Spheria (3 page)

His story wasn't atypical of other Information Age billionaires. He created something great, made a boatload of money, and used it to fund additional pursuits, all of which also made boatloads of money. His first company was started in his garage (studio apartment to be precise) where he created an automated stock trading system. This system outplayed all the other ones from competitors, and certainly anyone attempting to trade manually using just human knowledge and research. His day job was a data analyst for a large company, but he liked to offset the boredom by buying stocks. He noticed that many moves weren’t tied to relevant factors like reported earnings or price ratios, but by the emotions of individual buyers. In fact, stock theory is such that the market always self-adjusts, so you can never actually make money. Unless you can predict and exploit an abnormal movement before the system has time to correct itself. This is exactly what Graham started doing, and he was good at it,
reliably
good at it.

He never revealed the exact nature of his methods, as they’re a well-protected trade secret. But he hinted on more than one occasion that they used social media to exploit population trends, rather than raw statistics or the opinions of experts. Once he could turn his decision-making process into a computer program, his machine made all the trades for him. And at a much greater speed and quantity. The money started rolling in. He hired staff to handle administrative duties and formed Aboriginal Accruals as his first company. Within a year, Graham Neilson became one of the youngest billionaires ever. Aboriginal Accruals is still a privately held company and a perpetual cash cow.

Since then, Graham had formed five more companies all with the unifying “Aboriginal” moniker:
 

• Aboriginal Aquatics, which creates underwater exploration vehicles and tools;
  
• Aboriginal Augmentations, which produces prosthetics and medical devices for insertion into or attachment to the human body;
  
• Aboriginal Aerospace, which designs aerial and low orbit vehicles;
  
• Aboriginal Automotive, which builds high-end race cars;
   
  
• and Aboriginal Asteroids, which is currently researching the feasibility of mining space debris for platinum and other rare earth minerals.
  

Max believed that, aside from the first, that all these companies existed solely to allow Graham to create toys to use for his personal hobbies. Still, all but the last have become profitable in their own right.

“He loved my presentation?” Max repeated.

“He said it was brilliant! He specifically asked for an introduction.”

“No shit?”

David responded in his typical deadpan, “I never defecate in public.”

Max chuckled, then shivered. The two drivers had gotten out of their cars and were now shouting at each other, nose to nose. Their headlights blurred as Max remembered seeing Graham in the audience.

#

Max was sitting in a row of red velvet chairs on the stage, next to some of the most brilliant minds in particle physics. The conference was being held in the vast and extravagant Gothic Room. The dark wood on the walls was intricate carved and lined with eight tapestries representing the Trade Guilds of Brussels. Three offset rows of modern lights illuminated the round tables below. All of these were packed with people eager to receive the free flow of new information and ideas, fuel for the endless debates that would follow.

Loud clapping snapped Max out of silently rehearsing the speech he was about to give. Julian Farber, from the Large Hadron Collider team at CERN, had just finished presenting its plan to create Dark Matter. He walked across the stage and sat down. David rose and returned to the podium.

“Our next speaker is a young but brilliant, um, inventor.”

 
Inventor?
Max was amused at his introduction. Guess ‘scientist’ wasn't one of his qualifications.

“I first met this speaker on the Internet, and he had the audacity to debate with me some of the fundamental properties of the universe. Over time, however, I realized not only the need to challenge assumptions but how the only way to make progress is to change the way we think. He thought different, that’s for sure. And although I don’t always understand what he’s talking about, he’s shown me some amazing things. Things that can move our field forward, in a practical sense. I am proud to introduce Maximilian Moreau!”

The clapping resumed, although not as heavy as before, and subsided quickly. Max stood up, feeling nervous. As he made his way to the podium, he noticed one person in the audience who stood out: a tall gentleman with a bright blond mullet and a matching goatee. He seemed familiar somehow, and at the same time out of place. Max picked up the clicker and adjusted the microphone.

The slide behind him said, “Qubit or not two bit?”

Overcoming his stage fright, he leaned into the mic and said, “Thank you, David.” Every eye in the room was upon him, and the silence pressed in, making it hard to breathe. He cleared his throat to buy a moment of time. “It’s an honor to stand here before you. Many of you are my heroes, and I could only hope to someday be a fraction as brilliant as you. I’m not going to dazzle you all with any fantastic new theories. Or wow you with a new concept of how to explain the universe. Or even talk about new things that we don’t quite understand.

“Instead, I’m going to show you how I've applied the knowledge that you all have been generating. I guess ‘inventor’ is appropriate, for what value are all these theories, tests, and proofs if they can’t be used for something? Used to help improve mankind?”

Max advanced the presentation, and the next slide showed a large futuristic computer housing the size of a box truck. It had a control panel on one side with a screen and some indicator lights. “I’m sure you have all seen the D-Wave One quantum computer. It contains 128 quantum bits of metal niobium suspended in a super-cooled chamber. The fixture is protected from magnetic and vibrational interference by 15 layers of shielding. These qubits can perform calculations rapidly that the most powerful digital computers would spend years doing. They do this, as most of you know, by leveraging quantum superposition.”

Given the audience, it was safe to assume everyone understood what quantum superposition was. Max wasn't a fan of the typical description that a subatomic particle can be in multiple states at once. Or that the particle only chooses a value when you look at it. But this was the wrong audience to have that debate with. Regardless, superposition, when connected through a series of quantum particles, allowed statistical problems to be solved. The challenge was these qubits were susceptible to the slightest disturbance. Even a train going by miles away could cause the particles to decide an outcome prematurely, producing an incorrect result. Thus, the need for extreme isolation from the outside world.

The slide advanced, showing a cup of coffee and a plate of sugar cubes.

“What if I told you all that I could improve the power of a D-Wave computer by over thirty times, make it the size of a sugar cube, make it impervious from outside interference, and have it work at room temperature, all at the same time?”

Max looked at the audience. People glanced at one another, and some even snickered. Max cracked a grin. He was hoping for this response.

He reached into his pants pocket and, making his best Steve Jobs impression, pulled out a small cubical prism-like object. It was about a centimeter wide, and he placed it on the rim of the podium. Out of his shirt pocket, he pulled a standard laser pointer. This he also set on the podium, pointing toward the cube, and turned it on. The red laser shone into the prism. It began to glow a
blue
color and started pulsing.

“What you see before you, dear scientists, is the product of your brilliance.” The slide advanced, showing a close-up of a glowing blue prism, with the letters Q-U-B-E displayed above it. “I call it the Qube, which stands for Quantum Uncertainty Binary Engine. What you see before me on this podium has 3,840 quantum bits inside it. This is over thirty times more than anything ever made, and is no bigger than the tip of my thumb.”

More snickers from the audience.

“You don’t believe me? Believe me. I'm going to tell you how I did this. But not everything, because the process is proprietary and a trade secret.”
 

The blond man shifted in his chair, and he was the only person who’d moved.

“The problem with quantum bits is that they’re inherently unstable and subject to disturbances. So quantum computers up to now have attempted to solve this by blocking disturbances. My technique embeds the quantum bit inside a diamond lattice. This makes it stable within the system, impervious to any movements of the Qube as a whole.

“This crystal was produced by sublimating a gas of carbon and germanium particles under high pressure onto a seed plate. What formed is an artificial diamond interspersed with a lattice of defects. The germanium particles are locked inside the diamond in such a way that free electrons are held in a suspension state, thus behaving like quantum bits. These qbits are close enough together to allow interactions with each other, in a similar way to how the neurons in your brain interact. A set of lasers can then stimulate these electrons on one side, which causes a cascade of states through the entire structure, thus causing the whole system to emit a unique color spectrum. Over time, by activating them at different angles, they can be “trained” to perform complex calculations.”

“The one before me has been taught to calculate any digit of the number Pi. Let me demonstrate.” Max pointed at a man in the front row. “Sir, can you please give me a number, a large one.”

The man thought for a second and shouted, “78,557.”

Max repeated the number into the microphone. He turned off the laser and, after a second, the Qube ceased its glow.

“Now I'm going to feed that number into the Qube using binary. When I'm done, I will leave the laser on, which will end the calculation. David, can you please tell me what 78,557 is in binary?”

David was briefed for this and ready with a special calculator. He began to recite the numbers “1-0-0-1-,” and so on. With each ‘one,’ Max blinked the laser on, with each ‘zero,’ Max paused. David completed reciting the whole number 10011001011011101.

Max ended by locking the laser on. The Qube emitted a pinkish hue. Max said, “The entry speed was important, but David knew that. It’s kind of like Morse Code, beep beep pause beep pause beep. The Qube read the pauses as zeros, so the number was entered as dictated by David. As you can see, the Qube is now emitting a color. The hue is its result.”

The audience was silent now. Puzzled expressions dominated.

Max produced a box, similar to an alarm clock, from under the podium. He placed it next to the glowing Qube. “This is a portable spectrum analyzer. It's calibrated to convert ten different color hues into the digits 0 through 9.”

Max turned it on, and it showed the number “6” on its LED display. “There, the 78,557
th
digit of pi is the number
six
. A traditional computer would take hours to calculate that, as it has to go through each digit in order, one by one. The quantum algorithm we programmed into this Qube can perform that calculation instantly, skipping to just the position we want to know about.”

The audience began clapping; then they stood. Max smiled ear to ear and blushed. He glanced back at David, who gave him a thumbs-up.

Max made a downward motion with both hands and said, “please sit.” The audience did so. “And that’s not all. This is just a simple algorithm. The possibilities of this are… endless! I think we could make versions that could simulate the intelligence of insects, or even better.”

The crowd was moved. Many had begun talking with each other, and the noise level was rising.

“Thank you,” Max said, but it was drowned out by the voices.

David got up to the microphone and tapped it twice, producing loud clicks. The audience hushed. “We have a few minutes to field any questions you may have,” he said.

One woman stood up and asked, “How did you get the germanium atoms to align in an evenly distributed lattice?”

Max replied, “Good question. As I said, some of this is a trade secret, and that’s one of the pieces I'm not at liberty to reveal.”

She sat down, frustrated.

A gentleman stood and asked, “D-Wave costs ten million dollars for one computer. How does this compare?”

“Well,” Max said. “It's much more economical. However, that doesn’t make it cheap. Diamond, no matter how you make it, is expensive. The exhibit before you cost in the range of forty thousand dollars to create. Much more inexpensive than previous attempts, but still economically unreachable for, say, home users. I was only able to afford this one with the research grant I was using.”

Another gentleman stood up. “What is next for the Qube? What are you planning to do with it?”

“Two questions! Well, tonight I'm kicking off a tour of venture capital firms. I don’t have the money to mass produce these, but I do think there could be a large market for them. With the right backing, the company we form could become the next Apple or the next Google. Heck, it could make computers obsolete as we know them today.”

A woman, without standing, blurted out, “Does this present a danger if it falls into the wrong hands?”

Max stared at her, not expecting such a question from those who built careers out of furthering science despite any risks. “Well, um, I’m sure they could be used in nefarious ways just as traditional computers could.”

“So what if terrorists get these? What if the military gets them?”

“Well, I haven’t thought that through. I'd prefer that the Qubes are used for good rather than evil, just like anyone. But did Glenn Seaborg hesitate when he produced plutonium from uranium for the first time, knowing it’d inevitably lead to an atomic bomb? Everything can be used for good and bad. Let’s just hope the good guys keep winning.”

Something caught Max’s eye. Among the sea of wiggling bodies, one sat firmly immovable, staring intently at him: the blond gentleman. Max tried to place where he’d seen him, but before he could figure it out, David interrupted at the microphone.