05 - REM

Miles plopped face-down onto the lumpy couch cushions in the shop office. He let the waves of exhaustion held at bay so long cover him like a heavy blanket.

Years of his life spent trying to get ahead of the weight of his responsibilities, and what did he have to show for them? Nothing for himself and a total inability to provide for the person he cared about most.

All that time spent in the lab. It seemed like a waste of his life, looking back on it now, even despite the enthusiasm he showed in those early days after they joined Blueprint. He didn’t see any way out of the box Gary had put him in. He tried not to think about how much time he might have left with dad.

Miles used his breathing technique once more, and tried to put the negativity out of his mind. An image of the ocean came to him. He reached for his iPod, the same dependable one he’d had since high school, and his ears soon filled with the white-noise of beach waves.

With each crash of the sea he replayed the day’s events. Flashes of the lab; metallic surfaces reflecting the start of a scraggly five o’clock shadow. Irish whiskey truffles. Stacks of pancakes with syrup dripping from pulled tendrils of pork, Maggie and her yellow apron, Bennie scratching away at his stack of placemats, repeating the same phrases over and over and over again.

If he were to lay here indefinitely, how long would it take for someone to come looking for him? As the existential thoughts came and passed, he let himself drift amongst the waves. Soon he slipped into a silence somewhere beyond the room, and then into that place everyone knows but cannot describe. The void of the unconscious.

They’re in the booth. Simon is talking, but his voice is underwater. The restaurant is suddenly quiet. Patrons are getting up and sauntering outside. Miles rises from his seat and moves with them. It feels like the natural thing to do. Simon’s muffled voice continues, but his face is directed towards a finger turning round in the whip cream hat of his coffee mug. Bennie gets out from his spot and takes Miles’s dangling hand before following the crowd out the front door.

“GOING TO NOWHERE WHERE NO ONE IS GOING!” says Bennie.

The sun covers their vision in a sheet of white, like some cosmic interrogator. The huddle of random strangers stares up at the sky, into the swirling, molten center of the sun. The heat feels good beating down on Miles’s face and arms. The sound of water crashing against the cliffs below them steadily increases. Continues to grow until it’s almost all he can hear.

Bennie tugs on Miles’s arm and looks up at him.

Waves slosh against the walls of his inner ear.

“COOLS THE PROCESSOR COOLS THE COOLER COOLS THE PROCESSOR COOLS THE COOLER DAMNIT!”

His eyes were twitching. He didn’t know Rapid Eye Movement was possible when a person was awake, but he could feel the inadvertent left to right movement like an eyebrow twitching when his potassium was low. It was odd to think his body could make a muscle move faster than he could consciously, as if it had access to a hidden control panel, one he wasn’t aware even existed.

A stream of images shuffled out from behind each ear and projected into view for the tiniest fraction of a second before launching off into some distant dark corner. He’d tricked his body. It didn’t know he was awake. For the first time he was aware of the inner workings of his subconscious. Like meeting his own shadow. He tried not to think, afraid he’d break the flurry rushing past his darting eyes and take away this strange first encounter.

What was that guided meditation he had tried when he couldn’t sleep? “Feel your thoughts,” the soothing female voice had said, “be aware of them. And now see yourself floating away from them. Allow the inner processes of your mind to exist on their own. You are at peace in the stillness of your essence. You are nothing and you are everything.”

Miles’s eyes shuddered to a stop.

He opened his lids to a panorama of water-damaged ceiling tiles.

His right arm was numb. Stretched up above his head, the flow of blood pinched off from his rotator cuff up. The tingles trickled down. His nerves’ last attempt to warn their owner of a dwindling supply of oxygen, like miners yelling through collapsing rubble. He didn’t move, only let the little needles throb there for a moment before trying to pull his arm down to his side. The moment he did, it became instantly apparent that he had lost control over all muscle beyond his shoulder as his hand collapsed down against his face in a violent slap.

“Ahh!”

Miles reared up in bed, away from the sweaty sheets below him. He looked around for a moment, knowing what had happened but still feeling like someone had attacked him. A surprise ambush by his shadow. He imagined his subconscious laughing from some deep recess inside him. He wanted to laugh too, but the adrenaline was still surging with nowhere to go.

He closed his eyes again. The feeling of the sun against his skin returned. He’d enjoyed that moment, for the short duration it had lasted. And then he remembered the voice of Bennie standing next to him. Felt him tugging on his arm before he spoke.

“COOLS THE PROCESSOR COOLS THE COOLER COOLS THE PROCESSOR”

This time, Miles heard the words differently. Maybe it was the experience of REM while being awake, or having returned from the threshold of unconsciousness just moments earlier, or even a result of the adrenaline now spiking through his veins, but his mind was suddenly clear. Bennie’s words weren’t just words, they were images. A loop of a loop. Recursion. And in between the flurry of words and images he saw something, and from it an idea began to manifest.

Miles wasn’t going to waste any more time. He threw on his shoes and bounded outside to his sorry excuse of a motorcycle before heading back up the cliff side road towards Blueprint. Ten minutes later he was busting through the lab door, eye to eye with a look on Simon’s face that said he hadn’t expected him.

“Hey, that wasn’t much time to come up with ideas, but…”

“Forget it. You were right.”

“I was?” Simon didn’t seem to understand Miles’s sudden change in demeanor. “You look—rested.”

“Something weird just happened. A sort of sudden inspiration. An epiphany.”

“Does that mean you’ve got something better than the leaderboard idea?”

“No, that was the answer. Or rather, Bennie was the answer.”

“You are one hard-to-predict guy, Miles.” Simon wondered if his founding partner hadn’t already started to unravel. The unnerving look in Miles’s eyes wasn’t helping ease the thought, either.

“Prime the cooler. We’ve got work to do.”

---

By the time the boys had everything configured to Miles’s specifications the wall clock was ticking near 2AM. They were both running on the fumes of hope. Hope that Miles’s sudden revelation would be the key to getting their startup airborne before they ran out of runway. Hope that a leap in their tech would convince Gary to extend their funding another year. Their energies were higher than they’d been since first starting out on this journey together. Working in the same room after so many months apart was bringing back a sense of partnership that had all but been lost.

Simon sat on the edge of the table, balancing his laptop over the bridge of his crossed leg, waiting for it to finish compiling the last bit of code. Wires spread out like tentacles from his notebook ports before jutting into an array of wallet-sized circuit boards, each with their own set of tentacles leading back to the silver machine. He might not have proven himself as the greatest salesman of all time, but he knew his way around the custom ‘Raspberry Muffin’ circuit boards that controlled the various components of their cooler.

“Well, it’s not the prettiest prototype, but I think that’s it. I’ve set up the Muffins as a data link between the electromagnet surround, the quantum processor, and our cooler, so we should have a clean, three-way interface.”

The machine had grown in size over the last eight hours. The mirror polish Miles had put on the shell of their cooler was once again slathered in fingerprints.

“You know, if we screw this up we’re done for.”

Simon gave a funny smirk, then got up to search for the bag of chips he knew must have been around there somewhere, “How do you mean?”

“I mean, if we damage that Italian chip in any way…”

Simon responded, his voice half muffled behind a pile of boxes.

“Hey, things happen all the time in shipping. If we say ‘it left here just fine’ we surely couldn’t be held liable for a prototype chip and a shipping carrier’s lack of care, could we? They call baggage handlers ‘throwers’ for a reason, you know.”

“Do you think they’ll give us another chance if we can’t return their prototype in a functioning state? They’re just like us; a small startup who has put everything they have into their tech. If it doesn’t work upon arrival, we’re gonna hear about it. No, actually I’ll have to hear about it. You’ll be down at Elmer’s havin’ a stack of porkies, I’m sure.”

A hand jut out from the boxes gripping a bag of ranch-flavored nachos followed by Simon wearing the smile of a podium gold medalist. He had, in fact, discovered the lost bag of chips.

“Let’s see what happens before we jump down the rabbit hole of ‘what if’, alright? Let us enjoy this moment of invention.” Simon crunched a chip before plopping back down in his seat near the machine, careful not to disturb his medusa of wires. “I’m done with my part, you?”

Miles took a deep breath.

“I think so, let’s run down the order of operations.”

Miles pulled out his phone and read the checklist from the top:

“

1. Three-way interface? - Check, obviously.

2 Electromagnet surround fitted and shielded? Check 3 Cooler primed and interfaced with the Muffin?”

“Cheeeck,” pinged Simon with a second, verifying glance and another sharp crunch of chip.

“

4. Cooling field algorithm?”

“About that,” he said with a mouthful of nacho, “I’m not sure you’re gonna like it.”

Miles tilted his head around the machine to look at Simon directly, “What’d ya do?”

“You know those guys—from Calypso down the hall?”

“I know one of the cofounders is an asshat. They’re building some kinda new solar panel design, right?”

“No, that’s Helios. Calypsos is working on green building control systems, but they both use solar panels.”

“Oh yeah, the thermostat thing.”

“Right, well a week or so ago I was digging through the WI-FI network and I found their local code commits right out in the open. Just sitting there in a public folder. So, I took the liberty of—liberating them. Because you never know when these things could…”

“I know where you’re going with this, and while I would usually be opposed to this moral dilemma… screw those guys.”

“I like this new side of you. The crazy dreamer with balls.”

“What’s it do anyway?” asked Miles. “The code, I mean.”

“It’s actually quite an ingenious solution. Basically they…”

“Wait, wait. I don’t need the programmer jargon. Tell me in a single sentence and pretend I’m an idiot.”

“That won’t be hard.”

They both laughed before Miles flung a ball of used tape, just barely missing Simon’s face.

“Alright, alright,” said Simon. “I only know this because I overheard them talking about it weeks ago, but they’re using it to manage how the ambient temperature is distributed in their green buildings. They take data from each room sensor and then apply it to their green system controllers. So, for example, if one room is colder than another, they just route water from the walls on the sunny side of the building to the walls on the shady side, but it’s more complicated than it sounds.”

“That was like four sentences, at least.”

“We’re going to use it in a similar way, but instead of the room sensors it’ll use data from our electromagnet to gauge changes in the heat emitted from the qubits, and instead of water in the walls, we’ll adjust the direction of our cooling waves to an inverse of whatever the sensor data tells us.”

“You’re up to like” Miles counted on his fingers, “twelve sentences now.”

“But, the most interesting thing about their green little code, is that they’ve added this predictive algorithm. Now, I don’t fully understand it, but I definitely heard them say it took them six months to get it right.”

“Do we need that?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Your idea was to use the quantum chip to process cooling of its own energy waves in real-time, like recursive prediction, which is great, but I’m hoping this will help get us a little closer to full stability. See, if we can proactively cool areas that have a higher probability of generating heat, then maybe we can keep the qubits stable for longer—maybe even throw some more power into the system to increase the max number of computations.”

“That’s actually pretty smart, Simon. Probably the smartest thing you’ve said the past year. Simon held his fingers up to the light and blew on them as if each tip were a smoking barrel. “I have my moments.”

“Are we ready to test, or not?”

“Should be, but don’t be expecting this thing to just fire right up and work the first time out the gate, alright? We’ll probably need a few tries to fine-tune things, if it works at all.”

“Just don’t mess up the chip, please.”

“Noted. Now sir, would you like to do the honors?” Simon offered Miles the power switch; a thick cord attached to a red, flip-up style, fighter jet switch, the words ‘go-baby-go’ written below it in sharpie pen.

Miles followed the mass of cables leading from the machine into the haphazard, daisy-chain of industrial power strips, then plugged in their cooling system along with the Italian quantum chip’s power supply unit.

“Alright, that should do it,” he said before hovering his finger over the fat red switch connecting the system.

“Three. Two. One.”

Flip.

They stood there in the silence of the room waiting for something to happen.

“You know, it’s quieter than I thought it would be.”

“Ha-ha, very funny. I think your Muffins just took a crap.”

“My Muffins are fine. Nothin’ wrong with my muffins. Did you plug it into the wall?”

“Of course I plugged the—oh… I missed the main breaker.”

Miles made the necessary toggle in the fuse box, then returned to the switch.

“Going again. In, three. Two. One.”

Flip

The sound of the compression system in their cooling tower began its thump, chirp, thump, chirp routine at a steady pace.

“Cooling’s active. Turn on the EM coil and let’s check data input.”

“Electromagnet on. Muffins are awaiting data.”

Miles checked the temperature gauge to see how close they were to absolute-zero Kelvin. Without the chip staying at a fraction-of-a-degree above that point, it wasn’t going to maintain the state of superposition required for the logic gates to work.

“Currently passing 25 Kelvin.20 Kelvin.18.”

The back-and-forth plunging sound throbbed against the lab walls. Miles was glad the other startups were out of the building this late at night. They usually complained whenever he tested longer than a few minutes.

“Ten Kelvin. Five Kelvin. One K.”

Simon’s eyes darted across the data now filling his screen.

“I think it’s working. We’re seeing data from the EM sensor, though it’s hard to say if it’s accurate.”

“Qubits are about to wake up!”

“.5, getting close now.”

“Miles—we’ve got data flow,” responded Simon.

The quantum chip was working. Superposition was locked into place and the logic gates were awaiting commands.

“OK, turn on the algorithm and let’s see what it does,” yelled Miles.

As soon as Simon pressed the button, the machine’s tone notably shifted in pitch. The frequency of pulsing thumps coming from their cooler increased in speed, varied, then adjusted themselves. In the numerous times Miles had tested it over the past year, he’d never heard it do anything beyond its typical rhythm.

“What’s happening?” Simon bellowed.

“I’m not sure! Never seen this before!”

“What’s the temp? Should we shut it down?”

Miles tapped his finger on the Kelvin gauge as the needle continued to drop.

.001, .00001, .0000 … Until the sensor read only zeros.

“The thing’s broke!” Miles’s voice barely trickled through the now rapidly pulsing chirps.

“Negative what?”

“The Celsius gauge!” howled Simon with a pointed finger.

Miles moved around the shroud and peered into the secondary gauge marked in Celsius.

“-232.5!

point eight!

point nine!

“-233! THIS THING MUST BE BUSTED!” he yelled over the reverberating noise.

Miles knew something had gone wrong. The electromagnet must be messing with the sensors, he thought. Nothing else would explain a drop that far. It was an impossibility to reach beyond 0 Kelvin, named ‘absolute-zero’ for a reason. Hundreds of times colder than the coldest regions of space, it was the point where atoms stopped moving completely. Stopped vibrating so much that they could actually move inside one another without collision.

“Keep watching it!” Simon shouted through the piercing chirps.

“Negative two-thirty-four… point 8!” Miles’s voice was reaching its decibel limits, despite him cupping his hands to channel the sound in competition with the squealing chirps of the machine.

The cringe on his face made it clear that Simon was just as unsettled about the noise as he was. It was natural to be afraid of a steadily increasing scream. Probably a part of evolution that made humans coddle their crying child. Miles imagined an explosion of frozen metal components whistling through their bodies at impossible speeds. The words of Calypsos’ cofounder came to mind, “One day that thing is going to blow up and kill us all.” At least no one else would be around. Even if Miles knew there was no logical reason for that to happen, he felt just as nervous as Simon looked.

Frost began to spread across the outer shroud of the machine, something that Miles couldn’t account for happening at all. He wiped the now icy sensor with a towel, but the frost fought back, instantaneously precipitating across the glass, then froze the red dial hand in place.

White crystals formed across the bolts, overtaking the metal like mycelium fingers of mold, softening the sharp-angled edges into simplified shapes of powdered condensate as it continued to pulse and spread across the hull.

“TURN IT OFF!” Simon screamed.

Miles didn’t hear a word. The pressure on his skull was growing in parallel to the noise of the machine. The pitch was beyond ear-splitting. Neither of them could take it any longer and they obviously needed to fix their broken sensors anyway.

Miles turned towards Simon and was halfway through yelling “TURN IT OFF!” again before his voice was suddenly the loudest thing in the room. The silence came with a chill that swept through them like an icy wave.

It was jarring. Their ears took a minute to adjust to the change in room pressure. A mild ringing ensued.

Miles feared his ears had ruptured and he was now deaf.

“DID YOu…” he said, relieved at first that his hearing was fine, then pausing to adjust his voice to the room’s new acoustics.

Simon shot back, “I didn’t touch it.”

The feeling was surreal. Unnatural.

They both gawked at the machine.

The frost had ceased its full-out invasion of the silvery hull and was retracing its growth, eventually disappearing altogether like a hot breath on a cold window pane.

They looked at each other before Miles moved back to the Celsius gauge which was setup to hold their record temperature.

“It says…”

“What?”

“It says negative three-thirty-five-point-five. That’s—not possible. I don’t know, have we accomplished anything here?” A glance at Simon’s laptop screen showed that the chip was, impossibly, still processing data.

“Hey, are you seeing this? Simon?”

Simon didn’t respond. Miles rotated around the metal shroud until his face was visible. He wasn’t looking at the machine or the screen of his laptop. His eyes were transfixed off to one side.

“What is it?”

No reply. His face was still fixed on a point in the room.

Miles turned the corner and looked in the direction of his locked gaze.

A short distance from the machine, standing out against the white walls of the lab, a small round object, black as ink and hovering in midair, silently morphed into an infinite array of fractal patterns.