In 1975, Stephen Hawking showed that the principles of quantum mechanics would mean that a black hole emits a slow stream of particles and would eventually evaporate.
** QUANTUM SHORTS 2023/2024: HONORABLE MENTION
After the divorce, Jackson got a job delivering qubits. He'd been a HGV driver into his mid-twenties, which was hard for a family man. Though the family never materialised, Alice had insisted he find a “proper” job, one that didn't involve always being away, before they even said their vows.
Johnson was glad to be back behind the wheel. Glad his deliveries involved so many different roads, no chance to get bored. He covered all of South-East England, fanning out from the dockside warehouse, where quantum electronics arrived from the only qubit manufacturer in the world. Which was either in Geneva or some island nation out Australia way, he was never quite certain.
The specialised truck Jackson drove wasn’t permitted on motorways, something to do with vibrations at high speed, or decoherence, or whatever. Just one of a number of oddities, from the twin gates out of the depot, Slot A or Slot B, to a sat-nav that always offered two routes, forcing him to decide. The truck never needed refuelling, due to zero-point energy. Or so Bob, the bespectacled tech-genius who loaded the pallets, claimed.
“It’s electric?” Johnson asked, marvelling at the progress since he’d last sat in a cab.
“Something like that,” Bob replied as he downloaded the tachograph, which was more like a whizzy black box than the wax-paper Jackson was used to.
Another oddity was the poorly designed speedometer. Every time he glanced down, Johnson lost his place on the road, his position uncertain and precarious. He’d had a couple of heart-thumping close calls.
Mostly, Jackson ignored it, judging his speed by experience and from other vehicles. Perhaps that explained why the truck wasn't allowed to travel the motorways.
Johnson supposed there must be other depots, and other delivery drivers, serving the rest of the UK. He’d never met any of them. The medium-sized truck contained all the qubits a medium-sized factory needed for a year, even if most places he delivered to only wanted a single pallet.
Jackson supposed that was because the electronic components were eye-wateringly expensive, if essential for everything from the latest mobile phones to smart fridges.
He wasn’t sure why anyone needed a qubit processor in a fridge, but all Johnson had to do was deliver them, not market them.
It was well paid, and Jackson rented a small flat, walking distance from the depot. His deliveries were there and back in a day, as long as he started early. Which left him with long evenings with too much time to think. About Alice, about the shape of the rest of his life. Even about quantum physics, idle things that Bob mentioned.
It was better when Johnson was driving, focused on the road rather than those tiny components in the back of the truck, each designed to untangle the tangled, each a miniature box, containing a miniature Schrödinger’s cat. Was that why they couldn't be sent normal delivery? Some sort of spooky action, at a distance? Or was he getting superstition and superposition mixed up, yet again?
The truck was comfortable, though sometimes it felt like someone else had been driving it. Someone who ate a different brand of cereal bar, someone who stuffed Jackson’s furry dice in the glove compartment. Someone who kept a grinning photo of a young girl, no more than about seven, blu-tacked to the dash.
“Who works the night shift?” Johnson asked, but Bob frowned.
“There are no night shifts.”
Which made Jackson wonder if it was Bob, pulling a funny. But if he was taking the truck out for evening rides, at least he never messed with the seat position.
Whenever Johnson got stuck in a traffic jam, he’d think about quantum tunnelling. How, according to Bob, you could have what seemed like an unsurmountable barrier. But, as long as it only seemed unsurmountable, there was a small but finite possibility to jump from one end of the obstacle to the other, to quantum tunnel through.
“That’s not how it works,” Bob said. “Quantum effects are in the realm of the nano, determined by the size of Planck's constant. Particles can be waves, and so, technically, can a truck, but one with such a miniscule wavelength that for all intents and purposes you can and should ignore it. That, my friend, is why humans have no intuition for the quantum world. There's nothing in our daily experience that depends on it.”
Jackson waggled his smartphone, the Q-shaped hologram that all modern phones sported glinting in the early morning sun.
“Well, yes,” Bob reluctantly agreed. “But you can't see that qubit working. If you could, it wouldn't work, because you'd be observing it. Quantum interference, and why qubits are fundamental to cyber security.”
Johnson liked Bob, even if he couldn’t understand half of what he said. Maybe more than half. That’s what you got for picking Design and Technology over the sciences proper, back when GCSEs were still O' Levels.
The job would do until someone invented teleportation, by which time Jackson would be long retired. Until then, he was content to traverse the A and B roads of Southern England, delivering his precious cargo.
If only payroll would get their act together. Whoever this Jackson guy was, who shared both his date of birth and initials, and whose payslips kept getting mixed up with his, he must be as annoyed as Johnson was.
Nobody said this was going to be easy, Jackson thought, as he trudged back to his empty flat, for another microwave meal and an evening of Netflix movies.
Nobody said this was going to be easy, Johnson thought, as he drove back North through fading light, hoping to arrive before his daughter Eve’s bedtime, at the end of another long day on the qubit superhighway.