Omar came in with two coffees and set one down next to the acetone.
“Not there,” Eli said.
“Sorry.” Omar moved it about six inches to the left.
“That’s the same place.”
Omar picked up the coffee he brought for Eli and put it on the floor next to Eli’s left foot.
Eli’s bag had been packed and sitting by the door since the sun had come up. The department had put her on a list of people who could talk to reporters about quantum computing. In between trying to get things done, she had said no to a radio station in Providence, an obnoxiously persistent booker in New York, and a woman from a hedge fund who wanted forty-five minutes of her time and offered to send a plane to get her from Hanscom and fly her to NYC and back.
“IT sent another one,” Omar said.
“I saw it.”
“No, this is a new one. Do not install software updates. Nothing. Not the operating system. Not the browser, and especially not a thing on your phone that says it’s a security update.” He took his phone out of his pocket, clicked, and turned it to show her. “Especially the ones that say security update.”
“Okay.”
“That’s a weird email to get from MIT IT.”
Eli got her hands out of the glovebox and pulled the gloves off.
“The email is correct,” she said.
“Is it going to be fine?”
“Which part.”
“Any of it.”
“Fine or correct.”
“Start with correct.”
“The part where you can’t trust an update is real,” she said. “The moron professor from Stanford saying all encryption is broken is not correct. Your messages are fine. Your bank is mostly fine, at least today. What’s broken is the way things prove they are what they say they are.”
Omar put the phone in his pocket.
“Could we do it? Here, I mean. With ours.”
“No.”
“Could anybody?”
“Somebody did,” Eli said. “The machines didn’t get bigger this year. I know what every machine bigger than ours can hold, because I spend my life begging for time on them. Nobody built something new in the last eight days.”
“So how —”
“I don’t know how.”
He went back to his phone. After a minute he said, “They’re talking about the two founders again.”
“The what?”
“The two from Colorado. It’s on every news feed. Basalt Labs.”
Eli stood there with her gloves in her hand.
“That’s Samantha,” she said.
“You know her?”
“We were in the same year. When my mom came to visit, Samantha came over with a bigger group from her lab, stood in the kitchen, and argued with my mother about the Red Sox for an hour and a half. My mom was making dinner for us. Samantha doesn’t care about the Red Sox. She’s so fucking smart.”
Eli put the gloves down on the bench. “Go get food. I’ll pay. Get whatever and get me the same thing.”
“You’ve said that earlier today and you still haven’t eaten.”
“Go.”
As Omar walked out the door, he said, “Don’t let the coffee by your foot get cold.”
Eli sat down at the shared desk in the corner of the lab. On her laptop, she pulled up the seminar page, which she had built as a second-year, and scrolled through two years of Thursdays. Halfway down the third page she found what she was looking for: Classical Preprocessing for Period Finding on Neutral-Atom Hardware. S. Hale, Basalt Labs.
She remembered the seminar. It had been about an hour in 13-2137. There were eleven people, including her and Samantha in the room. She could name each of them.
She dragged to the end of the video.
Her own voice came out of the speaker. Sorry, one more question. Everything you showed us is at a size where I could do it on a laptop. Does it survive at a size anybody cares about, or does the depth kill it?
On screen Samantha put her hand flat on the podium.
Come find me after, she said, and the room laughed. Someone started clapping, and the recording ended eleven seconds later.
Eli leaned back in the chair.
After the seminar, they stood outside the room and talked quietly. Samantha hadn’t answered the question, but asked one instead. Can you take the video down. She said it was because the slides had things on them she should not have shown.
Eli had asked which slides. Samantha had said it didn’t matter and asked after Eli’s mother.
And Eli had said sure, absolutely, I’ll do it later today, and had gone to a thing at the Miracle. She’d forgotten to take the slides down and hadn’t ever thought about it again until this moment.
Her phone started buzzing. An unknown 617 number. She ignored it.
She started the video over and sped through it one slide at a time.
She found the slide Samantha must have been referring to four slides from the end. A single plot, logical qubits against bit length, log scale on the bottom. Samantha’s claim ran out at ninety-six bits and the entire talk lived under a hundred and twenty bits.
But there were two weird points on the plot.
They sat out at five hundred and twelve and seven hundred and sixty-eight, unlabeled, in the same color as everything else. Nobody in that room had asked about them. Eli didn’t remember noticing them.
A curve like that is supposed to bend upward. You go up in size, the requirement goes up faster, and the machine you need runs away from you. Those two points did not bend. She must have missed them because they were tiny dots on a huge seminar screen.
Eli grabbed a random piece of paper off the desk and laid a straight edge along the line and the dots. She looked at the vertical scale and guessed at where a bit length of 2048 would land.
A few hundred.
Holy fuck.
She knew of a half dozen machines that existed with over two hundred logical qubits.
Trembling, Eli stood up. She walked around the room sidestepping the coffee sitting on the floor. She sat back down and, while chewing on her bottom lip, opened the admin page for the seminar archive.
She downloaded all the files from the seminar. Then she opened a form and chose Samantha’s seminar presentation.
Remove media from public listing.
It wanted a justification. The dropdown showed Copyright claim. Technical fault. Privacy. Speaker request.
She picked speaker request, which was true, although a little dated, clicked, and got a thank you message that looked like it was from a website from 1999.
MIT could be so lame sometimes.
Next, Eli opened the access log.
Two full-file downloads in the last month, not including hers. Both in the last nine days. Neither of them was MIT. She did a quick lookup on Notify. One was from an AWS block. The other was from Transocks so she wasn’t going to figure that one out. The most recent one was Sunday.
She deleted hers from the list and closed the log.
There was a knock on the doorframe.
Startled, she closed the laptop lid, turned around and looked up. A woman in her fifties and a man Omar’s age flashed ids, said their names, and stepped in and closed the door.
“Dr. Rosen, you were at MIT with Samantha Hale.”
“I was.”
The man opened a folder and took out a sheet of paper with two photos on it. One was the teenager in an orange race shirt with strange hair. The other was a good looking young man, but not her type.
The woman did the talking.
“Is this a good likeness?”
Eli said, “Who are you again?”
The woman said, “We are with the US government. If you want I’ll show you my badge again.”
“That’s ok.”
Eli looked at the image. The hair was wrong. The girl was skinnier than Samantha. But she had the same intense look in her eyes.
“Maybe. It could be. I’m not 100% sure. She was a little older when we met,” she said.
“When did you last speak with her?”
“January. Maybe February. She texted me about a job she was hiring for. A student of mine had applied. I told her he wasn’t good enough.”
“Has she contacted you in the last week?”
“No.”
“Any contact at all. Email, a call from a number you didn’t know, anything through a third party.”
“No.”
The man was writing everything down.
“Did she ever discuss her work with you?”
“Not often. She kept to herself. She worked alone and was very secretive. I’m not even sure her advisor knew, or understood, what she was working on when she was here. She gave a talk in this building. A few years ago. I ran the seminar series, so I invited her.”
The younger one stopped writing and looked up.
“Is there a recording?”
“No.”
Both of them accepted it. The older one turned another page.
They asked whether she had ever visited their facility in Colorado, whether she knew Marcus Reed, and whether Samantha had family in Massachusetts. Trivial shit. She answered no, yes, I don’t know. Eli was starting to get impatient.
“Has anybody else come to see you today?”
“No,” Eli said. “Should I expect somebody?”
The older one closed the folder. He gave her a card that only had a phone number on it and told her to call if she thought of anything, even if it seemed unimportant.
She held the door open for them and closed it after them.
She went back to her laptop, looked at the seminar page again, and opened the photos archive. One was from the roof on Windsor Street. Marcus was taking a group photo and Building 32 was in the background. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. Samantha had turned around so the back of her head was visible. She was talking to Vlad, who was also turned around so only the back of his head showed.
Yummy Vlad. She remembered him. One long, awesome night where nothing got done the next day. She shivered. Now he was her type. Too bad he was so elusive. He never answered her texts after that. Oh well.
Omar came back with two paper bags and put one on the desk beside her elbow.
“Eat that,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He sat down on the other side of the bay, propped his phone up against the acetone, and tore into his food. Eli took a thumb drive out of the desk, copied the files onto it, deleted them off the machine, and emptied the trash so they were really gone. She twirled the thumb drive around in her fingers a few times and then put it in the bottom of her bag under her keys. Then she put the card from the government man under the drive.