The Quantum Connection

'Hunh?' Dr. Daniels then turned back to me and nodded at the other fellow. 'Oh, yeah right. Sorry Phillip.' He turned his attention back to the general, 'Well, Tabitha, I would say this is it. I'm not exactly sure how the SuperAgents will apply, but now that we know how to do it, we can figure out how to undo it. I still would like to get 'Becca and Anson's opinions on it, though.'

'We'll brief them when they return next week,' the general assured him, and scribbled something in her notepad.

The fellow Phillip turned to me. 'Mr. Montana, do you think you could show Dr. Daniels here how to recreate and modify, if needs be, your so-called SuperAgent code?'

'Uh, well I don't see why not. But if you're trying to reverse engineer something, I think I would be able to help more by, well, uh, helping.' I was hoping to make my point. I wasn't sure who any of these folks were and I sure wasn't about to just give over my SuperAgent code without a fight of some type.

The general laughed. 'Jim, I don't think he believes you have the wherewithal to undo his code.' There were chuckles from the rest of the room.

'No ma'am,' I replied. 'I didn't mean to imply that at all. I just—'

'Relax son, I'm just trying to get Jim's goat.' She smiled and adjusted the lock of red hair on her forehead. I could tell she was covering a very faint scar with her bangs. She turned to another Air Force officer; she, I assumed, was her aide although I did notice that both she and the general had wings on their lapels and they each wore an insignia patch displaying a missile inside a blue and red sphere with a big blue W² embroidered on it. Not to mention that they looked a lot alike. 'Lieutenant Ames,' she said.

'Ma'am.' The young redheaded lieutenant snapped to.

'I think we can show the abridged presentation now.' General Clemons nodded and then turned to look across the table. 'Wouldn't you agree, Phillip?' That last sounded more like an order rather than a question. It was my understanding that the Phillip fellow was in charge, but this female general seemed to be getting her way when she wanted it.

'Uh, okay Tabitha. Only the 'abridged' version though.' Phillip overemphasized the word abridged.

'Roger that,' Clemons said. 'Okay, Lieutenant. It's all yours.'

'Yes, ma'am. Jim, could you back me up when I get stumped please.' Lieutenant Ames sounded humble as she approached the front of the room and tugged on her uniform jacket.

'Annie, I think you will be just fine,' Dr. Daniels replied and chuckled. I found it very interesting that all of these people acted as though they had known each other for years. It was almost as if they were family. Our group wasn't like that, it seemed to me.

Lieutenant Annie Ames pointed to the screen. 'Okay, here on the first slide is the device.' Ames pointed to a photo of an emerald-colored cube-shaped chunk of glass with several orange smaller cubes within it. 'We believe these smaller orange cubes might be the intelligent processor components and these dark bands just beneath each of them are the RAM register input interference patterns. Until today, we had no idea how the device managed the data and the problem devolution. I would have to say that I am very impressed by Mr. Montana's effort thus far. The power inputs for the entangled witness beams, or as Mr. Montana had called them, quantum connected beams, come from here.' She changed slides to a cutaway diagram of the device. 'This is a scanning electron microscope image of the device. Note the false coloring we used to signify different density levels. It is possible there is something erroneous about the density measurements. Dr. Daniels will discuss this later. This bright spot here in the heart of the main cube is the connected light source and it appears the data information falls through here.' She paused for that to sink in.

'Uh, excuse me,' I interrupted, not sure if it was okay to do so.

'Yes, Mr. Montana.' Lieutenant Ames cocked her head and smiled. She looked surprisingly like the general when she was 'trying to get Jim's goat' I noticed.

'Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but, did you mean to say the data information, uh . . . falls through there?' I leaned forward in my chair, bumping into Larry's leg. 'Sorry,' I whispered to him.

'That is what I said and that is what I meant to say.' She paused for effect. 'Now as I was . . .'

'Uh, excuse me, sorry, but what do you mean falls through?' I interrupted her again.

Lieutenant Ames turned to General Clemons, 'Ma'am?'

General Clemons turned to Phillip. 'Well, Phillip?'

'No!' he said.

'Hold on a minute,' Dr. Daniels interjected. He turned to me. 'Steven, right?'

I nodded.

'Listen, it's just a figure of speech we've been using. Skip it. Just assume the data goes through an I/O port there in the center of the cube, okay?' Daniels was trying to give me a hint.

'Anne Marie, please continue,' General Clemons said, attempting to put the questions behind them quickly.

'Yes, ma'am. Uh let's see . . . yes, here we are. The RAM appears to be continuously changing and we believe that it's encrypted in more than machine code. Decryption never seems to take place as far as we can tell.'

The big fat bald gentleman sitting in the back finally acted as though he was awake and that the last statement startled him.

'It's encrypted?'

'Yes, Senator. We believe that the data sequence here that is continuously changing is encrypted data.' Anne Marie paused for his response.

'Jesus Christ Almighty! It could be a listening device. How do you know that those damned things aren't eavesdropping on us right now?' He seemed almost frightened and looked around the room as if to see somebody