Encounters at the Dragal Foundation

By Roy Jackaman

Within the mind of Darshan it was always the same, an interplay of strange disjoined events.  Characters oozing expediency and glorious machines exhibiting untold power.  Darshan had put forth a simple explanation, although lecturing the cleaner about it was maybe a little ambitious.  It was an overzealous boffin instructing a reluctant student.  Had Darshan mentioned it for her own delectation?

 

That was just the kick-off.  In another location Michael receives a bizarre letter, it gets him thinking if he should apply some analysis.  That, however, gave him pause.

 

Michael had no reason to panic; he was not on Ellen's hit list.  She had identified Michael in the Master plan; he was a bright young thing and had a skill Ellen wanted.  It was not for her personal amusement, but rather something more serious.  Easy to understand after a short while.

 

The ever-ebullient Ellen could undergo any contortion to win her point or satisfy her desires.  No one could construe her as all sweetness and light.  If she had a few blemishes in the marital area, so did her feckless husband, Jeremiah.

 

The game was playing out in a domestic setting.  Housekeeper, maidservant and the overpowering mistress with a penchant for pleasure.  However, there was more transpiring.  Deep below the surface, undetectable events were occurring, aided by the irrepressible forces of nature.  It all needed contemplation, remaining a puzzle even for the most gifted.

 

You would be unsure whether you could commit to memory all that had happened.  Could it also have been a figment of another's imagination?  What were the chances of that?

 

Do not worry.  Miraculously, the endgame was a quiet affair.  No explosions, nothing that peculiar.

 

(Written in UK English – Roy Jackaman.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roy Jackaman
• Release date: Oct 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393557616

Roy Jackaman

The author has earned degrees in mathematics, has a substantial career as an IT Specialist and is a member of MENSA. He has lived in many parts of the world. The objective of his writing is to tell a story from a technical idea and to present it in a readable form. He enjoys writing about complex fictional issues and abstract notions.  

Book preview

Chapter 1

Darshan was categoric , Quantum computing relates to the quantum state.  It all relies on probability.  No more mathematics than that.  Equivalent to the probability of you going to the shops today.

Darshan thought she was being generous.  Trying to help the person to whom she was talking, understand her complex role.  It was a futile attempt and somewhat incorrect, however.  Probability was far more complex than she had portrayed.  Thinking about it, she was also not sure it made sense.  The young woman standing beside Darshan remained obsequious and quiet.  Almost trembling about talking with someone as omnipotent as the lead scientist in the foundation.

Yeah, was the demure reply.

The quantum computer the Dragal Foundation was developing would incorporate artificial intelligence.  However, in that construct, there were absurdities.  It was a partnership of disparate concepts.  One could understand artificial intelligence since you could equate it with ordinary human intelligence.  The quantum computer was a deal more complicated.  Although complicated was the wrong word to use for it was more than that.  It was a technology that no one could really understand in any rational way because it used the ideas of quantum mechanics.  On this occasion, it was the reason Darshan had tried to explain it in simpler terms. Darshan missed out all the incomprehensible aspects.  Regardless, she felt no qualms about that faux pas.

Superposition, the act of subatomic particles assuming the same identity in two different places at the same time.  It’s like you being in the shops and also watching the local football match.  Erh, at the same time.

The young woman remained silent.  It was as if Darshan was showing off and stopping any chance of comprehension.

Darshan was a proficient physicist.  She knew that quantum mechanics flew in the face of classical physics.  Darshan knew that she was speaking down to the woman and she could see her bemused expression.  It could have been an opportunity for Darshan to say anything but being of pure heart she represented her work accurately.  As much as her recipient would allow.

Quantum entanglement well that’s a little different. It’s identical to saying, a well-specified entity, was simultaneously in two places, Earth and Mars, quite detached but having an unearthly connection.  That any interaction with the entity on Earth would affect the one on Mars.

Darshan could see the young woman to whom she was talking remained confused.

... or Boston and New York City.

Darshan felt she needed to change the locations to make the concept more digestible.  Regardless, her definitions were off the mark.  If she had been in one of her symposiums, they would have booed her off the stage.

Darshan could imagine what the young woman would be thinking.  A mad female scientist talking to her about something in which she had not the slightest interest.  Would she have the slightest concern about subatomic particles when she had a date with her boyfriend that evening?

The very attractive young female, the cleaner, was merely a temporary aberration.  She came in and cleaned the office.  A few minutes hence, she would vanish.  Become a disappeared memory in Darshan’s mind.  Normal thoughts would then prevail.  It was akin to the quantum particles Darshan investigated or ruminated over every day of the week.  A rapidly passing phase.  She had attracted the young cleaner’s attention for no other reason than to kill a vacant coffee break.  To educate.  Those thoughts passed quickly through her mind.  There were more important topics.  The intricacies of the scientific mind.  They passed then became unimportant.  Darshan considered the mistake in her definitions of the secret zone where she worked.  In the depths of the quantum world.  However, she had wanted to, at least, seem comprehensible.  That didn’t linger.  Darshan concerned herself more with getting her scientific point of view across rather than contemplating the minutiae of the young woman, Darlene’s, mind.  Darshan had not been talking down to the cleaner although if she knew the truth it would hardly make any difference.  Darlene was merely in between jobs and intent just in making enough money to pay the rent.  Clearly, Darlene had been humouring Darshan not vice versa.

THE MISMATCH IN THE theories of quantum physics.  The guesstimates of how it all worked shrouded in the illustrious mantle of scientific theories, versus artificial intelligence.  Therein lay the problem.  Even her most radical of friends would see the anomaly.  Darshan did not share the same opinion.  She felt there was a strange correlation.  Artificial Intelligence extended the meagre mental capabilities that man had possessed for an eternity.  Quantum physics was an extension of classical physics.  Quantum Physics, however, had wandered off on a tangent to rational thinking.  That was the fascinating part.  Darshan had a distinct feeling that artificial intelligence would do the same; to follow in the footsteps of its quantum friend.  Darshan believed in an almost divine intervention to make it so.  Something presented by a superior mind.  Darshan felt that same interference in her own mind but had no mechanism for guessing its instigation.  Likewise, she had a compulsion to believe that artificial intelligence would pursue, at least, a different way of thinking.  She could have imagined that to be her own plight.  Thoughts alien to everything she had previously.  It was Darshan’s own mental prognosis.  Would the same happen to Artificial Intelligence?  Something untoward or unexpected.  Befalling the realms of artificial intelligence, just as it did when the first bizarre theories on quantum physics had emerged.  When the eggheads had congregated and then concluded that the evidence prevented any feasible explanation.

Darshan who incessantly called herself Darshan Darshan, for some peculiar reason best known to herself.  Her odd way of handling her name had to every extent gone with the territory.  The strange world of quantum states had absorbed her and it had ‘rubbed off’.  Her oddly naïve nature, to handle some of the inherent strangeness in the subject matter with which she was dealing, was a prerequisite for sanity.  Her characteristics had morphed into becoming normal, at least according to her.  If all that had not been normal at all then everything else fell into a pattern of conformity even down to her incessant consumption of black coffee with one spoon of demerara sugar. The only other dictate was that it needed to be espresso coffee, very strong, served in a meagre portion.  She had followed that particular foible with the only piece of vanity which she had preserved; her desire to retain her slim figure.  Knowing her strange mind that obsession was unusual.  Her only other preoccupation was as an avid reader, a veritable scavenger for the written word even if it always followed the same technical route.  She could have smoked cigars but did not and have drank strong liquor but also did not.  That left her in the unenviable position, even if not by her own reckoning, of always having her head immersed in a heavy tome.  Heavy, not by weight but rather by content.  That was her to a tee, buried in one tome or another of extreme scientific worth trying to defy the rules of nature.

DANIEL REMEMBERED DARSHAN’S words as he walked within the organisation’s grounds. 

Superposition is evident in everything, but at a far deeper level than is perceivable by the visual apparatus of frail humans.

However, that idea bordered on being irrelevant given that Daniel had finally situated himself at the very macro level environment of the Dragal Foundation library.  Darshan would be in the very normal non-quantum level activity of scouring technical manuals for hidden secrets.  Daniel knew that.  The routine habits of Darshan would only have seemed abnormal to an entity that lived at the quantum level.  Humans observing test results from a colossal particle accelerator would be just as counterintuitive viewed from the quantum state.  As incomprehensible as superposition to humans.  While reading technical data from colliding particles was not on the hymn sheet of normal activity for most.  Most could imagine the possibility.  Habits and rules of the macro-world versus those at the quantum level.  An arcane rule to one, routine to the other.

If the hazy rules of quantum superposition were not clear to Daniel as he had moved from his office, they were also not fanciful.  That phenomenon still existed, but he was unaware normally and certainly uncaring at that precise time.  He had other things on his mind.  He was now in the library.  No longer in his office and another position at the same time according to the strange behaviour of a quantum entity.  In the library, he had hovered to a position overlooking his protégé, one of his most valuable assets.  Dismissing any such notion as superposition Daniel, the very macro level human, spoke to the learned form, brown with study, in front of him.

Noble.

Daniel, who always felt authorised to interrupt or approach anyone at the foundation with impunity, had once again exerted what he felt was his inalienable right.  On hearing Daniel’s word, Darshan looked up.

As Darshan broke from her reverie, she replied, Sorry.

It is noble that your work is absorbing you,  Daniel said.

Oh.

Seeing the dismayed look in Darshan’s eyes, Daniel spelt it out.

That’s a good thing, he said.

Thanks, was the nonchalant reply.

Daniel, even with all his bravado, which accompanied his potential promotion to New World Order think tank leader within the organisation quietened himself.  He observed the strict rules in the library.  It had to be silent; as quiet as a morgue.  Talk when you are ten metres from the building.

His comment was an attempt to exert his managerial prowess, something he seemed to stress since he had a sneak preview about his likely new job function.  He wasn’t trying to pinpoint any condition that should concern Darshan.  Bordering on a throwaway statement was it also an insecure statement?  Maybe a niggling suggestion that although Daniel was not as clever as Darshan in matters scientific, he could still jest with her.  That although he was not privy to unravelling the marvels of science, he could still tussle with her mind.

Since Daniel had uttered his platitude Darshan had roused herself.  She was now in the realms of the living, divorced from her deep muse.  She engaged Daniel in whispered tones.

Maybe Daniel, but it is less than a chore.  It activates the synapses in my brain.  It is interesting,  Darshan said.

Darshan’s quick mind could equally parry a perceived disparaging remark as it could dive down into the latest technical problem.

Then Darshan chastised herself for her faux pas.  She always associated synapses with the brain.  Did she not commit tautology?  From that rather unnecessary analysis, did she appear to blush or was it something else?  She was showing her propensity for identifying unnecessary detail.  That, however, was not a fault.  It was just the truth.  It was what had kept her employed in her present position.  Her work was always meticulous, her conclusions elaborate and precise.  There was no need to question herself.

The rigours of many imponderable considerations of the quantum state had immersed Darshan.  It was all in keeping with her joint project of quantum computing and artificial intelligence.  If the smallest creatures that Daniel could imagine were the microbes which often caused him dyspepsia then Darshan could drill much deeper, into the inner regions of the atom and then beyond.

WITHIN A MINUTE, DANIEL had persuaded Darshan to take a walk outside where they could talk freely.

How are things going? Daniel said.

Favourably,  Darshan replied.

The reply disappointed Daniel.  It said nothing significant.  Was Daniel unreasonable for wanting a little more meat on the bones?

Favourably.  That’s good Darshan.  But what does ‘favourably’ mean?

In a way quite frightening and in another totally expected.

Oh, Daniel replied.

"Well, it is favourable.  Given