17 In May of 2046, the Huang Group, the largest commercial real estate firm in China, announced a purchase of all of the stock of the McDonald’s Corporation for approximately $108 billion. It was the largest stock acquisition by a Chinese company of an American company to date. At the time of this writing, the McDonalds-Huang Corporation is the third most powerful corporation on Earth.
18 DFT is a computational quantum mechanical modeling method used in physics, chemistry, and materials science to investigate the electronic structure of many-body systems, in particular atoms and molecules. DFT has roots in “crazy cat guy” Schr?dinger’s equation. It’s a partial differential equation that describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time. Since replication and teleportation require capturing infinite dimensions of an object and then predicting their future state, DFT could be used to break down atoms and molecules into electronic and nuclear components to achieve something called the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The important thing is that this so-called “approximation” needs to be really fucking exact or all shit goes to hell, so the computing power necessary to calculate the future state of something is directly proportional to its complexity and dependencies. Finding an equation that integrates Moore’s law with DFT to predict complexity and distance of replicated or teleported objects was one of Sylvia’s pet projects.
19 Okay, this one is pretty complicated. There were whole books written on the creation myth of molecular patent signatures (MPSes) and the rise of commercial replication, but they are very boring books. The most popular theory is that MPSes have their origins in something called BitTorrent. BitTorrent was an old Internet protocol that was used to share large files across the net very efficiently. Suppose Jane Doe decided she wanted to use BitTorrent to share a song she made. She would take her song and make it available on her computer as a file called a torrent. The original file, as hosted on her computer, was called a seed. What BitTorrent did was split the file up into lots of pieces, such that anyone who wanted the file could use a BitTorrent client to request it from the seed host (Jane’s computer). The torrent file of the original song included a cryptographic hash of each chunk of the torrent. Every requesting client was sent one of the pieces and accumulated all the remaining pieces, over a period of time, from other people’s requesting computers through distributed communication. At any given moment, each requesting computer was downloading some parts of the file from some of the other requesting peers and uploading other parts of the file to other peers. If any requester got sent data that didn’t match the cryptographic hash, the BitTorrent client would reject the content and seek an original elsewhere. This proved to be a very robust method for integrity protection. The compute cost of generating something called a “preimage attack” that would essentially brute-force something called a “collision,” where an attacker might stumble upon the cryptographic hash of a file and be able to reproduce it, was prohibitively expensive, if not impossible. Just prior to commercial replication’s heyday, the notion of such cryptographic hashes was revisited in the context of molecular signatures to ensure the integrity of replicated items. The printer network worked similarly to the way BitTorrent worked, with the point of origin for any item being replicated essentially being a “seed,” and each printer wanting to reproduce that item being a “client.” To prevent replication of valuable or patented goods, printers could only reproduce items with MPSes that they were licensed for. However, even jailbroken printers that were hacked to circumvent MPS licensing couldn’t reproduce items like gold or Big Macs because the network would detect an unlicensed request for a privileged MPS and only offer error messages until a valid license was provided.
20 A qubit is a “quantum bit.” An important distinguishing feature between a qubit and a classical bit is that multiple qubits can exhibit quantum entanglement. Entanglement is a nonlocal property that allows a set of qubits to express higher correlation than is possible in classical systems. Particles that have interacted at some point retain a type of connection and can be entangled with each other in pairs, in a process known as correlation. Knowing the spin state of one entangled particle—up or down—allows one to know that the spin of its mate is in the opposite direction. What’s really cool is that due to the phenomenon of superposition, each measured particle has no single spin direction before being measured but is simultaneously in both a spin-up and spin-down state. The spin state of each particle being measured is decided at the time of measurement and communicated to the correlated particle, which simultaneously assumes the opposite spin direction to that of the measured particle. Einstein called this behavior “spooky action at a distance.” Quantum entanglement allows qubits that are separated by incredible distances to interact with one another instantaneously (not limited by the speed of light).
TARZAN BOY
JOEL2 WAS AWAKENED by an incoming call on his comms. If he’d been dreaming again, he couldn’t remember. He opened the stream to see Sylvia standing outside the hospital.
“Wake up, Mr. Byram. It’s time to get this vay-cay on the road.” She rotated her stream to show off a huge top-of-the-line recreational vehicle behind her.
“Wow,” said Joel2. “Hopefully we have some money left for booze.”
“It’s a honeymoon—we’re supposed to splurge. Now get dressed and I’ll be right up.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”
Joel2 closed the stream, noticing that someone had dressed him in his sleep. Gone was the classic bare-ass-on-display hospital gown, replaced by a comfortable pair of jeans and a polo. He rose from the bed, his limbs a little stiff. On the floor was a pair of brown hiking shoes and taupe wool socks tucked within them.
He was in the process of putting his shoes on when a Costa Rican nurse in lime-green scrubs walked through the glass wall. He had a pleasant face and the thickest eyebrows Joel2 had ever seen. He looked my duplicate up and down, scanning him with his comms.
“We advised your wife that a day or two more of observation would be prudent, but she was insistent that we release you,” the nurse said. “Since you’re technically healthy, we can’t force you to stay. Still, I feel obligated to inform you that we still don’t know exactly what happened to you.”