Spin State - Chris Moriarty [40]
As Park and others have noted, the parallel wave patterns documented in situ Bose-Einstein strata closely resemble quantum phenomena associated with human brain waves, and with the less well mapped quantum phenomena found in the associative interactions of poststructuralist-model Emergent artificial intelligences.
And, jotted in the fiche’s digital margin in Sharifi’s handwriting:
Re: dispersed/colonial nets in organics see Falter, Principia Cybernetica and the Physiology of the Great Barrier Reef, MIT Press, 2017.
She skimmed the next fiche.
Handwritten numbers and symbols scrolled up the page. Li knew enough to recognize Hilbert spaces, Poisson brackets, the long sinuous columns of Sharifi transforms, but that was about it. Not even her oracle could actually help her understand them.
It was Sharifi’s handwriting obviously—and as she watched it scroll up the screen Li remembered a joke Cohen had made the first time he saw her own handwriting. Something about how ex–Catholic school kids always wrote as if Sister Somebody was still standing over their desk with a ruler in hand. And he was right, of course. This was the careful, even, unmistakable script of someone who had survived years of penmanship classes, who had learned to write in poverty, on paper. With Sister Somebody standing over her desk.
Li had assumed Sharifi was adopted young, had grown up Ring-side, human in all but name. But what if she hadn’t? What if she had started her schooling on Compson’s World, with the nuns? Was there some connection on-planet that everyone had missed? Some deeply buried childhood loyalty that had turned her away from the job she came here to do?
Li shook her head, struck by a sudden urge to laugh. How did you explain Sharifi? She and Li were as genetically identical as twins—more identical, since the random errors of normal gestation had been assiduously caught and corrected by the birthlabs. They’d been tanked in the same lab. And unless Sharifi’s handwriting was lying, they’d learned their letters and numbers from the same battered secondhand textbooks, starting out each year by erasing the answers last year’s students had penciled in and submitting to the inevitable lecture about Respecting Church Property. Yet here Li stood, a miner’s kid who had struggled through her OCS physics requirement by the skin of her teeth, looking at the equations that had made Sharifi the most important scientist of her generation.
Li had seen her twice, both times from a distance. Sharifi had done a guest lecture stint at Alba when Li was taking her OCS course. The academically ungifted Li had carefully avoided taking any classes with her, but Sharifi was already notorious—a person you couldn’t help noticing.
Li had noticed her, all right. She had watched her. Secretly. Guiltily. Convinced that any overt show of interest in the other woman would betray her—or at the very least arouse dangerous suspicions. She’d wiped more of her own files that semester than in all her time at the front; she gave herself away every time she looked at Sharifi.
That semester had been before the Nobel Prize, though decades after the work that won the prize. Sharifi had been under consideration for a chair in quantum physics at Alba, but she hadn’t gotten it—for the obvious reason. There had been some kind of protest, Li remembered. A senior human professor threatened to resign unless Sharifi got tenure. In the end, he’d backed down, and Sharifi had withdrawn her candidacy and gone into some private-sector research job.
But it was a long way from Ring-side universities and research parks to digging up rocks at the bottom of a Bose-Einstein mine. What had Sharifi been doing in the Anaconda? What could have been worth the risk when she knew, as anyone raised on Compson’s World must know, what could happen?
Li plucked a leather-covered book off the desk and leafed through it. A flap inside the front cover held a clutter of business cards and, tucked