I took him up on it. Then I went home and Laz and I curled up on the couch and Sequenced for the first time in months. That was the extent of my graduation party. It was a good gesture for Larry to come to my graduation like that. Nobody else there knew me as more than some guy that was in one of his or her classes. Nobody, but Larry, knew me enough to shake my hand. That's the way it had been every birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas since . . . The Rain. I almost cried again, so I took another pill for it.
CHAPTER 5
The following Monday I went in to work and got reoriented and qualified as a full-time employee at an engineering pay scale. When I got through with all the paperwork, by lunchtime, Larry took me into a room with a combination lock on the door.
'Steve, sign this here and date it here,' he told me and handed me a clipboard and pen.
'Okay, there. What is this room?'
'We call this, depending on the meeting, a SAP/SAR (special access program/special access required) room or a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility). I'll explain it once we are inside. Do you have a cell phone or beeper or anything?'
'Nope,' I assured him.
He put the clipboard back on the wall, and turned over an eight-inch green door magnet that said closed over to the red side that said open. The magnet made a metal clanging metal sound when stuck to the door. 'After you.' He motioned his right hand to the door.
We got inside the room and he closed the door behind us. He walked over to a tote board on the other side of the room and pulled down a sign that said this room is now classified sap/sar and then he sat down. There was nothing fancy about the room. It was just a normal-looking conference room with cheap government-issue furniture, whiteboards on each side, and a large flat-screen television panel at the end. Larry turned the television on and fired up the laptop at the end of the table. The laptop had red and white stickers all over it claiming that it was authorized for classified material. And there were a lot of letters following the words top secret at the top and bottom of the computer screen.
Larry spent an hour explaining how the classified world and protocols work and at the end of his briefing had me sign some documents stating that I knew I would go to jail, be executed, and probably burn in Hell if I divulged any classified material.
'All right,' he said. 'Let's take a quick bathroom break, grab a soda or something, and we will talk about your little circuit.' Larry loosened his tie a little and stretched. 'You think this is exciting?' He smiled and raised an eyebrow at me.
'Well, it's pretty cool so far. But, I can't wait to see what this circuit is.' I nodded at it.
'We can't both go at the same time or we have to lock the room back up. So you head on to the john and then I'll go,' he told me.
After the break Larry placed a disk with top secret and a bunch of numbers stamped on it into the computer. He opened up a file marked 'RAM Quantum Teleportation,' clicked on a slideshow, and there on the big flat screen was a picture of the circuit that I had tried to reverse engineer.
'The circuit you had wouldn't work. The chip between the laser and the CPU chips, here,' he pointed at what I had labeled chip D, 'it was a dummy. Also, this chip between the two CPUs served no purpose. Since it didn't actually function, this dummy circuit wasn't classified. If something don't work, there's usually no need to classify it. Besides, the parts were all common and it's the application that is the big secret here.'
'Then what does it do?'
'Well, the circuit you had really wasn't much more than a fax or data relay from one I/O port to the other. I'm glad you figured that out; we've tried two other co-ops that didn't. I really believe you are the right person for this job.' He nodded his satisfaction.
'Now, this circuit on the other hand, does work.' A new circuit appeared on the screen. 'And what it does is allow for memory and instructions in the CPU chip on the left here to be teleported at the speed of light to the CPU chip on the right. Again, it is
'Uh . . . Larry, I'm not sure I know what you're talking about at all. Quantum connection? Quantum interference?' I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.
'Don't let it fret you none, son, it's some kooky stuff here. All right, hold on.' He stopped the slide show and opened up another one labeled 'Clemons Briefing for President.' Larry rummaged through it a few slides and must've found what he was looking for. 'Okay, this is it,' he said. 'Way back in the early part of last century Einstein apparently had troubles with the modern theory of quantum mechanics. You see, quantum mechanics describes every single thing in the universe as some sort of probability function, or wave function. For example, you could describe yourself as a superposition of a lot of different energy waves if you were real good at math. An electron, for example, can be described as a wave function that is fairly simple, like on this slide.' He pointed at a box with a sinusoidal wave pattern in it. 'This is the function for an electron in a box. The function is different if there is no box. Now also assume that an electron has a value called spin. It spins about an axis either clockwise or counterclockwise. We will say that one of the states is spin Up and one of the states is spin Down.'
'Yeah, I remember this from sophomore
'That's right, Steven, but it's more than just a probability. The electron actually exists in both states until you measure it to see which state it is in. The interaction of your measuring device causes one of the probability functions to collapse leaving just either a spin Up or spin Down electron. You follow?'
'This is Schroedinger's Cat right? You put the cat in a box and until you peek in the box you don't know if it's dead or alive, so quantum theory states it must be in both.'
