“Quantum research.”
“I know that,” Point Machine said. “But what did you do?”
I tried to shrug him off. “There were a range of projects. Solid state photonic devices,
“
“They’re complex equations that can be used to translate visual imagery into the language of wave forms.”
Point Machine looked at me, dark eyes tightening. He said again, very slowly, enunciating each word, “What did you do,
“Computers,” I said. “We were trying to build a computer. Quantum encryption processing extending up to twelve qubits. We used the
“Did it work?”
“Kind of. We reached a twelve-coherence state then used nuclear magnetic resonance to decode.”
“Why only ‘kind of? So then it
“No, it worked, it definitely worked. Even when it was turned off.” I looked at him. “Kind of.”
It took Satish two days to rig up the light.
Point Machine brought the frogs in on a Saturday. We separated the healthy from the sick, the healthy from the monsters. “What is wrong with them?” I asked.
“The more complex a system, the more ways it can go wrong.”
Joy was next door, working in her lab. She heard our voices and stepped into the hall.
“You work weekends?” Satish asked her.
“It’s quieter,” Joy said. “I do my more sensitive tests when there’s nobody here. What about you? So you’re all partners now?”
“Eric has the big hands on this project,” Satish said. “My hands are small.”
“What are you working on?” she asked. She followed Satish into the lab.
He shot me a look, and I nodded.
So Satish explained it the way only Satish could.
“Oh,” she said. She blinked. She stayed.
We used Point Machine as a control. “We’re going to do this in real-time,” I told him. “No record at the detectors, just the indicator light. When I tell you, stand there and watch for the light. If the light comes on, it means the detectors picked up the electron. Understand?”
“Yeah, I get it,” Point Machine said.
Satish hit the button. I watched the screen, an interference pattern materializing before my eyes — a now- familiar pattern of light and dark.
“Okay,” I told Point Machine. “Now look in the box. Tell me if you see the light.”
Point Machine looked in the box. Before he even spoke, the interference pattern disappeared. “Yeah,” he said. “I see the light.”
I smiled. Felt that edge between known and unknown. Caressed it.
I nodded at Satish, and he hit the switch to kill the gun. I turned to Point Machine. “You collapsed the probability wave by observing the light, so we’ve established proof of principle.” I looked at the three of them. “Now let’s find out if all observers were created equal.”
Point Machine put a frog in the box.
And here it was, the stepping-off point — a view into the implicate, where objective and subjective might be experimentally defined.
I nodded to Satish. “Fire the gun.”
He hit the switch and the machine hummed. I watched the screen. I closed my eyes, felt my heart beating in my chest. Inside the box, I knew a light had come on for one of the two detectors; I knew the frog had seen it. But when I opened my eyes, the interference pattern still showed on the screen. The frog hadn’t changed it at all.
“Again,” I told Satish.
Satish fired the gun again. Again. Again.
Point Machine looked at me. “Well?”
“There’s still an interference pattern. The probability wave didn’t collapse.”
“What does that mean?” Joy asked.
“It means we try a different frog.”
We tried six. None changed the result.
“They’re part of the indeterminate system,” Satish said.
I was watching the screen closely, and the interference pattern vanished. I was about to shout, but when I looked up, I saw Point Machine peeking into the box.
“You looked,” I said.
“I was just making sure the light worked.”
“I could tell.”
We tried every frog in his lab. Then we tried the salamanders.
“Maybe it’s just amphibians,” he said.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“How is it that we affect the system, but frogs and salamanders can’t?”
“Maybe it’s our eyes,” Point Machine said. “It has to be the eyes — coherence effects in the retinal rod- rhopsin molecules themselves.”
“Why would that matter?”
“Our optic nerve cells can only conduct measured information to the visual cortex; eyes are just another detector.”
“Can I try?” Joy interrupted.
I nodded. We ran the experiment again, this time with Joy’s empty eyes pointed at the box. Again, nothing.
The next morning, Point Machine met Satish and me in the parking lot before work. We climbed into my car and drove to the mall.
We went to a pet store.
I bought three mice, a canary, a turtle, and a squish-faced Boston terrier puppy. The sales clerk stared at us.
“You pet lovers, huh?” He looked suspiciously at Satish and Point Machine.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Pets.”
The drive back was quiet, punctuated only by the occasional whining of the puppy.
Point Machine broke the silence. “Perhaps it takes a more complex nervous system.”
“That shouldn’t matter,” Satish said. “Life is life. Real is real.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “What’s the difference between mind and brain?”
“Semantics,” said Point Machine. “Different names for the same idea.”
Satish regarded us. “Brain is hardware,” he said. “Mind is software.”
The Massachusetts landscape whipped past the car’s windows, a wall of ruined hillside on our right — huge, dark stone like the bones of the earth. A compound fracture of the land. We drove the rest of the way in silence.
Back at the lab, we started with the turtle. Then the mice, then the canary, which escaped, and flew to sit atop a filing cabinet. None of them collapsed the wave.
The Boston terrier looked at us, google-eyed.
“Are its eyes supposed to look like that?” Satish said. “In different directions?”
I put the puppy in the box. “It’s the breed, I think. But all it has to do is sense the light. Either eye will do.” I looked down at man’s best friend, our companion through the millennia, and harbored secret hope. This one, I told myself. This species, certainly, of all of them. Because who hasn’t looked into the eyes of a dog and not sensed
