Entangled

By K. D. Rosen

I want to be anywhere but here.

 

A dead-end town. An electronic tag with a strict curfew. A bunch of friends who prefer their phones to her, and a boy who's never going to like her back. Tangle wants out. When the opportunity comes, she grabs it.

 

I can go anywhere… but I can't leave myself behind.

 

But stealing a top-secret teleportation device has consequences. Lots of people with guns would like it back. Tangle has to think fast to stay one step ahead, but it's worth it: she's living the dream, seeing amazing places. So why can't she forget about the boy she left behind?

 

Sometimes all I want is to be nowhere at all.

 

The company she stole from will do anything to retrieve what's theirs, even threaten her family and friends. Just how much is Tangle willing to sacrifice to keep this technology out of the wrong hands, and what will she do when the consequences of her choices are too much to bear?

• Language: English
• Publisher: UpLit Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223063599

Book preview

Nohopetown

Istared at my parents in horror. There's no way. I'll disown you. You have got to be joking. Seriously?

Tough, Mum said. It's what's happening.

I'll run away. I'll disappear.

My day was going from bad to worse. Funerals are never fun events, but then for them to drop this news as we were travelling back was just classic horrible timing.

In typical Mum style she wasn't being particularly sympathetic or understanding, but ignoring me as she waited for the lights to change. I was surprised she was driving, to be honest. I thought she was still banned.

Dad was quiet as usual. Moody, dark, keeping his cards close to his chest, giving away nothing. No help for me from him. He would never fight my corner. All the fight was gone out of him. He just played the downtrodden, submissive ex role now and let Mum get everything her own way. You had to pick your battles and any battles with her were pretty pointless; she'd always win.

Granny Gigi was always on my side. But Granny Gigi was gone now, and the sooner I got used to that the easier things would be.

I fished out the little notebook I usually carried around and scribbled,

Dear Diary:

I am not my parents. They say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but I am nothing like them, and they don't know me at all.

Sad though it was, my diary was quickly becoming my best friend.

We passed the sign to our town. Hopetown, with the slogan underneath, Gateway to Anywhere! I always thought it odd that a town would advertise that the best thing about it was leaving. Of course, everyone called it Nohopetown.

We passed through the dreary streets and I carried on moaning about Gavin.

Mum snapped, Your cousin has to come and that's just how it is. His dad's been put away and Aunty Maddy's still trying to get clean. Social services will always try and re-house to family members first and that's us. You'll just have to get used to it.

I started to protest again, but it wasn't worth it.

My tag was itching again. My tag always itched.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Lance: Meet down The Slag?

I texted back: I'll be there in 10

We arrived at our pokey little house and Dad got out of our car and straight into his. He nodded his head in my direction and drove away without a word. A fine example of a father figure—not.

Mum trundled inside and caught me walking in exactly the opposite direction.

Oi, where do you think you're going?

Out.

Mira Walker, don't speak to your mother like that. Where are you going?

I do have a life, you know. My choice of words caught on the pain of Granny Gigi's funeral.

Yeah, right! Well, get me some fags while you're out and remember to be back before your curfew thing. I don't want them coppers round again just cos you're not punctu- not punctua— not on time, like.

I'll be back way before then. I carried on walking, to shouted reminders about fags and the neighbour’s dog’s afternoon barking marathon.

Ah, free from stupid parents, at least for a while. I picked up my pace. I needed to run. My tag jangled heavily on my ankle as I ran, but it was worth it. Before I knew it, I was sprinting. If only you could run your way out of your own feelings. But that would be too easy.

I took a corner too wide and curved around out into the road. A car had to slam on its brakes to miss me. I carried on, hardly slowing down. More shouts trailed me as I disappeared. If only I could just disappear.

I vaulted over the gate to the park and splashed through muddy puddles and out the other end. That’s all the park we’ve got round here, just an area that they haven't built houses on yet.

I pounded down the narrow corrugated fenced path and emerged next to the slag heap where my friends were already waiting. I suppose I shouldn't have expected them to react to me bursting in on them, panting and sweaty. Why would they care? It wasn't about them.

Lance, Smiler, Crystal and Holly had all adopted their usual poses, one hand in a pocket or on a hip, the other clutching their holy grail. Their pale faces lit up with the fake blue light of their screens. They were buried. Hidden away from the actual world. Lost in the artificial world of iPhones and Samsungs and Nexians.

There was no sign of Scott.

Lance grunted in my general direction without looking up. The other three didn't even grunt.

How's it going? I asked them.

Another grunt from Lance. The others were still in the land of gadgets.

You know there's a herd of rampaging dinosaurs about to come this way?

Another grunt.

I sighed. If you can't beat them, join them. I got my phone out and sent a (only slightly rude) text to all of them.

Lance and Crystal immediately said, What? and What's your problem? The others just smirked.

My problem? I tried to contain myself; it wasn't easy. My problem? Deep breaths, keep it in, Tangle, keep it locked away.

But then I burst, and it all came flooding out.

My problem is that I've just come back from my grandmother’s funeral which you all knew about and no one even bothered to ask me about it. You hardly acknowledged my existence. If it's not a pixel on a screen, you're not interested. You know this isn’t going anywhere, don't you? We'll all just get older and more and more numb and closed off and insulated. There's a whole world out there, full of people and experiences and amazing places and things to do and see and breathe in. But instead, we just sit here next to a stupid slag heap in grey grey grey Nohopetown and suffocate. And with Granny Gigi gone and you lot becoming more and more distant, I just don't see the point anymore.

That got their attention. I was breathing hard as they stared at me.

Jeez, Tangle. What's up with you? Lance said.

De-stress your mess, girl, Crystal muttered.

I was done with them. They were already going back to the safety of their phones, unable to understand or deal with actual real emotions. I turned and stomped back the way I'd come.

I didn't have to go far before a familiar figure appeared. He stopped and took me in. Tangle, you ok?

Finally, someone who cared. Oh, Scott. I wanted to throw my arms around him and cry into his shoulder. Instead, I just snorted and tried not to make a mess.

What's wrong? He moved closer to me. Sorry, dumb question. I guess the funeral happened? I just nodded. If I spoke now I would cry and I didn't want to do that in front of Scott. Hey. He almost sounded like he wanted to hug me. But I didn't believe that anything good could happen to me at the moment. I know you thought the world of her. She sounded like an awesome granny. So, I'm sorry.

Thanks. I snuffled.

Well, do you want some good news or bad?

More bad, really? Ok, let's get that out of the way.

Holiday's older sister, Anna, took an overdose and tried to kill herself.

Wha—? I nearly crumpled to the floor. I looked back at the group I'd just ranted at, and Holly. She had never mentioned that her sister was having problems, but then again I'd never asked. Maybe it was me who was closed off and insensitive. Is Anna ok? I mean, is there any lasting damage?

I think she's alright physically. Just going to take a while, you know.

Man, that's tough. Poor Anna. Poor Holly. I hadn't been paying attention to her, or any of them, I was too wrapped up in my own world and my own problems. People's faces are like masks and behind every person's mask there’s a world of issues going on.

Once again I just wanted to fly away from this place where everything went wrong.

I dragged my hands down my face. Ok, the good news, I pleaded.

Well... the good news is, it can't get much worse than this, right?

Wrong.

Quantum

Dodo cleared her throat . She wasn't sure what mood they were in. She was never very good at gauging people's feelings. She was more of a computery person than a people person.

Well, Niels Bohr famously said, 'It is meaningless to assign reality to the universe in the absence of observation.' His idea was that in the bit in between something happening and you observing it, that thing exists in a mix of all possible states. It's called a superposition of states.

There were seven other people in the room. Two of them were big guys dressed in crisp army uniforms. There were two men in sharp suits, a lady with a severe haircut and weird glasses, and the two she knew already who worked here, Cillian Walker and Roman Abjean, her boss.

Her small audience almost collectively sighed. She didn't know what that meant. Mr Abjean smiled at her and nodded, so she just ploughed on.

"Einstein was not happy about this. He said that there must be an inherent reality. Things are fixed. Things either happen or not. There's never any uncertainty about it. He said to prove this there must be locality. Each bit of the universe only affects the bits around it. The chain of cause and effect cannot be faster than the speed of light.

Einstein was pretty obsessed with the speed of light. He thought everything hinged on that. It was like the universe's barrier, and nothing could break it.

Mr Abjean coughed slightly and Dodo took that as a sign to get a move on.

Ok, so, two particles interact briefly and influence each other so that their properties are connected, but we refrain from observing them to maintain quantum uncertainty. They’re an entangled pair. But if you do observe either one, this automatically collapses the entanglement. The weird thing is, this happens across any distance, instantaneously. Faster than the speed of light.

Dodo was expecting her audience to suck in a breath in amazement. But they just maintained their blank stares.

Her instructions from Mr Abjean had been to keep her explanation as simple as possible. She was trying her best. She tried to put it another way.

An entangled pair of particles always spin in opposite directions. Well, it's not spin as we think of it, but that’s as good a way of expressing it as we can find. Interestingly, the way you measure the spin affects the spin’s axis. If you measure it vertically, it will spin up or down. If you measure it horizontally, it will spin left or right.

Dodo smiled at her audience, expecting them to be at least a little bit fascinated by this stuff, like she was.

Nothing. Zero response.

Ok, well, the point is that the spin is always opposite between the pair of entangled particles. If you measure one and it is up, the other one will have to be down. If you measure one and it's spinning right, you can know for certain that the other is spinning left. And this is a certainty. It's observed, it's definite. But the thing is, this happens over any distance, and it is instantaneous. The measurement of the spin of one instantaneously causes the other to be its opposite. That reaction doesn't take any time. It's faster than light. And it happens over any distance. Einstein didn't like it; he called it, 'Spooky action at a distance.' Which basically means he couldn't explain it.

Dodo hid her hand as she realised she was waving it around whilst explaining stuff. They were staring at her missing finger. She was still getting used to it and it made her self-conscious.

She hurried on. We already know of the experiments done in the Canary Islands, La Palma and Tenerife, and also of Professor Chao-Yang Lu with the Mikius Satellite teleporting quantum data into space. In fact, they paved the way for many of the advances in quantum cryptography.

That was met with even deeper blank stares, but Dodo couldn't resist a little digression. Entanglement is great for encrypting information. You can send information 100% securely because now you can tell if it has been observed. The entangled pair would collapse if either has been seen. It's like a digital burglar alarm. It's so cool.

Another minute cough from Mr Abjean.

Sorry. So, normally we can only teleport photons.

More blank stares. What was wrong with these people? Didn't they know anything? Photons are what light is made of? Still, they didn't seem happy. Anyway, you get two entangled photon particles and you can take them however far apart you like in two separate locations. You add a third to one of them and you can create an identical copy of that third at the other location. Basically, you make a new original.

Dodo was still met with blankness from her audience. She couldn't tell if this was because they knew all of what she was saying already or they just didn't have a clue about what she was going on about.

So that's with one single photon particle. In theory, you can just keep adding more particles. Most people say you would need a chamber of entangled particles at each location. An object would be placed in a chamber at one location, the quantum state of each particle of that object would be extracted and then it could be reconstituted at the other location. Technically, the object doesn't travel anywhere - the information about it does. But it's almost instantaneous.

The severe lady who seemed more interested than the others spoke up. So, if I understand, which I'm sure I don't, then the - what was it? - 'quantum state' of all the particles in the object you wanted to teleport would have to be, what did you say? 'Extracted'? Do you mean that a computer would have to know and store the information about every particle in that object?

Dodo couldn't quite understand why the lady had to ask that question. It was blatantly obvious. Dodo answered anyway because she felt she had to fill the silence. Yes, that's correct.

But if you wanted to transfer a large object, with a lot of particles, that would take a lot of computing power, would it not?

Were these people straight out of primary school or something? Dodo couldn't quite believe she had to explain this stuff.

Let's say you wanted to re-locate a typically sized human of 70 kilograms—

Almost everyone in the room started coughing, looking down, or shuffling nervously. What? She'd just picked a random thing with a lot of particles. What was with all the sudden awkwardness? She shrugged and carried on.

So that would be seven times ten to the power of twenty-seven particles. That's basically seven billion billion billion particles. Dodo couldn't resist some more facts. "Two-thirds hydrogen, one-quarter oxygen and one-tenth carbon, so those three types of particles add up to ninety-nine per cent of who you are.

Basically, yes, all the information about each one of these particles would have to be extracted, stored and transferred to the entangled particles in the new location. And yes, there's a heck of a lot of computing power required. That's where the Delta12 comes in.

One of the sharp-suited men puffed himself up.

Mr Abjean said in his smooth calm voice, Why don't we take you all through to see it? This was met with approving nods and everyone followed him along the corridors. Someone mentioned how many locked doors they had to pass through, and Mr Abjean tried to brush it off, saying it was just standard security for expensive machinery such as this. Everyone who worked at Vade Internazionale knew the incredibly strict protocols for security there. Nobody got in that shouldn't be there; the stakes were way too high.

They all shuffled through into a new lab. Dodo knew this area well. The Delta12 stood in the centre of the room, a fiendishly complex web of cutting-edge raw computing power. Banks of drives and wires and housings were at stations throughout the room, all feeding into the ceiling unit from which the main component dangled down like some bizarre futuristic stalactite. The small, all-important circuit board at the very tip of the downward-pointing fang-like shape was bright, gleaming gold. The entire stalactite structure was closed off in a see-through sealed unit. The room was alive with whirring and faint clicking and, it had to be said, instilled a sense of wonder.

Mr Abjean told Dodo to carry on explaining.

So, the Delta12 is a quantum computer and works quite differently to a normal computer. A normal computer would take lifetimes to calculate figures like we were just talking about.

Dodo wrestled with a way of explaining it in simple basic terms. "Let's suppose I invited 10 people around for dinner and tried to figure out the possible seating arrangements around my table. There are actually 3.6 million possible combinations of seating. Or a game of chess is another great example. After each player moves once there are 400 possibilities. After their second moves, there are nearly 198 thousand, after their third moves, 121 million. Basically, this shows that it doesn't take much for a normal computer to really start to struggle with calculations. Normal computers use very simple mathematics that anyone can do in their heads, they just do it very quickly. Quantum computers are totally different: they use the principles found in quantum mechanics to manage big calculations. They use things like quantum tunnelling, quantum entanglement and superposition.

A normal computer uses bits for information. Using bits means that either a piece of information is a 0 or it's a 1. That's just normal binary, right? Quantum computers don't use bits, they use qubits. Qubits represent an infinite range between 0 and 1. That piece of information is in superposition until it's observed. So it's a 0 and a 1 and a 0-and-1-together and every possibility in between, all at the same time in any single moment. The computing power has just been increased to almost infinity.

The blank faces had returned. Dodo tried to simplify things again. If I have two qubits, my computing power is actually 2 to the power of 2, which would be 4. So it's already twice the speed. 3 qubits is 3 to the power of 3, 27, so it's 9 times quicker now. Just 4 qubits and it's 64 times faster. Well, Delta12 can use over 300 qubits. That's the ability to process more bits of information than there are atoms in the known universe.

The blank stares did change at that point, much to her relief. "If a normal computer was