The Most Powerful

　

　

The neighborhood around the campus is questionable and said to be unsafe after dark. Secretaries and research assistants working after eight pm are given vouchers so that they don’t have to ride the elevated train and can go home by taxi. And, normally, after sunset, Geoffrey did not venture beyond the ivy-clad walls of the university and the security check-point with its drowsy African-American guard at its gate.

But, on this night, long after midnight, Geoffrey, disheveled and wild-eyed, nodded to the sentinel half-asleep at his post and, then, strode beyond the fortified campus and down the street toward the taverns with the beer signs in their windows and the after-hours joints and the convenience stores with their grated fronts, the check-cashing places and the pharmacies where young men were gathered at the street corner who growled and cursed at him. Soon, it would be dawn – in this time of year our nights are short – and Geoffrey could buy breakfast from a taco truck and, then, make his way home on the El crowded with worried-looking people hurrying to work.

The boulevard softened a little and Geoffrey saw small trees with sparse green leaves growing in the ruins of a burned-out building. In a corner of the sky, there was a pale streak, perhaps a harbinger of dawn and the street was empty, a desert for as far as Geoffrey could see, traffic semaphores ceaselessly signaling red, and yellow, and green to one another and the empty crossroads. The skyscrapers a half dozen miles to the north were lit haphazardly from within, cleaning crews probably still at work there, and the wind came off the lake and stole down the quiet avenues and freshened Geoffrey’s face, cooling the moist places under his eyes.

Dogs hidden from view barked in chorus. Geoffrey saw an animal trotting down the center of the empty boulevard. At first, he thought it was large cat, but the creature’s legs were long, stilt-like, and, as the animal passed, Geoffrey saw that it was panting slightly like a dog, a pennant of red tongue showing through its half-open jaw. The animal was the color of dry foliage and August underbrush. For a moment, Geoffrey thought that the beast was looking at him and he saw its eyes glitter briefly, catching something like starlight from the sky and transmitting that beam to him. The dogs concealed in the darkness howled in an ecstatic frenzy. The revelation passed. Geoffrey looked up and down the long, still street but the animal was gone. He walked another half-block to a bench marking a bus stop and sat down.

He was one of the leading computer scientists in the world and had spent the night processing data on the quantum computer that he managed. The quantum computer was like a mighty telescope or a particle accelerator: forty men and women worked on it around the clock in its underground vault so that the instrument could be used to peer into the heart of things. The machine was swathed in tubing that fed reservoirs of liquid helium cooling the matrices of superconductors. Sometimes, the liquid helium sublimed into the air and the technicians found themselves speaking to one another in high-pitched comical chipmunk voices. Conventional computers with high-resolution monitors radiated from the quantum device. The digital computers were installed in insulated cubicles installed on terraces above the helium vats and the SQUID devices in their vaults. SQUID means Superconductor Quantum Interference Device and these were plates of lead-niobium alloy separated by membranes one electron wide, sensors that captured the data output from the computer in the center of the array. The Quantum computer transmitted data in quantum waves measurable by magnetometers sensitive to one-billionth of a Tesla. Inside the so-called "black box" – it was actually a grey monolith englobed by mini-particle-accelerators– Schroedinger’s cat was both alive and dead, performing a trillion calculations per second. The "black box" processed qubits of information, the quantum equivalent of computer bits. These qubits were sub-atomic systems, impossible to imagine except through mathematical equations – theoretical probability circuits that were both 1 and 0 simultaneously, but, also, superposed so that all numbers in between those values could also be deployed in algorithms that only the machine could understand. The Quantum Computer was the most powerful calculating device in the world – indeed, in all possible worlds. Swathed in helium a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the machine manipulated super-dense information arrays of quantum-entangled cubits. Although the concept was hard to grasp, the instrument performed computations in multiple universes simultaneously. No one knew how many universes the device accessed – the number of dimensions in which data arrays were processed was thought to be a very high number, although, probably, not infinite.

As with the great optical and radio telescopes, computing time on the most powerful data processing instrument in the world was valuable. Most of the machine’s brain-power was devoted to military applications, of course, with a fraction of its computing capacity utilized to run programs relating to the economy. (Geoffrey wasn’t prepared to talk about the covert use of the device to prognosticate sports events and support wagering in Fantasy Football leagues.) Like any oracle, the machine was only as good as the questions posed to it.

For several nights, the University’s Quantum Computer had been calculating the probability of life existing elsewhere in the universe, or, indeed, in the multi-verse. A single-cell protozoa arises as the result of a billion billion outcomes, each generated, one might imagine, by the roll of a thousand-faceted dice. To produce a one-celled life form, matter has to be organized according to certain principles and this organization must proceed in accord with certain numerical sequences. Geoffrey called each outcome in this probability function a "decision" or a "decision-point," a term that he realized as unduly anthropomorphic since it assumed that someone or something was "deciding" rolls of the dice with a strategic purpose in mind. Nonetheless, Geoffrey adopted that phrase, as did his team, and they recognized that, in theory, each decision point could be calculated in terms of statistical probability. The most powerful computer in the universe could be programmed to take a "quantum walk" through these probability functions, exploring all possible outcomes, rummaging among them for those favorable to the predicted outcome, and, then, calculating the likelihood that a "decision" conducive to the evolution of life might occur. Further, in another dimension, the machine could calculate the probability that such a "decision point" would happen in the exact sequence necessary to lead to the next roll of the dice required to engender a living organism. No conventional computer could manage the data arrays necessary to attempt this calculation. But, it seemed to Geoffrey, that this was the best and highest use, perhaps, to which the quantum computer could be put and, so, for several years, he had devised algorithms to program the most powerful instrument in all worlds of worlds to envision a one-celled life-form, an amoeba, for instance, as a mathematical system and, then, reverse engineer that system through every possible permutation necessary for the creation of that system, each permutation conceived as a series of either-or equations that solved cumulatively resulted in the equation matrix representing that amoeba.

This was the work that had occupied Geoffrey, along with missile trajectories and pestilence dispersion studies and future treasury bond interest rates (as well as football and hockey prognostication), for the past 48 months. An hour before the machine had solved the equations and Geoffrey knew the answer to the probability of life evolving both on our planet and anywhere else in the multiverse.

Geoffrey put his head in his hands. He looked down at the gutter in front of the bus stop. The gutter was dry, but water from storms had run there recently, and some leaves and shredded paper were stuck together against the curb. The earth wobbled on its axis and neutrinos flooded through the planet’s molten core and, overhead, a few stars visible despite the orange-yellow glow rising over the city, trembled briefly as if quivering in the fluid of human tears. And, on cue, a drunk appeared, crossing the street on the diagonal, looking neither right nor left, but heading straight for the bench where Geoffrey sat.

Geoffrey didn’t move and continued to count and measure the fragments of leaves and paper in the gutter. The drunk stood facing him, a few yards away, and Geoffrey smelled the man’s sour stink and felt him wobbling in his own spine – the man was unsteady on his feet and this made Geoffrey feel slightly dizzy.

"That’s an unlucky bench," the drunk said.

Geoffrey looked at him. The man’s age was indeterminate. He was wearing a white tee-shirt that was torn over his left shoulder. Some stains on the tee-shirt showed charcoal-colored in the darkness, although who knows what there actual color was – maybe, there was no true color; it was just a matter of the light transfusing the scene. Geoffrey couldn’t see the man’s hair – he was wearing a baseball cap tight over his scalp. The drunk’s feet were bare in his ripped tennis shoes and Geoffrey could smell the faint reek of his dirty heel and toes through the other odors.

"That’s an unlucky bench, chief,’ the drunk said again. But he stumbled forward and sat down beside Geoffrey.

Geoffrey glanced at him sideways. The drunk had a noble, ruined profile. He seemed a mixture of all races and colors. His eyes glittered faintly like the eyes of the animal that Geoffrey had seen trotting down the street.

"Why’s it unlucky?"

"Funeral home, man," the drunk said. "It’s an ad for a mortuary."

"Oh," Geoffrey said.

The drunk fumbled in his pocket and a found a claw-shaped shard of broken glass. He set the glass piece on his knee.

"Dangerous neighborhood, you know," the drunk said.

"I didn’t notice," Geoffrey said. "I came from the university, the campus."

"You shouldn’t be out and about this late. Not in this part of town," the drunk told him.

"Is that true?" Geoffrey asked.

"Just my opinion which don’t amount to shit," the drunk said.

"No, no," Geoffrey said. "It’s worth knowing. I suppose I ought to..."

Geoffrey started to stand up. The drunk picked up the shard of glass carefully and inspected it.

"Not without an escort," the drunk said. "I could walk back with you. You done rambled a far piece from your campus. I could guard you. But, you know, it’s valuable services...and..."

"I suppose I have to pay."

"Just saying."

Geoffrey sat down. He looked up the avenue. He looked down the avenue. Perhaps, a bus would come along or a police car. But the street was empty and silent.

The drunk looked relieved. He set the glass back down on the bench between them. He said: "What brings you out into this part of the ‘hood’?"

"I was walking and thinking. Sometimes, I don’t pay much attention to my whereabouts," Geoffrey said.

"That’s a peril," the drunk said. "You gotta know where you be."

"You’re right," Geoffrey replied. "But I was, you know, lost in thought."

"Thinking about what?"

"We did a study, with the big computer at the U," Geoffrey said. "We used decision-tree analysis to calculate the probability of life evolving out of inanimate matter."

"Why?"

"We wanted to know whether there is a probability of life like us in other parts of the universe."

"Why did you want to know that?"

"Just to know. I guess we had government funding."

"Someone should boot some of that funding my way," the drunk said. "But what did you find out?"

"The probability that life could evolve from hydrogen, hydrogen atoms — "

"Why hydrogen?" the drunk asked.

"Because everything was originally made from hydrogen. That’s the stuff from which everything else emerges."

The drunk nodded.

"The probability is one chance out of 10 to the 80^th power," Geoffrey said.

"What’s that mean, boss?"

"It’s a fraction, a one sitting on top of a ten with 80 zeros."

"So what’s that mean?"

"It’s exceedingly unlikely that life could evolve from hydrogen atoms," Geoffrey told the drunk. He paused. "To give you an idea of the magnitude of ten to the 80^th power, the number correlates – it’s odd but at least on orders of magnitude – it correlates to the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe. It’s a coincidence, I suppose, but that number’s supposed to be between 4 times 10 to the 79^th power and ten to the 81^st. So imagine this, you look at every hydrogen atom in the whole universe, you look at every atom in every star and super-nova and galaxy of stars, you look and you look and you look and, finally, you find one of them, just one, and that’s life, that’s an amoeba wriggling in a drop of water."

"So you proved that we’re alive, that we exist," the drunk said.

"But there’s no one else," Geoffrey said. "There can’t be. One time in 10 to the 80^th, an amoeba evolves from hydrogen plasma. But for this to happen twice, the number is 10 to the 91^st power. That’s a hundred more universes than ours and still you only have two amoeba."

"So it can’t happen," the drunk said.

"Well, it did happen, of course, but it can’t happen again," Geoffrey said.

"All you done, my brother, is prove the existence of God," the drunk told him.

"How so?’

"You proved that we can’t be here, that we can’t be living here in this world, without that God done it."

"I don’t know about that," Geoffrey said.

"Brother, it’s as plain as the nose on your face."

"What I’ve shown, in fact, is that there’s no one else out there, no other life in all the universe, nothing but particles colliding with one another. This is what’s true. The most powerful computer in the world tells me this."

The drunk tapped his forehead. "This here is the most powerful computer in the world," he said. "You got nothing but hardware, nuts and bolts, back there at your university."

"I don’t know," Geoffrey replied.

"What’s the most powerful computer in the world tell you? I mean that computer you’re toting around in your skull?"

"It seems that there ought to be life out there somewhere. That’s how it seems."

"Your machine don’t tell you it ain’t there."

"It can’t prove a negative," Geoffrey said. "It just shows that the possibility of there being someone else out there is a vanishingly small, an infinitesimally small number."

"Well, we’re here, aren’t we?"

Geoffrey nodded.

"Anyway how do you know that something’s alive?" the drunk asked.

"We had criteria. A mathematical model," Geoffrey said.

"You can tell it’s alive ‘cause it moves," the drunk said. "It moves on its own."

"So a cloud’s alive. By that criterion, the moon’s alive when it crosses the sky. The snow’s alive when it falls out of the sky," Geoffrey replied.

"Well, who says them things ain’t alive," the drunk said.

To the east, where the streets dead-ended at the vast, cold lake, a fissure of greyish light opened beneath the orange glare cast upward by the furnaces of the steel mills.

"I gots to be going," the drunk told Geoffrey. "Do you think you could help me with some cash, a couple bucks, so I could get me a sandwich?"

Geoffrey took out his wallet and handed the drunk a twenty dollar bill.

"God bless you, boss," the drunk said. "God bless you."

He stood up a little unsteadily. "You can keep that there dagger," the drunk said. "For your personal protection."

The drunk limped down the sidewalk, moaning a little as he walked.

Geoffrey was afraid to touch the shard of broken glass. It’s razor edges were unpredictable and its geometry uncertain and he thought it might slash him. He nudged the claw-shaped piece of glass off the bench onto the sidewalk below. But, then, Geoffrey felt ashamed of himself. A child might see the glass while waiting for the bus and would be intrigued by its sharp edges and shiny surfaces. Someone might step on the glass and be cut. Geoffrey leaned over and, gingerly, picked up the scimitar of broken bottle. He wrapped it in his handkerchief and carefully slid the shard into his breast-pocket.

Suddenly, all the dogs on the block began to bay. Geoffrey looked up and saw the coyote prancing along the center of the boulevard. The animal was trotting back toward the lake, moving in a direction opposite to its previous path. As it passed, the coyote turned and grinned at him and Geoffrey saw its long red and eloquent tongue displayed between its jaws.