“Ed, this had better be important.”  My boss followed me down the hall, glowering eyes over starched suit.

“I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t,” I said, opening the door to the testbed, and stepping inside.  Equipment covered nearly every available surface, with wires and tubing converging on a central workbench.  I had purposely left the lights off, which made the red glow emanating from the prototype more obvious.  The coiled shadows from the tubing almost seeming to dance to the rhythmic hum of the pump in the background.

“There some sort of problem with the new chip?”  He sniffed the air, where the faint scent of sulfur lingered.  “I smell something, but everything looks okay.”

I shook my head.  “There haven’t been any more problems with the equipment.  It’s just that I’m not sure about the new engineer.”

“Naber?”

I nodded.

He frowned.  “Because he’s black, or because he’s foreign?”

I’m pretty much socially inept, but even I recognized this land mine.  “Neither.  It’s not that at all.  It’s this design.  It doesn’t make any sense,” I said, gesturing to the schematic.  And it’s not the black skin that bothers me so much as the red eyes.

“You and all the other engineers.  You all need to get over him figuring out this quantum thing, when none of the rest of you could.”

“It’s not that we don’t understand it.  We don’t have to get all the details to realize that what we’re seeing shouldn’t be possible.  Light physically can’t move fast enough to achieve that frequency, and just saying it’s quantum doesn’t change that.  It’s like the design is pulling in information from somewhere else.” 

Isn’t that basically what quantum is?  Calculating all the possible outcomes at once?”

I shook my head.  “It’s not that simple.  Look, do we really trust something that we don’t fully understand?  Have you even looked at the lithograph plates?”  A shudder ran down my spine at the memory.  Even not understanding those twisted lines, something about them made my skin crawl.

“It’s passed all the diagnostics.”

“Not counting the two test kits that spontaneously combusted.”

He shrugged.  “We’ve already reached out to the manufacturers to have them replaced.”

“It’s not about that.  Doesn’t it just feel wrong to you?”  I pointed back at the schematics.  “What about the diagrams.  They give me a headache just looking over there.”

He snorted.  “Then take an aspirin”

“And the red light from the testbed?”

“If the mass production models do it, then call it a feature.  Look.  It’s passed all our tests and we’re scheduled to ramp up production.  In ten months, it’ll be everywhere, and we’ll be back on top.  Now, unless you have some actual concrete issues to discuss, I have some marketing plans that I need to look over.”

I gritted my teeth and shook my head as he turned and left.  There was just no convincing him. I reached into my backpack and pulled out a canteen, frowning at the embossed crucifix.  Father Brown and I didn’t see eye to eye, but money still talked.  I glanced over at the, my eyes lingering on the tubing.  Let’s see how this thing likes a different cooling medium.