The entire thing was mounted on rubber-wheeled casters. When Oda tried to pull it away from the wall, these made noises suggesting they hadn’t moved in a long time. “May I, sir?” Tristan offered, and then put his considerably broader back into it. The ODEC creaked and squeaked its way out into the middle of the room, leaving a trail of mouse turds, dust bunnies, and dead spiders across the floor. I was now looking at the back of it. From here it was obvious that Oda had opened up the back of the Silicon Graphics workstation and routed a number of cables into it.
A miniature Manhattan of electrical stuff covered the top. Oda pushed, and this chittered out of the way on ball-bearing drawer slides, revealing the foam-clad lid of the fiberglass tub. Oda picked this up and handed it to Tristan, who found a patch of bare stone wall to lean it against. Exposed in the middle was the lid of the inner plywood box. Oda reverentially unhooked the simple clasp holding it down. He paused a moment, smiling to himself. I wondered how long it had been since he’d last opened it.
Then he lifted the lid, hinged on the far side. A pair of little chains kept it from flopping back. I don’t know what I had been anticipating, but it was no clumsy contraption. The box itself was plywood, but it was lined on the inside with thin sheets of green plastic, scribed all over with fine copper traces that I recognized as circuit boards. In some places, little electronic components had been soldered to these, projecting out into the airspace within the box, but in others, the copper tracery itself seemed to be what mattered. The linguist in me couldn’t help fancying a connection between these fine whorls of metal and the interlaced figures in old Irish manuscripts. Neat holes had been drilled through the plywood in many places to allow wires to pass through and make connections with these circuit boards. In many cases, these coincided with the massive coils of copper wire mounted outside the box. I now began to see these as being aimed inward, like science-fiction weapons.
Aimed, that is, at the cat inside the box. For resting on the box’s floor was a flat circular pillow upholstered in red velvet that had become permeated with cat hair down to the molecular level. A tiny saucer of spun stainless steel sat next to it, a thin disk of brown residue congealed in its bottom. I needed no forensic analysis to know that it had once contained cream.
Tristan had a look on his face as if all this was exactly what he’d been expecting. I confess, it mystified me.
“Call me stupid,” I said, “but I don’t understand the connection to photography.”
“Photography?” Oda asked, puzzled. As if I had just wandered into the wrong eccentric professor’s basement.
“There’s a connection,” Tristan reassured him. “I give you my word I’ll explain it—once you have completed certain paperwork that, I regret to say, is mandatory. In the meantime, I wonder if you could explain the ODEC to us.”
Oda-sensei shrugged. “In a nutshell,” he said, now entirely immersed in the science of the moment, “here is the premise. You insert living nerve tissue. You close the lid, creating a sealed environment. You pump in the liquid helium . . .”
“Wait, wait!” Tristan protested. “This is the first you’ve mentioned cryogenics.”
“You freeze the cat?” I exclaimed, aghast.
“No, no,” Oda scolded us. “That would just be mean. See for yourself, the box itself is super-insulated! And it has its own air supply, enough to keep a cat alive for an hour.” He was directing my attention to the thick foam mounted to the outer surface of the plywood. Then he moved his hand a couple of inches outward and patted the inner surface of the enclosing fiberglass tub. “The inner box is completely surrounded by a bath of liquid helium, chilled to a few Kelvins above absolute zero.”
“Cold enough,” Tristan hazarded, “to form a Bose-Einstein condensate?”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Oda said, so perfectly deadpan that I did a double take. “Yes, we begin by isolating the subject—”
“Within a jacket of matter that all exists in the same quantum state,” Tristan said.
“You’re completing each other’s sentences. Great,” I said.
“I’ll explain later,” Tristan returned.
“Conveniently, the low temperature also brings some of the coils down to the point where they become superconductors,” Oda added, tapping a fingertip against some of the things that I had identified as big magnets. “A continuously recirculating and self-reinforcing current pattern establishes itself in these. Its state can be read continuously by analog-to-digital converters at a sampling rate of about a megahertz. Which we used to think was fast.”
“So you’re reading the cat’s mind?”
“Not so much that,” Oda said, “as looking for the signatures of nascent wave collapse events.”
Tristan stood frozen for a few moments, then shaped his hand into a blade and whooshed it past his head. Good, I thought. Have a taste of what I’m experiencing.
“I lost you?” Oda inquired.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m messing around with renormalization.”
“Oh.”
“That’s what determines what the wave function is most likely to collapse into. By messing around with it, I can alter the probabilities.”
“You can do magic,” I blurted.
“Sort of,” Oda said. Then, in a curious, polite tone, he asked, “Is that what you’re here to talk about? Magic?”
“Classified,” Tristan said, and gave me the stink-eye. Then he turned to Oda. “Under normal circumstances we can make educated guesses about what is likely to happen when the wave function collapses. You’re screwing around with that.”
Oda nodded ruefully. “But only sometimes. And I can’t account for the variations. That’s why the patent was rejected. Why DARPA didn’t renew my grant.”
“What’s the computer doing?” Tristan asked.
Oda sighed. “Not enough, unfortunately. As I said, it was a fine machine for its time. Even so—despite a lot of code optimization—it wasn’t up to the job, even when it was running flat-out.”
“So it’s of the essence. It’s not just a data logger.”
“It is very much in the control loop,” Oda said. Glancing at me, he explained: “For the ODEC to work, it has to take in sensor data, perform certain calculations that are highly non-trivial, and make decisions about how to alter the current flowing through the coils. It has to do so quickly, or else the whole project fails. And it wasn’t quick enough.”
“What are the specs on that Indigo?” Tristan asked.
Oda sighed. “I don’t even want to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re going to laugh.”
“I won’t laugh.”
“One processor; 175 megahertz; 512 megabytes of RAM.”
Tristan laughed.
“I told you,” Oda said.
Tristan stood there a moment, eyeing the contraption. “With modern computers . . . or a cluster of them . . . some GPUs cranking the numbers . . . faster clocks . . . all of your problems on that front would be solved.”
“Possibly,” said Oda with a nod. “But I had neither the funds nor the space for that, and the Howler article pretty much made me a laughingstock in the academic community, so I’ll never get funding again.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said, “especially if the theory is sound.”
“No one funds theories. They fund results,” said Oda. “The results were not reliably reproducible. Using cats was a mistake; the premise was very easy to mock among lay people.”