Chapter Two
“And how can you be certain that the increase in clickthroughs was due to the new marketing strategy?” Jim Donovan, the SVP of Raincheck, our cloud storage service, raised an eyebrow.
“What do you take me for, Jim?” I said, my smile jovial as my stomach muscles tightened for battle. Jim had spent a decade in the trenches at Apple back in the dark ages and seemed to think this somehow made him the inheritor of Steve Jobs’s genius mantle. “I’d never try out a strategy this innovative in a vacuum. Next slide?
“You’ll see here, we A/B-tested the new strategy against our current campaign as well as against one of our most successful campaigns from the past few years, and in both cases the increase was in the double digits.” I raised a hand, preempting the protest I knew was coming. “We used a fresh batch of users, of course, so the data should be solid. Which is why I’m recommending we implement this campaign broadly across users as soon as possible, which should lead directly to…” I tilted my head at Owen, the admin running the presentations, who dutifully advanced to the last slide in my deck, a graphic one of my direct reports had worked up showing a woman cavorting in a field of money. “Significant increases in ad revenue over the next quarter.”
Paul, the SVP of Pix—the social platform that was still our biggest product by far—chuckled appreciatively. I exhaled, relief flooding me. He and Jim might have the same three letters in front of their titles, but everyone knew that Paul had way more power.
“Great work, Laurel. Really great work.” Paul smiled warmly at me. Where Jim tried to flex his power through disdain, Paul had always relied on positive reinforcement. Which was probably how he got such a plum title in the first place. “I don’t think we need an A/B test to know that you’re already adding huge value in your new role.”
I clamped my jaw against the grin threatening to split my entire face. The room was packed with heads of department, I had to at least try to act like I belonged here.
But Ollie had been right. I’d totally nailed it. And Jim, at least, had not been anywhere near ready for this jelly.
“Okay, I’m sure we all have places to be. Owen will pull together the action items from today’s meeting and send them out with the minutes by end of day,” Paul said. “Thanks, everyone. Really excited to see what’s coming next.”
With that, everyone rose from their seats around the ovoid frosted glass conference table, gathering their laptops and seltzer cans, falling into subdued conversation with their neighbors as they made their way to the exit.
“You’re gonna have to tell me how you managed that,” a soft voice said at my left shoulder. I didn’t need to turn to know Drew would be standing there, blue eyes crinkling with a shy smile. I let my giddy grin loose—Drew might technically run half of Lightning, our experimental division, but he was my friend first.
Drew and I had started at Pixel within a few weeks of each other, me as a junior marketing and advertising associate, him as a software engineer for core products, “a glorified code monkey” in his words. Usually our paths wouldn’t have crossed, but Pixel’s multiweek orientation deliberately threw the departments together, “so we all understand the breadth and depth of our mission.”
Which was actually the specific thing that bonded us. Drew had sat next to me the entire first week of orientation, his square jaw set, straight dirty-blond hair always slightly mussed (probably from his habit of tugging the hood of his standard-issue-coder-uniform zip-up sweatshirt up and down every few minutes when he was trying hard to focus). He’d kept his wide-eyed gaze fixed on the rotating cast of speakers at the front of the lecture hall—I was still reeling that even the relatively unimportant Boston office had a lecture hall —the picture of dutiful attention. Then, that Friday, our Company Culture Czar launched into his presentation of the mission, which wasn’t just to dominate various segments of the tech space, or to make astronomical profits (both metrics we consistently met), but to build the products that will bring justice to a broken world.
Drew had laughed aloud, loud enough that the speaker stopped midsentence to scan the room. Luckily, the hall was dim enough that Drew’s deep flush was only noticeable to me, sitting directly to his right. I’d waited until the speaker was deep into a spiel about how sharing our happiest moments with strangers can turn them into friends to turn to Drew and whisper in his ear.
“Don’t like this particular flavor of Kool-Aid?”
“It’s—it’s not that,” Drew stammered, wincing with his entire lanky frame. “I mean, it’s good to have a mission, it just feels a little…”
“Messianic? Egotistical? Completely contradictory to all of the peer-reviewed studies about the negative impacts of social media on mental health?”
A warm grin spread across Drew’s face, turning his strong, handsome features sweetly boyish.
“I’m not saying I’m not psyched to work here—it’s Pixel, it’s like…the Olympics for computer scientists—but if we really wanted to save the world we should at least try, I don’t know…moderating content?”
“Or turning a single one of our trillion server farms into an actual farm .”
“Or using the infinite data we have on our users to get them to, like…go to the doctor, or find therapy, or pretty much do anything but buy more random shit.”
“Really, the possibilities are as endless as the deep, meaningful connections we can all make through the avatar of world peace that is Pix.”
Drew snorted softly, his grin pulling out a dimple.
“You’re in marketing, right? Aren’t you guys supposed to really buy into all this stuff?”
“We’re supposed to find ways to sell this stuff. Not the same.”
“Then why are you here? At Pixel, I mean.” I searched his face for judgment, but I found only genuine curiosity.
“I mean…you said it yourself, it’s kind of the Olympics for all sorts of different jobs.” I shrugged. “Honestly, I think I wanted to show my dad that the ridiculous cost of my college education wasn’t a total waste. He tried really hard to be supportive, but he’s all about stability. I could see that ulcer forming when I told him I was majoring in English.”
“Well, I’m glad I’m not the only cynic,” Drew said, flashing that same soft smile he’d given me after today’s department head meeting, one that had grown wonderfully familiar over the intervening years. “And it was Flavor Aid, by the way.”
“Sorry?”
“People say ‘drink the Kool-Aid,’ but Jim Jones’s followers drank Flavor Aid. At Jonestown. I assume that was what you were referencing?”
“Oh, yeah…right.” I blinked, a little taken aback. I’d probably heard at some point that the phrase originated with the events at Jonestown, but it had never really sunk in. It made me want to stop using the phrase at all, correctly or otherwise. “Learn something new every day, huh?”
“If you’re lucky.” And from the glimmer in his eyes, I knew he really meant it.
After that we sat together at lunch through the rest of orientation, then started coordinating our lunch breaks in the months that followed, messaging each other on the company’s chat platform multiple times a day. We almost never discussed our jobs directly, unless it was to complain or gossip—Drew’s favorite hobbyhorse was the closed-mindedness of the experimental team, where he’d quickly managed to snag a spot; mine was officemances both suspected and confirmed, which he gamely pretended to care about. Even all these years later, despite the fact that we’d been steadily working our way up our respective ladders, he was definitively my work husband.
After a stressful morning, Drew’s familiar, solid presence was especially welcome.
“How I managed what?” I raised an eyebrow at him as I gathered my things. “Sorry to break it to you, but even after half a decade here, I still have to enlist a whole pack of code monkeys to build out our A/B tests.”
“Good. If you ever really set your mind to learning how to code, I might have to worry about my job.” That goofy grin was so hard not to reciprocate.
“You really must want something out of me to spew such obvious bullshit,” I retorted. Drew was a brilliant coder, just one of the many reasons he was already running an entire experimental team. But whenever I used “the g word,” as Drew called my occasional (earned) references to his obvious genius, conversation grew stilted, and he flushed even redder than he had the day we met. Apparently no amount of objective proof could fully overcome the years of medium-town Iowa “no one likes a bragger” programming he’d been subjected to.
“You know me too well, Laurel.” He bit his lip, glancing at the door and leaning in, voice lowering. “I meant how’d you shut down Jim Donovan without even breaking a sweat? Every time he starts digging into my presentations I feel like I’m in one of those naked-in-high-school dreams.” Drew gave a self-deprecating eye roll.
“It helps that he so clearly thinks my job could be outsourced to trained chimps. Not hard to beat expectations set that low. I’m guessing the questions he has for your team are a lot more intense.”
“That makes sense,” Drew said, nodding, the furrows in his brow slowly smoothing. “Well, I’m impressed either way. In fact…” His eyes dropped to the floor. “Would you ever run through my presentation for the board with me? I don’t have to give it for another few weeks, but if I can’t sell it to them, they might reassign my team.” Drew winced at the mere thought.
“I’m always down for a chance to see what the super geniuses are working on.”
“I’m not a—”
“Nope. Not allowed to claim you’re not a genius. Condition of my help.”
Drew’s lips quirked in a shy smile.
“I mean…the project is pretty cool. Come by over lunch? It’ll help if you get to see AltR in action.”
“It’s a date,” I said with a smile. Something flickered behind Drew’s eyes, and I immediately wished I could unsay it—Drew was my friend, and he’d never dream of crossing the line, but I suspected he’d been carrying a torch for me for years now, probably since that first exchange in the lecture hall. But drawing more attention to that simple turn of phrase would just increase the already palpable awkwardness.
“See you at noon,” I added, then turned down the hall, heading for the opposite end of the building, objectively massive, unless you compared it to the main Pixel campus out in Silicon Valley.
I didn’t have to look back to know he was watching me. And most likely wanting me. Drew was incredibly talented at many, many things, but hiding what he was thinking had never been one of them.
Even though I knew I shouldn’t—especially after this morning’s discovery—I had to admit: I liked it.
I paused outside the bank of frosted glass doors, lightning shimmering across the surface in iridescent letters. The name for the experimental division where Drew worked wasn’t particularly subtle, or encouraging. Aleksei, one of Pixel’s two founders, started it for “struck by lightning” ideas, the ones that were one in a million…coincidentally also the rough odds any of the dozens of constantly rotating projects had of ever seeing the light of day. Even most Pixel employees didn’t really know what went on behind those doors. The projects that managed to achieve proof of concept eventually got spun out into new departments.
The ones that failed received unceremonious burials in the seemingly bottomless pit of Pixel money.
But any given idea could be the next frontier not just for Pixel, but for technology at large. Which was why Lightning was the only department that was completely siloed. You might stroll through a clutch of software engineers en route to the nap pods, or overhear a few tidbits about the go-to-market strategy for a new Pix feature as you passed the conference rooms, but Lightning was entirely self-contained, barricaded both intellectually—the legal team apparently saw Lightning noncompetes as their own chance to take a moon shot—and physically.
I glanced at the keypad outside the door. Worth a shot, at least. Already reaching for my phone to shoot Drew a chat message to let me in, I swiped…and the door softly clicked open. Apparently access to Pixel’s most top-secret projects was one of the benefits of my new title. I probably should have read my new contract a little more closely instead of just skimming for compensation info, both for the potential perks and to learn just how intense the fire and fury would be if I dared to leak any of Pixel’s many closely guarded secrets.
“Hello?” I called out as I stepped inside, anxiety fluttering through me. Clearly I was allowed to be here, but the sense of crossing into some forbidden realm was practically physical.
It dissipated pretty quickly. I wasn’t sure what I had expected— everyone in cleanroom garb, moving through a space-age structure of chrome and unknowable, blinking interfaces like astronauts aboard some impossibly advanced interstellar ship, maybe? Or a straight-up Frankenstein setup, with all the computer scientists huddling around a reanimated corpse they were teaching their latest tabletop RPG obsession to?
Instead it was just…more office. In place of the Berber carpet that covered most of the rest of the building, the floors were concrete, but the swooping half-walls dividing the (currently empty) desks from one another, their surfaces covered with Funko collectibles, low-maintenance houseplants, and teetering piles of books, magazines, and snacks, were eminently familiar.
Then I saw it, tucked into a glass-walled “room” nestled in the far back corner of the larger workspace. Hanging from the two-story ceiling was a massive tangle of wires and metal, narrow tubes snaking in and out of a series of suspended gold disks, huge shiny loops of them curling at the bottom like high-tech tumbleweeds. It looked like a cross between a futuristic chandelier and a milking machine I’d seen on an elementary school field trip. My mouth dropped open a little as I took it in. In my peripheral vision, I saw Drew rise from a desk at the back of the room and approach me.
“Is that…?”
“A quantum computer?” Even his voice was grinning. “Yup. Even bigger than the one they have at the Mountain View campus.”
“How did I not know we have a quantum computer in the building?”
“It’s not exactly common knowledge outside my team.”
“So this is what you’re working on? Just casually rewriting the entire computing landscape?”
“This is what I work with . Thankfully Pixel has a whole army of physicists and hardware engineers actually making the things.”
“Okay…I’m gonna need you to tell me more about AltR, Drew.”
“Let’s set up over here.” He tilted his head toward his desk and I followed him across the empty room, glancing surreptitiously at each screen we passed. Only one hadn’t gone to sleep, but the jumble of code there was completely indecipherable.
“You… do have a team, right?”
“I do. But never underestimate the power of half-price pies day at District Four. Especially when it’s on Pixel this week.” Drew gestured at one of two chairs pulled up to his double-wide desk and I sat. Multiple screens clustered above the keyboard in front of his seat, and what looked like a gaming setup had been discarded haphazardly near mine. “Since we haven’t set anyone up on the program yet who’s not on the team, I figured it’d be less awkward if we’re not being watched. So…I deployed my department bonding budget tactically.”
“See what I mean? Clearly a genius.”
“We’ll see if you still think that after you see the program.”
I leaned back in the chair, folding my hands behind my head.
“What is the program? You called it AltR, but alter…what? You Lightning guys might as well be in a black box as far as the rest of us plebs are concerned.”
“Not alter, Alt-R,” Drew said, shaking his mouse to bring his screen to life. “It stands for Alternate Reality. And it’s funny you mention a black box.” He sniffed out a wry laugh. “You’ve heard of Schrodinger’s cat, right?”
“The cat that’s somehow alive and dead at the same time?”
“Bingo. Until you open the box and the quantum superposition resolves into one state or the other.” Drew’s eyes sparked with excitement. “Though it doesn’t really resolve the superposition so much as the act of observation reveals—”
“You’re already losing me here, Drew…”
“Sorry, I’ve been spending a lot of time with physicists lately.” He closed his eyes, exhaling slowly. “In the simplest terms…the cat being both alive and dead, at least until we observe it, is a logical result of quantum principles. And if you tease the concept out far enough, you get to the idea of a multiverse.”
“Like…parallel universes?”
“Sorta. Every time you open the box, you see that the cat is either alive or dead in your universe. But in another universe it’s the opposite.”
“Sorry…I’m still struggling. Wouldn’t that just make two universes?” Drew sniffed and I grimaced, mildly embarrassed. “English major, remember?”
“Think of it this way. Basically, every possible universe that can exist—or at least any universe that follows the laws of physics— does exist somewhere. Forget about the cat in the box, think more local. We’re in the Pixel building in Cambridge, having a normal workday. Theoretically there’s a universe that’s exactly the same in every single way except my desk is in that corner instead of this one.” He pointed to where the quantum computer loomed. “There’s one where you wore a red shirt today instead of a white one. There’s one where everything about your life was exactly the same until you wore a red shirt at the exact wrong place and time and a bull charged you in the street.”
“But everything else is the same?” I raised an eyebrow. “Just got up, dusted off, and reported to the marketing department post bull-charge in that universe?”
“No, actions still have consequences. Once the bull charges, everything that happens from that point forward changes in that universe.” He scrunched up his nose, gaze shooting up and to one side. “I mean…not literally—the idea of time being linear is just a limitation of human perception. But for the Laurel who’s living in the bull universe, it will feel that way.”
“But it won’t feel different in the red-shirt-today universe?”
“Maybe, maybe not. It’s impossible to know.” Drew’s grin was so wide his straight white teeth showed on both the top and the bottom. He looked like a kid who had just gotten his top wishlist item on Christmas morning. “It’s what we’re trying to find out. ”
“So you’re building parallel dimensions? How?”
“Not building them. More like seeing them. Or maybe just… imagining them? A big enough quantum computer can run more calculations per second than there are atoms in our entire universe. The current one, to be clear.”
“White shirt, no bull charge.”
“Right. In that universe— this universe—a big enough quantum computer could functionally imagine all the other universes, just computationally. It could run every possible scenario for every possible atom at every moment in time.” Drew licked his upper lip, eyes going distant with something like wonder. “And the even crazier thing is, let’s say just a fraction of a percent of the possible universes selected for human life on earth. Some percentage of those will also have quantum computers, and they’ll also be running that same computation, which means that briefly, those universes are almost like… touching .”