It didn’t hurt that she and Aiden had already mapped out the fields, noting the soil conditions as they’d done so. Laying out the sensors, data acquisition network, and irrigation system proved easy after that. He still needed to plan the crop rotations and figure out how to manage the fertilizer and pH adjustments, but he had a good start—and hopefully enough to convince his new team of his expertise.
His phone buzzed on the desk beside him. A hit from Samaira. He’d been so engaged in his work, he hadn’t thought about her for at least thirty minutes.
Finishing up soon?
He felt a jolt of electricity even as he cautioned himself not to get carried away. She’d sent him a hit, not a declaration of undying love.
Just about Where are you?
Out front
He saved his work and closed the laptop as he bolted from his chair. Despite his own warning, he was getting carried away. As he passed through the sliding glass doors at the front of the building, he noticed her standing next to a Prius in the circular driveway, talking to an older woman. She noticed him and waved, excusing herself from the conversation.
“Good day?” she asked.
“Not bad. You?”
“Interesting.”
“Who’s that you were talking to?”
The woman had returned to her car, but hadn’t pulled out yet.
“Check out the vanity plates.”
He took a moment to decipher the phonetics.
“Love Doctor Jimi? Who is Love Doctor Jimi?”
“Remember the physicist who left the party early on Sunday evening?”
“Yeah?”
“Luping said his mom picks him up…” she added, wagging her eyebrows.
Jayson’s eyes went wide.
“Dr. Akindele’s mother? I thought they were kidding about that.”
“Apparently not.”
He looked at the car again and wrinkled his brow.
“I don’t get the vanity plates. He doesn’t seem like the type who would call himself ‘Love Doctor.’”
“No. I don’t think he is,” she said with a laugh. “Maybe the car was a gift to his mother?”
“With love, from Doctor Jimi?”
“I hope so,” she said, raising a hand to stifle another laugh.
Samaira seemed less guarded than the first day when she’d avoided joining in on gossip about the physicist. A good sign, if she felt more at ease with him.
“What’d she want?”
“I got the feeling she was trying to pick me up—for him, I mean.”
“The Love Doctor is single? Who’d have guessed? You’d better move in quick before someone snatches him up.”
“I don’t get the feeling there’s a lot of competition, but I’ll find out more on my first date.”
She wagged her eyebrows again.
“Date?”
“Just with her,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “She’s invited me for tea on Sunday afternoon.”
Jayson rolled his eyes.
“By the way,” he said, “I meant to hit you at lunch, but I got carried away with work.”
“No problem.”
“But we should meet up. At lunch, I mean. When we can.”
“Sorry. I kind of made a commitment to someone else.”
Jayson’s face dropped.
“Who?”
He bit his lip, hoping he didn’t seem jealous.
“Andrew. The IT guy.”
“Are you kidding me? That guy is a total incel. He’s a weirdo, Samaira.”
Shit. Too much. He definitely sounded jealous.
“Maybe. But there’s something interesting there. I’m going to make him a bit of a side project.”
“So, you’re setting up a counseling service?”
“Nothing like that. It’s hard to explain.”
“I’m listening.”
“People don’t like him much. He’s struggling to fit in, and I think he could use some help.”
“Of course,” said Jayson, trying to take the edge off his jealous overreaction. “You’re right.”
How did she connect with people so easily? Richard, creepy Andrew, and Dr. Akindele’s mother had all been drawn to her. Even Jayson felt more at ease with her than he did with some of his oldest friends. He wondered if she might charm the aloof physicist, too. Probably not. Whatever gifts she had, surely they had limits.
***
Olujimi means ‘God gave me this’ in Yoruba, the language shared by more than thirty million West Africans. Jimi’s mother often wondered what she had done to deserve such a cursed gift from her Creator. Even as an infant, he exhibited signs that something about him was different. He avoided eye contact, and didn’t react to his mother’s attempts to bond with baby-talk and games of peekaboo.
As a toddler, he regarded other children as elements of his surroundings rather than living beings like himself. He would prod, bite, and push them, studying their reactions with curiosity rather than empathy.
Other parents, tired of the continual abuse, avoided Jimi and his mother altogether. Though she tried to shepherd him into friendships, none of them lasted long. The genius that accompanied his curse revealed itself with time, and it became apparent he could not maintain relationships with his peers because he didn’t have any.
Despite his evident brilliance, young Jimi struggled in many ways. He relied on his mother to organize and direct every aspect of his life, and it became her full-time job to guide his path. Choosing his schools and courses, managing his enrollment, applying for scholarships—it all fell to her—and she decided that if his life could not be normal, it would at least be consequential.
So outstanding were his achievements in theoretical physics, the field into which she had guided him, that upon completion of his doctorate at Cambridge, they offered him a tenured position as a professor without teaching duties. Theoretical work supporting quantum supercomputing became his sole focus. His mother shed tears of joy, knowing she had secured a future for her strange little gift from God.
She’d chosen a path to an academic career deliberately, feeling he had the best chance of success in a comfortable, familiar environment isolated from the pressures of the corporate world. And so, she reacted with skepticism when contacted by a recruiter for a nascent social media company called Hitz-It.com.
The company spared no expense in recruiting her as a proxy for her son. They flew her first-class to their headquarters in Silicon Valley to show her the facility where, they explained, he would play a critical role in transforming quantum computing from theory to reality. They listened to her concerns, acquiescing to everything on the list of requirements she presented. Then they placed a stock certificate and an enormous check in front of her as a proposed signing bonus. Only the technicality of telling her son where to sign remained. She accepted the offer on his behalf, and Jimi was on his way to the United States.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Initially, the quantum computing program leader and former Navy researcher, Dr. Richard Vandergroot, celebrated the arrival of his new employee. It didn’t take long for his enthusiasm to fade as the peculiarities of Dr. Akindele’s personality caused friction within the team. The older physicist, envious of the newcomer’s brilliance, balked at the condescension with which he explained his ideas.
As irksome as his behavior was, the arrogant young physicist’s contributions proved essential to the breakthrough that eventually made Anton Kamaras the richest man in the world. Jimi’s mathematics demonstrated a practical path to the quantum computing system that the company’s computer and software engineers brought to life as the proprietary Hitz-It.com quantum stack.
While others celebrated Jimi’s revolutionary interpretations of quantum physics, he seemed frustrated by his own achievement, and refused to move on. Without a word, late one afternoon, he walked into Richard’s office and wiped his portable whiteboard clean before rolling it toward the door.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Did you need this?”
“Well, no. But it’s still mine. It’d be nice if you asked.”
“Can I borrow your whiteboard, please, Richard?”
“Yes, Jimi. Go ahead.”
Akindele crossed his arms and glared. He’d explained a hundred times only his mother used that name, but Richard couldn’t help himself.
“Yes, Dr. Akindele,” he said with a sigh.
A couple of hours later, after he thought everyone had gone home, Richard passed the frosted glass wall of the department’s largest conference room on his way to the elevator. The lights were still on. He poked his head in and found Dr. Akindele pondering a half-dozen appropriated whiteboards. The physicist stood frozen against the far wall, his hand to his chin.
“Everything okay?”
Akindele shook his head, his eyes locked on his equations.
“The solution isn’t right.”
“What do you mean? The engineers have confirmed everything with the prototype. It works.”
“But it’s ugly, Richard. Mathematics is meant to be a thing of symmetry and elegance.”
Richard shook his head. Math either worked, or it didn’t.
“Is that what you’re obsessing about in here?”
“I don’t expect you to understand. You’re like a man with a candle exploring a dark cave, only able to consider one tiny section at a time.”
Richard snorted. He never got used to being spoken to like he had some sort of pitiable mental impairment.
“Try me.”
“Something is wrong with how we are modeling the superposition. It feels incomplete.”
“You’re right, Doctor. I don’t get it,” said Richard, shaking his head. “Try not to go any crazier than you already are figuring it out.”
With that parting shot, Richard closed the door and left.
Superposition was well understood in the world of physics, even if the general public still struggled with the concept. Perhaps well understood was an overstatement, but at the very least, his peers accepted it without argument.
Einstein famously hated the idea of superposition—the idea something could be in two contradictory states simultaneously—dubbing it ‘too spooky’ to be real. His onetime friend, Erwin Schr?dinger, took his own contempt for the concept one step further, illustrating the implications with a gruesome thought experiment. Though easy to accept the strange theory as it applied to particles so small they’d never be seen, Schr?dinger tied it to something tangible so the strangeness could not be ignored.
He described a closed box containing a single radioactive atom with a fifty percent chance of decaying and emitting detectable radiation during its half-life. In his imaginary box, he also placed a radiation detector attached to a mechanism that would break open a container of cyanide gas with a steel hammer if the atom decayed. The final addition to the box—a living cat.
As long as the box remained closed, and the inner workings unexamined from the outside, quantum theory stated the atom had both decayed and not decayed—in two contradictory states at the same time. Of course, that meant the radiation was both undetected and detected, the cyanide both safely encapsulated and released, and the cat simultaneously alive and dead.
Only upon opening the box to examination did the superposition collapse, and a single, definitive state emerge. Understandably, both Schr?dinger and Einstein found the notion unsettling. Whatever problem Akindele had with superposition, he wouldn’t succeed in undermining it when even Einstein had failed to do so. He could have all the time he needed to make a fool of himself.
Richard broke out in a grin the following morning when a requisition for a dozen more whiteboards landed on his desk. He signed it without hesitation—and even put a rush on the delivery. If they arrived in time, his arrogant colleague could burn himself out over the weekend while the rest of the team enjoyed some well-deserved rest. They rolled past his office toward the conference room just a few hours later.
On his way to the elevator after work, Richard poked his head in to see how things were going. The room reeked of body odor. Empty cola cans and half-eaten boxes of takeout spilled over the side of the receptacle by the door, and the squeak of a dry-erase marker rose from somewhere within the maze of whiteboards. Smirking to himself, he retreated to the bank of elevators undetected.
Throughout the weekend, Richard’s thoughts turned to Akindele, toiling away with futility in the tenth-floor conference room. With the physics side of the quantum computing research winding down, maybe he’d take some time to humor the humorless asshole and see how long he could keep him going. Ideally, he could get Akindele to submit something embarrassing for peer review, opening him to wider ridicule.
He arrived at work on Monday morning to find the mess and stench even worse, imagining Akindele must have chased the cleaning staff out to rid himself of distraction. Richard chuckled to himself as he wandered the maze of whiteboards.
***
“Richard! I asked you a question.”
“What?”
He turned away from the equations and met a glare from Rebecca Steinman, the new superstar executive who’d appeared out of nowhere in an impressive ascent through the Hitz-It organizational hierarchy.
“What the hell is going on in here? And what’s that smell?”
“I—uh.”
Richard glanced at his watch. He’d been in the room for more than three hours.
“I doubt he has the capacity to explain what’s going on here,” said Dr. Akindele as he appeared in the doorway.
Looking fresh and alert, he’d evidently gone home for a shower and some sleep after his breakthrough.
“No. I get it—I think,” said Richard, shaking his head.
He’d lost track of time as bemusement transformed first into confusion and then wonder, overwhelmed by what now revealed itself on the whiteboards. He’d misunderstood Akindele’s concern with the superposition model.
“Someone want to clue me in?” asked Rebecca, raising an eyebrow.
“The cat is both alive and dead—and remains so even after observation,” replied Richard, as though staring past her at some distant object. “Superposition does not collapse.”
“Very good, Richard,” said Akindele. “You might be a physicist after all.”
Rebecca put her hands on her hips.
“What cat? What the hell is going on?”
“How were we so stupid?” asked Richard.
“Indeed,” replied Akindele. “To believe we could change the nature of reality simply by observing it is the ultimate arrogance. We have no such power. Observation only reveals the reality in which we find ourselves.”
“If you two assholes keep talking like I’m not here,” said Rebecca, “I’m going to lodge my heel about ten inches up someone’s ass.”
“Forgive us, Ms. Steinman,” said Richard, snapping out of his trance. “What was the question?”
“What is going on here?”
Richard shrugged.
“Dr. Akindele has reinvented physics. He’s reinvented the universe.”
She surveyed the room, raising an eyebrow.
“Are you sure? It smells like he and his colleagues have been playing Dungeons and Dragons in here all weekend. What did he do, exactly?”
Richard took a moment to consider how best to frame a response that didn’t require more than a superficial understanding of physics.
“You know our quantum computer uses qubits instead of bits for its calculations.”
“Of course,” she said, tapping her foot.
“The bits used by regular computers have two potential values—one or zero,” he continued. “Our qubits have a third value. Besides one or zero, they can be simultaneously one and zero. When something is in two contradictory states simultaneously, we call that superposition.”
“I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’ve heard all of this before.”
“They might not admit it, but most physicists can’t tell you exactly what it means, either.”
“So, how do we know it’s really happening?”
“Because it works,” said Richard with a shrug. “It works mathematically and experimentally.”
“I’m hopeless at math. Tell me about the experiments that prove it’s real.”
“I’m going to have to dumb it down a bit.”
Richard gulped.
“No offense,” he added.
Rebecca folded her arms across her chest and said nothing.
“We know matter behaves as both a particle and a wave at small scales. One way we’ve proven this is by firing a beam of electrons at a barrier with two tiny slits in it. The electrons demonstrate a classic wave interference pattern on a detection plate on the other side of the barrier.”
He examined Rebecca for a sign she understood. Her expression remained unchanged.
“There’s nothing strange about those results when you’re firing a steady beam of electrons at the slits. The strange part happens when you fire the electrons one at a time. They still create an interference pattern on the detector, even when there are no other electrons to interfere with.”
“Okay. So what does it mean?”
“Just like the dual nature of the third state of our qubit,” said Dr. Akindele, “it means the individual electron has gone through both slits simultaneously—in a state of superposition.”
“This isn’t anything new, mind you,” added Richard. “This electron experiment happened over a hundred years ago.”
“So why all of the excitement today?”
“Because Dr. Akindele has proven superposition isn’t a paradox. No qubits or electrons are ever in two states at once. Both states exist simultaneously in separate realities.”
Rebecca eyed Richard for a moment before turning her attention to Akindele.
“If I understand Dr. Vandergroot correctly, he’s telling me you have proven the existence of parallel universes.”
“I don’t like that term,” said Akindele, shaking his head. “It’s been turned into a vulgarity by talentless science fiction writers and Hollywood hacks.”
“But that is what you’re saying, right?”
“Essentially, yes,” said Richard. “What’s different here is how he’s shown that these alternate realities can, and do, interact with one another.”
“At a subatomic level,” added Akindele, “and only briefly.”
“I didn’t see anything in your work imposing those limitations.”
“Not explicitly—but the energy requirements for larger scales would make it impractical.”
“I guess that’s not really the point,” replied Richard.
“What is the point, then?” asked Rebecca.
“We need to publish. We owe it to the world to get this out and have it peer-reviewed.”
“We owe the world nothing,” said Rebecca, raising a finger to Richard’s face. “This stays here until we can figure out if it has any commercial value.”
“What?” demanded Richard. “You can’t suppress Dr. Akindele’s work.”
A rare defense of his colleague—one he felt warranted under the circumstances. The work was too important.
“It’s not his work. All of this,” she said, gesturing to the whiteboards, “belongs to Hitz-It.com. Read your fucking contracts.”
Rebecca pulled out her phone and made a call.
“Dianne, I need locks on the large conference room on the tenth floor.”
Richard looked at Dr. Akindele, his mouth hanging open.
“Wait. Forget that,” she added. “Cut access to the tenth floor to everyone but Dr. Akindele and me. And get security to clear it out.”