"So that is how we got the QCCPUs to teleport data back and forth between each other," I summarized. The Air Force general, General Clemons, seemed very intrigued throughout my presentation. I could've sworn that I'd seen her somewhere before. She looked to be in her mid to late forties, was very athletic looking, and had bright strawberry-red hair. She spoke in a Southern accent of some sort. I didn't know that they made attractive generals.
"Jim, what do you think of this?" General Clemons asked.
"Well, if you ask me, and you did," Dr. Daniels replied, "it's a damned shame that we only were told about all this a short time ago or we would have been at least this far already! I can even perceive us having prevented the war with knowledge of a larger threat to force us to act together instead of against each other." Dr. Jim Daniels oozed confidence in himself, probably because he was handsome and from the looks of it extremely physically fit, with a chiseled jaw and short crop of sandy brown hair. I wouldn't have pegged him for some kind of super genius.
Then one of the other suits in the room interrupted, "Harumph, uh, Dr. Daniels please let me remind you that this conversation is at Top Secret only!"
"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's 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 of 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 he looked around the room as if to see somebody hidden there that he hadn't noticed before.
"Okay, okay," Phillip interrupted. "That's far enough for a second. Mr. Montana, would you mind stepping outside please? We will call you back in a bit when we can. Just wait outside." He nodded and an aide beside him led me to the door.
"Carrie, see that Mr. Montana here is taken care of please. We will call for him in a bit," the aide told the young lady at the desk outside the SCIF door.
"Sure thing, Bill," she said. The aide returned through the SCIF door back to brown-nose, uh, support his boss, and I was beginning to worry if my future was going with him. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked so many questions
But, there was a senator in there? Who was this Phillip fellow and who were all of those people in there? The most intriguing thing was that emerald cube that had data "falling" through it and the ever-changing continuously encrypted data. And just what in the hell did the senator mean by "those damned things could be eavesdropping on us"? What damned things? I was beginning to think that not only was I falling deeper into the rabbit hole, but that I was on the other damn side of the planet from the looking glass as well.
I sat there in the reception area of the conference room, SCIF, for some time and nobody came for me. After about an hour and a half I was getting nervous, anxious, and I was afraid I would get depressed if something didn't happen soon. Another hour later the door opened and the senator and his staffer came plowing through the lobby, signed out, and were out the door. But they jabbered the entire time.
"Bill, get me a meeting set up with the 'sissy' tomorrow. I don't care if they have to fly in from the far side of the Moon. I want them here tomorrow. I mean it. Senators you hear me, not staffers."
"Yes, Senator. I'll make sure of that."
"I'm here to tell you, Bill, this is bad news . . . bad news. I never believed the threat was this big. The general needs more men and money and by God she better get it for all our sakes!" They finished signing out of the SCIF and trailed off down the hallway still jabbering.
Fifteen minutes later Larry came and got me. "Okay, Steve you can come in now, but son, please for your own sake, just keep your mouth shut and only speak if you're asked a question. You with me on this?" He patted me on the shoulder and fiddled with his tie as he always does.
"Okay, Larry. Sorry, I hope I didn't cause problems."
"Only for yourself, son." He pressed his hand against my back and led me through the SCIF door.
"Mr. Montana, we appreciate you having patience with us today. Please be seated." Phillip nodded to a chair.
I tried to make myself comfortable.
Dr. Daniels was at the screen, "So anyway, we think the material these orange things are made of is something like lithium niobate and perhaps some KD star P in the I/O port portion in the center. The black bands between the gaps are probably some sort of an optical phenomenon, but without breaking the thing open there is little way to tell. And of course, we wouldn't want to do that, even if we knew how. The main part of the cube—well, all of our spectral analyses suggest no particularly known compound or substance, although it is possible that we are having problems making the measurements because of the quantum phenomena inside the cube."
"And go ahead and tell us your wife's theory, Jim," General Clemons said.
"Okay, 'Becca believes that the reason we can't find any particular spectra for the materials this thing is made of is because there is a fairly significant expansion of spacetime within the cube. And, worse than that, the expansion is not linear but following some polynomial expansion in the radial dimension from the center. Therefore, there would be no standard fluorescence spectra for any particular substance due to the nonlinear gravity red, uh, blue shifting inside the thing."
I couldn't resist. "What do you mean an expansion of spacetime inside the thing and why would a computer have such a thing in it?" Larry elbowed me in the ribs. I ignored him.
"Good question, Steven. Have you ever seen the ancient television show called Dr. Who?" he asked me.
"Never heard of it."
"Oh well, okay. Have you ever read any science fiction books by a fellow named Robert Heinlein?"
"Which one?" I returned the elbow back to Larry's ribs.
"It was the one where the little guy carried a pack around that was infinitely big on the inside, uh what was that one called . . . oh man, would Anson ever kill me if he knew I couldn't remember that. . . ."
"Glory Road!" replied Larry, Lieutenant Ames, Bill the support contractor, and General Clemons all together.
"Ah yes, Glory Road is the one. Well, this guy had a backpack that was the size of a backpack on the outside, but the inside was large enough to place all sorts of weapons, food, medical supplies, tables and chairs, you name it. Now what if we could create a RAM chip that is expanded like that on the inside. I mean if the RAM was the size of a normal memory chip on the outside but was huge on the inside. Wouldn't that allow you to store much more data on the inside than a normal chip? Wouldn't that be cool?" He paused for air.
I had to admit two things: one) that would be cool and two) I hadn't read Glory Road yet. I had given Larry an unwarranted elbow to the ribs, but I would rectify that sometime tonight. He never did tell me what Dr. Who had to do with it.
Not long after this conversation we were pretty much brain fried. All of the technology of this "cube" was way advanced and almost magical. It was obvious that these people were reverse engineering it, but then, who had built it? Did we steal it from the Russians or the Chinese? They would be the most likely candidates, but expansions in spacetime seemed too fantastic. And the biggest problem I had with this thing all day was the fact that there was only one major QCCPU. Where was its connected twin, its entangled counterpart? The board I'd worked on had to have two QCCPUs to function, it only makes sense. One fax machine just doesn't do, there must be another one . . . somewhere.
On the way back to the hotel I made Larry stop at a bookstore and I bought a paperback copy of Glory Road. I also asked him who all these people at the meeting were.
"Well, let's see. General Tabitha Ames Clemons is the female astronaut with the most hours in space and the leader of the W-squared group . . . don't ask . . . and the pretty young Lieutenant Ames, if you can put two and two together is her daughter. The young lieutenant is also an astronaut, and has many hours in the Air Force's space wing." Larry paused to see if I caught that and at the same time acted as though he shouldn't have said it.
"The Air Force has a space wing?" I fell a few feet closer to Alice.
"I didn't say that." He shrugged at me like as if to say, "Don't know what you are talking about." Then he continued, "Dr. Daniels there is the male half of the Dr. Daniels husband and wife team. They are two of the three most brilliant scientists the country has. You haven't met the third, or I guess I should say, first."
"Who is that, the other scientist I mean?"
"Dr. Neil Anson Clemons, astronaut and physicist and chief scientist of the W-squared group. You might recall that he and General Clemons were the only survivors of the shuttle accident a few years ago."
"That was them, but I thought the woman's name was Ames . . . oh, I get it." A ton of bricks hit me in the head.
"And let's see who else was there . . . the senator was Senator Mitchell Grayson from Iowa, former lineman in the NFL. I forget who he played for, but did you see that SuperBowl ring? That was years ago, now he is Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the SSCI or 'sissy.' He is one of the most powerful men in the country."
"What about the other guy, Phillip?" I was beginning to realize the big pond full of sharks that I had been swimming in and I was a little intimidated by it. Chum came to mind.
"Oh, he was the Deputy Director for Central Intelligence, Phillip Sorenson. His boss answers directly to the President."