She had not turned the tablet on since the Spur. When she looked at it, she noticed that Vlad had shared the list with her, so that saved a few minutes.
Owner, country, physical and email address, what they filed and when, and who published a maintenance calendar. But there was nothing in the list about whether the machine could run her circuit.
She made a new column in the spreadsheet and went down the rows.
Five of the seventeen machines were superconducting. That wasn’t going to work — her circuit was long and it put any two qubits next to each other, over and over, in an order that kept changing. The superconducting qubits were fixed in place. She put an X in her column next to them.
Two were trapped ion. Ions move, but slowly. Her circuit would come apart long before the end of a run. Two more gone.
Three were photonic. Useless.
That left seven. Three of those were too small based on her estimation of what error correction needed. She did the math a second time, just to be sure.
That left four.
She was startled by a noise in the bushes next to her. Looking around, she saw only darkness. As her eyes adjusted, she still didn’t see anything. She took a deep, slow breath and went back to the tablet.
Their machine in Basalt was one of the four. A wave of sadness washed over her as she realized how badly she wanted to just go back to Basalt, sit in her lab, and work. She shrugged it off.
Kestrel was next on the list. The Kestrel machine was much better than theirs. The other two were outside the US. She knew the one in Switzerland and it was good. She suspected the other one was in China somewhere, but its location was masked and she assumed it wouldn’t be accessible to her.
She turned the screen off and put the tablet face down on her thigh.
It was cold, which was good because it helped her stay awake and alert. She was determined to figure this out tonight. Her mind drifted and she thought about Marcus’s sleeping bag, four hundred feet below her and full of Marcus.
A vehicle was moving slowly far in the distance. The rumble of it floated over her as it came up the road, passed by, and continued on. She flipped over the tablet and looked at the time. 11:17.
She opened a blank note and typed a few lines. She stared at it for a few minutes. Four lines, three of which were in her paper.
She deleted it. She realized she was going to have to tell Vlad that she’d typed the four lines into a page on the tablet. Vlad would have an opinion about that, even though she didn’t think it really mattered since she was in the middle of nowhere and hadn’t saved the file.
It would take Marcus a week to understand this stuff.
Vlad had gotten most of the way to it two nights ago. She had told him very little, and he’d still almost nailed it. If she told him the last line, he’d have it in three minutes.
She spent an hour trying to build a version of the fourth line that would take Vlad longer to figure out. A few days maybe. She tried giving him everything up to the substitution, which she would hold back. She tried it the other way and held back the check. She tried it backwards, which was stupid, but she did it anyway. She couldn’t come up with a version that Vlad couldn’t figure out in a few hours.
She tried a different approach. What if she gave him the configuration. Trap spacing, detunings, phases, powers, the pulse shapes, the decoder — everything two years had cost her. He could write it on his arm. She could hand him that half tonight. It would be useless without the rest.
At two, her water bottle was empty. She was thirsty, so she slowly and carefully walked down to the creek below them to get some more water.
She saw the fire before she could hear them. It was almost gone. Vlad was feeding it a stick at a time.
She stopped in the trees with the bottle in her hand.
“Tell me the last thing you said again,” Marcus said.
“I said no.”
“Dude, cut it out. You sound like my 14-year-old brother. I’m asking what happens to her.”
Vlad broke a branch over his knee and put both halves on the fire.
“Right now they need her alive,” he said. “If I know it too, they only need one of us.”
“Jesus, Vlad.”
“You asked.”
She stood there and stared until Marcus lay back down. Then she went back up through the timber with the bottle still empty.
She wrote down what Vlad had said.
Then she started a second list, working through everything she knew about the four machines. If she could just get to theirs, that would be the easiest. But she knew that was a fantasy at this point.
When she finished, she mapped out all the different scenarios she could come up with. What she thought the next few days looked like. What happened to the two of them if somebody took her. What happened to the two of them if somebody decided not to bother. The thing that Vlad had said.
She couldn’t come up with a scenario where she survived.
A second vehicle went down the road around four. While listening to it, she picked up the empty bottle out of habit and remembered something.
She added another scenario.
A ruby-crowned kinglet went off about ten feet from her head. The whole bird weighed less than her tablet.
The light started to come up over the drainage a little after five. Her legs had fallen asleep and she stumbled as she got up, grabbing for a tree to steady herself.
She went back to camp with her headlamp off. Marcus was sitting up against his pack with his boots on. Vlad had the fire down to coals and his hands out over it. He looked up at her and waited.
“I typed it on the tablet,” she said.