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  Po∙ni, another three-legged Drone like Ti∙ni, approached her. She asked, “Can you make a square, Ti∙ni?”

  Ti∙ni bounced and laughed. She returned to the fallen blocks and formed them into a square platform on the ground. It was a decent job, considering Ti∙ni was their latest born Polyan and had a lot to learn. Po∙ni tidied up the structure a bit more.

  The Soldiers approached the platform and placed their shards upon it. Everyone gathered to admire the magnificence of the combined glow. The crystals illuminated the gathering now that the Source above had begun to dim, signaling the end of the day. Whispers spread through the congregation until everyone was asking the same thing: “Where’s Sa∙ma?”

  A mysterious voice spoke from within the crowd. “I'm here,” it said. Those near the voice spread apart, and a gap emerged through the crowd clearing a path to the center. The old Polyan then hobbled to the platform that Ti∙ni had built. “Today is wondrous,” he said, his front illuminated by the purplish glow. “Our hunting party must be commended for another fantastic capture. Bringing down a Zalisk is no easy feat. It takes the coordination of many skilled Soldiers, and at significant risk. Today we’re all blessed with their success and the Colony is stronger as a result. Come, it's time to celebrate. Let the feast begin!”

  Then, as if on cue, Po∙ni declared, “Let us Drones make sound!” All the three-legged Polyans started to bang their legs together in unison. Synchronized primal rhythms emanated from their motions. This was one of the few things Drones were able to do, besides menial tasks such as pushing things around. Ti∙ni bounced in cheerful glee, this being her first-ever celebration. She fumbled a bit but, after a dull clank or two, was able to mimic the cadence of the others. “Aren’t you a quick learner,” praised Po∙ni. Ti∙ni seemed to swoon and stumbled but recovered. This caste, being the most numerous, withdrew from the crowd and formed a musical circle around the others.

  Pu∙ma then bellowed at the crowd, to be heard above the noise. “Let us Workers make sway.” Upon hearing this, all the four-legged Polyans raised one of their legs into the air and tapped the ground with the beat. They raised another and did the same, and so on. As they performed their tapping dance, they spread out and formed a concentric circle just inside the one formed by the Drones. Their motion now synchronized and developed the appearance of a wave.

  Next, the crowd mingling inside turned to Be∙zo, of the five-legged caste. She declared to the anticipatory eyes, “Let us Soldiers dance!” The five-legged Polyans began to spin. They rotated around the central shards. Thus, they also formed a circle inside the ones shaped by the Workers and the Drones.

  All that remained inside were eight six-legged Polyans. Yo∙sa spoke to them, just loud enough for them to hear. “Let us Leaders eat first.” This caste, being just one leg short of a god, were the wisest and most elite. They thus had the honor and privilege of eating first. Each of them, in turn, climbed upon the platform in the center of the celebration. They placed the lower point of their core upon one of the shards and drained out a bit of the violet life force inside. Once at capacity, they climbed down and made their way through all the moving circles to find a place to rest.

  Now the five-legged Soldiers moved in, each performing the same act of feeding. This was followed by the four-legged Workers, then finally the three-legged Drones. The violet shards were eventually depleted, reduced to mere transparent shells again. A few of the Drones failed to get any, but nobody seemed to notice. Everyone spread out in a grid-like pattern and sat upon the ground, basking in the afterglow of having been replenished.

  Near the remains of the shards, two of the four-legged Polyans were in deep discussion. Sa∙ma was illustrating something to Le∙ma, making outlines in the air with one of his legs. Le∙ma seemed to be taking it all in. She’d learned to observe more since becoming his apprentice. Ga∙zo, considered to be the chief of the Soldiers, noticed this and spoke to them loud enough so the whole crowd could hear. “Show us some learning,” he teased. “Build us something, Le∙ma. Build us a statue.”

  The Colony in unison echoed his request. “Le∙ma, build us a statue. Le∙ma, build us a statue.” This chant was repeated until Sa∙ma stood and raised a leg. The crowd became silent, and Le∙ma took this as permission to appease them. She pushed the shards off, then separated the blocks making the platform. She stuck the largest six shards into the ground. Then she rested several brown blocks on top of them. To the front of the brown blocks, she attached five more small shards.

  She stepped back to view her masterpiece. The crowd couldn’t help but admire the beauty and symbolism of her creation. A perfect Zalisk replica stood tall before them.

  Chapter 2 - 1% Inspiration, 99% Funding

  “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” - Thomas Edison

  Max walked out into the raw Belgian night. A horn blasted from below, and he walked over to the balcony railing to peer down. Two cars were attempting to take the same parking spot. The drivers began shouting profanities in French. Max knew he had that same passion in his blood. If we realized we are all pieces of the same machine, conflicts like this wouldn’t happen.

  It calmed his nerves to know he was in the tower of the Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles. Here he could be an observer of society for a moment instead of interacting with it… instead of being the center of it. He pulled out an electronic cigarette and took a drag of vapor. The nicotine calmed his nerves.

  Light footsteps approached him from behind. Turning, he saw his friend David heading toward the balcony. He stopped next to Max and looked out upon the city.

  “Nice job today,” David said. “It’s not easy for a rookie to impress a roomful of leading particle physicists.” He looked up at Max, whose dark hair blended into the night sky, making him look even thinner than he was.

  Max took another drag of vapors, exhaled, and pretended to squint as if smoke blew into his eyes.

  David’s youthful demeanor belied his age. Max had befriended him years earlier in an online discussion forum on quantum theory. They’d formed a long distance friendship due to their shared interest in the components of the atom. This turned out fortuitous for Max, because when his friend was appointed chair of the 25th Solvay Conference on Physics, Max landed a speaker invite.

  Max was thrilled to have participated in this event. The first one, in 1911, was attended by many luminaries including three of his heroes: Albert Einstein (who explained the photoelectric effect), Marie Skłodowska-Curie (the first woman to win a Nobel prize for radioactivity), and Henri Poincaré (a mathematician who created the foundations of chaos theory). It was, and still is, an invitation-only gathering and represents the best of the best.

  This year the theme was “The theory of the quantum world.” Max had demonstrated a radically new device. It was an honor to have shown it to the modern equivalent of those who had made it possible, people who actually cared.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” David said.

  “I’m kind of burnt out on meeting people, that’s why I’m out here on the balcony.”

  Sounds from the cocktail party floated up from the conference below. The lively debates were still going on, and would go to the wee hours of the morning.

  “Kid,” David said, smiling at him. “It’s not just anyone. It’s Graham Neilson, and he loved your presentation.”

  Max raised a brow, Spock-style. “The Graham Neilson? The wealthiest man in Australia, the brilliant investor, the international playboy?”

  “The same.”

  Max knew a lot about Graham Neilson. He had a reputation as a flamboyant spendthrift. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he used his wealth to fund eccentric hobbies, such as treasure hunting and racing fast cars. His progressive policies toward employee benefits also got him on the cover of many news magazines. Max had wondered, more than once, how he had time to run a bunch of companies and do all the cool things he did. Maybe he just had talented and tr
ustworthy managers overseeing his companies for him.

  His story wasn't atypical of other Information Age billionaires. He created something great, made a boatload of money, and used it to fund additional pursuits, all of which also made boatloads of money. His first company was started in his garage (studio apartment to be precise) where he created an automated stock trading system. This system outplayed all the other ones from competitors, and certainly anyone attempting to trade manually using just human knowledge and research. His day job was a data analyst for a large company, but he liked to offset the boredom by buying stocks. He noticed that many moves weren’t tied to relevant factors like reported earnings or price ratios, but by the emotions of individual buyers. In fact, stock theory is such that the market always self-adjusts, so you can never actually make money. Unless you can predict and exploit an abnormal movement before the system has time to correct itself. This is exactly what Graham started doing, and he was good at it, reliably good at it.

  He never revealed the exact nature of his methods, as they’re a well-protected trade secret. But he hinted on more than one occasion that they used social media to exploit population trends, rather than raw statistics or the opinions of experts. Once he could turn his decision-making process into a computer program, his machine made all the trades for him. And at a much greater speed and quantity. The money started rolling in. He hired staff to handle administrative duties and formed Aboriginal Accruals as his first company. Within a year, Graham Neilson became one of the youngest billionaires ever. Aboriginal Accruals is still a privately held company and a perpetual cash cow.

  Since then, Graham had formed five more companies all with the unifying “Aboriginal” moniker:

  Aboriginal Aquatics, which creates underwater exploration vehicles and tools;

  Aboriginal Augmentations, which produces prosthetics and medical devices for insertion into or attachment to the human body;

  Aboriginal Aerospace, which designs aerial and low orbit vehicles;

  Aboriginal Automotive, which builds high-end race cars;

  and Aboriginal Asteroids, which is currently researching the feasibility of mining space debris for platinum and other rare earth minerals.

  Max believed that, aside from the first, that all these companies existed solely to allow Graham to create toys to use for his personal hobbies. Still, all but the last have become profitable in their own right.

  “He loved my presentation?” Max repeated.

  “He said it was brilliant! He specifically asked for an introduction.”

  “No shit?”

  David responded in his typical deadpan, “I never defecate in public.”

  Max chuckled, then shivered. The two drivers had gotten out of their cars and were now shouting at each other, nose to nose. Their headlights blurred as Max remembered seeing Graham in the audience.

  #

  Max was sitting in a row of red velvet chairs on the stage, next to some of the most brilliant minds in particle physics. The conference was being held in the vast and extravagant Gothic Room. The dark wood on the walls was intricate carved and lined with eight tapestries representing the Trade Guilds of Brussels. Three offset rows of modern lights illuminated the round tables below. All of these were packed with people eager to receive the free flow of new information and ideas, fuel for the endless debates that would follow.

  Loud clapping snapped Max out of silently rehearsing the speech he was about to give. Julian Farber, from the Large Hadron Collider team at CERN, had just finished presenting its plan to create Dark Matter. He walked across the stage and sat down. David rose and returned to the podium.

  “Our next speaker is a young but brilliant, um, inventor.”

  Inventor? Max was amused at his introduction. Guess ‘scientist’ wasn't one of his qualifications.

  “I first met this speaker on the Internet, and he had the audacity to debate with me some of the fundamental properties of the universe. Over time, however, I realized not only the need to challenge assumptions but how the only way to make progress is to change the way we think. He thought different, that’s for sure. And although I don’t always understand what he’s talking about, he’s shown me some amazing things. Things that can move our field forward, in a practical sense. I am proud to introduce Maximilian Moreau!”

  The clapping resumed, although not as heavy as before, and subsided quickly. Max stood up, feeling nervous. As he made his way to the podium, he noticed one person in the audience who stood out: a tall gentleman with a bright blond mullet and a matching goatee. He seemed familiar somehow, and at the same time out of place. Max picked up the clicker and adjusted the microphone.

  The slide behind him said, “Qubit or not two bit?”

  Overcoming his stage fright, he leaned into the mic and said, “Thank you, David.” Every eye in the room was upon him, and the silence pressed in, making it hard to breathe. He cleared his throat to buy a moment of time. “It’s an honor to stand here before you. Many of you are my heroes, and I could only hope to someday be a fraction as brilliant as you. I’m not going to dazzle you all with any fantastic new theories. Or wow you with a new concept of how to explain the universe. Or even talk about new things that we don’t quite understand.

  “Instead, I’m going to show you how I've applied the knowledge that you all have been generating. I guess ‘inventor’ is appropriate, for what value are all these theories, tests, and proofs if they can’t be used for something? Used to help improve mankind?”

  Max advanced the presentation, and the next slide showed a large futuristic computer housing the size of a box truck. It had a control panel on one side with a screen and some indicator lights. “I’m sure you have all seen the D-Wave One quantum computer. It contains 128 quantum bits of metal niobium suspended in a super-cooled chamber. The fixture is protected from magnetic and vibrational interference by 15 layers of shielding. These qubits can perform calculations rapidly that the most powerful digital computers would spend years doing. They do this, as most of you know, by leveraging quantum superposition.”

  Given the audience, it was safe to assume everyone understood what quantum superposition was. Max wasn't a fan of the typical description that a subatomic particle can be in multiple states at once. Or that the particle only chooses a value when you look at it. But this was the wrong audience to have that debate with. Regardless, superposition, when connected through a series of quantum particles, allowed statistical problems to be solved. The challenge was these qubits were susceptible to the slightest disturbance. Even a train going by miles away could cause the particles to decide an outcome prematurely, producing an incorrect result. Thus, the need for extreme isolation from the outside world.

  The slide advanced, showing a cup of coffee and a plate of sugar cubes.

  “What if I told you all that I could improve the power of a D-Wave computer by over thirty times, make it the size of a sugar cube, make it impervious from outside interference, and have it work at room temperature, all at the same time?”

  Max looked at the audience. People glanced at one another, and some even snickered. Max cracked a grin. He was hoping for this response.

  He reached into his pants pocket and, making his best Steve Jobs impression, pulled out a small cubical prism-like object. It was about a centimeter wide, and he placed it on the rim of the podium. Out of his shirt pocket, he pulled a standard laser pointer. This he also set on the podium, pointing toward the cube, and turned it on. The red laser shone into the prism. It began to glow a blue color and started pulsing.

  “What you see before you, dear scientists, is the product of your brilliance.” The slide advanced, showing a close-up of a glowing blue prism, with the letters Q-U-B-E displayed above it. “I call it the Qube, which stands for Quantum Uncertainty Binary Engine. What you see before me on this podium has 3,840 quantum bits inside it. This is over thirty times more than anything ever made, and is no bigger than the tip of my thumb.”

  More snic
kers from the audience.

  “You don’t believe me? Believe me. I'm going to tell you how I did this. But not everything, because the process is proprietary and a trade secret.”

  The blond man shifted in his chair, and he was the only person who’d moved.

  “The problem with quantum bits is that they’re inherently unstable and subject to disturbances. So quantum computers up to now have attempted to solve this by blocking disturbances. My technique embeds the quantum bit inside a diamond lattice. This makes it stable within the system, impervious to any movements of the Qube as a whole.

  “This crystal was produced by sublimating a gas of carbon and germanium particles under high pressure onto a seed plate. What formed is an artificial diamond interspersed with a lattice of defects. The germanium particles are locked inside the diamond in such a way that free electrons are held in a suspension state, thus behaving like quantum bits. These qbits are close enough together to allow interactions with each other, in a similar way to how the neurons in your brain interact. A set of lasers can then stimulate these electrons on one side, which causes a cascade of states through the entire structure, thus causing the whole system to emit a unique color spectrum. Over time, by activating them at different angles, they can be “trained” to perform complex calculations.”

  “The one before me has been taught to calculate any digit of the number Pi. Let me demonstrate.” Max pointed at a man in the front row. “Sir, can you please give me a number, a large one.”

  The man thought for a second and shouted, “78,557.”

  Max repeated the number into the microphone. He turned off the laser and, after a second, the Qube ceased its glow.

  “Now I'm going to feed that number into the Qube using binary. When I'm done, I will leave the laser on, which will end the calculation. David, can you please tell me what 78,557 is in binary?”