Strike Force Read Free Page B

she could speak. Her hospital blues were all the introduction she needed. "The injury sustained to the external carotid--"
       "In English?" someone shouted.
       The young ensign's face reddened, but the room became pin-drop quiet under the weight of the Command Master Chief's scowl.
       "The injury sustained to the external carotid artery," the young ensign repeated, running a hand down the right side of her neck to demonstrate. The ensign stopped, swallowed hard. She looked nervously to the Command Master Chief. The chief prodded her on with his eyes.
       "The injury…" she began again, but apparently was unable to continue.
       As the Command Master Chief walked the ensign out of the room, Scott raised both hands to his head. Ansely had seemed okay--wounded but okay. He could hear Ansely's voice in his head, saying "Don't bother. Blood's not mine." How in the world could Cooper with a sucking chest wound be alive though still in surgery while Ansely with a gouge on his neck be dead?
       Scott couldn't help himself when he blurted out, "Edie? Is Edie okay?"
       The Command Master Chief turned on his heel. "Who?"
       "The civilian female," Scott said. "The civilian from the Sea Shepherd ."
       "The civilian female?" the ensign asked. "She was D.O.A."
       D.O.A. Dead On Arrival. Scott's world spun. He had to push back against the wall to keep from falling over.

 
     
     
    Chapter 6
    Bluffdale, Utah Evening, Previous Day
     
     
     
    A few unexpected interruptions followed by staff meetings kept Dave from his desk for hours after he applied the update to the query engine. Although the updates were live and the systems were working, he had yet to perform his final checks and his shift was nearly over.
       Using the native query language, he entered DIFF "BASE X:MEDSEA -24H" & TEST.LOG. This was a standard query to give him the difference between current live activity levels in the Med and those he'd logged earlier. The baseline results would tell him whether the query engine was working as expected.
       Distracted by thoughts of his quantum tests, he turned to his second screen and opened the summary document containing the results from his D-Wave tests. A lot of people in Big Data were envious of him and his research opportunity. Classical computers had been around for decades but quantum computers were new and exotic. Those working with the D-Wave were working to answer the exciting questions of the day. What would happen when computers operated under quantum rules? Could quantum computing really work? How would it work?
       Traditional computers worked with information in the form of bits. Each bit could only be either 1 or 0 at any given time. The same was true about any arbitrary collection of classical bits. It was the foundation of everything mankind knew about information theory and digital computing. It ensured that whenever you asked a classical computer a question, the computer proceeded in an orderly linear fashion to obtain an answer.
       But the niobium computer chips in the D-Wave relied on quantum bits or qubits. Unlike traditional bits, which were always either 1 or 0, qubits used quantum superposition, which allowed them to be 1, 0, or 1 and 0 at the same time. Because they could exist in a superimposed state, it was almost as if qubits existed in a parallel universe, for a quantum bit could simultaneously exist as two equally probable possibilities. Not only was this exceptionally strange, but it was also incredible useful for performing powerful queries and analytics.
       To be effective though, qubits needed to exhibit quantum behavior. They needed not just superstition but also entanglement, which linked the states of multiple qubits together.
       The power of entangled qubits was in their exponential capability to perform calculations. Because one qubit could exist in two states at the same time, one qubit could perform two calculations at the same time.