff down
in the baseements of this fazenda, including an iron slave-mask for
gagging unruly peças that scares him. The house is full of old
stuff that Mr. Peach keeps giving to Edson, but he'll never have
anyone to pass it on to. Edson could make more online, but he prefers
his cash quick and secretive and vends through the guy at the Cidade
de Luz Credit Union. De Freitas Global Talent is built on Alvaranga
antiques.

In this scenario, it's the gym and a lot of mutual appreciation in
front of the mirrors. He passes the spliff to Captain Superb, who
takes a little tentaative puff through his mask, leaks aromatic smoke
through his nostril-holes. Captain Superb is in titanium and black:
boots, pants, belt, gloves, full-head mask. Even afterward, in the
chill, he likes to wear the mask. Seen, not seen. Lying on his back
his belly doesn't show. Edson doesn't mind the belly as much as Mr.
Peach thinks he does. He loves the old fuck.

"Hey hero."

"What?"

"What do you know about quantum computing?"

"Why are you asking!"

Hero passes spliff back to boy wonder.

"I was talking to someone."

"You were talking to someone about quantum computing?"

"It was business. Don't give me a hard time. So: how does it
work?"

Captain Superb's civilian aspect is Mr. Peach, a semiretired
professor of theoretical physics at the University of São
Paulo, last heir of the former coffee fazenda of Alvaranga, superhero
fetishist and Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas's mentor and afternoon
delight.

"Well, do you remember when I told you about shadows and frogs?"
Edson/Sextinho wriggles in his costume and presses up against Mr.
Peach. Ever since the first tentative, apologetic fumble—Mr.
Peach much less comfortable than teenage, cocky Sextinho—every
session has been paid for with a story. Like a superhero, Edson feels
he can fly, high and vertiginous, on what physics tells him about the
real.

The story of the shadows and the frogs is one of the best, simple yet
confusing, moving from the mundane to the extraordinary, weird yet of
profound importance. Edson is not sure he has worked out all the
philosophical and emotional implications of it yet. He suspects no
one can. Like all the best stories, it starts with a blindingly
obvious question: what is light made of? Not so simple a question,
not answerable by the simple razor of chopping it finer and finer
until you reached fundamental units that could not be split any
further (though Edson had learned, in his superhero sessions, that
even that was correct; the fundaments had fundaments, and even those
might be made up of vibrating strings like guitars, though Mr. Peach
did not hold with that interpretation of reality). For what
fundamental units of lightwere seemed to differ depending on what you
did with them. Fire a single photon at certain metals and they would
kick out debris, like when Edson would watch his older brothers
practice on the road signs with the airgun. Fire one through two
tiny, tiny slito, and they do something very different. It makes a
pattern of shadows, dark and bright lines, like two sets of waves on
a puddle meeting. How can a single photon go through both slits? One
thing cannot be two things at the same time. Physics, Mr. Peach
always says, is about physical reality. So what is the photon: wave
or particle? This is the question at the heart of quantum physics,
and any answer to it means that physical reality is very very
different from what we think it is. Mr. Peach's answer is that when
the single photon goes through, the real photon goes through one slit
but a ghost photon goes through the other slit at the same time and
interferes with it. In fact, for every real photon that goes through,
a trillion ghosts go with it, most of them so wide of the mark they
never interfere with the this-worldly original. Of course Edson
wanted to know what was so special about photons that they had
ghosts. To which Mr. Peach said,
Nothing
. In physics the laws
apply everywhere, so if photons have ghosts, so does every other
particle (and these they had covered in Physics 101, years before)
and everything made from those particles. A trillion ghost Sextinhos.
A trillion ghost fazenda Alvarangas, a trillion ghost Brasils and
ghost worlds and ghost suns. Ghost every things. And there is a word
for a physical system of everything, and that is a universe. A
trillion and more, vastly more, universes, as real to their Sextinhos
and Mr. Peaches, their Miracle Boys and Captain Superbs, as this. To
which Edson thought, head frying,
Maybe somewhere I never took the
peach from the bag the driver offered when he didn't have any change
for the thirteen-year-old car-minder
. Physical reality is all
these ghost universes stacked beside each other: the multiverse
and—on the very smallest, briefest, weakest scales—the
doors between the universes open. Edson's still thinking about that;
more real to him now he's obsessed with a girl who works in ten to
the eight hundred universes. But what about the frogs?

Oh, that's easy, Mr. Peach had said. A frog's eyes are so sensitive
it can see a single photon of light.

"Frogs see on the quantum level; they can see into the
multiverse," says Miracle Boy as Captain Superb moves his gloved
hands over the firm cutve of his ass. "That's why they sit
around with their eyes wide."

"So what's the sudden interest in quantum computation?"
asks Captain Superb. The slatted light beaming through the shutters
fades. The room goes dark. A gust of wind rocks the hanging flower
baskets on the verandah. Sudden rain rattles on the roof tiles.
"You've met someone, haven't you? You bitch! Who is she, go on,
tell me!" Captain Superb sits up, fingers raised to tickle
Miracle Boy into submission. There is no bitch or bitterness in his
voice. It's not that kind of affair; it's not that kind of city. Here
you can lead many lives, be many selves. Mr. Peach has seen many
half-heartbreaks pass through Sextinho's life, but none ever touch
what they have in the fazenda up on the hill. There are whole
provinces of Edson's life he barely knows, many he suspects he never
will.

"Just tell me, and maybe then I might tell you," Miracle
Boy says, springing out from beneath the tormenting fingers, the stub
on the maconha in his hand. Someday Edson hopes to graduate from
being something Boy to something Man, or even Captain something.

"Okay. Come on back to bed, but you tell me, right?" He
cups his hands over Miracle Boy's semierect cock and begins the
story.

Says Captain Superb, there are two classes of computations: the
doable and the budget-busters. Time is money in computing as in any
enterprise, so you need to know how long it's going to take to do
your computation: now, or longer than the universe has left to run. A
surprising number of everyday problems fall into that latter category
and are called NP problems. The most common problem is factorizing
prime numbers.

Miracle Boy says, "I know about prime numbers. They're the magic
numbers from which all the others are built. Like the chemical
elements for mathematics. "

"That's a good analogy, Sextinho," says Captain Superb.
"It's easy and quick ro multiply two prime numbers-doesn't
really matter how big, even up to a hundred thousand digits-together.
What's not so easy is to take that number apart again-what we call
factorization. There are a number of mathhematical tricks you can
pull to eliminate some obvious no-contenders, but at some point you
still have to divide your original number by every odd number until
you find a result that divides evenly. If you add a single extra
digit to your original number, it triples the amount of time a
computer needs to run through all the calculations. A
two-hundred-and-fifty-digit number would take our fastest
conventional computers over ten million years. That's why very large
primes are code-makers' best friends. It's easy to take twodigit
primes as your keys that unlock your arfid chip and multiply them
together. But to take that million-digit product down into its prime
factors, there literally isn't enough time left in the universe for a
single computer to crank out that sum. But quantum computers can
crack a problem like that in milliseconds. But what if you divided a
number that would take ten billion years to factor up into chunks and
farmed them out to other computers?

"Ten computers, it would only take a billion years to solve. A
million computers, a thousand years. Ten million computers would be a
hundred years; a hundred million ...

"There is at least that number of processors in São
Paulo. But with modern crypto, you're looking at computation runs at
least ten billion times that. There aren't enough computers in the
world. In fact, if every atom of the Earth was a tiny nanocomputer,
there still wouldn't be enough."

"But there are ghost universes," Miracle Boy says. The rain
lashes hard on the roof, then eases. The eaves drip. Sun breaks
through the shutter slats.

"Correct. At the smallest level, the quantum level, the
universe—all the universes of the multiverse—display what
we call coherence. In a sense, what seem like separate particles in
the other universes are all the same particle, just different aspects
of it. Information about them, about the state they're in, is shared
between them. And where you have information, you have computing."

"She'd said ten to the eight hundred universes. There was this
glowing thing, they had to keep it cold." He thinks about the
frogs that can see into quantum worlds.

"That sounds like a high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate, a
state of matter in one uniform quantum state. An array like that
could do compuutations in, let me see, ten to the hundred thousand
universes. That's a lot for a handbag. It's approaching what we'd
call a general-purpose quantum computer. Most quantum computers are
what we call special purpose-they're algorithm crackers for
encryption. But a general-purpose QC is a much more powerful and
dangerous beast."

"What could you do with one?"

"What couldn't you do? One thing that immediately springs to
mind is that no secret over three years old is safe. Certainly the
Pentagon, the White House, the CIA, and the FBI are open for
business. But the big picture is rendering, what we would call a
universal simulator, one that can get down to that level. What's the
difference between the real weather, and the rendering?"

Miracle Boy tried to imagine a hurricane that blows between worlds.
He shivers. He says, "Do you think she might be in danger?"

Captain Superb shrugs in his spandex suit.

"Isn't everyone these days? Everyone's presumed to be guilty of
something. Hell, they can cut you up just for a television show. But
the gringos and the government guard their quantum technology very
carefully; if she's using an unlicensed machine, someone will be
interested. Even at São Paulo U the quantum cores were so
heavily monitored you had to have a security officer with you. You've
got yourself a scary girlfriend, Sextinho. So who is she, this
Quantum Girl?"