Randomize

ervous?” she asked.

He set his fork down. “To be honest: yes. This all seems very dangerous. Las Vegas is . . . well . . . the people there can be very threatening.”

“It’s up to you. We can just do nothing if you want.”

“No, I want to do it.” He gestured around to the apartment in general. “This isn’t what I want for us. For you. A ridiculously expensive one-bedroom hovel in a questionable part of Oakland? People who work in Silicon Valley can’t afford to live in it. It’s absurd.”

“I have no complaints,” she said.

“You deserve more. And we are trying to have a baby. We need more room. And for that, we need more money. But still, if we get caught, we could spend a long time in jail—”

“That won’t happen,” she said.

“We haven’t really had a chance to go over how this whole thing works. Can you be certain we won’t be caught?”

“No. But in the absence of evidence, why would anyone suspect us?” She stood from the table and walked to her work area in the tiny living room. Her QuanaTech 707 hummed gently. A cursor blinked on the monitor, awaiting instructions. Two long-term storage units sat connected to the computer.

He craned his neck to watch her. “How hard is this to set up?”

“It’s trivial.” She executed a program on the console. In less than a second, it was done. “That’s it. Every qbit on my storage unit is now entangled with a qbit on the unit you’re taking to the Babylon.”

“You’re sure there’s no way they’ll know the qbits are entangled?”

“It’s physically impossible to know if a qbit is entangled.”

“And how exactly does entanglement let us cheat at keno? This quantum stuff has always confused me.”

Sumi’s parents had done their best. Her absurdly high intelligence had been clear as soon as she learned how to speak. They’d put her in the best schools for gifted children, but she still found them dull. They went deeply into debt to hire tutors just to keep up with how fast she learned.

Soon she would be able to repay them. And build the life she and Prashant wanted. The American dream.

Her parents knew they’d never find her a man as smart as she was. So they focused on “smart enough not to be left behind.” Prashant was brilliant in his own ways. It was a wonderful match.

“Quantum physics is a confusing, nonintuitive thing,” she said. “The rules that govern the universe at the small scale are nothing like what we expect. Suffice it to say that two qbits can be set up such that if you randomize one, the other will become the same value. Once you set them up like this, they are ‘entangled,’ and it doesn’t matter how long you wait before using them or how far apart and unconnected they are at the time. Once they’re entangled, they are guaranteed to be the same when randomized.”

He pointed to the storage units. “So we have two copies of some data?”

“No, don’t think of it as data. Think of these storage units as two piles of dice, but the dice are magically linked, so if you roll a die and roll its counterpart in the other pile, they are guaranteed to have the same result.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Quantum physics doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Please don’t try to think about it too much. It can be very distressing.”

“Once they’re entangled, they are guaranteed to be the same when randomized.”

He fidgeted in his chair. “Their storage unit and our storage unit are linked. So they’ll basically be talking to each other across the country. But didn’t you tell me once that quantum entanglement can’t be used for communication?”

She typed on the keyboard and ran a quick self-test. “I did, yes. And it’s true. But we’re using a loophole,” she said. “Two parties can’t communicate via quantum measurements. But they can both observe their respective results and act accordingly.”

“That seems like communication.”

“Not quite. Think of an intersection with stoplights. The stoplights are, functionally, entangled. If I see that one light is green, I know the other light is red.”

“With you so far,” he said.

“Let’s say two cars approach at cross-directions. One driver sees a red light, and the other sees green. The drivers don’t talk to each other or communicate in any way. But they each observe their own lights, which lets them know what to do and what the other driver will do. There was no communication, just an agreement in advance on what red and green lights mean.”

“Okay, so do we have an ‘agreement in advance’ with the casino on what these qbits mean?”