...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 14: Ray

Cheryl peeked in on Ray and found him seated in his VR chair, gauntlets and helmet on, his fingers rapidly typing in mid air on an invisible keyboard.

"He's still at it," she said. "Better give him a few more hours."

Cern said, "Um, could Dema and I maybe mess around with your demo some more?"

"Sure," she said, with a glance at Karen for confirmation.

Karen nodded. "No worries. We can use our desktop screens for what we have to do." She led the way back to their lab. Dema and Cern geared up again and spent the rest of the morning exploring the model.

Over lunch they were talking about the experience. Dema had just been saying, "Once I got the feel of it, I felt like I was flying over the whole planet!" when Ray burst into the room, went straight to the refrigerator and came back with a plate full of leftover catfish, wolfing it down with his fingers as he walked to the table.

He had left his glasses behind somewhere, and he looked exhausted. When he sat and leaned forward over the plate to cram more fish in his mouth, the lank dark hair that perpetually sought to cover his left eye finally succeeded. He appeared not to notice.

Nobody said a word until he had finished half the plate. Then he stopped to take a breath, brushed the errant lock away from his red-rimmed eyes with one fishy finger, looked around at them and said, "It works!"

At that everyone cheered and Ray beamed. Then he said, "Half the night I was approaching it all wrong. I kept trying to figure out how to ask it something. Nothing I did was any good. Finally I decided to try telling it something, just store a little data and see if I could retrieve it. When I did that it was like opening the floodgates! I got my data back all right, and then more data like it. Every variation you could imagine. I spent the rest of the night figuring out how to turn it off, narrow it down, control the flood."

Ray appeared to remember how hungry he was, and started eating again. Karen said, "I've known people like that. Ask them a question you get a one word answer, but mention your latest bright idea and they'll tell you a thousand they think are as good or better."

"Probably accessing their own personal plenum," said Cern.

With his mouth still half full Ray said, "I think you're right. That's how it works. It's a resonance effect, just like Drake described it."

"That's exactly how our memory works, isn't it. Start thinking about something you're interested in, and related things start popping up."

"Right! So what you have to do then is filter them, pick the ones you want to pay attention to. That's what I had to do, work out a way to filter the output."

"And you've done that?" asked Cheryl.

"Yup!" Ray was beaming again. Cheryl beamed right back at him.

Everyone else just sat there stunned. It was beginning to sink in what Ray had done. They'd been hearing for years about quantum computing, that it would be this vastly more powerful approach to information processing. No one had ever suggested it might be a data retrieval system, or that it could retrieve data from the whole history of the universe. It was, quite literally, unbelievable.

Ray, meanwhile, had stopped eating. He pushed the plate away and stopped smiling too. He started to stand up, and it looked like his eyes were glazing over. He said, "I've got to get some sleep," and stumbled out the door.

Dema thought he needed help, and started to get up, but Cheryl said, "Let him go. He'll make it. Give him a few hours, he won't be able to stay away from his lab for long."