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  When Brian found out that Conwell wanted to cooperate, the first thing he did was reinstate Jill. She knew as much about Conwell as almost anyone. The next thing he did was contact the co-intel guys in Washington. They had two people they wanted to send.

  In the days leading up to the meeting, Brian had given a lot of thought to what might have prompted Conwell’s change of heart. It certainly hadn’t been anything he’d done. He had toyed with the idea of asking Janaya if she had something to do with it. She hadn’t been herself for more than a week and he could tell something was wrong. But he’d eventually dropped the idea. If it turned out that she wasn’t the cause, he’d have felt like an ass for prying into her personal life. And if she were the cause, he didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how alluring he found it.

  __________

  When Reed Hoffman walked into the room with his client, Jill almost didn’t recognize him. Dyson looked totally different without a suit on. Today he was in jeans, Timberland boots and a beige V-neck sweater. And she couldn’t stop staring at his watch. She’d never seen one quite like it. She noticed that the Pentagon guy was really confused by Dyson’s casual get up.

  Brian opened the meeting with introductions. “Mr. Conwell, Mr. Hoffman, I believe you know most of our team, but allow me to make introductions for the benefit of our guests.”

  Reed didn’t like the look of the guests, especially the one in uniform. He hadn’t anticipated any surprise attendees and he momentarily considered rescheduling.

  Brian said, “At the end of the table is Special Agent Jill Lessor from my office, next to her is Shelly Chang-Randolph and Joyce Springer from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” He turned to his left. “And over here we have Dr. Ira Mulhorn from DARPA and Colonel Tyler Walraff from the Pentagon. Colonel Walraff is the Director of the Air Force’s Directed Energy Directorate, a place where I punched the clock many moons ago. Dr. Mulhorn is,” Brian looked down at his notes, “the Deputy Director of the Defense Sciences Office at DARPA.”

  Walraff gave a grim nod and Mulhorn waved gleefully. The Odd Couple, Reed thought to himself.

  Joyce spoke up. “Let’s get started with Mr. Conwell explaining why he asked for this meeting. We’re all dying to know.”

  Reed said, “From the look of this crowd, you already know why. At any rate, that’s not material.”

  “Will your mouthpiece here do all the talking, or will we hear from you?” Walraff said, staring directly at Dyson.

  Reed got visibly upset. “I beg your pardon, sir, but—“

  “Personal reasons,” Dyson said, cutting his lawyer off.

  “I hope you’re going to be a little more open than that,” Joyce said.

  “Ask a more relevant question,” Dyson said, “and I’ll be as open as possible.”

  “Here’s one,” Walraff said. “Tell us about the polymer-protein drive.”

  “Wait,” Reed cut in again. “Before we get into that, I need to know who’s going to be preparing the 302 for this meeting.”

  Jill raised her hand.

  Reed pointed at her legal pad. “I want approval authority over its final form.” It was a highly unorthodox request.

  “Agreed,” Brian said to the shock of his colleagues. “Can we move on now?”

  Reed nodded to Dyson.

  “The PPD is a nonmagnetic storage medium which uses heat shock proteins to bind carbon nanotubes to rotoxane molecules within a polymer substrate. The molecules store data on the atomic level and the carbon tubes respond to electrical currents just like standard transistors. It’s not that deep. Anyway, the basic PPD architecture was Dr. Wei’s idea, not mine. I was just a grad student at the BCL.”

  “Who’s Dr. Wei and what’s the BCL?” Jill asked.

  “Dr. Charles Wei is professor of Biophysics at MIT and the head of its Biological Computing Lab,” Brian answered. Jill gave him a sharp look but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  “That’s right,” Dyson confirmed. “That’s where the PPD prototype was developed.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Walraff said. “We’ve seen it. It’s the same basic design as the IBM and Sony drives. We want to know why the HMC version stores exponentially more data.”

  “Because the HMC version stores data in nine dimensions and the competing designs use only two,” Dyson said.

  Walraff and Mulhorn raised their eyebrows almost at the same time.

  “How is that possible?” Walraff asked.

  “I discovered that replacing the second term of Planck’s constant with the 25th Mersenne Prime allows one to predict the electroweak characteristics of interfering particles instead of the frequency distribution of radiant energy.”

  He might as well have been talking to a room full of chipmunks.

  “I’ve never heard of that prime number,” Walraff said.

  “That’s probably because it was only recently discovered,” Dyson replied. “It’s two raised to the power of 21,701-1.”

  “Where did you get the idea to reconstitute one of the most important equations of all time?” Mulhorn asked jovially.

  Dyson looked at the bespectacled bureaucrat and said, “I had a dream about it.”

  Mulhorn giggled and said, “Just like Kekule!” But no one else seemed to get the joke. “Do tell,” he said to Dyson.

  “I had this dream where five kids were shooting marbles. The first kid had five marbles, the second kid had 7, the third kid had 3, the fourth kid had 13, and the fifth kid had 11.”

  “How do you leap from there to Planck’s Constant?” Walraff asked suspiciously.

  Dyson said, “Don’t you see? Every kid’s marbles add up to a prime number. And the kids had formed a circle, which reminded me of an oscillator. And oh yeah, the kid with eleven marbles was named Hassan and H is the letter symbol for Planck’s constant. After that it was simply a matter of mathematical elimination.”

  “In what way?” Walraff asked despite himself.

  Dyson launched into a mathematical fusillade that not even Mulhorn could follow.

  “Whoa there, Dr. Conwell,” Mulhorn interrupted. “Not everyone here has a technical background. Why don’t you try explaining it conceptually, without the math. Use analogies if you have to. Pretend you’re talking to children.”

  “Yeah,” Jill said, “retarded children.”

  Mulhorn was the first person in that room to refer to him as Dr. Conwell. It was a small show of respect that nonetheless meant a great deal to Dyson. Mulhorn knew this because he was well experienced at coddling scientists and their theories, which some scientists love more than their spouses. As one of the few permanent employees of DARPA, he found himself in meetings like this one all the time.

  Dyson said, “Maybe I should start from the beginning.”

  CHAPTER

  40

  “There are only four forces in nature,” Dyson explained. “Gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces and subnuclear forces. To one extent or another, everything is derived from—or sustained by, these forces. I’m sure that everyone here is familiar with gravity. If you listen to the radio or use a toaster, then you’re also familiar with electromagnetism. Varying levels of electromagnetism also happen to explain why the molecules in your body stay apart from the molecules in your clothes and why your body didn’t fall straight through the chair you’re sitting on. Nuclear forces are the phenomena that occur within the nucleus of an atom and subnuclear forces are the phenomena that occur within the particles that make up a nucleus. Still with me?”

  A few heads nodded, so Dyson went on. “But there are a few problems with this view of nature: To begin with, why are there four forces and not ten or a hundred? No one knows. And how do these four forces work together to result in Nature? Same answer: we’re not sure. Coming up with a theory that successfully explains all four forces is what Einstein was working on when he died.

  In the 1970s, some people started asking, ‘Hey, what if there aren’t really four separate forc
es, but just four different manifestations of the same force?’”

  “String Theory,” Mulhorn commented.

  “Right,” Dyson said. “String theory reconciled the four forces wonderfully except for one big flaw: the equations only work if the Universe has nine dimensions. Since we can only observe three dimensions—length, width and height—most people said String Theory had to be wrong.”

  “It is wrong,” Walraff said flatly. “You can’t just add fake features to the Universe just to make your equations work. That’s sloppy. And backwards.”

  “But is it?” Dyson asked rhetorically. “What if the other six dimensions really do exist, but are just too small to detect?”

  Walraff wasn’t moved. “If they can’t be detected, how do you know they exist?”

  “The same way we know creativity exists,” Dyson said. “Even though we can’t detect it, we can see evidence of its existence.”

  Mulhorn chuckled. “That’s a clever analogy, but what evidence could you possibly present for the existence of extra dimensions we can’t detect?”

  “The best kind,” Dyson said. “Cold, hard data. The PPD uses atoms in those extra dimensions to store representations of ones and zeros.” He smiled for the first time. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

  Walraff had been doing some quick calculations on his notepad. “There’s a fly in your ointment,” he said. “Even if what you’re saying is right, these extra dimensions wouldn’t help you because they would have to be smaller than a single subatomic particle to be undetectable. If the PPD uses atoms to store data, and all six of these extra dimensions put together are smaller than one atom, then you’re limited to the atoms in the PPD, which is smaller than a postage stamp. Given its size and density, it simply doesn’t have access to enough atoms to store the amount of data we know it does.”

  Dyson nodded. “What you just described is called the Hawking-Beckenstein Boundary. You’re absolutely right, if we were limited to the atoms in the PPD itself, we’d be short by trillions of atoms.”

  “But you’re not short. I’ve seen the PPD in action. The question is: where does it get all the additional atoms?”

  “It borrows them from other universes,” Dyson said nonchalantly.

  CHAPTER

  41

  “Wait a minute,” Joyce said. “I won’t pretend that I’ve followed this whole discussion, but did you just say that the HMC thingy is in another universe?”

  “No. The thingy is in this universe, but it borrows resources from certain other universes.”

  “Like Shor’s Algorithm,” Mulhorn cut in again. He was starting to sound like Dyson’s amen choir.

  “Similar,” Dyson said, “but the HMC process is more of a sorting engine like Grover’s algorithm, only it’s far more advanced. It sorts through the infinity of universes in the Multiverse until it locates those with certain characteristics, namely those with nine dimensions like this one but where the extra six are big enough to hold plenty of atoms. Then it determines the probability that those atoms actually exist and assigns a value to that probability. The inverse of that value represents a datum of information to the PPD.”

  The room was so quiet Dyson could hear air blowing out the ceiling vent.

  “But how does it search the Multiverse?” Mulhorn asked at last.

  “By evaluating the interference levels around entangled photons.”

  “What about Heisenberg Uncertainty?” Mulhorn said. “How can you evaluate a photon without changing it?”

  “It only evaluates one half of the pair. The half it doesn’t evaluate¾the half we care about¾retains its quantum properties because we never actually observe it. It works because the evaluated half will always be doing the opposite of its partner, even if its partner is on the other end of the universe, or in another universe all together. That’s why my algorithm uses inverse values.”

  “But nobody knows how quantum entanglement works,” Mulhorn said confidently.

  “And that’s still the case,” Dyson assured him. “But that doesn’t prevent us from making us of it. It’s no different than cavemen using fire.”

  “I’m kind of feeling like a caveman right now,” Brian admitted. Joyce, Shelly and Jill nodded in agreement.

  Analogies, Dyson thought. “Are there any basketball fans here?” he asked.

  “Ooh, I am,” Shelly said excitedly.

  Dyson smiled at her. “Imagine you’re at a basketball game and you see a guy dunk a basketball. Everything is normal except that after the ball goes through the hoop, you hear two balls bounce off the floor. At first you think you’re just hearing things, so you ask the player to dunk the ball again. He does it and once again you hear a second bounce, even though you only see one ball. You ask him to dunk the ball a hundred more times and a hundred more times you hear two balls bounce off the floor. At that point, just to make sure the second bouncing sound is not some sort of echo, you take the player to an echo-proof room with a hoop and ask him to dunk the ball again. What happens?”

  “The player sues you for harassment?” Shelly quipped.

  “You still hear two balls bouncing, even though you only left him with one,” Brian said. “I follow you so far.”

  “Right,” Dyson said. “Physicists call the sound of the second bounce quantum interference. After studying the sound of this second bounce for a long time, some of them figured out that the reason you heard two bounces is because the player actually dunked two basketballs. It’s just that the second ball is too small to see.”

  “Ahh,” Joyce said. “I see now.”

  Dyson continued. “When we made the PPD, we took things a step further. We figured out how much air the second ball could hold if it were bigger. Then I wrote another algorithm to trick the PPD into acting as if that air were real.”

  “Wow,” Shelly said.

  “So how did your balls end up in another universe?” Jill asked, invoking a completely different analogy.

  “That’s a little harder to explain without a lot of math,” Dyson said.

  Colonel Walraff had been silent a long time. He suddenly asked, “And you never thought to provide this technology to your own country?”

  “Knowledge belongs to no one,” Dyson said. “All modern technology, including my algorithms, stand on the shoulders of scientific achievements contributed by people from around the world.”

  “Including terrorists?” Walraff asked.

  CHAPTER

  42

  “I think what the Colonel is trying to ask,” Mulhorn interjected, “is how did HMC end up with this technology?”

  “And how did you end up at HMC?” Brian added.

  “I meant exactly what the hell I said,” Walraff thundered.

  “HMC funded Dr. Wei’s initial research,” Dyson explained. “That funding paid for all of his grad students, including me. I was never sure, but I got the impression that Dr. Wei and Dr. Tsang were old friends.”

  “They are,” Brian said.

  “I’m not surprised. After I came up with the initial interference algorithm, Dr. Wei claimed that HMC owned the intellectual rights to all of the products of his research, including my algorithm.” He looked at Walraff. “Just for the record, I tried to convince Dr. Wei that we would’ve been better off using the algorithm to get a fat three-year grant from DARPA. But he wouldn’t budge. He insisted everything belonged to HMC.”

  “And you believed him?” Joyce asked, feeling smarter than Dyson for the first time.

  “Tell me about it,” Reed chimed in.

  “I’m not a lawyer,” Dyson said in his own defense. “Back then I didn’t even know what intellectual property was.”

  “You mean you don’t know everything?” Jill said sarcastically.

  “No, I don’t. Not by a long shot.”

  “Oh,” Jill went on. “That must be the Dyson Conwell from the other universe. Maybe we should be talking to him. It might save a lot of time.”

  “Who’s in charge here?
” Walraff asked loudly.

  “I am,” Joyce and Brian both answered at the same time. They glared at each other.

  “Well one of you better get this young lady under control,” Walraff commanded.

  “The young lady was never out of control,” Jill said acerbically.

  “That’s enough, Jill,” Brian said.

  “What is this, Family Feud?” Reed asked. “Maybe we should come back when you guys are ready to talk to us instead of each other.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Joyce said, narrowing her eyes at Jill. “I promise you there won’t be any more unnecessary interruptions. Go on, Dr. Conwell.”

  “Where was I?” he asked.

  “You were about to let Dr. Wei steal the rights to your invention,” Joyce reminded him.

  “Oh, right. I was skeptical about Dr. Wei’s motives and I was thinking of approaching DARPA on my own, so I asked Michelle to take a look at the lab’s sponsorship agreement with HMC to see what she thought about it.”

  “Michelle?” Brian asked.

  “Michelle Hillman, his ex-girlfriend,” Jill said.

  “Ms. Hillman is an associate at our firm and Dr. Conwell’s principal business counsel,” Reed said immediately.

  “That too,” Jill said.

  “Actually,” Dyson said, “Michelle was still in law school at the time. But yes, we were living together.”

  “That’s not material,” Reed said.

  “And what did Ms. Hillman think about the agreement?” Joyce asked.

  “She said it had more holes than Swiss cheese. I don’t recall every flaw she found in it, but I remember her explaining how it only covered one of the two algorithms I had developed. She told me to give her limited power-of-attorney so she could handle it for me. So that’s what I did. Michelle is a pitbull with that kind of stuff. The only instruction I gave her was to try and get them to let me pursue my own grant. Three weeks later Michelle said we had to go to New York for final negotiations. I asked her if that meant they agreed to my request, but she just laughed. I should’ve known something was up because she took me to Legal’s Seafood for dinner that night. That was big spending for us back then.”