| Chapter 6 | Chapter 8 |
Part I
7 Wietse
Southeast Pacific, September 30, 2036Wietse could not believe what he was seeing in front of him. Hovering just four centimetres above his working desk was a small silvery sphere. Theory was one thing, but seeing that theory manifest right before his eyes was something quite different.
Quickly Wietse glanced around to see if there were any guards around to witness the unexpectedly eye-catching result of his experiment. While all his captors had really been interested in had been Wietse's continued work on Quantum Slicing, ever since Wietse's little trick with his night-guard's laptop a few years back, the new, more military type of guards his captors employed to guard him in his relocated lab, slash luxury prison, compared to the old crew have been way more observant and on their toes. Something that was to be expected, given the fallout caused by his attempt to expose his captors to the world and bring them to justice. There had been a moment when Wietse thought his captors were going to end his life over the laptop incident. But no! They needed him desperately enough to tolerate Wietse's mischief for the moment, despite the enormous consequences for PUPR and for the world that had come from it.
They needed Wietse to find another revolutionary Quantum Slicing algorithm. Not for public key cryptography this time, but for PRN-coded radio transmissions used by the opposing armies. Their only chance at procuring this coveted algorithm was Wietse and both Wietse and the PUPR supervisory board knew it.
Funny how the very incident that could very well have gotten Wietse killed, had created a huge problem that they now needed Wietse to stay alive for. Ultra low power spread spectrum transmissions used by the different factions that are aligned against PUPR, use long, unguessable pseudo-random sequences. Finding these sequences wouldn't be much of a problem if the signals these sequences were being applied on hadn't been so ultra-low in power, that even detecting the presence of a transmission without a synchronized receiver would be impossible. Impossible even at a few centimetres distance from the transmitting radio. The only way a receiver could ever hope to synchronize with the sender would be knowledge of the full PRN sequence that they were trying to find. Again, Wietse needed to find a quantum solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem. Wietse had been making progress on solving this problem. Slow progress. His progress had been just enough to keep his captors from growing inpatient, giving Wietse some time in which to work on his little private pet project.
In secret, Wietse has been working hard on the use of his quantum entanglement trinity for the theoretical concept of M-brane folding.
The glimmering little silvery sphere that Wietse was staring at was about two centimetres diameter. Much larger than Wietse had anticipated. And why was it silvery? Until now, M-branes had been a purely theoretical concept. No one really knew how big an M-brane would be, and apart from Wietse, no one had even contemplated the practical possibility or possible implications of folding an M-brane.
"Wow! Twenty-one millimetres in diameter, who would have thought a folded M-brane would be this huge." Wietse thought to himself.
As Wietse stared at the small sphere hovering over the right front corner of his working desk, he suddenly noticed something was off. While the sphere looked just like a sphere shaped mirror, something wasn't quite right with the reflection.
What the …?
As Wietse moved his face closer to the sphere, instead of seeing his own reflection come closer, all he saw was the reflection of his desk and the door behind him, but not of himself.
Wietse moved away from the sphere in confusion, accidentally knocking over his plastic cup of warm cocoa. Ah, damn! Ah, never mind.
Wietse moved closer to the sphere again. Where was his reflection? It was almost as if Wietse was a vampire from one of those old vampire movies. Wietse took a large magnifying glass out of his desk's drawer and started to look more closely at the sphere. Then he heard the sound of the doorknob turning. Wietse quickly placed an upside-down cardboard box over the hovering sphere in order to obscure it from sight, just in time before his guard entered the room.
"Ah, Martins, good you are here. Go and grab me some paper towels and a new cup of hot cocoa, will you? I just accidentally pushed over my cup."
"I am not your bleeding assistant, professor. I am only here to guard you. To keep you from escaping and to keep you from causing problems. I am not here to serve you, trouble making old fool!"
"Please, Martins, help me out here. You wouldn't want to be responsible for stalling my progress now, would you Martins."
As Martins threw an angry look at Wietse, he walked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind himself. Wietse quickly picked up his magnifying glass again and lifted the cardboard box.
"What?"
As Wietse saw a small puddle of a brown substance directly under the sphere, a state of confusion came over Wietse. He checked the inside of the cardboard box, but it was completely clean. Then he picked up a huge magnifying glass and looked at the sphere once more.
The bottom one-and-a-half millimetres part of the sphere that had been as silvery as the rest of the sphere now had a dark brown color. A drop of a brown liquid started forming underneath the small sphere. The drop came loose from the sphere and dropped smack in the middle of the small puddle on his desk. Wietse quickly put the cardboard box back on top of the sphere and hurried to his console to abort his experiment.
Whatever could this be? This didn't make any sense. Some kind of brown quantum-ooze leaking out of the bent M-brane? The very idea was just too ridiculous to consider, but it was straight before him.
"Nonsense Wietse, nonsense." Wietse spoke softly, shaking his head.
Wietse picked up the cardboard box again. The sphere was gone as expected, but the brown ooze was still there. Wietse picked up his magnifying glass again and he looked closer at the brown substance. At that moment Martins walked in without knocking.
"Talk about crazy scientist! Think you are going to reach a Quantum Slicing breakthrough by looking at a puddle of cocoa?"
"Cocoa?" Wietse looked at the brown puddle again. Cocoa? Could it be?
Then Wietse looked at the other side of the table. In the middle of the puddle of spilled cocoa on the left side of his desk, there was an eye-shaped section where the table was mysteriously clean. There was no cocoa at that spot, just the light-grey table surface.
Could it be?
As Martins looked at Wietse looking back and forth at the two brown puddles, he shook his head.
"I told them guys you might have lost your marbles, but now I'm completely sure."
"Please, Martins, just give me those paper towels."
Wietse took a stack of four paper towels, spread them out like a Chinese fan and quickly wiped up the larger of the two puddles. As he realized Martins was staring at him, he reluctantly took a fifth towel and cleaned up the smaller of the puddles that had been directly underneath the silvery sphere.
'Oh, my,' Wietse thought,' I need to throw these away, but I need to know. Hmm, this could be really dangerous. Do I dare?'
Wietse looked at the brown stain on the last paper towel he just used, closed his eyes and quickly but shortly inhaled in order to smell if this indeed was cocoa. If it wasn't, it could be anything and smelling it might kill him, but he had to know and took a short breath. As the smell of cocoa filled his nostrils, Wietse sighed. "It´s cocoa!"
"Well, duh!" Martins exclaimed. "What else did you expect?"
"Please give me my cocoa now Martins. I need to think."
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