Aurora Read Online Free Page B

spoons knocking flat a house of cards.
    “No one wants to hurt the ship,” Badim said. “We don’t have anybody that deranged.”
    “Maybe,” Devi says.
    Badim eyeballs Freya for Devi to see, as if Freya can’t see this, though of course she does. Devi rolls her eyes to remind Badim of this. How often Freya has seen this eye dance of theirs.
    “Well anyway, the printers are back up again,” Badim reminds her.
    “I know. It’s just that whenever quantum mechanics is involved, I get scared. There’s no one in this ship who really understands it. We can follow the diagnostics, and things get fixed, but we don’t know why. And that I don’t like.”
    “I know,” Badim says, looking at her fondly. “My Sherlock. My Galileo. Mrs. Fixit. Mrs. Knows How Everything Works.”
    She grimaces. “Mrs. Ask the Next Question, you mean. I can always ask questions. But I’d rather have the answers.”
    “The ship has the answers.”
    “Maybe. She’s pretty good, I’ll give her that. She’s the one who caught it this time, and that was not an easy catch. Although it was in part of her. But still, I’m beginning to think that the recursive induction we’ve been introducing is having an effect.”
    Badim nods. “You can see it’s stronger. And it’ll keep doing it. You’ll keep doing it.”
    “We have to hope so.”

    Sometime in the middle of the night, Freya wakes and sees a light is on in the kitchen. Dim and bluish; the light from their screen. She gets up and creeps down the hall past her parents’ room, where she can hear Badim faintly snoring. No surprise: Devi up at night.
    She is sitting at the table, talking quietly with the ship, the part of it that she sometimes calls Pauline, which is her particularinterface with the ship’s computer, where all of her personal records and files are cached, in a space no one else can access. Often it has seemed to Freya that Devi is more comfortable with Pauline than with any real person. Badim says the two of them have a lot in common: big, unknowable, all-encompassing, all-enfolding. Generous to others, selfless. Possibly a kind of folly a duh, which he explains is French for “a two-person dance of craziness.”
Folie à deux
. Not at all uncommon. Can be a good thing.
    Now Devi says to her screen, “So if the state lies in a subspace of Hilbert space, which is spanned by the degenerate eigenfunction that correspond to
a,
then the subspace
s a
has dimensionality
n a
.”
    “Yes,” the ship says. Its voice in this context is a pleasant woman’s voice, low and buzzy, said to be based on Devi’s mother’s voice, which Freya never heard; both Devi’s parents died young, long ago. But this voice is a constant presence in their apartment, even at times Freya’s invisible but all-seeing babysitter.
    “Then, after measurement of
b,
the state of the system lies in the space
a b,
which is a subspace of
s a,
and is spanned by the eigenfunction common to
a
and
b
. This subspace has dimensionality
n a b,
which is not greater than
n a
.”
    “Yes. And subsequent measurement of
c
, mutually compatible with
a
and
b
, leaves the state of the system in a space
s a b c
that is a subspace of
s a b
and whose dimensionality does not exceed that of
s a b
. And in this manner we can proceed to measure more and more mutually compatible observables. At each step the eigenstate is forced into subspaces of lesser and lesser dimensionality, until the state of the system is forced in a subspace of dimensionality
n
equals one, a space spanned by only one function. Thus we find our maximally informative space.”
    Devi sighs. “Oh Pauline,” she says after a long silence, “sometimes I get so scared.”
    “Fear is a form of alertness.”
    “But it can turn into a kind of fog. It makes it so I can’t think.”
    “That sounds bad. Sounds like too much of a good thing has become a bad thing.”
    “Yes.” Then Devi says, “Wait.” There is a silence and then she is in the hallway,