Authors: David Epperson
I glanced around. “Do the building inspectors know about this?”
“Partially,” she replied. “This was originally an old mine dating back to the Colonial era, From what I’ve been told, it played out before the Civil War. Over the intervening years, developers attempted a variety of schemes to make the property commercially viable, without success. The last one went broke in the 1970s.”
“How did you acquire it?”
“We cut a deal. As you would expect, the previous owners had left a mess, so we agreed to clean up the site to modern environmental standards.”
“And in return, the city agreed not to ask too many questions,” I said.
“Something like that. Of course, they had to approve our structural plans. They didn’t want responsibility for a cave-in.”
“How did you explain what you were doing?”
“Cryogenic research for the Defense Department,” she replied. “All top secret.”
“They bought that?” asked Markowitz.
“Why not? It’s perfectly plausible.”
“Why here? Why not out in the country somewhere, where you wouldn’t have to deal with inspectors at all?”
“What do they call it – hiding in plain sight? In the country, nosy neighbors would watch every delivery made to our site and compare notes. Here, we’re just another pair of MIT researchers – two out of hundreds.”
Markowitz pulled his coat tighter and shivered. “Don’t tell me you spend all day working in this cold?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Personally I prefer the beach. However, extreme cold was crucial to achieving the quantum effects that we sought.”
Bryson stepped through an opening in the bank of instruments at the center of the back wall and led us to a plexiglass enclosed chamber the size of a tennis court. Inside that chamber rested a glass cube about two meters across, and inside that sat a black box roughly the size of a household air conditioner compressor.
“This, gentlemen, is the heart of the quantum computer.”
Both of us stared forward, trying to comprehend what we were seeing. Five narrow tubes, connected to a web of multicolored wiring, pointed toward the center of the black box.
“There’s a sixth tube under the floor,” she said. “One for each face of the cube. It is a coordinated laser array, which is the final step.”
“The final step of what?” asked Markowitz.
“You’ll be pleased to know that even pointy-headed academics can conduct a cost-benefit analysis. We cool the surrounding air – this room we’re in now – using standard meat-locker technology.
“This allows us to save money when we lower the temperature of the outer chamber to minus 196 ºC using liquid nitrogen, which, as you know, is relatively inexpensive. For the cube in the center, we use liquid helium, which gets us almost where we need to be.”
“Where is that?” I asked.
“Absolute zero,” she replied.
“The lasers get you there?” asked Markowitz.
“This represents our real breakthrough. Three of our colleagues at MIT succeeded in cooling materials within a few micro-Kelvins of absolute zero using a similar process, but so far they’ve managed it only for an object the size of a coin. Our lasers are the first to accomplish the same feat with something of this magnitude.”
“When did you first achieve this success?”
“With what you see here, about four months ago,” she replied.
“You should have called us. My father would have rested easier knowing his money had not been wasted.”
“I can assure you, Mr. Markowitz, that the funds he allocated to construct the quantum computer went into our device. I will be happy to go over the accountant’s statements with you, if you’d like. They are correct to the penny.”
He considered this for a moment.
“That won’t be necessary,” he finally said. “However, I would like to know about the second half of your charge. How close are you to accomplishing that task?”
She hesitated for a brief instant before replying. “You’re referring to the quantum trading algorithm?”
Markowitz nodded. “You weren’t only to build a computer. My father also intended it to accomplish a specific purpose.”
An uncomfortable silence ensued. Finally, after a couple of minutes, I spoke in a quiet voice.
“I believe you have something to tell us.”
Bryson stared ahead for a few moments and then wheeled around and marched to the chamber’s entrance. “Let’s get out of the cold. Now that you’ve seen the device, we can discuss it in the comfort of my office.”
We went back up the elevator, hung our coats in the locker, and walked through three additional doors before we reached Juliet’s spacious but windowless office.
Its appearance was just what I had expected of a busy academic. A 36-inch computer monitor dominated half of Bryson’s desk. The remainder was covered in stacks of technical papers, as was the credenza behind her chair. A 5x7 photo of herself and Henry – scuba diving, by the look of it – rested to one side.
Whiteboards hung from two of the four walls, each covered with incomprehensible scribbles and diagrams. The only things that seemed out of place were the four Aeron chairs, though Juliet explained that she had picked them up on the cheap from a bankrupt dot.com.
Whatever the case, the elder Markowitz could rest assured that the recipients of his largesse hadn’t wasted his money on frills.
Ray walked over to the coffee pot in the corner and picked out one of the motley collection of mugs. He poured each of us a cup, and the warm liquid felt good after our time in below-zero cold.
We took our seats. After some brief chit-chat, she spun the monitor around and scrolled through a few PowerPoint slides detailing their progress over the last three years. I couldn’t help but be impressed.
Markowitz, though, hadn’t lost sight of his father’s original purpose.
“Your achievements to date are remarkable,” he said, “but what of the trading algorithm? How have you progressed with that?”
She leaned back and sighed.
“I might as well admit it,” she finally said. “We haven’t done a thing. In fact, such a construct is not possible. We’ve known all along that the entire premise is flawed.”
“But other Wall Street firms – ”
“In our view, our colleagues have either taken their backers’ money knowing their project will fail, or they have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that a complex system involving millions of widely dispersed human beings could ever be calculated with precision. The idea is preposterous on its face.”
“Even with a more powerful quantum computer?”
She pointed to the coffee cup in Markowitz’s hand. “Let’s leave the global markets alone for a moment and focus on one person, one simple decision – that is whether you would pour yourself a cup of coffee when you came into this office a few minutes ago.”
“It seems quite simple to me, either I do or I don’t.”
“That would be the random choice,” she said, “just like flipping a coin. However, if you had a large sum of money contingent on the outcome, you’d want to determine the odds with greater precision, would you not?”
“Certainly.”
“Once you started working it all out, you would find that in the real world, a calculation of even this seemingly simple option would require an almost infinite number of variables. You may not drink coffee at all, for health or religious reasons, or you may drink it for precisely those concerns.
“You may be exceptionally tired today and want more, or be so buzzed with your 18th cup that even the sight of the stuff makes you ill. You might even pick up the pot but decide from the aroma that you don’t like that particular brand. The possibilities are endless.”
“But – ”
“To achieve the required level of precision for just this one simple choice, I may need to know, for instance, that in the afternoon of the Thursday following the second full moon after the autumnal equinox in a leap year not ending in zero, you drink four cups of coffee instead of three, provided the brand is something other than Starbucks.
“I could model that, if I knew the relevant variables. But suppose I needed to work out the possibilities for ten people, or a hundred, or a thousand.”
“Faster computers could accommodate those calculations,” said Markowitz. “For instance, weather forecasting is far more accurate than it was even a decade ago.”
“For natural phenomena, perhaps; but don’t forget that with the markets, we’re dealing with people. Human beings do inexplicable things. Not only do they not always seek – how do the economists put it –
maximum utility
, but they can, and often do, act in a manner directly contrary to their own self interests, or even their own self preservation.
“Young people demonstrate this every day on those silly video web sites. As a private investigator, Mr. Culloden, surely you would concur.”
“Unfortunately that is true.”
“But you still took the money, knowing what he asked you to do was impossible,” said Markowitz.
“We did, and I’ll apologize for perhaps misleading you. That being said, under our contract, your father owns the lion’s share of patent rights to our work, which should be sufficient for him to recover his investment, and earn a decent return to boot.”
While I could see the wheels of his mind turning, Markowitz made no immediate reply.
I waited a few moments and then spoke softly. “We’d like to ask you about that return, if it’s not too much trouble.”
She stared down at the floor and did not respond.
“I believe you left something out of the account of your progress here.”
Again, she did not speak.
“A little over a billion somethings, if my math is correct.”
Finally, she glanced back up. “You mean our stock in Wal-Mart and Cisco?”
“You presented yourselves as modestly prosperous academics,” I replied, “something we checked thoroughly before Jonah Markowitz hired you and provided the funding for this venture. It turns out you were multimillionaires all along. I believe you owe us an explanation.”
She hesitated for a few moments as she turned the screen back around to its regular position.
“When you found the basis of our wealth, I assume you checked the purchase dates?”
I nodded. “That was a puzzle. You were ten. He was fifteen.”
“How did you explain that? Rich uncles? Hidden trust funds? Ed McMahon showing up at our doorstep?”
“We couldn’t find anything.”
“No, you couldn’t, could you?”
“Then how did you do it?”
She smiled. “It was actually quite straightforward. We sent our orders back in time.”
Markowitz nodded as if that were the most logical thing in the world – for the few seconds it took his mind to fully register what she had just said.
Then his jaw fell. “You did
what
?”
“We sent our purchase and sell orders back to the particular moments that would provide us with the highest possible returns, since we had the advantage of knowing how the investments would turn out.”
Markowitz considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I find this a bit hard to swallow.”
“That’s understandable, but nevertheless what I said is true.”
She turned once more to me. “Like you said, your first investigation of us was quite thorough. In your latest audits, you undoubtedly wondered how you could have overlooked something of this magnitude.”
“I’ve had my staff running in circles for days,” I replied.
“I’m sorry to have caused them so much trouble,” she answered.
“Three years ago, we had an idea but no funds to pursue it. MIT, as you know, is as open to backing new scientific concepts as any of our institutions, but we knew that we could never get anything like this through the grant review committees. Normal university channels were therefore closed to us.”
“So you went looking for suckers,” said Markowitz.
“I wouldn’t refer to your father in those terms, Mr. Markowitz. He wasn’t the only person on Wall Street to fall for that particular delusion.”
“Call me Ray.”
“OK, Ray. What happened was this: with his initial investment, we developed the technology to the point where the central processing unit was the size of a typical laptop. We found that we could use this to transmit a two dimensional object, such as a letter or a fax.”
“How did you know it worked?” I asked. “Surely you would have wanted to test it before you wired money.”
“We had some fun with Alicia up front. We’d send a seemingly urgent fax back to the previous hour, and then we’d ask why she hadn’t informed us immediately of its arrival. The poor girl became quite befuddled.”
Markowitz finally laughed. “So once you proved it up, you sent the order back for Wal-Mart?”
She nodded. “At that point, our biggest challenge was finding a bank that had stayed both solvent and in one location for the past 35 years. That took a couple of months.”