Anna stepped out into the barnyard to a cacophony of sounds and movement. Uncle Jack called the days leading up to the fair “controlled chaos,” and it showed. The farm had the feel of a Hollywood set or a traveling circus setting up camp before opening night. Most of the farm staff were shuttling between buildings. Shouts and playful banter in multiple languages seemed to come from all sides, woven together with the sounds of farm animals and heavy equipment. There were several new faces too, helping assemble freshly fabricated tables, exhibition booths, and displays. The lot was scented with freshly cut wood. Kevin from Kenya was leading the build, while Gladness helped guide selected livestock to open trailers. Li Wei was pouring rich black soil into a glass display that looked like a giant ant farm, and Faye the Gray was waiting patiently for a small autonomous tractor as it ferried crates of newly harvested heirloom peaches and blueberries to the back of an electric truck.
Anna made her way to the end of the barnyard, smiling at familiar faces and making sure to step out of the way of the orchestrated ebb and flow of work. She walked down the shady side of a football field-sized greenhouse at the end of the lot, grateful for the reprieve from the morning sun, and made her way to Mara’s shed.
She opened the door without knocking and was hit with a wall of cool, dry air. The room felt charged with ions, and the servers were running in the corner, filling the space with a hum.
“Hey Mara,” Anna called out. “You here?”
Mara peeked up from her desk. She was wearing goggles with large round lenses that made her eyes appear enormous. A broad smile lit up her face. In front of her was what looked like a tall stack of brass plates joined by glass tubes and wires.
“How long have you been hiding here?” Anna asked.
“Since dawn. I needed to explain my sudden departure last night to your uncle. I didn’t want him to worry.”
“Oh. That’s right. I heard you had family issues.” Anna assigned air quotes to the last part. “What’s that you’re working on?”
“Let me see. The quantum data plane, the control plane, and the control processor plane,” Mara said as she removed her goggles.
“That’s a lot of planes,” Anna said, smiling.
“Especially when you’re building by hand. SID is working on the quantum processing unit, but it’s slow going. The design isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of materials from your time.”
“Wait. You’re building a quantum computer?” Anna asked.
“It’s child’s play, and I mean that literally. We played with them as children like you play with blocks,” Mara said.
“Wow. A quantum computer. How’s it coming along?”
“I don’t know. Let’s ask,” Mara said, then looked over to the cylindrical speaker next to the computer monitor. “Hey, SID. How are we doing?”
The small green light that lined the top of the speaker began to pulse and glow. SID’s voice echoed across the room, clear and bright—and in a distinct Scottish accent.
<I’ve finished the first quantum processing unit, which will store up to one billion qubits. Sufficient for our purposes until we can refine the process. Instead of diamond, I opted to use a superconducting graphene material that can be replicated easily in this time. It’s not programmable matter, but it will do. We should finish our quantum computer by this afternoon and have it running by this evening.>
“Why is SID speaking in a Scottish accent?” Anna asked.
“Because it sounds delightful, don’t you think?” Mara laughed.
“No, seriously.”
“Okay. So now we’re being serious,” Mara said playfully. “I’ve installed a simplified version of SID on the local network and have a need to interface in some way. The speaker patches into our iCom using components and materials from this time.”
“Still. Why do you need a version of SID on the local network—or a quantum computer—when you have the real SID right here?”
Mara paused before answering.
“Because we have some big problems to address, and we need to do it fast. Big, incredibly complex problems that the computing architecture of your time can’t address,” Mara said.
“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Anna said.
Mara smiled, then stood up. “Listen. This is going to take a little bit. Are you up for a walk? I need to stretch my legs anyway.”
Anna followed Mara out past the greenhouse and down a narrow dirt path lined with tall grass and orange hawkweed plants. The trail ran along the edge of the woods, filled with a chorus of bird calls, and meandered past a decaying wooden fence overrun by brambles. Heavy dew still hung on the vegetation and collected on Anna’s pants legs as she walked. The air was humid and warm and filled with the smell of fresh soil. Mara stopped and took in a deep breath.
“Tell me. What do you see?” Mara asked as she pointed at the brambles—a tall, leafy cathedral made of interlocking blackberry bushes.
“A bush.”
“Look more closely,” Mara said.
Anna took several steps closer and felt, more than heard, a soft, almost imperceptible buzz. She paused and let her eyes focus on a single patch of small flowering plants. What looked static a moment ago was now pulsing with movement. Thousands of bees and wasps and butterflies and moths swarmed the brambles and danced from flower to flower.
“How did I not see that?” Anna asked.
“It’s easy to miss. How many species can you identify?” Mara asked.
Anna laughed.
“I don’t know. Too many to count.”
“What if I were to tell you almost every one of those species doesn’t exist in my time? The bees, butterflies, hummingbirds—even the blackberry bushes—were just historical records of species long gone, just as the dinosaurs are to you,” Mara said.
Anna heard the words, but they were an abstraction, just sounds, and she found herself incapable of internalizing what they meant.
“I thought—”
“We survived? We did. But we lost so much in the transition,” Mara said. She started walking again, with Anna walking numbly behind.
“But you showed me your world. It was beautiful,” Anna said as she jogged to catch up.
“It was a bubble we created to protect ourselves from the damage already done,” Mara said. “Have you heard of the Library of Alexandria?”
“Yeah, I think so. It was an old library that burned down, right?” Anna said.
“It didn’t burn down, at least not at once. It took centuries for it to fall into decay. But the story is the same. At one time it was supposed to have contained the sum total of human knowledge, and its destruction ushered humanity into the dark ages,” Mara said. “You are living in a similar moment, Anna. Right now. But the stakes are so much higher.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We need solutions to an array of problems. But nature has already solved most of those problems through evolution. Energy production, resource distribution, water collection, waste management. The list goes on,” Mara said. “Nature is like the Library of Alexandria, but instead of scrolls there are natural models. We just need to learn its language. Unfortunately, your time doesn’t have the tools needed to unlock that language fast enough. And in my time, well, we learned that lesson after the library had already burned down.”
“So that’s why you need a quantum computer,” Anna said.
“Yes, to better model the complexity of nature while there is still enough nature to model.”
“But still, why don’t you just use SID?” Anna asked.
Mara stopped mid-stride and turned around.
“When I decided to stay and work here on this farm, I didn’t do it just to help your uncle. My timeline, our future, is no longer a fixed path. We have a chance to help rewrite the future—maybe even prevent the great warming or minimize it if we can. But this isn’t going to be easy, Anna,” Mara said.
“I don’t know,” Anna said. “You already know the future. Let’s just fix it.”
“Understanding the outcome doesn’t always reveal the cause,” Mara said. “What if we pursue the wrong problems? In the wrong sequence? How much new science or technology can I introduce to your time? Too much too soon could destabilize society. Too little, and, well—”
“Well, what?”
“Well, there will be a lot of unnecessary suffering and loss,” Mara said. “I’ll have to strike a balance. The best path forward I can think of is to use materials from your time to build new and better tools. Tools that others can build—not just me—and adapt if necessary. That’s how we’ll scale. But we’re going to need to do lots of experiments and get lots of people involved.”