Spin State - Chris Moriarty [58]
A letter, addressed to Major Catherine Li, Room 4820 spoke 12, Compson’s Station in quick fluid script. She picked it up and opened it.
For a fraction of a second the paper remained blank. Then a blocky engraved monogram appeared above the fold with the words 130 Avenida Bosch Zona Angel. Words took shape below it, written in the same flowing script:
Dearest C. Stop being stubborn and come to tea instead. Usual place and time. Tomorrow. C
As she read the words, they scattered, broke into syllables and letters, rose from the page and turned into bright flocking birds that wheeled and swooped down the empty corridor like swallows.
HIDDEN VARIABLES
At this point the reader still should not feel altogether happy about building this house of cards. Although we have introduced corrective measures, what if they themselves are faulty, as they must be in any real system?
. . . the “realistic” quantum computer looks very different from the idealized noise-free one. The latter is a silent shadowy beast at which we must never look until it has finished its computations, whereas the former is a bulky thing at which we “stare” all the time, via our error-detecting devices, yet in such a way as to leave unshackled the shadowy logical machine lurking within it.
—Michele Mosca, Richard Jozsa,
Andrew Steane, and Artur Ekert
Zona Libre, Arc 17: 15.10.48.
She dialed into the Calle Mexico just off the Zócalo. Mile-high needle buildings glittered in refracted sunlight, pointing the eye up toward the carefully calibrated atmospheric field—and far, far above it, to the blue seas and white ice fields of Earth.
This was the heart of the Ring, point zero of UN space, the richest few square miles of real estate in the universe. Its interface was the best money could build: a realspace-interactive multiuser quantum simulation that was, for almost any imaginable purpose, indistinguishable from the real thing. Originally coterminous with the central banking zone, the interface now extended the length and breadth of the Ring. Anyone with credit for the sky-high access fees could register a corporation, eat a three-star meal, rent a whore, run a skip trace, or shop for anything from Prada handbags to black-market psychware.
The crowd broke over her like surf, with all the stylish, hard-edged excitement of 18 billion people scoring and scheming and consuming at the absolute center of everything. She looked around, getting her bearings. A day trader leaned against an interactive Public Arts Commission sculpture, scanning virtual ticker tape, making quick bidders’ and sellers’ gestures on a trading floor that only he could see. Tourists and corporate concubines hurried by clutching designer shopping bags and talking into the elegant earbuds of external VR rigs.
Just for fun Li dropped into the numbers so she could see who was real and who wasn’t. Half the people around her faded into compressed code packets. Digital ghosts. Simulacra. She dipped idly into some of the codes as she walked—and as always was amazed at the number of people running cosmetic programs. Her own interface was about as stripped-down as they came. It scanned her, packaged and compressed the scan data, and relayed a running simulacrum into streamspace. She couldn’t imagine caring enough about how she looked to bother with anything more. And if she did care, she certainly couldn’t imagine admitting it. Obviously, people in the Zone felt differently.
She crossed the Zócalo, passing the war memorial and threading through the ever-present clumps of schoolchildren gathered around the EarthWatch Monument.
“And here,” a holo-docent was explaining as she passed, “we see a time-lapse image of the seeding and spread of the artificial glaciers. Notice how the weather patterns change over the course of the recording. In the first frames the Sub-Saharan and Great North American Deserts have almost no precipitation,