Ball Machine

Chapter Three - Quantum Entanglement

Chapter Three - Quantum Entanglement

Arizona, August 2014

Rosa was on her way to see her boys, the ones she actually trusted. Tony and Dany, older than most of the guys here, smarter too. 

She tracked them down to the programmer’s lair, a room filled with screens, boxes, wires, gadgets, soldering irons and hard drives. One whole table was covered in empty drinks cartons and discarded food wrappers. 

Tony didn’t look up from his screen, his fingers still bashing away at the keyboard. “When’s the match?”

When’s the striptease, that’s what he was really asking. It was still on everyone’s mind. At least it was getting things done around here.

Tony was eighteen stone, out of condition, and didn’t look he could run for a bus, never mind do a thousand sprints around a tennis court. He wasn’t what Rosa had in mind, when she thought of the ideal audience for a striptease. 

“You tell me,” she said. “We’ve got the parts but they don’t work together. It’s not even a very good ball machine. Can’t we make something more…,” she waved a hand in the air, “more lifelike.” 

Tony hit the enter key with a flourish and pushed his chair away from the desk, finally looking up at Rosa. “Lifelike is impossible. Too many variables. You’d need a million ‘if this, then’ iterations just to make it ask the time of day. We can programme game thinking, strategy and tactics, but it’ll never feel like you’re playing a person. Then there’s social intelligence, motion and manipulation, natural language processing, not to mention common sense. There’s  nothing that holds them all together.”

Rosa frowned. “So how do people do it?” 

Dany Ng gave a polite cough. They both turned to look at him. 

Dany was a mystery, drifting around the place doing higher mathematics, talking of algorithms, messing with programming and computers and processors, discussing quantum mechanics and the Indian sages. Mathematics came naturally to him in ways that made Rosa’s head spin. 

He came from China and spoke good English, but understanding his mind was beyond Rosa. His thoughts seemed unconnected. Or connected to the wrong things. Or different things to the way most people stumbled through life. She had seen him at times, on the edge of the campus, staring at the desert for hours on end, not moving a muscle. Was that where he did his thinking? 

“You can’t make a robot look like alive. Too hard,” Dany said, his accent a mix of Chinese, southern American drawl and uptight British persnicketiness picked up in Cambridge. “Easier way, you do it for real.”

She watched him, waiting for more. What did he mean? 

“Make it look alive, because it is alive,” Dany said. 

“And how would we do that?” Tony’s voice was tinged with sarcasm, reigned in only because everyone on campus was in awe of Dany’s intellect. “Good enough to play tennis was the deal. Now you want artificial life?” 

Dany placed a box on Tony’s desk. “Processor. My invention.” 

“You mean this is it? It’s ready?” Tony sounded impressed. He opened the box and peeked inside. “Wow.” Tony’s face, his eyes, his voice, suggested history had been made. That they were in the presence of greatness. “I thought it was years off.” 

“Prototype,” Dany said proudly. 

Rosa leant over his shoulder. The box contained an shiny metal canister, about the size of a human brain.