“You walked away! You scared me.” Olivia said.
“Sorry miss. Thought I’d check out the side of the building. It’s really narrow isn’t it, the building. Anyway. The mirror glass isn’t glass.”
“I wondered,” said Charli nodding her head, “they are metal?”
“Aluminium is my guess. Polished to look like mirror glass. On the narrow side of the building the surface is recessed and after the lower floors there are rows of vertical metal fins reaching all the way up to the Weiss & Cie floors. They go in deep those fins. It’s too warm in the shade as well. I’d like to come back at night with a thermal camera to confirm it, but I think that building is one bloody great heatsink.”
“Verification.” Charli tells Olivia.
Anyone going to let me in on what this is all about then?
Tommy Erdogan is asking from the drivers seat. They are back in the leather and cheap perfume fug of the old Rover rumbling east towards Skeleton Man shaped trouble. Tommy is watching Charli in the rear view mirror, and Charli is wondering how he can look back at her and still pilot the Nautilus car without rear ending the machine in front.
Charli turns to Olivia.
Olivia?
Olivia shrugs her shoulders and sinks back into her seat.
Why not? Why not tell whole world.
Olivia has been keeping a secret Tommy. Weiss & Cie have a quantum computer in the basement.
What the hell for?
Tommy’s eyebrows rise in the rear view mirror and he is watching Charli again.
Miss Olivia, is this true? What do they use it for?
Olivia is turning inwards by the second. Her eyes are looking at the street outside the passenger window seeing nothing but that which is haunting her. Charli waits for Olivia to respond but she is lost inside her head. Charli answers Tommy instead.
They aren’t a law firm. That’s a front.
Tommy’s eyes roll around that rear view mirror.
This part of your conspiracy theory then?
Lilly thinks the Brahmin exists.
Tommy’s eyes widen. Really?
She agrees it’s more probable that they do exist than they don’t
Olivia has shrunk into the corner of the rear set, watching the City pass by. She mutters something to herself.
You can take over at any time you want to Olivia. It’s your discovery.
Olivia shakes her head. More quiet rapid Italian.
Tommy, how’s your math? Charli asks.
My math? Well, It’s OK.
What sort of cooling capacity do you think a structure that scale has?
Oh, that sort of math.
Tommy has been thinking about that question since he had seen the 90 story vents on the side of the Weiss & Cie tower.
Vast. I mean you have to be thinking megawatts.
How many?
Tommy’s brow creases in the rear view mirror.
I get more than ten, less than twenty.
Given the current state of the art, that’s an insane number of Qbits. A couple of million maybe, and they may be more than state of the art.
How so? demands Olivia, provoked out of her introspection.
Just a hunch., said Charli. Advanced technology is always a strategic advantage. The rich live in the future, the poor live in the past.
They travel on in silence for a while. Then Tommy says.
That’s two raised to the power of two million states, isn’t it?
Could be more.
That’s crazy. What could you do with that level of compute?
Fuck the future, Tommy. Olivia replies.
Olivia looks through the dust of the Rover’s passenger window at the black bulk of the Burning Bear. It looks like a galleon had collided with a grand house and settled into the ruins. Then it had caught fire. It’s walls were as black as char. Its leaded windows bowed from the heat the panes cracked and yellow as old teeth. Perhaps there is brick and stone beneath the crazed charcoal of the pub walls. To be certain Olivia would need to get closer, and deep in her gut, she knows she should not get closer.
A sign hangs from a horizontal pole high above the arched and crumbling entrance, a painting of a bear’s head surrounded by flame. The painting on the cracked and peeling rag of a board is distressed by many winters, but the malevolence in the bear’s eyes still find her and pins her to the worn leather seat of the mad old English car. Cat bones in the foundations, she remembers. Cat bones in the London clay. Or perhaps, at the ground breaking for the Burning Bear, the offering had been larger?
I stay here.
The American woman weighed Olivia’s fear with those fabulous eyes. Beautiful eyes glittering with calculation.
Look after her, Tommy, Charli orders.
Then she is gone, stepping out of the steel and leather cocoon of the car across the cobbles and through the mouth of the pub. No hesitation. Assertion in her strides.
Right Boss, Tommy said, long after she had disappeared.
This is better, Olivia thinks. Just Tommy. Tommy remains reassuring, in part because he seems as lost as she does. Olivia allows herself to sink deeper inside. Far beyond the soft seat, beyond the steel hull of the car, into that distant silent space she carries around in her mind. The place where no one can touch her.
The American had shown her Lilly’s data. The trawl of millions of tiny causal anomalies, millions of them. Lilly had confirmed their accuracy, displayed the gaussian of the afterbirth of universes.
Two to the power of two million.
That’s just insane. Tommy said.
Had she said that out loud?
Yes Tommy, yes it is.
And insanity is an option of course. Is the world coherent? Maybe this is just some hallucination she is enduring. Not reality, but some extended dialogue a secret part of her was inventing to torment her, for where else do hallucinations come from but from deep inside? Olivia holds her hand up in front of her face. Counts her fingers. But then how would she know how many fingers she had if she were hallucinating? Is qualia reality if you can’t trust what you see and hear.
Miss? Are you OK?
Qualia is just another model of the world. Like the models in sims or AI projections or maybe now the models in world scale quantum simulations. The only difference with qualia is that you believe it is true. What if you can no longer be so certain? Is one different to all the others?
Is this real, Tommy?
Miss?
Olivia waves her hand at the interior of the old car, at the Burning Bear glowering at her from its sign, the pub that could so easily, with the slightest twist of perception, become a black coral or the corroded hull of some machine.
Don’t you ever worry, Tommy, that none of this is real?
Tommy frowns.
It is real miss. It is for me. This is my London. I remember Dad bringing me here when I was a nipper. I used to sit at the bar on a stool and Normal would bring me a bowl of chips and a lemonade while Dad and Uncle Ted would talk business. One summer Uncle Ted took me for a ride on his Norton Commando. We went all the way to Southend to see the Pier. And I used to work in Uncle Ted’s garage when I was down from Uni in the holidays to make some cash. The garage is just down the street here. Nothing’s changed miss.
I remember Mercato delle Pulci di Sant’Ambrogio when I was little. I went with Nonna to help her at her stall. I used to guard her money tin and got paid in sweets, and she always helped me make my lantern for Rificolona because Mamma had to work. We used to go to Spiagge Bianche every summer, the whole family. All you could see was blue and white stretching forever. As a child I believed if you stayed there you would live forever too.
I don’t understand a word miss but it sounds wonderful. Has anything changed for you?
I would say no. But I have seen the data, and the American believes it. She is smart, no?
Oh yeah, she is brutal sharp miss.
I think so too. And she believes something has happened.
Uncle Ed does. And he hates change.
Evil old man with parrot head?
Tommy grins back at her. Yeah, parrot head.”
I hate him.
You’ve never met.
Why that make any difference? I hate him. He threaten to give me to Wagner.
Tommy turns in his seat to look back at Olivia.
He said that?
Yes.
Tommy turns back and stares down the Street with No Name to the garage of George Berner and Son’s.
Something’s not right, Tommy said, his voice low and certain. Uncle Ed’s a hard man, miss. But he doesn’t make empty threats, and he doesn’t threaten women. Not ever. So if he said that to you... something is really, really wrong
I had some excellent help from Portia with this chapter. Portia is my cultural consultant for all things Italian and she is also a very talented translator and writer. You can find Portia here…
Thaks for the shout-out, Steve!
With all that is happening in the world, this story doesn't sound too far-fetched. If only we had Ed, Tommy, Charli, and Molly to sort us out!