Spin State - Chris Moriarty [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Quote
Acknowledgments
ENTANGLEMENT
SYSTEMS WITH ONE DEGREE OF FREEDOM
HIDDEN VARIABLES
INTERFERENCE PATTERNS
UNCENSORED TOPOLOGY
COLLAPSE OF THE WAVE FUNCTION
KILLING VECTORS
SLOW TIME
FURTHER READING
About the Author
Praise for Spin State
Copyright Page
For Mitchel
Then we encountered a leopard man who was rumored to be a cannibal. He must not have thought we looked good to eat; he smiled and let himself be photographed like a veteran tourist guide. After that I started asking everyone where we could meet real cannibals. I wanted to see them, know them.
“They exist,” my hosts told me.
“But where?”
“No one knows. But there’s nothing special about them. You can’t even tell them apart from normal people.”
“Ah, but I have to know them, eat with them! I want to eat a person. Just a taste. Just to taste it!”
—Louis Lachenal, Vertigo Notebooks
Special thanks to Anne Lesley Groell for her brilliant editing and uncanny ear for what I meant to say; to Charles H. Bennett, John A. Smolin, and Mavis Donkor of the Quantum Information Group at IBM’s Watson Labs for brainstorming, technical advice, and quantum teleportation jokes; to Ann Chamberlin and M. Shayne Bell for kindness above and beyond the call of duty; to Scott Anderson, Julia Junkala, Jim McLaughlin, Susan Mayse, Tony Pustovrh, and Kirsten Underwood for being the best readers any writer could ask for; to Judith Tarr for sensible advice and extravagant encouragement; to John Dorfman for being there at the beginning . . . and of course to the fabulous Jimmy Vines, who made it all happen.
ENTANGLEMENT
Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play at dice.
—Albert Einstein
God may not play at dice, but She certainly knows how to count cards.
—Hannah Sharifi
They cold-shipped her out, flash-frozen, body still bruised from last-minute upgrades.
Later she remembered only pieces of the raid. The touch of a hand. The crack of rifle fire. A face flashing bright as a fish’s rise in dark water. And what she did remember she couldn’t talk about, or the psychtechs would know she’d been hacking her own memory.
But that was later. After the court-martial. After jump fade and the rehab tanks had stolen it from her. Before that the memory was still crisp and clear and unedited. Still hers.
After all, she’d been there.
Li knew Metz was going to be big as soon as she met the liaison officer TechComm sent out to brief her squad. Twenty minutes after Captain C. Xavier Soza, UNSC, hit planet surface he’d gone into anaphylactic shock, and she was signing him into the on-base ER and querying her oracle for his next-of-kin list.
Allergies went with the uniform, of course. Terraforming was just a benign form of biological warfare; anyone who had to eat, breathe, or move in the Trusteeships got caught in the crossfire sometime. Still, no normal posthuman was that fragile. This time TechComm had sent out a genuine unadapted Ring-bred human. And clever young humans didn’t get cold-shipped to the Periphery, didn’t risk decoherence and respiratory failure unless they’d been sent out to do something that counted. Something the brass wouldn’t trust to the AIs and colonials.
Soza spent thirty hours in the tanks before he recovered enough to give them their briefing. He seemed alert when he finally showed up, but he was still short of breath, and he had the worst case of hives Li had ever seen.
“Major,” he said. “Sorry you had to deal with that little crisis. Not how I imagined my first meeting with the hero of Gilead.”
Li flinched. Was she never going to enter a room without her reputation walking two steps in front of her?
“Forget it,” she said. “Happens to the best of us.”
“Not to you.”
She searched Soza’s handsome, unmistakably human face for an insult. She