The Flicker Men Read Free Page A

that happens,” Satvik said while he poured, “it will hurt you bad.”
    Satvik was the first to ask my area of research.
    â€œI’m not sure,” I told him.
    â€œHow can you not be sure? You are here, so it must be something.”
    â€œI’m still working on it.”
    He stared at me, taking this in, and I saw his eyes change—his understanding of me shifting, like the first time I heard him speak. And just like that, I’d become something different to him.
    â€œAh,” he said. “I know who you are now; they talked about you. You are the one from Stanford.”
    â€œThat was eight years ago.”
    â€œYou wrote that famous paper on decoherence. You are the one who had the breakdown.”
    Satvik was blunt, apparently.
    â€œI wouldn’t call it a breakdown.”
    He nodded, perhaps accepting this; perhaps not. “So you still are working in quantum theory?”
    â€œI’m done with it.”
    His brow creased. “Done? But you did important work.”
    I shook my head. “After a while, quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview.”
    â€œWhat does this mean?”
    â€œThe more research I did, the less I believed.”
    â€œIn quantum mechanics?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “In the world.”

 
    3
    There are days I don’t drink at all. On those days, I pick up my father’s .357 and look in the mirror. I convince myself what it will cost me, today, if I take the first sip. It will cost me what it cost him.
    But there are also days I do drink. Those are the days I wake up sick. I walk into the bathroom and puke into the toilet, needing a drink so bad my hands are shaking. The bile comes up—a heaving, muscular convulsion as I pour myself into the porcelain basin. My stomach empties in long spasms while my skull throbs, and my legs tremble, and the need grows into a ravening monster.
    When I can stand, I look in the bathroom mirror and splash water on my face. I say nothing to myself. There is nothing I would believe.
    It is vodka on these mornings. Vodka because vodka has no smell.
    I pour it into an old coffee thermos.
    A sip to calm the shakes. A few sips to get me moving.
    It is a balancing act. Not too much, or it could be noticed. Not too little, or the shakes remain. Like a chemical reaction, I seek equilibrium. Enough to get by, to get level, as I walk through the front entrance of the lab.
    I take the stairs up to my office. If Satvik knows, he says nothing.
    *   *   *
    Satvik studied circuits. He bred them, in little ones and zeroes, in a Mather’s Field-gated Array. The array’s internal logic was malleable, and he allowed selective pressure to direct chip design. Like evolution in a box. The most efficient circuits were identified by automated program and worked as a template for subsequent iteration. Genetic algorithms manipulated the best codes for the task. “Nothing is ideal,” he said. “There’s lots of modeling.”
    I didn’t have the slightest idea how it all worked.
    Satvik was a genius who had been a farmer in India until he came to America at the age of twenty. He earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT. He’d chosen electrical engineering because he liked the math. After that, Harvard and patents and job offers. All described to me in his matter-of-fact tone, like of course it had happened that way, anybody could do it. “There is no smart,” he said. “There is only trying hard.”
    And he seemed to believe it.
    Myself, I wasn’t so sure.
    Other researchers would come by to see the field-gated arrays set up around his workstation like some self-organizing digital art. The word elegant came up again and again—highest praise from those for whom mathematics was a first language. He stood crouching over his work, concentrating for hours. And that was part of it. His ability to focus. To just sit there and do