Short Story / Sci-fi
The dimmable lights were turned down to their lowest setting. The shades were drawn, the computers in sleep mode, the AI assistants muted. Bose sat upright in the room, reveling in the silence.
A sudden beep caused Bose’s steady, rhythmic breathing to fluctuate. The motionless surface of his mind rippled; and the crests of the tiny waves caught in the winds of his thought and lurched upwards. His eyelids fluttered, his fingers flexed involuntarily and, as the asymmetry of his movements increased, so did his awareness. He was slowly made aware of the stiffness in his legs, back, and shoulders, and of the omnipresent dots of indicator lights glowing reassuring green and standby yellow on output units around him.
The colossal facility thrummed with life. Unfathomably powerful electron microscopes fired wave upon wave of oscillating electrons; sensors calibrated to incomprehensible precisions honed in on minuscule changes; Petri dishes were being streaked with strains of genetically modified bacteria; and beside one of these Petri dishes, an unattended watch ticked 9:46 PM.
Bose was unwilling to wake his laptop from its slumber. He could feel its tug, could sense it cajoling him towards the power button. The air quivered with the eager vibrations of the artificial intelligences. They had been programmed to overwork, and they were desperate to return to the equations, batter at them, and wring them until they yielded results. But that had been done already, and what Bose understood, and the artificially intelligent could never, was that after the appropriate work was done, and the wheels of progress set in motion, the thing to do was wait, patient and undeterred, and that was where many minds fell apart.
The papers had been published around twenty years ago, the ones that had taken the world by surprise and sent it reeling. Quantum Biology had still been an emergent field; little known, but with immense potential. It wasn’t until the Bengali researchers published their findings that it caught media attention.
The first paper had been largely dismissed, and rightfully so. Claiming that biological systems could manipulate quantum phenomena was bold at best, and further claiming that the systems could be persuaded to perform said quantum actions repeatedly and predictably was plain ludicrous. It wasn’t until they had successfully engineered a bacterium that could tunnel electrons at a whim that the world of quantum physics was set ablaze.
Bose was first made aware of the anomaly through his department-issued smartwatch, which flashed spontaneously and pulsated with a shrill alarm. Simultaneously, his laptops were made to bypass their hibernatory restrictions and sprang instantaneously into action. Graphs and spreadsheets materialized on the screens, and the processing capabilities of his laptops were borrowed to supplement the humongous supercomputers.
The facility had been founded, as many great human projects are, amidst a buzz of skepticism. Nations and billionaires judged it far too expensive to fund, while advocates claimed that biology was the future, both for the world of quantum and of humans. Think about it, they argued, their tongues watering, if we can use proteins to tunnel electrons, we can use them to study fundamental particles or build biological quantum computers. Think about it, a quantum computer inside an orange.
Of all the graphs that danced merrily on Bose’s laptop screens, one in particular commanded his attention. The same one, in fact, that his peers were also narrowing down at. A long, merry graph, with a wavy peak near its middle, that proclaimed (or at least hinted) they were one step closer to their orange computer.
A part of the facility was devoted to trial and error, meaning the researchers had made random mutations in the bacterial DNAs in hopes of miraculously stumbling across a variant that worked. It is entirely possible that there exists some alternate reality where fate favors such educated guesses. If only that were also true for us.
After a bout of frantic searching, Bose found the director of the trial and error department seated in his office, staring transfixed at a monitor and muttering to himself. Bose opened his mouth to utter an exclamation, checked himself, straightened his belt, and leaned beside his superior.
“It’s true,” the director muttered, “it’s true. It is true.”
Bose looked at the screen and found the same graph with its wavy peak staring at him. The director pressed down on his keyboard and the graph dissolved under an icon of a spinning bacterium. It reloaded a moment later, unchanged.
“It’s true,” the director muttered.
“Director? Mr. Bose? A squeaky, hesitant voice came from behind.
“It’s true, Anna,” the director turned to face his assistant, “we did it.”
“But director-”
“Yeah, there is still peer review left, the results have yet to be replicated, but look, I repeated the readings, it’s tru-”
“Sir, you might want to look at this.”
***
One of the main ways Bose slacked off at work was by formulating alternate realities in his head. Two weeks after the incident, he was doing exactly that. He had brought himself to forgive the technician who had forgotten his watch beside the sensors and petri dishes. He was grateful that the magnetic pull of the clasp hadn’t damaged the sensors in any real way, and that was that. Technicians are, after all, only humans.
Regardless, he daydreamed now of a reality where the laws of magnetism were altered and the magnetic clasp of the watch hadn’t interfered with the sensors in the way it had.
Halfway through his rose-tinted thoughts, Bose sighed. Alter magnetism all you want, but their false positives would still remain false.
Nobody said it was going to be easy; great human endeavors never are.
His colleagues were all at their desks, chipping away at equations, waiting for computer analyses, persevering in the face of challenges, all the things that propelled the human story forward. Soon, he would have to quit procrastinating and join their efforts. Still, Bose kept his smartwatch close and charged; just in case the universe wanted to do them a miracle, for real this time.