Lost in Time(76)
The last line brought a wave of laughter and applause. As the questions began, Adeline decided that the CEO of speedio was smart and funny and probably a little overconfident and all the things she had been missing in her life. His name was Nathan Hill, and Adeline didn’t know if he was part of Daniele’s past, but she decided that he was going to be part of her future, even if it broke causality, because she couldn’t take being alone anymore.
For that reason, she sat through the Q and A, unsure what some of the questions meant.
“So,” a venture capitalist in the front row said, “I get how you speed up static assets—images, flash video, Java applets—but how are you handling dynamically generated pages? Say, an ASP.NET web form, for example. The ViewState is going to be different for potentially every visitor.”
“Yes and no,” Nathan said. “Even for a web form, the vast majority of the page is static—we can compress that. Same for the ViewState even. Have you ever seen some of the names on these .net controls? Like, what are the developers thinking? It’s like a haiku poem or something. We take a name like txtLastNameGrandParent1 and change it to c18—assuming it’s the eighteenth web control on the page. That’s like twenty bytes saved right there. We change the name back when we post the form data to the originating server for server-side processing. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you save twenty characters for every control on the page, those bytes add up, like fractions of a penny in Superman III.”
After the event, Adeline approached him at the bar.
“Hi.”
Nathan stooped to read her name tag. “Daniele Danneros. San Andreas Capital. Not familiar, but nice to meet you.”
She gripped his hand. “Likewise.” She stared into his eyes. “I’m interested.”
“Okay. Wow. Nice. What size investments does your fund typically make?”
“I’m not interested in investing.”
*
They had dinner the next night in a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant that had excellent chips and even better margaritas. About halfway through, Nathan dropped some of his bravado—but not all—and Adeline got to know the real him, the one he hid from the people at work and the venture capitalists on the phone.
For the two of them, from then on, being together was effortless. Adeline thought one of the reasons their relationship worked was that it never got serious enough to interfere with either of their true passions. For Nathan, it was his company. For Adeline, it was the future. Those two things were, sadly, the main attractions in each of their lives.
But the relationship was enough to help Adeline hang on, until the fall of 2018, when an alert popped up on her computer. It was a notification for a video she had been waiting ten years to see—a video that would start it all.
She clicked the link and sat back as it played on YouTube.
In the clip, Elliott was standing on a stage with a picture of a spiderweb behind him.
“Thirty years ago, scientists at CERN invented a web that changed the world. That web we all know today. We surf it on our phones and tablets and computers. But there’s another web waiting to be discovered, one far more important. It connects to you and me and every atom in this room. The web I’m talking about is, like the World Wide Web, unseen and extremely powerful. This web is a quantum mesh created by entanglement. And it’s going to change the world. Even more than the last web.”
*
Adeline waited two days before she sent her email.
Dear Dr. Lucas,
I saw your lecture on the quantum web at CERN. It’s fascinating. In fact, I think your theories could be applied to create a technology with incredible potential.
I’m the founder and managing partner at an early-stage venture capital fund. We’re small, but we have extensive capability—and capital to deploy.
At your earliest convenience, I’d like to discuss the possibilities.
Daniele Danneros
FIFTY-TWO
In their first phone call, Elliott was resistant to Adeline’s suggestion that his ideas on quantum entanglement could be commercialized. But Adeline was persistent.
She sent an email the following day.
Dear Dr. Lucas,
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. I know my ideas might seem far-fetched, but I assure you, we can make them a reality. You wouldn’t be expected to toil on them alone. You can pick your team. And you are certainly not expected to take any risk. That’s why firms like San Andreas exist. We know you have a comfortable teaching position and a well-respected lab at Stanford. If you decide to pursue Absolom, rest assured, there will be funding to compensate you for the risk and help you recruit the best and brightest to make this revolutionary technology a reality.
Imagine this: if we can make instantaneous transportation of parcels from one point to another, anywhere in the world, affordable and accessible, we will change human society. I assure you that it’s possible. In time.
All I ask is that you keep an open mind and call me back if you reconsider.
- Daniele
Emailing Elliott made Adeline think of Charlie. She opened a window and did a search for him. She remembered the shape of what had happened, but not the details. An article on Palo Alto Online filled in those details.
Charlie had been a passenger in the car when it was wrecked late on a Saturday night. The driver died. Charlie’s right leg was shattered in two places, and two of his vertebrae were fractured. He had been a rising senior that summer before the crash—with a full athletic scholarship to USC. The injury had instantly ended his football career. There were doubts about whether he would ever walk again unaided. The college had agreed to honor the scholarship, but Charlie never made it there.