Here & There (5 page)

Less than a half hour later, Reidier is downstairs in his home office/lab in the basement. The footage is discontinuous, jarring. It is not from the Department feeds, but recorded with his computer’s webcam. Reidier obviously made this recording himself, but without any decipherable purpose or method. Instead, it’s a disconnected montage of half thoughts and disjointed moments. The overall effect suggests that he randomly, and sometimes accidentally, hit the record and pause buttons. There’s no indication of any review or editing. More of a stream of consciousness, or unconsciousness as the case may be.

The first shot is of Reidier at his desk, still in his pajama bottoms and sport coat. He faces the camera in a whispered testimonial. Reidier’s manner and tone are conspiratorial, bordering on paranoid. “It’s all about tomorrow. If I’m right, then . . .”

A quick smile curls at the corners of his lips and flattens back out. He nods to himself, then finally stops. “It solves everything. You’ll see, Kai. Then we’ll—”

He abruptly turns around and stares up the stairs. He appears to be searching for the source of a noise that either didn’t occur or didn’t get picked up by the computer’s microphone.
⁹

After almost half a minute, Reidier turns back to the camera. He leans in close to the camera and confides, “The ceiling fan is still trying to eavesdrop.” He shakes his head. “Don’t think it can hear down here. But it doesn’t matter. It still can’t read Leo’s Notebooks.”

Jump-cut to his empty chair. In the background, Reidier, wearing an eye-patch on his right eye, paces back and forth, holding, of
all things, a wok. He makes small circular motions with it as he walks. From inside the wok swishes out the tinny sound of metal on metal.

Jump-cut to a God shot (presumably Reidier holds the webcam above, pointed down) of the wok. At the center of it sits a metal marble. Reidier’s hand comes into view and spins a second metal marble around the wok’s lateral surface like a roulette ball. As it spirals down, the other marble jumps away from the first, as if pushed by an invisible force. It’s disorienting at first until you realize the two marbles are similarly charged magnets. They move in tandem together, circling the center. Every now and then Reidier reaches his hand in and nudges one. Instantly, the other moves in response.

Jump-cut to Reidier sitting with his back to the camera at a three-quarter angle. He seems completely motionless, possibly asleep. At the bottom left corner of the screen, a fluttering movement catches the eye. He holds an unframed photograph. He tilts the photo ever so slightly back and forth. Due to the angle, the dim lighting, and the general low quality of webcams, we cannot see what’s in the photograph.

After this, there’s one more jump cut to a final testimonial, although its intent is debatable, as it might have simply been an accidental recording. Reidier faces the camera, but his eyes are focused below it, on the computer screen. He shifts from right to left. His eyes similarly shift in the opposite direction. It is unclear as to what he is looking at, but his behavior suggests that he’s staring at his own live video image in a webcam window. This interpretation is further bolstered by Reidier’s parting whisper, “We are never who we were.”

That’s the last shot of the discombobulated montage. The only other recorded activity that night is Reidier walking up the stairs, shuffling down the quiet hallways between the upstairs bedrooms, and climbing into bed with Eve.

During one of my visits to the Reidier house, after the Test day, I think I found the photo Reidier was looking at that night. It was face down in the wok. The magnetic marbles were still holding each other up against the conical sides, about an inch above the center.

The photograph was taken a few years ago when they were living in Chicago. Reidier and Eve are standing in Navy Pier Park with the Great Lake behind them. It’s a sunny day. Reidier and Eve hold hands. Reidier smiles at the camera, his head tilted toward his wife. Eve is looking down at one of the boys, dangling in front of Reidier, fast asleep in a Baby Björn.

In interpreting the webcam footage, especially compared to the previous mundane Eve packing moment, one wonders about Reidier’s psychological state. Indeed this suspicion has already been explored in numerous intra-Departmental e-mails under the guise (and sometimes outright accusation) of inquiring about the connections between genius and madness.
¹⁰

The hypothesis that these two are related has existed for centuries. Historical and psychiatric research shows higher rates and intensities of psychopathological symptoms in creative individuals. Or more properly put, that individuals with creative, “outside of the box” thinking exhibit a higher incidence of symptoms associated with mental illness. Still, a trend does not signify correlation or causation with any statistical significance.

Dean Keith Simonton, PhD addresses and classifies these trends
in his May 31, 2005 article for the
Psychiatric Times
, “Are Genius and Madness Related? Contemporary Answers to an Ancient Question” (
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/cultural-psychiatry/are-genius-and-madness-related-contemporary-answers-ancient-question
). Simonton summarizes the three basic conclusions in this matter:

1. “The rate and intensity of psychopathological symptoms appear to be higher among eminent creators than in the general population . . . On average, the more eminent the creator, the higher is the expected rate and intensity of the psychopathological symptoms . . . Depression seems to be the most common symptom, along with the correlates of alcoholism and suicide.”
   
2. “The rate and intensity of symptoms varies according to the specific domain of creativity. For example, psychopathology is higher among artistic creators than among scientific creators.”
   ¹¹
   
3. “Family lines that produce the most eminent creators also tend to be characterized by a higher rate and intensity of psychopathological symptoms.”
   ¹²
   

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known for his work on flow, has spent over forty years studying creatives and their processes. What he has found common to all “geniuses” is not madness, but rather discipline. Perseverance through bout after bout of trial and error—this is what’s required of the mind of a genius. “Discipline is not a hallmark of minds in the throes of emotional distress. ‘Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect,’ writes Csikszentmihalyi, ‘most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.’”
¹³

All of this is a grant-fueled, academic way of saying that at best the link between genius and madness is inconclusive. Nevertheless, Reidier does not seem to be exhibiting any symptoms of a psychotic episode or suicidal depression. This is supported by the previously described lab footage the day of the Test. Reidier seems focused, in control, and disciplined. In spite of the “absurdity” of his behavior in his home office, he seems to behave in as normal a manner as anyone would alone, in the middle of the night, before a possibly monumental, career-making day.

These moments are not the meaningless testimonials of a lunatic. They are the private utterances of a focused, albeit anxious, man.

This is bound to unsettle some within the Department as it leaves several crucial questions unanswered.

Who is Kai?

What and where are Leo’s Notebooks?

What’s the significance of the wok and the magnets?

And why is there only one boy in the photograph?

Public interest in the Gould Island incident/accident barely took hold in the public consciousness and waned in the weeks following
The Reidier Test
. Gould Island was uninhabited and sold to the State of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantation. Cleanup of the marine-animal carcasses was completed within ten days. Human casualties were never reported by the Department. The structural survey of the nearby Newport Bridge revealed no damage. And the busy season of summer had been over for weeks.

Probably the most significant reason for
The Reidier Test’
s lack of prominence on the nation’s radar was the date: September 14, 2008. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy only a few hours later at 1:45 a.m. on September 15. The national news networks ran the story all day, cutting back from images of Lehman employees removing files and belongings from 745 Seventh Avenue to shots of the Stock Exchange as its shares tumbled over 90 percent. The country was overwrought about economic implosion and unconcerned about an actual explosion (incidental or accidental) a couple hundred miles up the Eastern seaboard.

There was a follow-up piece to Reidier’s obituary, noting the contributions he had made in the world of quantum cryptography while working for Centre Spatial Guyanis (CSG),
¹⁴
the French spaceport near Kourou in French Guiana. It mentioned how Reidier created the R00 protocol,
¹⁵
which improved the information reconciliation and privacy amplification of the previous BB84 and E91 protocols. There were no letters to the editors in response to this piece or any printings of eulogies from colleagues.

This last point brings up a unique aspect to Reidier’s work. Even with all of the corporate investment, intellectual property stakes, and
consequent gag orders within the scientific community, it has continued to maintain open communication and a collaborative spirit. Reidier’s work, however, was and remains a completely isolated and insulated pursuit. As of yet, no one in the Department has clarified whether this was solely at DARPA’s insistence or due to Reidier’s own preference. It’s difficult to assign the proper term without understanding his motivation, which could range from paranoia to competitiveness to insecurity to pathological self-reliance. Interviews with friends and colleagues suggest that Reidier was eager to discuss colleagues’ work but consistently dismissive or cryptic about his own. He did, however, have a tendency to “drop in” on friends and coworkers with seemingly random but incisive questions about their respective specialties.

Regardless of the motivation, it is clear that advanced measures and protocols were instituted in order to maintain the highest level of secrecy. All outside intellectual input and mechanical production was compartmentalized into fractured and redundant tasks, and then outsourced to a wide array of independent contractors with no classification access. I suspect that the five Deputies of the Department insisted on exceptional, top-secret status for two reasons. One, obviously, to protect the Department’s investment and maximize its strategic utility if successfully developed. And, two, there was no foreseeable benefit to sharing information: Reidier was ahead of all of his colleagues working in the field of teleportation.

While other scientists, mathematicians, and engineers were still trying to understand, create, and harness teleportation of information, Reidier was already fine tuning what we can approximate as matter transmission.

Curiously, among teleportation researchers, Reidier was solely known for his cryptographic contributions and his entertaining philosophical lectures. He published no papers or articles in the field and is rarely referenced by colleagues in their publications. Still, although
less than a few dozen people with the highest clearance may know it, Reidier was
the
teleportation expert. In 1967,
Star Trek
introduced the idea of teleportation to the masses, but, until Reidier, no one had come anywhere close to making this a reality.

Of course others were making significant contributions in the field. In 1997, while Reidier was working on his PhD, Anton Zeilinger, at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, performed the first practical demonstration of teleportation using entangled photons to “transmit” Bell polarization states.
¹⁶
In that experiment, 75 percent of the teleporting events still couldn’t be measured. To this day, no one has managed to devise a complete Bell-state analyzer. Independently, at the University of Rome, Francesco DeMartini had developed a way around this 75 percent problem by riding information shotgun on an auxiliary photon.

In 1998, Jeff Kimble managed to teleport complete light particles (not just their quantum states) at CalTech’s Norman Bridge Laboratory across a lab bench of about a meter. The year 1999 witnessed the development of the 3-qubit quantum computer
¹⁷
; 2000 saw the creation of the 7-qubit quantum computer. In 2002, a quantum key was transported across twenty-three kilometers of open air by the UK Defense Research Agency. In that same year, Indian physicists Sougato Sharma and Dipankar Home at the Bose Institute in Calcutta showed how it might be possible to entangle any kind of particle, not just photons, electrons, and atoms.

While all of this was both impressive and slightly impenetrable, it all seemed amateurish compared to what Reidier was allegedly working on. And what exactly was that? It’s been more than a little challenging to put the pieces together and arrive at a clear picture in light of the paucity of public records, the overzealous Department censorship of Reidier’s documents (even though I’m expected to
learn Reidier’s mind, I’m not privileged enough to be able to read his thoughts), and the tragic reality that everyone who had enough clearance to understand or at least see Reidier’s work was killed while attending
The Reidier Test.

I’m alone in this without a map.

Obviously, the Department has not brought me in to interpolate and analyze Reidier’s physics. I’m sure that’s been fractured apart and dispersed to thousands of scientists for segmented analysis, none of them remotely aware of how the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

In any case, it’s not the physics that’s important here. If it were, I wouldn’t know any of this. No, it’s Reidier. He’s the key. Something he did or didn’t do. Something hidden except to him.

The Reidier Test
wasn’t about physics. It was about Reidier. And Eve and Otto and Ecco. Only through them will we ever know what happened. Accident or incident. Tragedy or miracle.