...And We Will Have Snow

Part 2: The Dreamers

Kore really did go home and sell the house. Dema and Naga had surprisingly little they wanted her to pack up and ship to them. Cern had even less. Naga had Kore turn over to the new administrators at the clinic all the medical references she had kept at home. Kore, at Tengri's request, shipped Sedna's collection of shaman lore to the island. When she got back they went through it all together, and added it to his.

Ray tried every chance he got to explain to the others, collectively or individually, how his link to the plenum worked. He kept telling them it went back to the definition of a Turing machine, that any true general purpose computer could emulate any other general purpose computer, that the method of encoding the data was irrelevant, because the patterns were the same. He said it had already been shown that the human mind is a general purpose computer, and so is the Q. So they can emulate each other. Because his supercomputer could access the Q through its quantum portal, it could indirectly access a human mind.

At this point everyone he talked to had the same question. "What's this 'Q' you're talking about?"

"Oh, sorry, that's short for 'quantum foam.' It's the same as what Drake calls the plenum."

"Oh, okay." And then they would turn around and walk away with their eyes glazing over, and Ray would have to find someone else to explain it to.

He really wanted someone to ask how the Q recognized his code, since his conventional computer encoded everything in binary. His answer was going to be, it doesn't. Or it doesn't matter. It detects and resonates with the encoded pattern. But no one seemed to care about that. All they cared about was that it worked. In fact, they cared about that a lot. On the whole, Ray was happy with that.

Actually, Ray wasn't completely sure what the link to the Q was doing. All he could do with it himself was feed it some piece of information and then compare that to what he got back. The first one to really test it was Cheryl. She gave Ray some spreadsheet data about ocean currents, and asked him to see what the Q would come back with. It filled up the spreadsheet, but Cheryl was having trouble making sense of it. She had pored over it for hours, without much success.

Dema was the first one to make it work. She'd been watching Cheryl, trying to help, but although they could both see some similar patterns in the Q data, there didn't seem to be any clues what they meant. Then Dema asked Ray to let her try something. He said, "Sure," so she got him to let her sit in his VR chair and put on his helmet and gloves. Then she asked him to show her a picture of a snake.

"Any particular kind of snake?"

"Doesn't matter a whole lot. A gopher snake or a bull snake will do."

He wasn't sure how to spell 'gopher,' so he gave her a picture of a bull snake.

"Good," she said. "Now send that same picture to the Q."

He did that. Nothing happened. At least not right away.

Then a lot of snaky-looking things started appearing on the screen. Ray and Cheryl saw that Dema's hands were moving, and some of the snaky things disappeared. Then more of them went, and new ones started showing up that were more like the picture.

Then Dema deleted the original picture and got rid of all but one snake. This one started to move. It crawled around for a bit, then coiled up comfortably and looked at the screen. Dema said, "Ray, do you have sound on? Will you hear the snake if it talks to you?"

Ray bent over his keyboard and clicked a few keys. "Uh, okay..."

The snake opened its mouth and said, "Hi Ray."

Inside her helmet Dema grinned.