Chapter 16

Wednesday, 09 March 2022 – 8:00 p.m. MST

Ramesh and Quinn had been interrupted by the arrival of dinner, but they were both sitting.

“What do you know about this company?” Quinn asked.

Ramesh felt that this was simply a diversion, but humored Quinn. “Not much actually. Brad was never willing to talk about work much and you were so busy. I just read the same news that everyone else read. I remember that most of the news related to how your company was poised to change the landscape of Tempe and Phoenix. You definitely did do that. I know you have networking, telecomm, computing, genomics and biotech companies.”

Quinn smiled. “Yes, yes. Local boy becomes next billionaire business man and transforms sleepy Arizona town.” He chuckled. “Tell me something, Ramesh. You’ve known me for a long time now. Am I really smart enough to have created all of this?”

Ramesh choked as he swallowed a bite of food. His face flushed as he looked up at Quinn, but struggled to find an appropriate answer to the question. Ramesh had long considered Quinn’s success to be more derived from luck than from skill, but he had never considered actually telling Quinn that.

Quinn laughed. “Come on old friend. You’ve spent the last few years writing primarily about business ethics, pointing out that the lack of truthful intercourse in business is the bane of capitalism. I’m not going to be offended, just tell me what you think.”

Ramesh cleared his throat and began, nimbly choosing his wording, “You must understand Quinn. Without knowing much about what is really going on inside a privately-held business ... It’s hard for anyone to truly know.”

Quinn interrupted, “Come on Ram. Just tell me what you really think.”

Ramesh stammered, “It has always been puzzling to me that you were able to create such an enormous business in areas that you have no real formal training. I know you are a computer programmer, but your companies are not really software companies. And so I always believed that you were either amazingly lucky or you were hiding something else ... perhaps politically.”

Quinn looked up at Ramesh. “That’s what most people think. Either I had extremely powerful friends in Washington, or that I’m simply the luckiest man alive.” Quinn stopped. “I do have powerful allies in Washington now, that’s true, but not when I started this.” Quinn sat back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. He started to speak then caught himself. He smiled in spite of himself, then looked directly at Ramesh and continued.

“Let me take you back to the beginning of the idea. It will become clear.” Quinn grabbed a bottle of chilled water and sat back comfortably in his chair. Opposite him, the view screens lit. Simultaneously, the ambient light in the room decreased. Quinn spoke. His voice was firm and clear. He was in presentation mode as Valerie called it. He was a very effective speaker when he wanted to be.

“Just after college, I was working for a small networking company called AccuTel Switches, here in Tempe. I was hopeful that the company would go public and that I’d make a lot of money and be able to do something besides programming for the rest of my life. But, something completely unexpected happened.

“One morning while I was preparing to deliver a proposal to the company board, I received a very unusual email message. At first I thought it was spam. You remember the term spam?” Quinn asked, looking at Ramesh. Ramesh nodded.

“It looked almost like a solicitation. It had a bad date. This was back in 1995 and the date of the email was 2004. It looked like a novice spammer had generated a really badly-formed message. Anyway, I looked at it again. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but the message had my signature on it. It was as if the message was actually a response to me from a message I sent in 2004.”

“Anyone could have forged your signature, though?” Ramesh asked.

“I thought about it,” Quinn responded. “And it’s true, I had sent many messages with that signature, but back then I was obsessed with Star Wars. I had created a signature using an Aurabesh font with the letters of my name.”

“Aurabesh?”

“Oh, it’s a font that was used in some of the writing in the films. It’s a real Star Wars geek kind of thing,” Quinn answered. “I couldn’t get it out of my head that this message looked so legitimate. Part of my job at the time was to find ways to increase the quality of service on our networking equipment. I spent days trying to detect and manage dropped packets. It was my life – as sad as that is.”

Quinn’s eyes lit up as he continued. He explained to Ramesh in detail how all computer network traffic is broken into discrete packets and how those packets sometimes get lost in transmission or arrive out of order.

He continued, “As I considered the message over and over, it struck me that perhaps there was a chance that the message had originated in 2004. And somehow it landed in my inbox in 1995.”

“Time traveling email?” Ramesh shook his head as he listened to Quinn.

“Sure, why not? We’re talking about electrons and photons traveling through an enormous interconnected network of computers. Why can’t a single photon or a single electron travel through time? Or a whole bunch in a row?” Quinn continued enthusiastically. “Now I’m not saying that I’m a particle physicist or an expert in quantum mechanics, but it seemed to me that one possible explanation of dropped packets could be that they somehow shifted in time. I built on that theory and integrated some special logic into the firmware of our company’s first commercial switches.

“At first I just sent all out-of-sync packets to a special computer and stored them. It was arduous work, but after sifting through thousands and thousands of packets, I began to see exactly what I was hoping to see. With the trillions of network packets traveling through our global computer infrastructure, occasionally some of those data packets would travel unexpectedly ... through time.”

Ramesh protested, “It’s absurd. I am sure you are playing at something. What is it? This is all nonsense. Have you brought me down for this? If you need me to help you or to help Brad, then you must be honest with me. I cannot fly all the way to Durban to tell Brad that he is in danger because you can somehow see into the future. It’s ridiculous. Maybe you have spent too much time with your Star Trek things.”

“Star Wars...” Quinn said, trailing off.

“What?” Ramesh asked, exasperated.

“I’m sorry. I was just saying that I’m a Star Wars geek, not a Star Trek geek,” Quinn answered, then continued, “But, I really do understand how you must feel. I’ve only told one other person this and she reacted in about the same way.”

“Laura?” Ramesh asked.

“No. Valerie. Laura doesn’t know.”

Quinn struggled with that fact often. He hated keeping secrets from Laura. And he felt a slight level of betrayal any time that he considered he had a closer relationship with Valerie in some ways because of the information they shared. But he was sure that Laura’s knowledge of the truth would put her in danger, though recently he wondered if he could keep her safe at all.

Ramesh stared at Quinn for a moment. He couldn’t seem to even put a sentence together in his mind. He finally managed to pull his thoughts together and asked, “Can you just tell me how you expect me to believe any of this?”

Quinn shrugged, “Can you think of any other explanation how I could have known the winning numbers for six independent lotteries?”

Ramesh shook his head. He truly wanted to find another explanation. He opened his mouth as if he were about to speak, then stopped.

“Just hear me out,” Quinn continued. “Then I’ll have you taken to your suite. You can sleep on it. There’s so much more you need to know and to see. In the morning, I’ll let you take a look at the futurestream and if you want, I’ll show you how it works. But, if you can, assume for the moment that I’m telling you the truth.” Quinn looked for a response in Ramesh’s eyes.

“Futurestream?” Ramesh asked.

“That’s what we decided to call it. Basically it’s a stream of data that gives us a view on the future,” Quinn responded.

“I’ll try to lay aside my doubts for the moment,” Ramesh said skeptically.

“At first it was just me. I spent a lot of personal time sifting through thousands of data packets. After months of data analysis, I finally stumbled on some information I could use.” Quinn pointed at the displays on the opposite wall. The lottery drawings were running again. He smiled.

“No...” Ramesh looked quizzically at Quinn. “You won the lottery?”

“Why is that so hard to believe? You just won six lotteries today. I found future winning lottery numbers spanning nearly a complete year.” Quinn winked. “I picked one and decided to play. I didn’t play all the numbers, just enough to make a few nice investments in stocks that were bound to go up.” Quinn punctuated the last statement with another wink.

Quinn continued to explain how within a few years he had amassed enough wealth to buy the struggling AccuTel Switches. He then leveraged that into an opportunity to distribute more of his technology throughout the United States. With an increased base of networking equipment constantly sending stray packets of information, Quinn was able to quickly expand and grow the company into a significant player in the industry.

“I hired three key people fairly early on. Sireesha is an extraordinary database developer. She basically wrote the book in full-text data searching and near real-time data analysis. I brought her on to develop management software for the data packets that were coming in so quickly that we could no longer manage them. We were losing valuable information simply because we couldn’t process it quickly enough to use it.

“Daniel was hired for his networking skills. When I hired him, he was in some serious legal trouble with a few large Asian banks. The only thing that kept him out of prison was the fact that the government in South Africa was so overwhelmed with local issues. They had no interest in prosecuting a young kid for hacking into networks in other countries. I needed to find someone like Daniel – great with network software, able to cover his tracks – to expand the firmware in the next generation of our switches.”

Ramesh recognized an almost remorseful look in Quinn as he talked about Daniel. Based on what had occurred recently, Ramesh understood the look.

“I hired Brad as chief financial officer,” Quinn continued. “I needed someone that I could really trust to manage the finances and the business. Brad was never comfortable with the business, but he adapted. He never broke confidence, and that really wore him out emotionally. He is just too ethical a person to have been involved. I never should have brought him in.” Quinn stopped.

“We deployed an amazingly successful product in the second generation. And when we did, we received so much out-of-sync data that it changed everything ... literally.”

“How is it possible that no one else has noticed this phenomenon?” Ramesh asked. “If there is so much data, it seems unlikely that you are the only one who would have seen it.” He struggled to find any reason to invalidate what he was hearing.

“I don’t know for sure that no one else has seen it. My best guess is that no one else is crazy enough to consider it. There are many other reasons for dropped packets in a network that are more logical. I suspect nobody else thought of the time-traveling-network-packet theory.” Quinn smiled again. He knew how hard it was to accept this. He knew how crazy it sounded, but he had been living with it for over two decades. It was as much a part of his reality as his wife, his marriage and his family.

“But you keep saying that you receive thousands of these packets. How could that volume go unnoticed,” Ramesh questioned. He had leaned forward in his chair. His head was in his hands and he was speaking to the floor. He considered briefly the possibility that he was dreaming, but no matter what he did, he was still having the most unusual conversation of his life.

“Actually, we process millions of time-displaced packets now. Our network has grown to cover most of the world,” Quinn answered.

“Millions? Okay, but my question remains, how can so much information go unnoticed by anyone else?” Ramesh grew frustrated. It seemed that every time he asked a question he received an answer that increased his disbelief.

“The main thing to remember,” Quinn started, “is the huge amount of information being sent over the network. Our estimate is that only about one in one billion packets are time-displaced. So in one sense, it’s a negligible phenomenon. But when you consider the number of packets that have ever traveled over the network, it’s a huge amount. And you have to remember that the information network today is the same as the old Arpanet and then the Internet and today’s global network together. It’s all the same. And as hard as it is to imagine, we consider all network traffic from all time – back to the beginning and forward into the future – as one enormous volume. It doesn’t matter when a packet originates, it may appear in our timeframe at any instant.”

Ramesh sat quietly. He hadn’t looked up for some time.

Quinn continued, “Imagine every piece of mail and every parcel ever sent or that ever will be sent. Imagine the vastness of the information contained in those letters. Now imagine being able to go in and read excerpts of that information from any time in history. That’s what we have to work with. Every email, every instant message, every web page, every electronic file transfer. Everything ever distributed on the network at any point in time. We get a small snapshot of it all. It’s unimaginable.”

Ramesh looked up. He had no words. His head was spinning. In some way, the idea that Quinn proposed seemed almost possible. He shook his head. He was exhausted – both physically and mentally. “I need some time to think about this,” he whispered.

“I understand. That’s all for tonight anyway. There is so much more to discuss, but it’s late and I need to know if you’re ready to accept this completely before you go to Durban. Because if you go, you’ll have to be in completely. You’ll have to trust the information you’ll have, or it will be a wasted effort.”

Quinn stood. The lights in the room brightened and all of the displays went blank. “I’ll have you driven to your suite.”