The secret life of an electron
A story about quantum computing. And also about you.
Meet Ari, a character who will appear in Subtextt when the science calls for it. This is her first story.
Her morning begins in a meeting about electron shuttling, a technique that moves a single electron through a silicon chip. She ends up inside one, passing through quantum wells that show her something she wasn’t expecting to find.
Ari had not meant to leave the meeting
She had been sitting at the long table on the seventh floor, her notebook open, her pen in her hand, watching Dr. Ling draw a diagram on the whiteboard of something extremely small.
The diagram showed a row of tiny dots inside a silicon chip, connected by a long thin corridor, and Dr. Ling was explaining how a single electron could be moved from one dot to the next. Carrying a piece of quantum information with it as it travelled.
“We call it shuttling,” Dr. Ling said.
Ari wrote the word in her notebook.
Then, without any warning whatsoever, she was gone.
The Ride
She was sitting on something.
It was small and round and warm and it hummed. She looked down at it. It was glowing a faint blue-white and vibrating at a frequency she could feel in her back teeth.
It was an electron.
Well, she thought. That’s new.
The electron didn’t wait for her to have any further thoughts on the matter. The corridor ahead of them lit up, and they shot forward at a speed that made her grab onto the electron with both hands and hold on very tightly indeed.
The walls blurred, the ceiling disappeared, and her hair streamed behind her. There was no sound except the hum, which was now radiating from her in all directions.
Ahead of them, at the end of the corridor, something glowed.
It was red.
The Red Well
The electron dropped into the first well and stopped suddenly.
Ari looked around.
The space was vast, but she wasn’t.
The walls pulsed with a deep red light. She took a step to the left, the red darkened. She stepped back, it brightened. She did this three more times because it was satisfying.
Then she saw them.
Every version of herself she had ever been was standing in the red light looking back at her. She couldn’t count how many there were, but it must have been many thousands.
She noticed one sitting in the corner of a room, a baby who wasn’t yet walking. Another with a woman a woman she didn't recognise, who took both her hands and said she had needed to hear that. And one at a table by the ocean, writing fast, filling pages.
Ari looked at the one writing. It collapsed immediately.
She looked at the one at the conference.
Gone.
She looked at the baby in the corner. The red light was pulsing faster.
She reached toward her.
Before she could touch her, the electron shot forward. The red light and every Ari in it disappeared at once.
The Orange Well
She had arrived at the second well with her arm still reaching. Ari quickly put her arm down before anyone noticed.
She looked up.
This well was full of light. It had thousands of tiny points, darting and turning, forming shapes and patterns, then dissolving before she knew what they were. They moved like swooping starlings, as if one mind was controlling all of them at the same time. She turned slowly on the spot watching them, mesmerised.
Each one was making its own decisions, and yet all of them together made something that took her breath away.
She had seen this before, she thought. It was like the way a conversation moved around a table without anyone guiding where it should go.
Nobody in control. And yet…this.
The orange light wheeled and turned above her head.
The electron tapped her foot.
It was time to move on.
The Yellow Well
Ari arrived into the third well and looked down.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, the floor was the night sky.
Stars stretched beneath her feet in every direction, tiny and brilliant against the dark. She walked on the stars, half expecting to fall through. But she didn’t.
Then she saw it. There was a pattern in the stars, and it was Dr Ling’s diagram. Every dot exactly as he had shown it.
She stood there for a moment, looking down at the universe. She felt very, very small indeed.
The electron tapped her foot.
They moved.
The Blue-Violet Well
The final well was different. Ari knew it immediately.
This one held still.
A deep blue-violet quiet that felt full.
Ari climbed off the electron and crouched beside it. She had been riding it for so long she had assumed it was solid.
It’s made of waves.
She reached toward it and found no surface. Just patterns of energy moving in every direction and spreading into the space around it.
She remembered something Dr. Ling had said once, half to himself.
At the smallest scales, the universe stops being a collection of objects. It becomes a collection of relationships.
Then the well began to show her things.
The red well first. All those versions of herself, still shimmering. The choices she’d made in each version had all been hers. Every single one of them. Which meant she had similarly assembled this particular version of her life without knowing it.
That’s a bit alarming.
The red well faded.
The orange appeared. The points of light were swooping together. She found herself among them, a single point threaded to everyone who had shaped her and everyone she had shaped in return. Her sisters. Her friends. The teacher who had said something once, that she still thought about.
Every one of them had changed her. And she had also changed every one of them. Without any of them realising it.
The orange dissolved.
Now the yellow. Stars above and below, revealing the same shapes at every scale. The universe, it turned out, did not invent different rules for different sizes of things. What governed an electron governed a galaxy. And if it governed a galaxy, it governed everything in between.
Including her.
Ari sat beside the electron and thought about this.
She had assembled herself from choices. She was woven into a pattern far larger than herself. And the same rules that applied to the electron applied to her too.
Which meant she wasn’t solid either.
She looked at the waves. She was more like them than she had known.
It was a very good thought.
Then she smiled. And climbed back on. The corridor lit up, showing the way back home. Each well glowing as she passed through.
The Return
Ari blinked.
She was back at the long table on the seventh floor. Her notebook open, her pen in hand.
Dr. Ling was still drawing on the whiteboard.
“…and so the electron arrives here,” he was saying, tapping the final dot.
"You cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string. The electron carries everything it has passed through with it. That is the point."
Ari looked down at her notebook.
She had written one word.
Shuttling.
The Subtextt
Beneath the feeling of wonder is something Ari didn’t expect to learn from a silicon chip. She is not a fixed thing moving through life, but a form of the relationships between everything she has passed through.
Nothing lived is ever truly left behind, it travels with you.