Chapter 3
Ray met me in my office the next morning, and we drove up to Boston together. Alicia, the receptionist, greeted us with a friendly smile, though I could detect a faint whiff of irritation that our presence had forced her away from her primary duties — split between the latest fashion magazine and a half-finished game of solitaire.
She pressed a button and announced that Markowitz and yours truly, Bill Culloden, were waiting at the front entrance. A minute or so later, a set of double doors opened.
“Welcome,” Juliet said as she shook our hands.
Apparently, she had known we were coming.
I was pleased to see that she had remained the trim, attractive woman I remembered from three years before. The only visible changes were that her hair now carried the thinnest shocks of gray, and that she had replaced her gold rimmed glasses — the ones that reminded me of my junior high math teacher — with something more fashionable.
She walked over to a set of double doors. “Would you gentlemen please follow me?”
We entered a cavernous room that resembled one of the big warehouse stores, though instead of merchandise, the shelves were stacked floor to ceiling with black electronic boxes, each flashing lights of various colors.
Markowitz and I glanced at each other in curiosity.
“
Juliet smiled. “Not at all.”
She kept going toward the rear of the building, though she finally turned around when she realized we had not followed.
“I assume that as part of your audit, you examined our electric bills? The power consumption of this facility is enormous.”
“It did cross our minds,” I said.
Indeed, one of the ironies of the information age was that supposedly the greenest of all industries gobbled up massive quantities of coal fired electricity, a fact the young activists rarely considered as they updated their social networking pages.
“Nothing here has the slightest relevance to our research,” she said, “but it provides a reasonable cover story. Do you remember your visit a couple of years ago, Mr. Markowitz?”
He nodded.
“A month or two later, we had what passes for a heat wave in this region, and the power company called to ask if we could cut back our usage temporarily. After that, we decided that we needed a way to explain what we were doing in case some authority showed up and demanded a better look.”
“I get that, but why the racks full of servers?” replied Markowitz.
“To a casual observer, we could explain that we were either storing vast quantities of data or conducting an exercise in massive parallel processing. Either way, they would see what they expected to see: the bustle of industry and lots of flashing lights.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You sound like you’ve read those management books: ‘Bias for action’ and all that nonsense.”
She smiled. “Feverish activity is the essence of progress, is it not? At least in the minds of the unthinking.”
***
Juliet flipped a switch and the racks of machines went dark.
“We only turn them on for the occasional visitor,” she said. “After all, they do consume power we could otherwise devote to more constructive purposes.”
“Yes,” I replied. “If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask you about those purposes.”
“You
“Of course.”
Juliet led us to a small box and pressed a security code. After a brief second’s delay, the door opened to a small room containing a bank of lockers.
“This way, gentlemen, if you please.”
The door closed quickly behind us and we immediately noticed that the temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees.
Juliet opened one of the lockers, took out a thick yellow jacket, and then handed us two larger ones — both colored in the most fashionable safety orange.
“These appear to be your size,” she said.
Markowitz and I glanced at each other, then donned the coats and followed her to another door at the opposite end of the room. She punched the codes once more, and after a brief delay, this door opened automatically as well.
This passage led into a storage closet, filled with file cabinets. However, when Bryson removed a key from her pocket and turned the lock closest to our left, the center cabinet swiveled around, exposing an elevator sized opening.
“Go ahead,” she said. “It’s just what you think it is. Just be sure to step over the red line.”
She stepped in behind us and pressed a button. The doors closed and we could feel ourselves descend. About half a minute later, the doors opened again to reveal a large rectangular chamber, with banks of computers and instrumentation lining each of the four walls from floor to ceiling.
Markowitz shivered and pulled his coat tight. He glanced up at a thermometer atop the nearby console: minus 20?C, or minus 4?F.
“How far down are we?” he asked.
“Thirty meters,” she replied. “About a hundred feet.”
I glanced around. “Do the building inspectors know about this?”
“Partially,” she replied. “This was originally an old mine dating back to the Colonial era, From what I’ve been told, it played out before the Civil War. Over the intervening years, developers attempted a variety of schemes to make the property commercially viable, without success. The last one went broke in the 1970s.”
“How did you acquire it?”
“We cut a deal. As you would expect, the previous owners had left a mess, so we agreed to clean up the site to modern environmental standards.”
“And in return, the city agreed not to ask too many questions,” I said.
“Something like that. Of course, they had to approve our structural plans. They didn’t want responsibility for a cave-in.”
“How did you explain what you were doing?”
“Cryogenic research for the Defense Department,” she replied. “All top secret.”
“They bought that?” asked Markowitz.
“Why not? It’s perfectly plausible.”
“Why here? Why not out in the country somewhere, where you wouldn’t have to deal with inspectors at all?”
“What do they call it — hiding in plain sight? In the country, nosy neighbors would watch every delivery made to our site and compare notes. Here, we’re just another pair of MIT researchers — two out of hundreds.”
Markowitz pulled his coat tighter and shivered. “Don’t tell me you spend all day working in this cold?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Personally I prefer the beach. However, extreme cold was crucial to achieving the quantum effects that we sought.”
Bryson stepped through an opening in the bank of instruments at the center of the back wall and led us to a plexiglass enclosed chamber the size of a tennis court. Inside that chamber rested a glass cube about two meters across, and inside that sat a black box roughly the size of a household air conditioner compressor.
“This, gentlemen, is the heart of the quantum computer.”
Both of us stared forward, trying to comprehend what we were seeing. Five narrow tubes, connected to a web of multicolored wiring, pointed toward the center of the black box.
