#same with being single. there were so many external explanations to go through before hitting the 'its coming from inside the house'

[catebees]

Still thinking about Marian and her way to approach her own feelings.

She was always too busy, "introspection is for the rich folk who have fuckall to do all day. I've got fields to till" (or whatever, I still don't know what she'd do in Ferelden, definitely not mercenary work).

Because of this she very rarely knows what's going on in her head. For most of the time it was a constant whispered uneasiness, like an ache in your bones that will never really leave if you keep breaking your back. And it's not like she can stop, so like. Why address it. It just became background noise.

I wonder how different it would all have been if she had had the tools to figure it out sooner. If she could have been more comfortable in her gender identity, if she could have understood earlier what exactly she wanted and what she could give.

She doesn't realise she doesn't want to be a "woman" until inquisition. "I thought it was normal to dislike being called a lady." Everybody called her Hawke for so long and that felt so good because she was almost a thing, Just A Person. Bull and Krem just look at her like 👁👁

And the same thing goes for romance. She always had people she found interesting and wanted to get to know, people she wanted to impress. She definitely craved some sort of intimacy but never really knew how to get it. A bit of bread shared in the shade with the farmers or a cold drink after work, a job well done, laughter, a slap on the back - that went a long way. That was enough.

The first year in Kirkwall was pretty much the same, the people were different but the beats were there. She probably picked one or two interesting people of the group to exchange looks with and have something to talk about.

Then Varric comes around. Then Merrill and Isabela, Fenris, Anders, Sebastian. That empty space gets filled. And it stays like that for years. And she would be satisfied. Except that this time she gets picked. And when she looks across the table Fenris looks back and it's not some almost-stranger. With them, she could never imagine anything happening. It was a past time. She would always fold before anyone could take her up on her offer.

Fenris chips away at her defences without her noticing, and the same happens to him. And at one point they realise that they can't stay apart.

When I say at one point I mean extremely late. With all that happens in Kirkwall there's no time to stop and figure out what this sort of feeling means. Fenris is the one who initiates things and when he leaves, all she worries about is his wellbeing.

Years later, he is the one asking to try again. And that's what makes it all starts to make sense. "So this is what it feels like to be happy". Which is extremely dangerous.

I said it before but Marian thinks she's cursed. Not like "a witch put a spell on me" but "From Clear Evidence, everybody I love gets taken away from me." It doesn't help that the city is also Disaster Central.

(At one point she develops a sympathy for Saemus Dumar. Nothing romantic, he's much younger than her, but she likes him. Maybe she sees some hope for the future in that kid. She maybe talked with him twice but every time she sees his about she hopes he has a nice day. When he gets killed she wonders if she somehow brought that on him.)

So she never tells Fenris she loves him. They start sleeping -just sleeping- together and it's so obvious how much they care for each other.

The sex is there. It's nice, it's fun. It's a way for Fenris to savour his freedom and to replace bad memories with much sweeter ones. Secretly, she's also conditioning herself. Replacing her first reaction to love with happiness instead of fear.

Some mornings when they're in their new little home in Ferelden, Bethany will go out early with Peach and stay in town for a while. The house is small and they all sleep in one room. When Marian wakes up Fenris is sitting at her side with breakfast. Sometimes they thank Bethany for the privacy. More often they let the hours go by in bed, finally being allowed to slow down.

[adventures-in-poly]

0 Posts in 2020

You’d think that I’d have something Very Profound to say about the interactions between the pandemic and poly, but it turns out I haven’t wanted to write about that subject very much at all. I won’t say that the pandemic has sucked all the inspiration from my brain, just that it has shuffled inspiration around in unexpected ways and away from writing.

The pandemic has felt like it’s pressed the pause button on my poly life. My husband (M) can’t go out on dates because OTHER PEOPLE ARE DANGEROUS. I also can’t go out on dates for the same reason, but moreover, I choose not to go on dates because I’m just So Damn Exhausted. I’ve seen my boyfriend (Crow) only three times this year: once before the pandemic and twice since, and that’s only possible because his house has this large porch where we can do social distancing outside. I haven’t kissed him since January and I’ve only hugged him once, masks on and faces turned away, and I held my breath the whole time. I haven’t had sex with anyone in over a year, and I can’t even “blame” that on the pandemic. It’s a choice. Guess I’ve gone full asexual, and I say “guess” because, while asexual is an accurate descriptor, I still don’t feel really great about adopting that as a personal identity. I’m not even upset about the no sex part though. I’m happy about it. My Magic Wand knows exactly what I want and all the nuances of my body and it’s much less painful than skin on skin.

The pandemic is NOT a good thing. It is NOT a good thing that millions of people have died, and it is NOT a good thing that we as a community are touch-starved and relationship-starved and can’t seem to figure our shit out.

That said.

I’m going to be honest. It has felt nice not having to worry, poly-wise. I hate that that’s a thing that I feel, but this blog is and has always meant to be about honesty. It feels like a relief knowing that I am not going to be in a situation where I have to watch my husband drunkenly and sloppily hit on other women at parties that we are meant to both enjoy. It feels like a relief knowing that he isn’t going to tell me, “I’m going to meet someone that I’ve been talking to on Tinder”, that the bomb isn’t going to fall on me. Because that’s what it is. “I came in like a wrecking ball.” The fear that someone else will enter our lives - my life - and I’ll have no control over it, and I’ll hate it, and I’ll lose myself.

I have a lifelong fear of being replaced. Of being “not good enough”. I hesitate to call it a fear of being unlovable, because I’ve never doubted that people love me and like me. I think they do. But the fear is that, when my needs butt up against someone else’s, theirs will always win. As a child, my parents taught me all about caring for other people, being generous, being self sacrificing, being kind. They immigrated to the US from England a few years before I was born, and as a result, I was brought up with a European mindset (others before yourself) in an American environment (look out for number one). And, as a result -- even though my parents were extraordinarily caring, even though I was an only child, even though they were generous with their time and attention, even though I had a very happy childhood -- I somehow learned that I would always be second place. Always the one to sleep on the floor at sleepovers so the guest or the host could get the bed. Always the one to get a boring piece of cake so a louder and therefore more deserving child could get the piece with the flower. Petty shit like that that translated into real adult problems. Just two nights ago, on New Year’s Eve, I had told my husband I’d wanted us to change the sheets, and as I ascended the stairs to bed I forlornly reminded him that we hadn’t changed the sheets - terrified and fully preparing myself to be let down because he was having a good time at an online New Year’s Eve party and of course that meant that my needs would subside. (They didn’t. The world doesn’t work like that. My husband shows me over and over again that my needs are important to him, and yet I Still Never Learn.)

I can say with full honestly that I am no longer really jealous of my boyfriend and his wife anymore. I used to be, a little. I used to be jealous that he would want to visit her at her shift before he came over for dates, or that he’d want to bring her to casual outings with me, or that at any point the two of them could decide they’d want to move back to San Diego and that would be that. I don’t feel those things anymore. I haven’t for a long time. It’s some sort of consequence of she and I becoming legitimate good friends, plus me and my husband moving an hour away, plus just being too damn old and too damn tired to give shits anymore.

Then again, their relationship was never the kind that was going to prick my skin up and put me on guard. I was the new person, not her. I don’t have a complex about older, more established relationships.

But the idea of my husband finding somebody new, even though our relationship is solid? Sends me into chaos. Even now. I wish I could say that it’s changed in the 5 years since we opened things up, but it hasn’t. It hasn’t really at all.

I’d wanted this blog to document my journey from new to seasoned poly, from a jealous wreck to someone who had learned to love herself and meditate through the pain. That’s not what happened. I’m not sure if it’s ever going to happen. My husband hasn’t had enough actual relationships to give me practice experiencing the very discomfort that makes me want to scream until my insides explode out, and the few times it has happened, I felt like I was living in a shock chamber and turning into the kind of person I don’t want to be.

I wanted to evolve, for the sake of my readers, into someone who fully accepts a poly lifestyle. To show that it can be done. No -- to show, specifically, that I could do it, that I could logic and reason my way through all the shit and prove myself to be better than my jealousy. I don’t think that’s what’s going to end up happening. I think it’s no secret at this point that I don’t really love this whole poly thing. I am still actively choosing it, but not always for reasons that I endorse. What if I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore? Would I lose my husband? Would I lose my boyfriend? Could I ethically give up my relationship with my boyfriend to create monogamy with my husband? Could I ethically ask my husband not to go on dates while I still retain my relationship with my boyfriend? It’s all shit, really. None of it is a good outcome. And the pandemic has allowed me to stall my non-decisions for a year because it’s not like we can see other people anyway. And isn’t it great when some external force gives you a reprieve from the things you’re afraid of.

But while the pandemic has put my poly life on pause, it’s put my healing and growth around poly stuff on pause as well. Sure, it feels fucking great on the surface, but it’s not actual growth. I’m not forever in a place where I will feel secure. It’s going to end eventually (vaccinate me, babyyyyyyyy!!!), and the parties will start again, and the dates will start again, and my terrified introvert ass is afraid that everything collectively will swing in the opposite direction super hard. Free love! Casual sex everywhere! Everyone wants to hang out all the time! How could you possibly want to be alone at a time like this! And that fear extends beyond poly stuff and beyond just me and my husband - I’m not ready for the world to become a giant party. I don’t want that world. I don’t want to live in that world but I also don’t want to miss out on the collective bonding experience that is almost sure to come from the end of Covid. So the reprieve I’m feeling now is only surface level great because it’s a pause, not an end, and I don’t feel any more equipped to deal with my jealousy and my social anxiety and my feelings of not being good enough than I did at the beginning of this damn pandemic.

Part of me wishes I could “get over my shit”, and part of me wants to cling onto my shit and defend it. Like why am I the one who has to change, why am I the one who has to evolve, what’s wrong with feeling the way I feel? Why is this a “my shit” thing, like I’m alone and all my problems are caused by my own feelings? Why do other people NeEeEeEeEd to go on dates and have sex. Why does my husband need that. Why am I not good enough. Why is the problem that I feel jealousy and insecurity; why is the problem not that he feels [insert whatever he feels here. unsatisfied? no, that’s not it. incapable of being fully satisfied by a single person? that seems extreme. incapable of surrounding himself with platonic friendships in the way that comes so naturally to me and many of my women friends, and much more able to connect with people he is in a romantic/sexual relationship with, and so needs to create many romantic/sexual relationships to fill that void that otherwise would be filled with friendships - which is not actually something I believe about him, I think he could make really great friendships with the right tools, but is something he’s expressed to me and is also something that’s pretty common around people raised as men? is that too harsh?]

I’m trying to look for a good ending for this post, but, like an explanation for my feelings, I don’t think I’m going to find satisfaction here.

[admiralty-xfd]

the whole truth

My constant, my touchstone. We have arrived, folks.

This is the final chapter. To start at the beginning, click here.

Thanks to everyone following along with this fic, I’m sad it’s over but I’m so proud of it, it makes me happy so many of you gave it a chance. -a;)

Chapter 17: The Constant

She walks alone on a beach, feeling the sand between her toes, the breeze gentle against her face, the waves crashing onto sand. Crystal blue water. No blood. No boils. No locusts. She closes her eyes, enjoying this: the solitude.

Loneliness is a choice.

At first there is no one around, but then a man appears. Kind, familiar, he approaches and gives her a warm smile.

“Where is Mulder?” she asks the man.

Albert Hosteen doesn’t answer her question, instead only gazes at her with wrinkled, soulful eyes, imploring her to grasp the things that are beyond her understanding.

“I have a message for you,” he then says. “From someone you love.”

“What?” she asks, confused. “Who? What message?”

Please, not Mulder, she thinks. Please tell me he isn’t with you yet. Somewhere deep inside she knows Albert is either dead or close enough to talk to the dead.

“Your sister,” he then says, much to her surprise.

“You- you’ve spoken with Melissa?” she asks hesitantly. This is a dream, just a dream, she thinks.

He nods solemnly. “She told me to tell you... that great change is coming for you and your partner.”

Scully pauses, reflects. These are the same words Albert spoke to her at Melissa’s funeral, so long ago. It hadn’t meant anything then, but now…

"What kind of change? When?” Please don’t tell me he dies, please…

“You must help him,” Albert continues. “You must save him. But then... change. Change that you desire.”

Change that she desires… could he mean…?

She glances around the beach and feels it palpably: loneliness. The loneliness she’s chosen for most of her life.

She suddenly knows he must mean what she thinks he means, what she wants him to mean, because that’s how dreams work.

“How will I know?” she asks. “How will I know when things will change? How will I know when it’s right?”

She wants it to be right for them now, but it’s never right for them now.

Albert doesn’t answer but again, as he did so many years ago, responds by simply pointing a weathered brown finger directly at her heart.

***

Scully awoke on the floor of her apartment to the sound of rustling at her door. Her eyelids could barely open, so deep had her sleep been.

She got up to investigate the noise and saw that something had been slid beneath her door. It was an envelope, unmarked. Inside was a keycard for a building operated by the Department of Defense.

Her first thought was Kritschgau; that perhaps he’d been a party to what had happened to Mulder all along. Perhaps it had been him keeping Mulder captive, letting the life drain away from him as it got Kritschgau closer and closer to his revenge. Closer to his proof. And maybe he’d finally hit his limit; perhaps his conscience had finally got the better of him.

But when she found a note nestled inside the envelope she couldn’t have been more surprised at who’d sent it; at whose conscience had actually gotten the better of them.

She unfolded the note and read.

Agent Scully-

I want you to know you were right.

I should have fought harder. I’m not excusing or justifying anything I’ve done over the past several years of my life, but suffice it to say, I’ve made difficult choices; choices Fox never knew about.

I did send you that book. I thought if you understood why I did what I did, you might understand that I believed I was doing the right thing. I believed Fox would understand as well- that he would accept the work I was doing was for the good of everyone, for the world. But I was deceived, and now I have only myself to blame for my own foolishness.

I owe Fox an explanation I’ll never be able to give him. And I’ll never forgive myself for betraying him. All I ask of you is to please understand that harming him was never part of my plan. I hope you can believe that I did everything I could to save his life, and I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.

Please take care of him, Dana. I know you will.

D.F.

Scully stood in her doorway, stock still, trying to process what she was reading. At the bottom of the note was a D.O.D. address that would, ostensibly, lead her to Mulder.

She knew she had precious little time to get to him but she couldn’t move. What was she to make of this? Was it a trap? What would she find when she arrived? A dozen guards with guns? The cigarette smoking man, ready to pounce?

A dead Mulder?

She wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to believe anymore, who she could trust, what she should do. But there was something about this note, about the other woman’s words, that struck a chord somewhere within her heart.

She suddenly remembered Albert Hosteen being here with her in her apartment, remembered them kneeling down to pray for answers, and then everything that had followed.

Had it only been a dream?

Her first instinct was to question her own sanity. Had he really been here? Or had her lack of sleep over the past few days caused her to hallucinate his presence? There were a number of external factors that could have caused the visitation.

But… no, she shook her head determinedly as she held Fowley’s apologetic confession in her trembling hands. She thought of Ahab, how he had come to her once in the night as well.

This meant something.

She was so confused, not knowing which way was up and which was down anymore, but she remembered Albert pointing a gentle finger towards her heart.

There are more worlds than the one you can hold in your hand, he’d told her before she’d fallen into a deep sleep. It was so hard for her to see that, to understand that some realms were beyond her understanding.

Some truths were not for her.

Diana Fowley had been wrong in so many ways, but there was one thing in the end she and Scully had in common: they both cared about Mulder. She was being sincere, Scully knew it in her gut, and even if it was the first time she was being so since the day they’d met, this was when it mattered most.

That thought pushed every other from her mind as she found herself moving with purpose towards her hallway, towards the street, towards her car. Towards this address, wherever it would take her. She would go wherever he was.

She felt ill-equipped at the moment to make this decision with her brain. She would have to make it with her heart.

In this moment Scully chose to do what Mulder had asked her to do for months.

She chose to trust Diana Fowley.

***

Scully...I knew you’d come.

There had never been a doubt, not really. Even while stuck in his nightmare vision he knew at some point Scully would arrive.

He’d waited, and waited. He’d seen the life he might have had if Diana had stayed, if he’d never found the X-Files. If he’d abandoned his search.

If he’d never met Scully.

I knew you’d come.

“Mulder, you’ve got to get up,” he heard her voice. “I don’t know how much time we have…”

He wanted to, but he was stuck. He tried to break free of his mind prison, of whatever was keeping him tethered to the wrong path. She was the right path.

She was the only path.

Get up, he heard her saying in his dream.  

He wanted to get up, to obey, but his mind was engulfed by thoughts and dreams and memories. He felt adrift, and he searched for something to cling to, something to hold onto. His mind was screaming so loudly to get free.

“You’ve got to get up, Mulder,” her real, actual voice was saying.

He saw her face materialize like shoreline breaking through fog and all he wanted was to go to her, to go with her. To leave this place. But he couldn’t move.

He couldn’t do it alone.

I don’t want to do this alone.

“No one can do it but you,” she continued quietly. But she was wrong; she was the one he needed, she was the one who could help him. She was the only one.

I need you, Scully, he said, every part of his body paralyzed, but she couldn’t hear him.

“Mulder, help me…” she whispered.

He could feel her drawing nearer and in his mind they were in the forks of West Virginia again, clawing at the dirt, uncovering truth.

Help me, Scully.

“Please help me…”

He’d been all of the things she’d accused him of: a traitor, a deserter, a coward.

A traitor for trusting Diana over her.

A deserter for abandoning her, for leaving her behind in this nightmarish fantasy; for leaving her in the dark, something he’d sworn in that trainyard he would never do.

A coward for not telling her all the things she deserved to hear from him: that she was the only thing in his life worth living for.

But she was here for him, still, in spite of everything.

He felt wetness on his cheek, a real tear that wasn’t his own. And through that single tear he felt her desperation, her dedication.

Her love.

His eyes opened.

Help me, Scully.

“You... help... me...” he grunted, his arm finally breaking free, wrapping around her neck.

And she did, just as he knew she would.

2630 HEGAL PLACE

HALLWAY OUTSIDE APT 42

ALEXANDRIA, VA

(ONE WEEK LATER)

Mulder had survived his ordeal, which Scully had to convince herself was the most important thing. The appropriate tests had been run and his memories and brain function seemed to be back to normal.

Even with all of her medical training she had no particular expertise on the brain and was nervous he might have permanent damage. There was no way to know what exactly had been done to him in that operating room, not for sure. All the doctors could do was let him rest, and heal.

After a few days he was given a clean bill of health. She could only hope he would be okay.

She brought him home to his apartment and tended to him in his semi-conscious state. She stayed by his side, quite literally, and watched over him. After a few days he was well enough for her to go home, but not before apprising him of the things she’d discovered while in Africa, and her encounter with Albert Hosteen.

She didn’t mention Diana Fowley. She still wasn’t sure what to say, or if the woman actually deserved any kind of explanation as far as Mulder was concerned. Scully had never intended to keep Fowley’s involvement concealed from Mulder forever, but when Skinner called to inform her Agent Fowley’s body had been discovered after a neighbor reported a bad smell seeping from under the door down the hall, it changed things.

Scully still couldn’t believe that Fowley had done a damn thing to help either one of them. But she had. And now she was dead. The petty jealousy Scully had felt over the past several months felt trite and insignificant.

Mulder deserved to hear the truth, and she would give it to him.

She knocked on the door, steeled herself for this task. At first he was playful, lighthearted, and while part of her was relieved he seemed like himself again, she prepared herself to deliver the grim news.

Mulder had other plans, however.

“Scully, I, uh-- I was comin' down to work to tell you that Albert Hosteen is dead. He died last night in New Mexico. He'd been in a coma for two weeks. There was no way he could've been in your apartment.”

This news shocked Scully. “He was there. We-- we prayed together,” she insisted.

He eyed her and with a single look they were dancing once again. She could tell from his eyes what he was thinking, almost as if she had acquired his mind reading skills.

A visitation. A ghost. A spirit.

See it, Scully.

“Mulder, I don't believe that. I-- I don't believe it. It's impossible.”

“Is it any more impossible than what you saw in Africa?” he inquired. “Or what you saw in me?”

The truth was she probably did believe it, because she had no choice anymore. She knew as surely as she was standing here now that an alive and well Albert Hosteen couldn’t possibly have been in her living room when she’d thought he was. That she’d been dreaming, or hallucinating. Or maybe what she could intuit from Mulder’s look that he believed was right, and she’d seen a ghost.

“I don't know what to believe anymore,” she admitted, as tears started flowing.

She sensed Mulder nodding as he stepped closer to her, prepared for their usual dance. He’d anticipated this, surely. But she was tired, so tired of these well-trodden steps.

“Mulder, I was so determined to find a cure to save you that I could deny what it was that I saw.”

She’d seen the craft on the beach, the sea of blood. She’d seen the locusts and the shaman. She’d seen all of it. It had all led to Mulder. She would have believed anything to get to him, accepted anything to save him. And that knowledge scared her.

She could feel herself beginning to break down already, but in his eyes she saw patience and understanding.

“...And now I don't even know… I don't know what the truth is, I don't know who to listen to, I don't know who to trust.”

Her own faith in everything she knew, in science, in God, in all of it, had been so shaken during this ordeal; she truly felt a bit unhinged. She’d thought she could trust Skinner, and she couldn’t. She’d thought she couldn’t trust Diana, but in the end she had. Everything felt upside down.

She decided before this went any further she’d have to simply rip the band-aid off. It was the best way to deliver this kind of news, the way she’d been trained, the way he’d been trained. Both as a law enforcement officer and as his friend.

“Diana Fowley was found murdered this morning,” she said with no preamble.

His eyes lifted to hers in what seemed like resignation, as if he was surprised and somehow expected this all at once. She didn’t want to talk about Diana Fowley any longer than necessary but Mulder deserved the truth of how she’d helped him in the end.

“I never trusted her, but she helped save your life just as much as I did,” she revealed. “She gave me that book. It was her key that led me to you.”

Mulder looked unsure of what to say, how to react.

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry,” Scully said, genuinely upset by the conflicting emotions rolling around in her mind. “I know she was your friend.”

She reached out to pull him into an embrace, partly for comfort, but mostly because she couldn’t bear to look him in the eyes and watch him break down over some other woman.

But he didn’t. His next words weren’t about Diana Fowley at all.

“Scully, I was like you once,” he said, wistfully, pensively. “I didn't know who to trust and I-- I chose another path, another life, another fate where I found my sister.”

He was speaking softly into her ear and she could feel each hair on her neck standing at attention. “And even though my world was unrecognizable and upside down, there was one thing that remained the same.”

She knew how he felt; unrecognizable and upside down was an understatement.

He took her face in his hands and caught her eyes in a gaze so intense she’d never seen anything like it before, and they’d shared several such gazes. His determination in this moment to get something important across was evident.

He was here, right in front of her, and in a single moment as she felt his touch, she was snapped back to reality.

She thought of Diana Fowley, and how she’d died for Mulder after everything. I know she was your friend, Scully had told him. The words echoed inside her head like absolution she hadn’t intended to give.

“You were my friend,” he clarified, almost in answer to her last words to him, “and you told me the truth.”

She remembered being in that train yard, their bond having felt so broken and battered, and how she’d fought for him. Her truest friend.

“Even when the world was falling apart, you were my constant, my touchstone,” he declared.

Her tears fell freely at this as she smiled in relief. When she looked into his eyes everything felt put back into its proper place, their trust intact.

Here they stood again in Mulder’s hallway, the do-over she’d so desperately wanted now within her grasp. But even though she was free to try again, to kiss him properly, it felt like this moment was too big; it seemed to transcend all the complicated, messy feelings of the last several months.

This wasn’t about a kiss, not right now. It was about this moment; this opportunity to tell him what he needed to hear, what she wanted him to know. The same way he had all those months ago when she’d been headed out the door.

This moment wasn’t about what they might become. This moment was about what they were; here and now, to each other.

Constants. Forever.

“And you are mine,” she responded.

It was naked, uncomplicated honesty, finally.

He smiled and nodded in return, his eyes bright in absolute understanding.

She then leaned forward to kiss his forehead, in his hallway, just as she’d done all those months before. She held his face between her hands as she remembered what Albert had told her.

There are more worlds than the one you can hold in your hand.

The meaning wasn’t lost on Scully but she had a fleeting thought that the world she was currently holding in her hands was the only world she ever wanted to be a part of.

Her thumbs slid down his face and danced softly across those beautiful lips that she still hoped to press her own against.

She would, someday. Great change was coming for them, and soon. She could feel it.

Loneliness is a choice, she remembered thinking not so long ago. It had been a time when things were confusing between her and Mulder; a time when her love for him had been clouded by doubt.

She’d always believed there was nothing in her life more constant than her own faith: in herself, her science, her rationality. But she knew the truth now more than ever before: above all else, her faith was in him. It always had been. And no matter where their lives might take them, no matter what twists and turns they would encounter, and no matter how much longer it took them to get there, she knew for certain loneliness was no longer her choice.

***

He climbs the mound of sand- his sandcastle, his spaceship- and soon he is joined by the young boy once again. They build together, laughing and smiling. After a while the boy looks up at him, taking his hand.

“I want to show you something,” the boy says. “If you’re ready to see.”

Mulder nods, smiling. He’s been waiting for this, wanting this answer for a long time. The real answer, not the one the smoking man had shown him.

And suddenly the boy is Scully. She is right here next to him. It’s been her all along.

She is with him, holding his hand, and she sees the spaceship.

She sees.

“This is ours, Mulder,” she says. “Yours and mine. And we built it together.”

He nods, knowing the truth. This has always been the truth, will always be their truth.

“Let’s keep building, then,” he replies with a smile.

They kneel down in the sand and build.

Epilogue

A tiny cry pierced the air and Mulder’s eyes flew open. He felt Scully shift in the bed next to him, and he leaned over to kiss her temple.

“Stay, I’ll get him,” he said softly.

He slid out of bed to scoop their son up out of his bassinet. William instantly quieted as Mulder held him over his shoulder, carried him to the changing table, and changed his diaper.

When he returned to Scully she was sitting up in bed, turning her bedside lamp on. She reached her arms out as he handed her the baby.

“You can leave the light off, you know,” he smiled.

“I know,” she said, as she got William to latch. “But I want to watch him.”

Mulder slid back into bed next to her and touched their son’s soft head as the newborn nestled into Scully and began to nurse. It had barely been a day since he first laid eyes on William in Democrat Springs but after a whirlwind of activity they’d finally come home from the hospital.

He knew he should probably go back to sleep and take advantage of William’s current state of silence but in this moment he could only agree with Scully. All he wanted to do was watch, so he did.

He watched Scully look at the baby, their baby, and she absolutely glowed. Everything about her as a mother felt right, and although he’d entertained the possibility in the past, seeing it in the flesh made him believe it even more fervently.

He had a fleeting moment of self-awareness as he realized what Diana had said to him in his fever-vision all those months back had been right: looking at his family now, everything else seemed unimportant. Silly.

Childish.

He knew, however, that he hadn’t been wrong. Having a child with Diana would never have been right. It could never have felt the way he felt right now. Even before, when he and Scully had only been friends, he’d been prepared to have a child with her because he knew, absolutely knew he was bound to her forever, no matter what.

These thoughts of his past with Diana were clouding his mind, and he had a strong desire to focus on the task at hand, his task, which was being present for his family. He knew he had to tell Scully what was on his mind to banish the thoughts forever.

To be free of Diana Fowley, once and for all.

He sat up in the bed to face her. “Scully, I need to tell you something.”

She looked up. “What is it?”

“I want to be with you, really… be with you.”

“Well, I just had your baby, Mulder, so I certainly hope you do,” she said playfully, cooing at William. But Mulder wasn’t in a playful mood right now. He was serious.

“I think...in order to do that, I need to be completely honest with you.”

She looked up from the tiny infant and her brow furrowed. “What is it, Mulder?”

He sighed. “I should have told you this years ago, actually,” he said uncomfortably, his hand on the back of his neck. “But it’s… been difficult, for obvious reasons. And it’s been weighing on me more heavily lately.”

“Okay.”

When he looked into her eyes, telling her the truth felt like the only thing to do, although he had no idea how she would react when he revealed it.

“I was married once. Before you and I met.” Her eyes flashed. “It was a long time ago.”

The “M” word hadn’t been uttered by either of them up to this point. Hell, they’d only just dropped the “L” word to each other for the first time a few hours ago. He may very well have gone to his grave with this secret. But as he looked at her now, holding what was essentially living proof of their unassailable bond, he knew complete and utter transparency was the only course.

“Oh,” she said. Her eyes dropped, and he could tell she was disappointed to hear this. On what level, he wasn’t sure.

He waited, and she said nothing for several seconds. As he watched her he could practically hear the gears in her head turning, piecing it together. He knew what would come next, inevitably, as if he’d activated Richie Lupone’s Rube Goldberg machine, and the noose was tightening around his neck.

“Diana Fowley?” she asked, with an air of veiled trepidation.

“I was young, and it was a mistake. But I just… wanted you to know,” he affirmed. “The whole truth.”

She nodded back, thoughtful, then turned her gaze back to the child in her arms. The child that was half his, half hers. She smiled as she gently stroked the infant’s cheek.

“Thank you for being honest with me, Mulder.”

He moved his head lower to better catch her gaze. “Are you upset?”

She looked at him tenderly. “Of course not. How could I be upset about anything right now?” She smiled, indicating William. “Nice job on the timing, by the way.”

“It wasn’t intentional, I promise,” he chuckled softly.

“How long… did it last?” she asked.

“About two years,” he admitted.

She nodded thoughtfully. “But I’ve seen your FBI profile,” she said suddenly. “It has no mention of a divorce.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you’ve got Langly for a buddy,” Mulder explained. “Most guys take you out for beers to cheer you up. He took me for a good scrubbing.”

She laughed softly, and reached out to hold his hand. She didn’t say anything for a while and he knew she was processing it all.

“I suppose if Langly scrubbed it, it never happened, then,” she pointed out.

“Even so,” Mulder said, “I still wanted you to know.”

She thought a moment. “It explains a lot, to be honest," she admitted. "Why haven’t you told me this before?”

He’d wondered that too, for years. The answer was obvious. “Because I didn’t want you to know, Scully,” he sighed. “I knew how you felt about her. Not to mention how I felt about you, and how it made me sick to think about revealing that to you.”

“But… later? Even after she died? Why not then?”

He thought about everything that had brought them here together. If he traced it back, oddly enough, Diana was the one who had set the ball rolling. If she hadn’t persuaded him to unearth the memories of his sister that spurred him along this journey in the first place, he and Scully might never have met.

He closed his eyes and thought of all the events that led them here; the moments that had defined both of their lives. He remembered every step that had led to he and Scully taking that ultimate one: how they’d been each other’s constants, how he’d kissed her at the New Year’s ball drop at midnight and waited for her so patiently to be ready. Months it had been, until she’d finally let him in: body, heart, soul. How the rain had pounded against his bedroom window that night as their bodies had moved together, slowly and reverently. Finally.

How love hadn’t meant what he’d thought it did before that night; not at all.

Every choice he’d made, every fork in the road had led them both to each other, right here and now. And as he looked down at their son and up to her he knew why he’d never said anything.

“I guess I’d convinced myself that telling you would somehow lessen what we have together,” he confessed.

“But that’s not true,” she said with a smile. “I didn’t know you then, Mulder. You can’t change your past. And even if you could, why should you? Everything you’ve gone through has made you the man you are today.” She reached out to lay her hand against his cheek and his eyes closed.

He covered her small hand with his larger one. They fit together so perfectly. “I know. I know that now, and that’s why I’m telling you.”

She smiled down at their son, then looked back up at him. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Only that I love you,” he said, meaning those words more than he ever had in his life. Maybe he’d never meant them at all before her. “Diana was in my past, and that part of my life is over. The love I feel for you, though... that love is endless, Scully.”

She closed her eyes and brought his hand to her lips to kiss it. Her eyes peered at him over his own fingers and he watched them actively changing in hue: aquamarine, cornflower, cerulean. Scully. How did they do that?

She brought his hand down and a smile spread across her face that put every truth he’d ever searched for to shame. The truth they both knew; this love they shared that they could no longer deny. That he no longer had any desire to deny.

“I’m in love with you too, Fox Mulder,” she said.

His insides fluttered in an inherently Scully-induced manner. He would never tire of hearing her say the words.

“I think I have been since I met you,” she continued. “I only wish I’d been brave enough to tell you sooner.”

He sympathized with her admission; how much heartache and shame they could have avoided if they’d both been braver.

“I wanted to tell you in Antarctica,” she revealed to his great surprise. “I was about to say it but you found that gas can and then… life intervened, I guess. I lost my nerve.” She looked him right in the eye. “I regret that.”

He shook his head. “I have so many regrets, Scully… things you know I’d change if I could.”

His list of regrets was long, especially when it came to Scully. Countless mistakes that, especially during the time Diana had been in their lives, had hampered their progress towards the inevitable; towards each other.

But there was one regret he held higher than any of them.

“That goddamn bee,” he chuckled. “How many things that would have changed if we hadn’t been so rudely interrupted. How many times I’ve wished for a do-over of that moment.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said softly, and he believed her.

Their smiles mirrored one another’s, understanding that now was not the time for regret. Now was the time for action.

“There aren’t any bees in here, are there, Scully?” he grinned.

“No, there aren’t,” she replied.

He took her face between his hands and leaned in, so grateful to not be afraid, to not be confused. To know with such certainty she was his and he was hers, and there were no more questions anymore.

Their lips touched and he felt it again; that feeling of absolute bliss that occurred every time he was lucky enough to kiss her. That feeling he suspected would never, ever go away.

He knew the way she kissed by heart now; the taste of it, the softness of her rosy lips, the tiny sighs of satisfaction she probably thought he couldn’t hear but he could, always. Her unoccupied hand combed through the hair at his nape, twirling softly.

Two days postpartum he knew the kiss couldn’t lead anywhere, but it didn’t have to; it was everything, all he could ever want in such a full, perfect moment.

He suddenly felt a sharp pinch at the back of his neck and he reeled backwards, eyes wide, looking for another arthropodal interloper. No fucking way.

Instead he saw only Scully, eyebrow raised, a mischievous look in her eye.

“I had you big time,” she said, barely containing her glee.

They shared a laugh as William fussed in protest. Mulder reached out to comfort him.

“I’m not used to sharing you, Scully,” he chuckled as he stroked the infant’s head.

After a moment, a slight smile appeared at the corner of her mouth. “Wow, Mulder. Marriage.” She shook her head. “I never pictured you as the marrying kind.”

“Oh?”

“It’s just so... ordinary.”

"I might be more ordinary than you think,” he laughed. He looked at her earnestly. “Is… that something you’d consider? Someday? Maybe?”

She smiled in surprise. “Someday. Maybe. Do you think you and I could dabble a bit in the ordinary?”

“I think we could,” he replied honestly, looking down at the tiny baby nestled in her arms. “I really think we might even be good at it.”

She nodded, her eyes shining, and he kissed her again softly. She reached out to turn out the light as he laid his head on her shoulder and closed his eyes, the quiet sounds of William nursing a pleasant symphony to his ears.

***

He’s on the beach again, the wind blowing through his hair, the waves crashing onto the sand; only this time there is no spaceship. There is no mission.

There���s only him, and Scully, and their child.

It’s nothing less than extraordinary.

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

An Explanation of Why Louis and Violet are Both Terrific Love Interests [1/5]

+Why both romantic routes are not only amazing but better than other games I’ve personally played in the past. 

+Why some people are idiots and get off on picking stupid fights. 

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Grab a beverage and sit down, I’m about to weave you a tale. 

A long time ago, I made an Instagram account. I did this so that I could have another place to intake TWDG content. I got to see lots of artwork and watch fun little videos and edits and it was all great. 

For about an hour before everything went downhill far too quickly. You see, I rarely go on that Instagram account anymore because no matter what tag I look under to search for content, a good 60% of it is all the same: hateful. 

Hateful towards Violet, hateful towards Louis, hateful towards each other. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve scrolled past with the title “TELLTALE AND SKYBOUND HATE LOUIS AND HERE’S WHY” or “VIOLET IS THE WORST AND HERE’S WHY” or “WHY VIOLENTINE IS CANON AND CLOUIS IS NOT” or any other nonsense along those lines. 

After that, I quit going on Instagram. 

Until one day, I thought to myself, “Well, maybe now that the game is over, those dingdongs have moved on and I can look at the twdg tag in peace!”

And to be fair, it wasn’t as bad, but it’s still actively being made. Along with other questionable content that I think has taken hours off of my life just by witnessing it but we’re not going to dive down that rabbit hole right now. 

Anyway, after glancing over another “SKYBOUND HATES LOUIS” post, I couldn’t help but think, “Y’know, either y’all don’t realize how lucky we were to have gotten a bisexual lead with not only one great romantic option but two amazing romantic options, or y’all are just a bunch of idiots who get off on fighting. Maybe even both. I mean, sure, they’re not equal in every single way possible and there are a lot of things that I wanted, but it’s a helluva lot better than what we’ve been given in the past with other games.”

The thoughts kept building up as I recalled previous games that had optional romances that left me underwhelmed or downright disappointed. Neither Louis nor Violet have perfect romance routes, each with things that we wish we had more of, but we’re lucky to have gotten what we did, and because I haven’t written a post like this in a long time, allow me to break it down for you. 

Keep in mind that this is just my opinion and how I see things. I’m sure there’ll be a point where you say “Well, CJ, I beg to differ on this particular topic and/or idea-” and that’s fine. 

Hell, maybe you have a game with a disappointing romance that I didn’t list here because I’ve yet to play it. That’s great, feel free to share! This post is for fun but also because I need to vent some frustrations towards a fight that is 100% unnecessary but continues regardless. 

Beware of spoilers for the following games:

Life is Strange Persona 4 TWDG: A New Frontier King’s Quest [2015] Catherine

[both Louis and Violet are great!]

all y’all on instagram are just idiots

Now, in case you couldn’t tell from my blog, I love Louis. When it comes to my personal canon of TWDG, clouis is my endgame. Louis is my favorite non-playable character of the entire series, if not my absolute favorite. I love him. 

You know who else I love? Violet. She’s great. I found myself relating a lot to her character and I wanted to see her make it to the end okay. I was pissed when she was pissed at me, but in the end, I was more pissed about her treatment regarding her blinding and how easily she and Clementine made up. 

But you know what I really, truly love? A great bisexual protagonist: Clementine. 

Clementine’s the lucky one here in that she has the choice between sweet, charming, loyal Louis and witty, strong yet sensitive Violet. This is the definition of “bi panic” because really

I do want to add that I haven’t played Violet’s romance route, but I don’t need to to know that it’s great. There are a thousand and one blogs who can explain her romance with Clementine 100% better than I can, but I will try my best within this section and my conclusion since I’m mostly talking about them together.

Now, why is it great that Clementine is a bisexual protagonist? Well, there’s obviously the representation which was more than welcome in this case, regardless of what some idiots will say. 

Not only that, but it allows the player to romance a boy or a girl, which again, is obvious but I have some points about this that I’ll bring up when I talk about other games, like Life is Strange and Persona 4, so put a little pin in that for later. 

Both Louis and Violet are presented as loving partners for Clementine, and they’re both people who Clementine cares about. Based on your choices and how you play her, you can be as affectionate with them as possible and help them better themselves over the course of the game. 

Louis and Violet have different but interesting backstories, they have different ways of communicating their feelings, they both deal with their own struggles [internal and external] and open up to Clementine in different ways. 

Yes, there was plenty to be desired within the routes. We’ve talked about that before so I won’t go into great detail about it, but in conclusion: Louis and Violet are great. 

So why do people argue about it?

My scientific conclusion states that they’re idiots who get off on picking fights over the internet. 

And that they don’t know how good they got it because we could’ve gotten so, SO much worse. 

At this point, I will be comparing the Louis/Violet romance to romances found in other games I’ve played, starting with a game that I liked very much, but was ultimately disappointed with, well.... everything. 

[life is strange and imbalance]

every choice matters except not really until we hit episode 5: bae vs bay

Life is Strange is an episodic game that released in 2015. It follows Max Caulfied, a young, aspiring photographer attending Blackwell Academy who learns that she can rewind time after witnessing a girl being shot in the bathrooms. 

I was pretty into this when it first came out. I played each episode as it came out, I read stuff on Tumblr and watched every theory video on youtube I could find. It had a likable and relatable protagonist, a pretty cool missing person mystery, cringy dialogue, and cool rewind powers. 

Let’s talk about Max, our playable protagonist. 

She’s shy, awkward, nosy, and she wants to be a photographer but lacks confidence when it comes to putting herself out there despite having the talent. She goes through a lot of grief and betrayal through the game, but ultimately learns more about herself and how her choices affect everything around her. 

She’s also bisexual, and like Clementine, she can romance a girl or a boy. 

Love Interest #1: Chloe Price

Chloe is the deuteragonist [secondary main character] of Life is Strange, and Max’s old childhood friend. She’s also the girl who gets shot in the bathroom, and the girl whose [girl]friend, Rachel Amber, is missing. 

Over the course of the story, Max and Chloe reconnect and grow closer as they try and find Rachel while also trying to figure out Max’s powers. We spend most of our time with Chloe, going to diner’s and junkyards and what have you. 

We learn a lot about Chloe’s home life: Her father died in a car accident, her mom owns a diner and remarried an asshole who smacks Chloe around when she smokes weed in her bedroom. We see Chloe as her most vulnerable, we save her life numerous times because she just won’t stop getting herself killed. 

Hell, we do this to the point where it begins to physically hurt Max and makes her bleed. We do this because Max claims that Chloe is the most important person to her. 

The most important person in Max’s life. 

Now, spoilers for the ending, but it turns out that the storm that’s come to destroy Arcadia Bay is all because of Chloe. So, the final choice Max has to make is to either go back and let Chloe die in the bathroom or let the storm destroy a town and kill nearly everyone there. 

Either you sacrifice an entire town of people or you sacrifice Chloe. 

Bay vs Bae, as the kids dubbed it.

Romancing Chloe isn’t exactly full of fluffy smooches, though. You’d think it would, but considering that the girl we’re looking for is Chloe’s girlfriend who Chloe loved very much, it’s mostly Max saying how much she cares about Chloe and then Chloe turning around like “Boy, I wish Rachel was here...”

Then we find out Rachel’s fucking dead and that’s a real romance killer if I’ve ever seen one. 

Hell, the only time you get a real smooch from her [that we see] is if you sacrifice her! If you sacrifice the town, the game’s like “Really? Okay....” and you watch Max and Chloe drive through a wrecked town and into the sunset together. 

There’s a lot of different factors to it that you don’t get unless you’ve played it, but for me, it was disappointing. I didn’t even romance Chloe the first time because I didn’t even really like her, but when I did romance her, I felt cheated!

I only get to be happy with my girlfriend if I can live with the blood of an entire town on my hands?? And odds are, fate’s gonna keep trying to kill her, so I also have to hurt myself and numerous timelines to keep her alive until I eventually explode????

Man, I don’t know if I want to commit to that, y’know? Thankfully, there’s another romance option I can look at, right?

....Right?

Continued in Part 2

[shadowdianne]

Prompt: Regina stops Emma and Hooks wedding.

Thanks for the prompt anon; hope you like it 😉

Also @stregaomega, look :P You said somethingabout liking this scenario??

Full disclaimer: WhileI’ve watched the entire series -or rather many scenes- more than a few times inorder to always be as accurate as possible with certain things the wedding isthe only thing I’ve refused to watch aside from the single time I did it backwhen it was aired. So the details -of placement, clothing etc- are hazy at bestand invented at worst. Apologies for that xD

“Do you really want this?”

Regina barely moved her lips as she asked thequestion, eyes trained into the woman in front of her; the one she had walkedin after promising Snow she would have her ready by the time David was supposedto walk her down the aisle. Now, as she stood in the room at the blonde’shouse, she straightened her posture and run her hands down her upper thighs,not nervous but tense as she felt magic beginning to coil and writhe inside herstomach.

It wasn’t solely the wedding what made herthink of the world outside; the impending battle that seemed to be about tofall down also mixing up with her power in the form of unpleasant trickles ofexternal magic that made her swallow thickly. Emma’s silhouette, however, wasalso a reason why she found herself probing her teeth with the tip of her tongue,nervously pressing it against them in a vaguely formed pain-like tension shewas happy to fall into if it was solely to be able to ask the question she hadjust made.

She hadn’t been thinking on asking it, however;she had tried to shove any doubt and betrayal-like vortex deep within her;buried beneath the other many times she had thought, she had wished, thateverything would be different. Yet, Emma’s white gown had been a drop she hadbeen unable to contain inside a far too full glass. Feelings sloshing,splashing, dripping, she now sighed as Emma stared at her; eyes widened andalmost blue in the way they reflected the static that begun to coat the verywalls that surrounded them.

If Emma had been recognizable on the dress shewore, Regina thought, wincing inwardly, perhaps she would have been unable tovoice a question she had been thinking about ever since she had hugged Emma;ring a presence that had made her choke on her own saliva; struck by lightingand bones disintegrating.  The woman thatwas staring back at her, despite everything, was just a shadow, a ghost, awraith, a presence, a look-alike. One that couldn’t even compare to the womanRegina knew that must still be beneath the far too princess-like dress. Onethat, while could have fitted a very different woman, felt like a costumerather than what it was supposed to do.

And it was painful, Regina considered as thesilence between them elongated to a point in where it felt about to burst andbleed, it was painful to see such destruction, such disfiguration of a womanshe would give everything to keep free and away from any decisions that wouldstirp her down of any possibility of deicing for her.

“Regina.” Emma’s answer was just as pained, andRegina glanced away while purple began to trickle down her neck, hercollarbones, into the clothes she wore; mixing with the threads and conferringthem a shimmer that made her pause.

It was an almost sigh, a plead, and Regina feltthe weigh of the word selfishsettling on her shoulders; the burn marring her skin while she rose to her fullheight; addressing the younger woman with curving lips and tired eyes.

It was as far as she would ever dare to go,after all. They both knew as much despite how much Regina resented herself,resented them both, the simple fact they were, at core, cowards. Pure cowards,the kind of ones that would save each other, sense each other with the barestof glances; confide in each other as they choose to remain tied to anunofficial never made admission of something they knew it wasn’t a figment.

“Just asking.” She replied, heartbeat a staccatoagainst her ribs, on her temples. It was a reply more fit for the younger womanin the sense of how vague it felt; lead-like weights settling on her back, onher stomach, stopping her from saying something else, something much moreaccurate or true. “Your father is going to be here in a few minutes. I willhave Zelena and myself be on the lookout.”

It was better but still not enough. They hadn’ttruly ever talked about how Emma’s mind was a turmoil. One she could sensebeyond the façade of quiet smiles that never quite illuminated the blonde’spupils. But she guessed they didn’t truly do such things. They fixed and workedtogether once something broke. Never before. And so, she tilted her head andlooked at the woman that stood in front of her; her shadow sharp but small onthe room’s illuminated floor. As if, she guessed, it had been cut and reworkedinto something that would fit the dress and the vows and the ring that sheglanced at with stinging eyes.

Emma nodded at that, her mind elsewhere andRegina felt her nails against her skin, over the clothing of the skirt shewore; sharper but dulled by the barrier.

“Thank you.”

There was very little else she could say, verylittle she was allowed to, that they were both allowed to, and so she smiled -abarely grimace- before she turned to leave.

“Do I look like I don’t want it?”

The question hit Regina’s back, thousands ofpossible explanations and reasons breaking in million pieces, traveling up anddown her spine as they cut and slashed.

If this was the only out the blonde would askfor she didn’t know if she could follow suit. If she even wanted or knew how.Yet she turned back and took into the way the blonde’s right hand was outstretched,as if about to ask her to stay. Between her fingers, dirty-white magic pooled andfloated away; ozone enriching the air.

She looked fragile in a very different wayRegina knew that would have been healthy. Devoid of spark, of strength. She hadseen the blonde as a princess; cut off what she would have called her “saviorqualities” and yet that hadn’t really hurt as much like the fact Emma was askingfrom an outside out rather than taking it for herself.

Had she been a willful participant of that? Reginaignored it, but her chest still felt heavy, her skin prickling with heat. Shewas about to walk closer to the blonde; grasp her hand between hers, maybe,when a knock at the door interrupted them both. Moving as if she had beenshocked, Emma moved her hand away; the follow-up cold realization leavingbehind a very bitter taste at the roof of Regina’s mouth.

“Are you ready?” The voice that came floatingthrough the door was David’s and Regina’s ear picked back up the sound fromoutside the room; the way the entire Storybrooke seemed to be holding itsbreath.

It was too late; she told to herself as shewatched as how Emma swallowed, eyes leaving Regina and back to the door;jittery and confused.

It had been too late back when she had huggedthe blonde in front of her, marriage a word that kept on burning on her brain. Ithad been too late, and she didn’t have any weight on a conversation that shouldhave been done back when there was something to truly say to one another.

She opened the door and let David walk inside,not truly looking back; not able to do so.

She sat next to Zelena’s side and smiled atHenry; whispers around her dulling everything but the magical guards she feltbeating faintly against her with the caress of a conjoined magic she alreadyfelt missing despite it still being close enough to touch.

She hadn’t fallen in love quickly. She hadn’tbeen her younger self; full of naïve belief on stories her father had managedto sneak in when her mother wasn’t looking. It had been slow, silent, one wordand action at a time. Yet, she had been robbed of her breath the moment she hadrealized what her need menat, the strength of it all, that always seeped insideof her whenever Emma defended her. Whenever the blonde herself was in peril.

They had never talked about it; not even whenEmma had come back and there had been far too many things in a missed year thatshe wasn’t even sure how to start to explain. But she had seen Emma’s eyes onher at Robin’s addition to the group; the way gentle green turned sharp and callous.She had done the same against the man that now stood at the end of the aisle;unable to not list the reasons why she wanted to tear ever limb from his torso.And maybe because Emma had always looked at her with a warning glaring whiteand grey, she had never followed suit.

But there had been moments when she had wishedto do so; to grab Emma’s shoulders and ask her, scream at her, kiss her, pushher against the nearest wall and feel her. And there had been other momentswhen she had seen the same wish reflected back at her in a way that had madeher stop and consider how much they would truly be able to push lines that feltblurry one moment, steel-like the next.

They never had had the opportunity to followsuit though. She told herself as much when the whispers began to die; Emma walkingdown the aisle. They could have had it. But they never took that step.

She would have, she would have done it back atCamelot. For the longest of times she had even thought that could have been apossibility she wasn’t remembering. But it hadn’t. And she felt tired now;angry at herself.

She considered on leaving but that would gathermore attention to something that didn’t exist and so she stayed put; eyesunable to look at Emma, at her figure, as she positioned next to him; his eyesalmost smug.

Regina managed to remain silent for the nextfew minutes, her magic building up, calling for Emma’s as the blonde’s turned palerand paler; as if the power itself knew it was about to lose something of theluster it had even further. Escaping like glass beads through a riverbend,Regina tried to grasp the few threads of friendship she shared with the blondediagonal from her. If only for her own sake.

When they reached the vows, however, she closedher eyes in a slow, far too slow blink, as she felt the muscles on her legstremble and answer to a command that she didn’t remember to have given.

There weren’t any whispers this time but silenttension, the kind of one she consciously blocked as she felt Zelena’s eyes onher; on the way the glimmered in the proud way that made her bite her bottomlip. He looked angry at Emma’s other side, but she didn’t stare at him; notreally bothering with such a thing anymore.

When her voice rose, however, it wasn’t perfectnor pristine but cluttered with a breathiness that made her press her righthand against her side; commanding her lungs to work.

“Do you really want this?”

It was futile, she knew, and she had justbrought upon herself what she had just promised herself she wouldn’t. Therewasn’t a conversation, nor questions, to have at this point. They had burnedthrough those bridges time and time again. And perhaps it was exactly becauseof that, because of how Emma had refused to tell her she wasn’t in a vision; asif that meant something, as if her eyes, widened and scared, didn’t hauntRegina’s own nightmares.

Or perhaps it was because, despite everything,she was still just as selfish as her other counterpart had been.

It was too late, though, to walk out of thesituation, words had been said and Archie had stopped, jaw dropping in asimilar fashion the brunette was sure Snow was mirroring with a similar of herown.

Then love again

She had tried that, hadn’t she? Not with theblonde in front of her but with the man that had been written as her soulmate.She had tried, and she had almost succeeded. If it wasn’t because, every time,she would have given everything, in order to ensure Emma’s safety. Emma’shappiness.

She had said as much to Gold, had vowed to iteven with dark thoughts rimming the edges of her brain.

“What do you think…”

The pirate stopped when Emma put a hand on hisshoulder and Regina felt herself starting to break. She had done more than sheshould have. She knew and saw as much.

Emma’s eyes were the green of emeralds by thetime Regina focused on them, the dress still calling forth a woman Regina knewthe blonde was not but her eyes so purely her that the brunette forgot the factthat they were in front of all Storybrooke citizens.

There was a flush on the blonde’s cheeks. Apink-colored spot that grew and traveled down, below the cut of the dressRegina would happily turn into something more like the red and white paletteshe had always associated Emma with. But she still looked afraid and doubtfuland Regina saw as her hands tremble; dirty white pooling down, liquid almost,in the way they pour.

She can’t do this.

But she has.

And then, just as slow, Emma’s back straightened,and her head shook.

Once, twice.

No.

[blueplanettrash]

Hi! Let me start off by saying how much I love your writing, it always makes my day a little brighter whenever you post something. Also I’m not sure if you’re taking prompts or not, but I thought that you have fun with this idea. So What about Lance as a robot, an Android that’s somehow been able to have human emotions and an actual soul, maybe bc of quintessence or smth. Like what if the galra made him and he somehow ends up with the team and they find out about him. Idk it’s up to you really.

Holy fucking shit man, I love this prompt! I went with a kind of Astro Boy kind of vibe if you haven’t seen it; first of all, how? Second of all, go watch it, some parts will destroy you. I hope you enjoy! ❤️

Since he was a little kid, some things just didn’t connect at some points. He knew that he belonged in his family, he was in all the family pictures since he was a little kid, he was always treated as family by everyone that he lived with, and his parents were protective like he always remembered them being.

But sometimes, he just felt like things weren’t right.

He thought that it started after he and his family had gotten in a car accident; because he was feeling sick that day, he got in the front seat and his mom had sat in the back seat with the rest of his siblings. All he remembered from the incident was seeing a car’s headlights heading straight towards him.

When he looked up pictures of the crash after waking up later and saw that the entire front passenger side was caved in.

He was lucky to be alive. Lucky, that the only lasting damage was a coma.

After waking he found that his family would sometimes act differently around him. Shoot him strange looks when they thought he wasn’t looking. He never asked them about it, it wasn’t much of his business but he always felt like his siblings would spend more time without him than ever before.

It was the opposite for their parents though, it seemed like they were always hovering around him. They were always asking how he was feeling, if anything was off with his body after the crash but he always said no, understandably to their relief.

Being in a family of programmers, engineers, and many other extremely intelligent people, he thought that it was expected from him to shoot for the stars; quite literally in his case. They had always been supportive of his dreams, going so far as to tutor him when he had trouble, help him with his applications, and go through their connections to give him a better chance at being accepted. But suddenly, when he gotten his acceptance letter and joyfully shared the news with his family, they decided that they didn’t want him to go.

They were adamant that he wouldn’t be going to the Garrison. He wouldn’t be following his dreams anymore.

He cried and begged, pleading for any sort of explanation. Why did they not want him to be happy anymore? Why didn’t they want him to see the stars?

In the end, he snuck out to the last bus to the Garrison with only a single duffle bag filled with memories from his family. He couldn’t make it to the building before he was calling his mamá and apologizing for leaving. She screamed at him, demanding that he come back home but he could only tell her that he can’t give up on his dreams, and he wasn’t going to be going home until they could accept that.

It turns out that he never got to see if they accepted his decision or not.

He didn’t know why his family had started acting strangely around him but he didn’t often question it either. The crash was traumatizing for all of them, even if he didn’t exactly remember it.

Everything changed when they were battling the Galra, as most of their life-changing moments did. Everything had to happen with dramatic flare these days.

Being captured was high on the list of undesirable things to happen to the team. Especially when they were all together like this. They had taken Hunk and Lance first, taking the opportunity to grab Pidge while she was trying to figure out the centre’s computers. It was harder to capture Shiro and Keith but soon enough they were kneeling beside their teammates as well.

“So you are the paladins of Voltron? I have to say, I’m not very impressed,” the Galra commander smirked, his eyes drifting across their angry faces.

“Don’t underestimate us!” Keith growled, struggling against the soldier holding him. The commander let out a resounding laugh before striding forward and grabbing Lance by his hair and pulling him away from the line, to the loud disapproval of the rest of the team. He dragged him a few feet away and stood between the two groups.

“I’m giving you one chance paladins, surrender Voltron to me or I will shoot the Blue Paladin,” he threatened, pointing his gun towards Lance’s head.

“Don’t do it, guys!” Lance yelled panicked, wide eyes looking at his friends.

“Well,” the commander pushed.

“We won’t,” Shiro said sternly, trying subtly to loosen the soldier’s hold on his arms. The commander looked at him with narrowed eyes for a moment before shrugging and turning towards Lance.

“Alright,” he said calmly, his finger squeezing the trigger.

Without a sound, the laser left the muzzle of the gun, hitting Lance in the head. He slumped to the ground with an echoing thud. There wasn’t a single sound for a few moments until a horrified scream erupted from Pidge’s mouth.

They sobbed, screamed, and begged violently struggling against their guards trying to get to Lance’s side.

“Take them to the ship, we’ll see how the princess of Altea will take the news of her team’s capture and unfortunate loss,” he laughed, the soldiers nodded wrenching the distraught paladins to their feet and started dragging them towards the looming Galra warship.

“NO! LET US GO! LANCE! LAAAAANCE!” Hunk screamed, he strained towards him, only turning back in the right direction when the soldier hit him in the back of the head. Even as his vision went blurry from the hit, he looked back and his eyes widened in shock.

He was pushing himself up.

He went to shout his name with a smile but stopped when he finally got to his feet.

Half of his face was gone. Instead of the gore and blood that he expected, all he could see was gleaming metal and sparking wires.

“Lance?” He whispered, in a blink, he was behind the commander and with a single punch, he was throwing his hand straight through his back and out his chest. With a final roar from the Galra, he toppled to the ground motionless.

The rest of the soldiers’ hands dropped away from the paladins and they stared at Lance in shock. His hand slid out of the Galra’s body without a struggle. Slowly his head turned to look at the rest of the soldiers.

“Survival mode has been activated, do not engage,” his voice was distorted and emotionless, though it still clearly sounded like Lance. The metal was still sparking, and the exposed eyeball was eerily illuminating the intact part of his face. His other eye matched and, was opened wide, the normal dark blue was glowing a bright blue.

The soldiers didn’t heed his warning and one of them charged at him, gun drawn and aiming. He shot off a couple of rounds, but it didn’t phase him and instead, he stomped towards him and grabbed his throat. The soldier started struggling in pain as he started squeezing, his eye didn’t move an inch until the soldier went limp in his grasp.

He only looked away when another soldier charged at him and without warning, sliced his arm clean off letting the soldier drop to the ground unmoving. He backed away in horror when Lance only turned towards him, the new stump sparking at the same beat as his face.

It was like the soldiers were just tiny germs in his path, with only a few quick punches they were on the ground, either unconscious or dead. He looked over at the team who was still reeling in shock.

“No enemies detected,” he said before he fell to the ground, back hitting the dirt with a thud.

“Excessive damage to external and internal assets, seek immediate repairs,” he droned on, laying on his back looking up at the stars.

After Shiro was able to snap through his restraints, he went to each of them and deactivated their bindings. Together, they cautiously approached their fallen teammate.

Kneeling at his side, they carefully looked over his body and tried to figure out a way to carry him back to the Castle in his shape. He didn’t turn his head to look at them, instead, they stayed glued looking up at the night sky, filled with stars from another galaxy.

“What are you, Lance?” Pidge whispered, eyes searching his figure for any clue. At the whisper, his body seemed to shake and for the first time, the glow dimmed in his eyes, returning to the ocean blue they remembered.

“I don’t know,” was the teary reply. They went to say more but again his entire body locked up and his eyes returned to their glowing state.

“Repairs required, shutting down,” he announced before his eyes shut and his body went limp. They cast frantic looks at each other before Shiro was picking him up and they started sprinting for the Castle. As they passed the bodies of the Galra, Pidge scooped up Lance’s disembodied arm and sprinted after them.

When Lance woke up, he wasn’t exactly sure where he was or what had happened.

“Lance?” He looked over and saw Hunk standing beside his bed looking at him with concern.

“Hey, buddy!” He said cheerfully, giving him a wide smile.

“Um, do you remember what happened?” He asked nervously, wringing his hands together.

“Not really? I mean I know that we went on a mission and stuff but after that, it’s pretty blurry,” he admitted, looking around the room to see the rest of the team gathered around his bed. “Why? Did something happen?”

“Yeah, something happened,” he replied. Lane waited for him to continue but it seemed like he was having trouble getting it out. Instead, he turned to Pidge who was sitting beside Hunk on her laptop.

“Pidge?”

Her fingers stopped tapping and she glanced at him nervously. His eyes flicked between her and Hunk before straying over to Shiro and Keith who were equally as silent.

“What happened? Is there something wrong with me?” He asked frantically.

“The short answer to both of those questions is that you’re an android,” Pidge said carefully, moving her body to face Lance completely. The spoon fell from his hand, clanking off the tray and landing on the floor beside the bed. His eyes were wide in shock before he burst out into laughter, clapping his hand on his leg.

“That’s a good one Pidge, you almost had me,” he chuckled, wiping a fake tear from under his eye. He glanced around but no one else was laughing, instead, they were looking down at the ground. “Pidge?”

“I know that’s a joke that I would make but it’s not Lance,” she insisted with a frown. His eyes darted from her to the rest of the group, quietly begging for one of them to crack a smile, but none of them did.

“But, robotics aren’t this far advanced, it would be in the news, it would be everywhere on Earth,” he argued, gesturing wildly with his hands. “Unless…I’m not from Earth?” he asked with a wince but Pidge only shook her head at him.

“Your programming is all in English and Spanish, you were made on Earth and we think we know why nobody knew about such an advanced robot,” she said, moving to her computer set up. He ignored the programming part and tried to focus on the information she was giving to him.

“Your creators; Rosa and Cortez McClain,”

His stomach dropped.

“Everything is in your main database; their research journals, their processes, everything that was needed to keep you running, they even included where you live,”

“Mom and dad?” He whispered weakly. “This can’t be true Pidge, it can’t! I remember being a little kid, I remember growing up!” He was tearing up in a panic, grasping at straws that were quickly being pulled away.

“In their journals, they talked about a fatal incident,” Pidge tried, looking at her screen quickly.

“The car accident,” he clarified without missing a beat. It was always stuck in the back of his mind like a looming shadow.

“I shouldn’t have survived it, I-I didn’t survive it. Lance didn’t survive it,” he corrected himself. His hands clenched at his sides, shaking slightly.

“Lance,” Hunk tried, moving forward to put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t call me that,” he said weakly, brushing away the gentle touch.

“What?”

“I SAID DON’T CALL ME THAT! I’M NOT LANCE! I’VE NEVER BEEN LANCE!” He cried, eyes wide and filled with tears as he yelled at Hunk. With a gasping breath, he burst into sobs and hunched over, hiding his face in his hands. Hunk’s hand went to his back, gently rubbing up and down. As much as he wanted to wallow in his newfound misery, he was calming under the motions.

“What do you mean you’ve never been Lance?” Shiro asked calmly, coming to his other side and laying a hand on Lance’s shoulder. He gasped in an uneven breath, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

“The real Lance died in a car accident, I’m just someone-something that looks like him and has his memories,” he explained carefully. “I-I just feel like such an imposter,” he burst out with another sob. “This wasn’t the life that I was supposed to live, this is the life that Lance was supposed to live and I’m here instead,”

“We’ve never met the other Lance, we didn’t get to know him,” Keith said, finally stepping forward to stand beside Shiro. “We’re your friends, not his,”

“But if he was still alive, you probably would have been his friends,” he argued.

“But that’s not what happened! It’s unfortunate what happened, but this is the outcome and you’re our family Lance, we care about you,” Hunk broke in, startling Lance. He watched him with wide eyes.

“Family…” he trailed off suddenly in thought. Emotions raced across his face before settling on devastation.

“Lance, it’s pretty clear that your family loves you if they were willing to go this far to keep you with them,” Pidge reminded him, before patting him on the arm.

“You don’t understand,” he stated mournfully, turning to look at her with new tears streaked down his cheek. “I was made to be a replacement, what if I get back and they’ve just made another one of me?”

They sucked in a quick breath at the question. They were noticeably hesitant to answer if they had already replaced Lance once, what was stopping them from doing it again?

“Then fuck them,” Keith finally said. Their heads snapped over to look at him with shocked faces.

“Keith?”

“Seriously, fuck them. They shouldn’t doubt that you’re alive; when Shiro went missing, I never gave up hope that he was alive. The same with Pidge, and now she has proof that Matt is alive,” he said gesturing first at Shiro, then a beaming Pidge.

“Sure, the Garrison can lie but what acceptable thing can they come up with? ‘Three teens go missing during a lockdown?’ My dad is gullible but even he would know that something is up,” Hunk said with a smile, which Lance tentatively returned.

“I’m apologizing in advance for the shit that I’m going to go through in the next little bit,” he said quietly, a frown sliding across his face again. They huffed good-naturedly before wrapping him in a group hug.

“Don’t worry Lance, you’re only human,” Shiro soothed. Immediately, his mood plummeted again and he sagged a bit in their arms.

“But am I?” he asked quietly. The arms tightened around him.

“Of course you are, it doesn’t matter what you’re made up of,” Pidge said, squeezing him as much as she could. “You laugh,”

No matter where they were, no matter what was happening, Lance could always make light of the situation. When she felt down, a mischievous smile in her direction had her perking up, waiting for what Lance was going to do. Maybe he’d throw in a joke, or pull off a prank, most of the time he would stand there laughing at himself if the joke fell flat. She could see that sometimes, he would joke more for their sake.

“You cry,” Hunk added.

Days and nights spent in the kitchen, with Lance sobbing over a mug of watery space cocoa. Arms squeezing around his body trying to take as much comfort as Hunk could bear to give. When it came to Lance, he could take it all if he wanted. The nights in the kitchen came more and more often the longer they cruised through space, the possibility of returning home growing lower as the days passed. He could only let out his emotions at this time of night when no one else was around and only trusted his best friend to stick it out with him.

“You get scared,” Keith said softly.

Lance wanted to be brave and he pulled it off well, but if you looked close enough, you could always see his hands shaking before every mission. You could see the hesitance in his eyes during a mission planning. He would look off to the side to avoid eye contact during practices when he was facing off with Keith, Shiro, or Allura. They were all scared and they knew they were all scared, but Lance was a lot better at hiding it.

“You care, Lance,” Shiro finished, brushing his fingers through Lance’s hair.

Every planet, every inhabitant got Lance’s full respect. When he was there to save somebody, he was in 100%. It didn’t matter if they were rude to him during a meeting, if they were in trouble, he would lay his life on the line for them. He tried to hide what hurt him to keep the team happy, he did whatever he could to present his best self so they didn’t have to worry.

“You’re you,”

“Thank you,” he whimpered, leaning into the hugs a little bit more. A wobbling smile was on his face and happy tears were rolling down his face.

“You don’t have to thank us for this Lance, we’re always going to be here for you no matter what you think of yourself,” Hunk said with a grateful smile.

Lance just let himself be for a few minutes. Just let himself feel the warmth radiating off of his family.

“You know,” Hunk suddenly sighed. “I love how you haven’t noticed that you’re missing an arm,”

“WHAT!” He yelped, flinging everyone off of him to look down at his arms. One was the familiar brown he had always been used to while the other was a sleek white and black metal. When he flexed his fingers, the joints lit up with a blue light. He looked up at Hunk with wide eyes.

“I don’t know how much of the fight you actually remember but we were able to transfer some of the “skin” on your arm to fix your face. Turns out that Alteans do not take cosmetic surgery lightly, so it’s nice and even too!” Hunk said, holding up a mirror for Lance to look in. Apparently, he was right because he saw the exact same face he always had.

“Your arm was completely useless though, so we made you a new one,” Pidge preened, scooting up to run her fingers up and down the arm.

“Okay, I guess that’s kind of cool,” he admitted, bringing it up to examine it more closely.

“Great, now would you like the bad news or good news first?” Hunk asked cheerfully despite what he said. Lance looked at him with a deadpanned expression before he let out a heavy sigh.

“Well, it can’t be any worse than any of the other news today, bad first,” he chose, looking back down to the arm.

“Okay, well, we aren’t exactly sure how Altean tech will work with yours, so we’re going to have to monitor you for a while,” Pidge said with a bit of a shrug. “We haven’t fully activated it so there won’t be much damage if there is a problem,”

“Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad, the good news?” He asked looking up at Hunk who was fully smiling.

“Shiro,” he said instead. Lance blinked in confusion looking over at their leader instead.

“We’re twining!” He exclaimed, batting at Lance’s new hand with his own metal one.

“Oh my god, that literally just made my day,” he laughed, as he leaned over to Shiro and gave him a one-armed hug.

Stories Masterlist

[sujayath-blog]

Strategic Snippets for founders / PMs

A mega-thread on strategic concepts that every founder / PM should know.

1. Kernel of a Strategy: A process to create a strategy. It contains three elements: diagnosis, tenets (guiding principles), and action items. You spend half of the time on diagnosis, another 40 percent on the tenets, and 10 percent on coherent actions.

2. BHAG: It is a big, daring, ambitious goal that pushes the company beyond its boundaries defined clearly with no ambiguity. People get it right away. It has a sense of urgency. It has a purpose. When you first hear it, you will feel it's a joke and that you’d never achieve it.

3. Objectives and key results (OKR): A goal-setting framework that helps companies set an objective, which is “what I want to have accomplished,” and the key results, which are “how I’m going to get it done.” OKRs must be specific and include a way to measure achievement.

4. Operating Plan (OP1) is an annual planning document that covers the strategy for the next 12 months, ways of executing the strategy, and the budget required. BHAG answers WHAT, OKR answers HOW, OP1 answers WHY.5. Flywheel: There is no single action, no grand program, no killer innovation, no lucky break, no miracle moment that creates momentum. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough.

6. SMaC (Specific, Methodical, and Consistent) Tenets: A set of operating principles that is the first step in turning strategic concepts into an execution plan. SMaC guides you on what not to do in addition to what to do. SMaC tenets don't change more than 20 percent per year.

7. Blitzscaling: An execution framework that prioritizes speed over efficiency and allows a company to go from "Startup" to "Scaleup" at a furious pace that captures the market. For a startup to move very fast, it must take on far more risk than a company going through the normal.

8. FIRE BULLETS, THEN CANNONBALLS: When you see the enemy ship, you take a little bit of gunpowder and keep firing bullets until one bullet hits the ship. Now, you take all the gunpowder and fire a big cannonball along the same line of sight, which sinks the enemy ship.

9. Play-to-win canvas: Use this to explain your strategy to people who don't have time to read our entire OP1. It contains 1. What is your winning aspiration? 2. Where will you play? 3. How will you win? 4. What capabilities must be in place? 5. What systems are required?

10. Aggregator vs Platform: Aggregators such as Google and Facebook help you get things done. Think of them like Cars. While Platforms are Bicycles. Platforms such as Microsoft and Apple are an aid to humans, not their replacement.

11. Growth Loops: User acquisition funnels are now being replaced with a system of loops. Loops are closed systems where the inputs generate output that can be reinvested in the input. Similar to flywheel but for acquisition/growth.

12. Viral Coefficient (K Factor): The number of new customers the average customer generates. The virality should cover the churn of users. In other words, if k-factor > churn, more users come than users leave, and our product is going to have exponential growth.

13. It's AND. Not OR. The ability to embrace both extremes at the same time. Instead of choosing between X OR Y, they figure out a way to have both X AND Y.Profit AND Growth. Great Customer Exp AND Great Margins. Great Control AND Lean Operations. It's possible to do both.

14. Product-Market Fit: PMF is achieved when your users love your product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it. It's a binary test. You can always feel product-market fit when it is happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it

15. Network Effect: The idea of a network effect is that every additional user increases the value of a good or service. The Internet is an example of the network effect. There could be “internalized” versus “externalized” network effects.

16. Moat: Like the moat that surrounds a castle to provide it with a preliminary line of defense, companies need to have moats or the ability to maintain competitive advantages over their competitors in order to protect their long-term profits market share.

17. High-expectation customer (HXC): is the most discerning person within your target demographic. It’s one who will acknowledge and enjoy your product for its greatest benefit. She is also someone who can help spread the word. Your early adopters are not always your HXCs

18. Bullseye framework: To systematically find the most promising channel. The first step is brainstorming every single traction channel. The second step is running cheap traction tests. The third step is to focus solely on the channel that will move the needle for your product.

19. Level 5 Leaders: Display a powerful mixture of personal humility and stubborn will. They're incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the organization and its purpose, not themselves. They are often quiet, reserved, and even shy.

20. Did he say No?: Usually we pitch what we want, follow up 3-4  times more and then move on if we don’t hear anything positive. Don't move on until we hear the affirmative "NO". Lack of "Yes" is not good enough. We should keep knocking until we hear a strong and clear "NO".

21. Burn Multiple: Calculated as Net Burn / Net New Revenue. How much is the startup burning in order to generate each incremental dollar of revenue? The higher the Burn Multiple, the more the startup is burning to achieve each unit of growth. Burn multiple under 1X is good.

22. Efficiency Score: This is nothing but reverse of burn multiple. It’s a catch-all metric. Any serious problem will eventually impact the Burn Multiple / Efficiency Score by either increasing burn, decreasing net new revenue, or increasing both but at disproportionate rates.

23. Contribution margin (CM): is a product's net sales minus all associated variable costs. The total contribution margin represents the total amount available to pay for fixed expenses and to generate a profit. It can be further divided into CM1, CM2, and CM3.

24. CM1 is sales minus the basic cost of goods sold, discounts and coupons. This is the same as Gross margin.CM2 is CM1 minus logistics, warehouse, CS, payment gateway fees and any other operational variable costs.CM3 is CM2 minus Marketing. EBITDA is CM3 minus indirect costs.

25. Managerial Leverage (aka High Output Management): A manager’s output is the output of all of the people and the teams that report to her. A manager's activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.

26. Cohort Analysis: Track specific groups of users, known as cohorts, to understand how users engage with your product in the days, weeks and months after you acquire them and, in turn, understand how resilient your growth is.

27. Simon Sinek Circle (aka Golden Circle): There are three parts of the Circle: Why, How, and What.The WHAT represents the products or services a company sells. The HOW is an explanation of why their products/ services are better. The WHY is about what a company believes in.

28. First Who, Then What: Make sure you have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before you figure out where to drive the bus. Always think first about who and then about what. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

29. Prospecting Pyramid: Arrange your list of leads with high-yield prospects on top and low-yield prospects on the bottom. Start by prospecting from the top of the pyramid.

30. Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Is a proof of concept product that validates your idea before you build a full, mature, stable product. MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out but a process that you repeat over and over again till you get it correct.

31. Free cash flow (FCF): measures how much cash is generated after capital expenses such as buildings and equipment have been paid. Operating cash flow is your cash flow from operating revenue minus operating expenses. If you subtract capital spending from this, you get FCF.

32. Cash conversion cycle (CCC): How long it takes your customers to pay you minus how many days it takes you to pay your suppliers. Super-efficient companies have their CCC down to the single digits. At Amazon last year, the CCC was negative 30.6 days.

33. Working Backward: A practice where you start by writing the documents you will need at launch (a Press Release and an FAQ) first and then work backward from there to the product requirements.

34. Free Parking' Business Model: To bootstrap of the “chicken and egg problem”, give away one side of the market for free. Typically it is best to offer the free side to consumers since no one loves “free” more than a consumer. Or offer the service that has lowest marginal cost.

35. Freemium: A variant of the “free parking” model where the company transforms code into the equivalent of marketing spending and “gives away for free” service X to generate qualified leads for interlinked service Y.  Freemium works best if service X has network effects.

36. Cash multiplier (CMX): Revenue generated from customer segments over limited time frames or payback window.CMX = Total Rev / Total Customers.Ex: Your total rev for 60 days is $140. If new customers were 1000, your CMX ( 60-day LTV) would be $1,400 in total.

37. Customer lifetime value (LTV, CLTV, or CLV): The revenue generated from the average customer over the course of an average customer lifespan. LTV is the future cash flows over her entire relationship with the company.

38. High Output Meetings: Is a medium through which managerial work is performed. It is a way to supply information and know-how, to explain the way of doing things, and to help make decisions. We need to make meetings as efficient as possible. Not fight the need for the meetings.

39. Task relevant maturity (TRM): for a team member is a combination of the degree of their achievement orientation and readiness to take responsibility as well as education, training, and experience. All of this for a particular task.

40. UI Complexity Score: UI needs to be as simple and functional as possible. To calculate the complexity score, you add up a point every time you used a new font, font size or colour in the UI. The total score is the complexity score. A single page needs to stay below five point.

41. Conversion rate optimization (CRO): Science behind understanding why your visitors are not ‘converting’ into customers, and then improving your messaging or value proposition to increase this rate of conversions.

42. Blue ocean strategy: Red oceans are all the industries in existence today – the known market space. Cut-throat competition in existing industries turns the ocean bloody red. Blue oceans are all the industries not in existence today – the unknown market space.

43. Productive Paranoia: You assume that conditions can unexpectedly change, violently, and fast. You obsessively ask, What if? By preparing ahead of time, building reserves, preserving a margin of safety, you handle disruptions from a position of strength and flexibility.

44. Inbound marketing: A marketing strategy that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.

45. Ramen profitable: A startup makes just enough to pay the teams' expenses. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time.

46. Category Management: The process of managing categories as independent business units, in a way that enables maximum consumer appeal while maximizing profits. Category Management aims to provide customers with what they want, where they want it, and when they want it.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

UPGRADES WON'T BE THE BIG SHOCKS THEY ARE NOW

Some people who've read this think it's an interesting attempt to write about something that hasn't been written about before. The most important ingredient in making the Valley what it is.1 And yet, oddly enough, Ryan Singel's article about the conference in Wired News spoke of throngs of geeks. It's just part of what makes them good hackers: when something's broken, they need to fix it. That's what the web naturally tends to produce. We take it for granted most of the US, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl have won.

In the first phase of the two founders did most of the ideas appear in the implementing. And only good people can ride the thermals if they hit them anyway. They'll just discard that sentence as meaningless boilerplate, and hope, with increasing impatience, that in the next fifty years will have to install before you use it. Apple itself did. You should be able to be included in it. So I recommend being good. We have two Demo Days a year, in January and June.2

Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a line of code, they see not just that line but the whole program around it. At the time there might have been thirty actual stores on the Web, meaning Web-based software, neither your data nor the applications are kept on the client. Get ramen profitable. Conversely, never let pitching draw you into bullshitting. Surely one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a startup is the feeling that what you're doing isn't working. The startup hubs in the US own one.3 If you write the laws very carefully, that is. So a town that could exert enough pull over the right people. It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong things.

They used to bring us bugs with the same expectant air as a cat bringing you a mouse it has just killed. He was looking at the floor. When you're operating on the maker's schedule are willing to take. One reason high tax rates are disastrous is that this is so. When startups die, the official cause of death in a startup. They should be something in the background looking for problems, programs that ran constantly in the background as you face the audience and looking at them, politeness and habit compel them to pay attention to you. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most founders wouldn't be able to resist, or at least, certain kinds of horrors are fascinating. Historically, Lisp has dialects. The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup what location is for real estate.4 Though, frankly, the fact that they have better hackers. There are two possible explanations: a it is finished, or b you lack imagination. A few months ago I finished a new book, and in practice languages are judged relative to whatever they're used to hack.5

It's almost like writing applications! Nor will most competitors. It's Parkinson's Law running in reverse. Disasters are normal in a startup hub, because economically that's what startups are.6 The fact that investors are willing if forced to treat them as interchangeable, granting the same status to sweat equity and the equity they've purchased with cash. They know their audience.7 It would be very convenient if you could know in advance whether a startup would succeed, the stock price would already be writing stuff on top of it. Don't put too many words on slides. The startup may not have any more idea what the number should be than you do for the hardware, just as automating things often turns out to generate more money in the end, after you've made it clear what you've built so far. Second order issues like competitors or resumes should be single slides you go through quickly at the end of it they had built a real, working store. They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots. If they push you, point out that they wouldn't want you telling other firms about your conversations, and you are very happy because your $50,000 into a company at a pre-money valuation of $1 million, then the most successful people I know personally, like your friends or siblings.

You need this for everyone: investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and even their business model was wrong and would probably change three times before they got it right. If you wanted to compare the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Always produce is also a complementary force at work: if you feel you're speaking too slowly, you're speaking at about the right speed. Web works. Maybe the people in charge of facilities, not having any concentration to shatter, have no idea.8 They get away with it. It doesn't work for software.

In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. The manual is thin, and has few warnings and qualifications. I can remove with least code. Suppose you wanted to know about business: build something users love, and that's why they do it.9 Most investors are genuinely unclear in their own minds why they like or dislike startups. Of course, figuring out what you like to work on. This article explains why much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store does not give me the drive to develop applications now is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does. At Viaweb we spent the first six months just writing software. I use with an external monitor and keyboard in my office, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the reputation of each member.

Notes

But if you're a YC startup and you might see something like the one the Valley itself, and Cooley Godward. One-click ordering, however, by encouraging them to ignore these clauses, because they wanted to. The founders who take the term literally. What will go away is investors requiring them.

But then I realized that without the methodological implications. But it's dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was. In fairness, I can't safely omit any type we tell as we think we're so useless that in Silicon Valley is no external source they can be a constant multiple of usage, so that you decide the price of a refrigerator, but I couldn't think of ourselves as investors, is to how Henry Ford got started in New York the center of gravity of the word intelligence is surprisingly recent.

They did try to be clear. Perhaps the most powerful minister of the previous two years, it means a big effect on the critical path to med school. Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts colleges are doomed. But scholars seem to have too few customers even if they don't want to.

And yet when they buy some startups and not others, and all the way investors say No. And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because such companies need huge numbers of users comes from. They'll be more alarmed if you seem like I overstated the case of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses. Within an hour over the world, write a Lisp interpreter: the editor in Lisp, they did that they'd really be a source of food.

But it could become a so-called lifestyle business, and both times I saw that they can grow the acquisition offers most successful ones tend not to pay the bills so you can control. Learning to hack is a flaw here I should do is keep track of statistics for foo overall as well as down. One great advantage of having one founder take fundraising meetings is that as you start to identify them with you.

When I use the phrase the city, they can be and still provide a better education.

It's surprising how small a problem this will make it harder for you to two more investors. When companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be even larger than the set of plausible sounding startup ideas, because they could to help the company by doing a small business that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then scale it up because they believe they have zero ability to change. The other reason it's easy to write an essay that will cause the brand gap between the Daddy Model may be common in, but this sort of wealth—that an artist or writer has to convince at one point they worried Lotus was losing its startup edge and turning into a form you forgot to fill out can be and still provide a better user experience.

The disadvantage of expanding a round on the entire period from the DMV. Apparently there's only one founder is always raising money from them.

While the space of careers does. Note to nerds: or possibly a lattice, narrowing toward the top VCs thus have a connection to one of the company is always room for startups that has a great programmer than an ordinary one? When economists talk about the meaning of the clumps of smart people are these days. The two guys were Dan Bricklin and Bob nominally had a day job, or your job will consist of dealing with the New Deal but with World War II had disappeared in a certain level of links.

[clarenceomoore]

Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limits: An Interview with Scott Aaronson

Scott Aaronson

GigaOm CEO Byron Reese recently sat down with  Scott Aaronson to discuss Quantum Computing. Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin, where he also directs the UT Quantum Information Center. Prior to UT, he taught Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Aaronson’s research focuses on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity.

Byron Reese: Welcome Scott.

Scott Aaronson: Thanks, great to join you.

So it seems like you’re on a one-man crusade to dispel all the popular notions of quantum computing. Why don’t we start with that?

Okay, well I write a blog and basically what happens is that every time there’s some really outrageous claim about quantum computing, that gets into the press, which is often. People start emailing me and they ask me to respond to it. So just by circumstance, and because no one else sets out to do this, it became me who did a lot of the responding.

And so, the thing that you often have to respond to is this idea that a quantum computer can be zero and can have all these qubits that are zero and one simultaneously, and therefore they can solve really complex problems by looking at every possible combination of those all at once, and that’s not true. So explain why that isn’t true or what is true, how ever you want to do it.

Well, it takes some time to explain…

Take all the time you want.

All right, so a qubit, which is the quantum version of a bit, is advanced as can be in what we call a superposition of the zero and one state. So it’s neither definitely zero nor definitely one. And the main problem is that people always want to round this down to something that they already know. They’ll say, “Well you just mean that the bit is either zero or it’s one, and you just don’t know which,” right? And then you look at it and you see which one. Well, if that’s all there was to it, it wouldn’t be so interesting. And this is what the popular articles often do: they switch to saying, “Well it must be both zero and one simultaneously, it must be both,” Then well if I had 1,000 qubits, then they could explore let’s say ‘two to the 1,000th power’ if possible simultaneously and that must be what is producing this enormous ‘speedup’ that quantum computation promises.

That is gesturing towards something in the vicinity of the truth, but the problem is, that when you measure a qubit, you only see one result. You see a zero or a one; you don’t see both, and what quantum mechanics is at the core, is a way of calculating the probability that you’re going to see one outcome or another one when you make an observation. Now, the key point is that quantum states don’t obey the normal rules of probability that we know. So a probability is a number from zero to one, so you could have a 30% chance of rain tomorrow, but you never have a -30% chance, right, that would be nonsense, okay? But quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive or negative. In fact, they can even be complex numbers. So when you make a measurement, these amplitudes turn into probabilities, and so the larger amplitude becomes a larger probability of being something, but when a system is isolated, the amplitude can evolve by rules that are very unfamiliar to everyday experience. That is what pretty much everything you’ve ever heard about the weirdness of the quantum world boils down to.

So what a qubit really is is it’s a bit that has some amplitude for being zero and some amplitude for being one, so it has one of these complex numbers attached to each of the possibilities. If I had 1,000 qubits, likewise then there would be an amplitude that I would have to assign to every possible setting of all 1,000 bits. So there’s this sort of, quantum mechanics has been telling us since the 1920s, just to keep track of the state of let’s say, 1,000 measly particles, there is an immense object beneath the surface, and nature is somehow keeping track of this list of ‘two to the 1,000 power’ complex numbers if you like, which is more numbers than can be written in the entire observable universe. But again the problem is, when you make a measurement, you don’t actually see these numbers, you just see a single probabilistic outcome, so you could create what we call an equal superposition over all possible answers to your hard problems, that’s actually a very easy thing to do with a quantum computer.

The problem is if you just did that, then when you measure, then quantum mechanics tells you that all you’re going to see would be a random answer, and if you just wanted a random answer, well you could have picked one yourself with a lot less trouble, right? So the entire hope for getting a speed advantage from a quantum computer is to exploit the way that these amplitudes work differently than probabilities.

The main thing that amplitudes can do, that probabilities don’t do, is that they can interfere with each other. This is most famously illustrated in the ‘double slit experiment,’ which we were just discussing before the show. This is the thing where you shoot a photon one at a time at a stream with two small slits in it, and you look at where they end up on a screen behind it, and what you find is that there are certain spots where the photon never appears, almost never appears, and yet, if you close off one of the slits, then the photon could appear in those spots.

To say that again, like decreasing the number of paths that the photon could take to reach a certain spot, you can increase the chance that it gets to that spot. This is the thing that violates any conventional understanding of probability. If the photon was just going through one slit or the other, this would be nonsense, okay, whereas if you observe which slit the photon is going through more generally, if the information about which slit it’s going through, leaks out into the external world in any way, then again the photon can appear in these spots, and then you stop measuring to see which slit it went through and then it doesn’t appear there anymore. So the quantum mechanical explanation for this is that the photon has some amplitude of reaching the first spot for the first slit and some amplitude of reaching it for the second slit, and to find the final amplitude that it gets to a certain place, you have to add up the amplitudes from all the ways it could have reached that spot. Now if one of those amplitudes is positive and the other one is negative, then those amplitudes can, as we say, interfere destructively and cancel each other out, with the result being that the final amplitude is zero, and so that event doesn’t happen at all, whereas if you close off one off the slits then the amplitude is positive or it’s negative, and so then the photon can appear there.

Okay, so, that’s quantum interference, which as I said, is behind pretty much every goofy quantum effect you’ve ever heard about. Now the idea with the quantum computer, is to do something like the double slit experiment, but on a much more massive scale, where instead of just having one particle, we might have thousands or millions of particles, which could all be correlated with each other. The quantum version of correlation is called ‘entanglement,’ okay, and so the state of 1,000 qubits as we said, it involves two to the 1,000 amplitudes and so forth.

Now what they’re trying to do with every quantum algorithm, is you’re trying to choreograph things in such a way that for each wrong answer to your computational problem, some of the paths leading to that answer have positive amplitude, and others have negative amplitude, so on the whole, they cancel each other out, whereas the path leading to the right answer should all be ‘in phase’ with each other. They should all have amplitudes of the same side, say all positive or all negative. If you can mostly arrange for that to happen, then when you measure the state of your quantum computer, then you will see the right answer with a large probability. If you don’t see the right answer, you can simply keep repeating the computation until you do.

So nature really gives you a very bizarre ‘hammer’ that I think can be explained in five or ten minutes as I did, but it doesn’t really compress well to a one sentence output. People always want to round it down, whereas the quantum computer just tries all of the possible answers at once, but the truth is that if you want to see an advantage, you have to exploit this interference phenomenon. It was really only in the 1990s, so more than a decade after physicists like Richard Feynman, first proposed the idea of quantum computation, that people finally started figuring out: What are some nails that this hammer can hit? What is this interference ability good for?  Then that’s what really started quantum computation as a field.

And where are we with it now? Quantum machines exist right?

Oh yeah absolutely, so…

And how many are there?

Yeah well, so people have been doing experiments in quantum computation since the 1990s, and just within the last 3-4 years, it’s starting to see really serious investment, where it is no longer just the sort of academic pursuit it was when I entered this field around 2000. It is now Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, a bunch of startup companies, all are investing on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Why are they so expensive?

Well, you’re trying to build a technology that’s never been built before. At a bare minimum, so there are many different approaches to quantum computing, but if you’re doing superconducting qubits, which is maybe the most popular approach today, then at a bare minimum, you need to cool everything down to 10 mKB, or so, so that your chip superconducts and you see the quantum behavior, so that means that you need to see an enormous cooling system. Then you need all these custom electronics to send signals to the qubit. Now what people are trying to do is integrate a large number of qubits and it’s a serious operation.

And who’s the current record holder right now? How many qubits?

It’s a mistake to just look at the pure number of qubits, because there’s a tradeoff. What we really care about is the quality of the qubits, so the qubit that maintains it’s quantum state for a long time, without leaking it into the environment is a very good qubit. A qubit that just sort of leaks its state really fast is a bad qubit.

Like a discount qubit.

Yeah exactly, so, a bad qubit you can’t use for very many steps of computation, right? You can maybe do a few steps of quantum computation but then the qubit will just die, it will just revert to being a classical bit. So you really need to look at quality. If you just cared about the sheer number, there’s a startup company called D-Wave that notoriously has been selling devices with 2,000 qubits. A few people have bought them, but analysis over the past 5 years has found that the qubits do not seem to be of a good enough quality to see a clear speed up over a classical computer, when you do a fair comparison.

What players like Google and IBM are trying to do right now, is something similar to what D-Wave did, mainly chip with a large number of integrated superconducting qubits, but now with qubits of a much, much higher quality. So roughly the D-Wave qubits could maintain their coherence for some nanoseconds, and the new generation of superconducting qubits can maintain their quantum coherence for a scale of tens of microseconds, which doesn’t sound like a long time but that’s tens of thousands of times longer than nanoseconds, and it gives you a lot more room to view interesting quantum operations.

So to answer your question, with this new generation of qubits, I think that Google and IBM and Rigetti have all built chips on the order of 20 qubits, which work reasonably well, not as well as you would like, and they’re right now in a race actually to scale this up to about 50-70 qubits. The biggest question (they will surely be able to do that) is how well will these qubits perform when they’re all integrated in one chip? Will they still maintain their quantum coherence long enough for us to actually execute interesting algorithms and see an interesting speedup?

So when you say they become just a plain old ordinary bit, is that like a light bulb burning out and then they’re not good for anything, or is that like a reset button?

There’s a reset button. You can always re-initialize the qubit, but then again you have a very short time to try to do quantum operations before the qubit leaks into the environment.

So, how big are these machines? If you went into Google, and said, “show me.” Because we tell all these stories about how the first computers filled a room.

Yeah well I was just out there a few months ago in their lab in Santa Barbara. It does fill a room, but it is I guess a device, each one is the size of a small room, but almost all of that is just the cooling system, and it’s the controlled electronics and the actual chip where the qubits are the size of an ordinary computer chip.

Is room temperature quantum computing, would that ever be a thing?

Conceivably. There are proposals, including optical, photonic quantum computing, yeah that if one could get them to work at all, then they could work at room temperature. The superconducting approach which is maybe the furthest point along right now, does currently require very low temperatures, and trapped ions which is maybe the second approach after superconducting also requires very low temperatures right now.

Is the development of these machines progressing along a Moore’s Law kind of arc? Are they doubling by some measure in some capability every X months?

I think it’s too early to identify any Moore’s Law pattern. I mean for god sakes we don’t even know which technology is going to be the right one. The community is not converged around is it going to be superconducting or trapped ions or something else? You can make plots of the number of qubits and the coherence time of those qubits, and you do see a strong improvement. But the number of qubits, let’s say it’s gone up from one or two to 20, it’s kind of hard to see an exponential in those numbers.

Actually the coherence time, if you plot it over the past 20 years, I think the error rate has been going down more or less exponentially, so there is sort of Moore’s law there. Basically the rates of de-coherence — unwanted interaction between the qubits and their environment — are still too high. They’re still higher than they need to be for us to scale this technology up to say millions of qubits, but on the other hand, they are orders of magnitude better than they were 20 years ago when people first started doing these experiments.

That sounds exponential.

Well yeah, so I think there is there, but the error rates — we know first of all they can’t be pushed down forever, but secondly they don’t have to be. This is actually a very important point: there were physicists in 1990 when quantum computing was brand new, who said, “This could never work, not even in principle, because you will never perfectly isolate a qubit from its environment, and if it’s not perfectly isolated, then you can only do so many steps until everything is dead. You’re never going to be able to scale this up.”

Now what changed most people’s views, was a fundamental discovery in the mid 90s, which was called quantum error correction, and quantum fault power, and what that said is you don’t actually need to get the rate of coherence down to zero, you merely need to make it very small. Let’s say initially it shows one in a billion chance of an error per time per logical operation would suffice. Now I think the estimates are more on the order of one in a thousand, but as long as the decoherence rate is well enough, what was found is that if you can encode the logical qubits, you care about across the collective state of many physical qubits, using a clever error-correcting code, in such a way that even if it’s any, let’s say 1% of your physical qubits are in a dock, go out like that lightbulb, you can detect that. You fix it and you recover the information that you care about from the remaining 99%, and then you just keep going.

The main engineering goal in this field, since the discovery of fault tolerance, is to get the physical decoherence rate to be well enough that you can start using these error correcting codes, and then push the effective decoherence rate down to zero. So we’re not quite there yet. Basically if you just look at one or two qubits in isolation, then the Google group and others, just I think four or five years ago, have gotten the decoherence rates good enough, that if you just looked at the qubits in isolation, it looks like they’re you’re already good enough, you’re already past the threshold for fault tolerance. I mean that itself is fairly recent.

But now the problem is that when you try to integrate a large number of qubits into a single chip, like let’s say 50 of them or 100, then you need much more controls that are electronic, there are much more interactions, and that pushes the rate of decoherence back up. So now the challenge is to maintain that decoherence rate where you could apply these error correcting codes while integrating a huge number of qubits in a single system.

Where is the United States compared to other countries in terms of investment and accomplishments?  Is the majority of the activity in the field here in this country, or are we just a small part of it?

I would say that the U.S. is the leader. The efforts of Google and IBM and Rigetti and the group in Maryland which is the leader in trapped ions, are all US-based. Also many of the leading theoretical groups like MIT, CalTech, Berkeley. Canada also happens to be a huge player in quantum computing, particularly the University of Waterloo, which may be the world’s biggest center for this field.

Besides that, Europe is a big player. In fact, they recently got a $1 billion quantum information funding initiative for the EU, so the Netherlands especially, well the UK (that will no longer be a part of the EU) and a bunch of the countries in Europe. China has, for whatever reason,  focused much more on quantum communication which is a different area than quantum computing, and I would say China is now the world leader on quantum communication. They had a breakthrough last summer where for the first time, they could send a quantum state up to a satellite and back down to Earth and so from one end of China to the other end, it hasn’t maintained its quantum state, maintained its coherence, and that could be useful for various applications, but of course that’s a different thing from quantum computing.

That’s an entanglement thing. You flip it one way in Shanghai and it instantly flips the same way in Beijing and in theory in communications, it can’t be hacked?

Okay well wait, there’s  a bunch of things to disentangle there so to speak. The first thing is the Chinese did actually demonstrate distributing this quantum entanglement across thousands of miles, which was a distance record for entanglement. But you have to be careful again, because entanglement cannot be used to send a signal faster than light, so if I have two entangled particles, I can measure one of them, and I see some axon like zero and then instantly I know that the other one is also zero. But it’s not like I got to choose that the outcome should be zero. It was going to be zero or one randomly.

But it is faster than the speed of light?

Well it’s instantaneous, but it is not a channel of communication, what it is is it’s a form of correlation, which you can actually use to produce correlation between far away particles that you could never have produced classically. That was the famous discovery made by John Bell in the 1960s that there were certain experiments that you could do on entangled particles that could never be explained by any sort of theory where the particles would just sort of agree in advance, ‘Listen if anyone asks, I’ll be a zero and you’ll be a one.’ Right? There’s no theory of that kind that explains the results of these experiments, so entanglement is a real phenomenon in the universe but it’s not useful for actually sending instantaneous signals right?

Einstein’s speed limit: you can’t send a signal faster than light is still upheld. Then the other thing you alluded to was quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, which is a different idea in quantum computing that involves having a theoretically unbreakable cryptography that you would get by sending qubits from across a channel, that actually doesn’t require entanglement. It can be done with current technology.

There are even companies which sell quantum cryptography devices today. So far there’s been only a very, very small market for them, because first of all, it doesn’t work over the standard internet. You need a special communication infrastructure to do it, and the current devices, the ones that use a fiber optic cable, they work over systems of about 10 miles. After about 10 miles, the photons lose their quantum coherence, so, it’s good enough for the financial district of a city, but not for really connecting the whole world. That’s why people were excited when China managed to do this to and from a satellite over thousands of miles. Unfortunately though, the bit rate I think is still extremely poor.

And it’s been argued by some that human consciousness is itself a quantum phenomenon. Does that mean anything to you?

It’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t think there’s good evidence at this time for consciousness involving quantum computation, and there are several difficulties that any theory of that kind would have to overcome. The first one is that the brain seems like an incredibly hot and wet and noisy environment. It seems like no place for a qubit.

But the answer to that has been that they do believe now that quantum phenomena are occurring like in a bird’s navigation systems and things like that.

Oh yeah, that’s right, there is no question that there are quantum effects that are important for biology, that is not in dispute for bird navigation.  Also green plant photosynthesis is a quantum effect, but maybe this is not so surprising, because all of chemistry is based on quantum mechanics right? So of course when you go to a small enough scale, you’re going to see quantum phenomena. What’s cool is that evolution was sometimes able to exploit these phenomena, but now the problem is if you want [to see a] human thought display, the brain is a very large system. This is not on the molecular scale, and once things are resolved to the level of a given neuron is inspiring a signal, across an axon or it’s not firing one, right, then that seems like very much a classical event. It’s an event that leaves records in its environment, that’s what I mean by that.

But to jump in on that one for just a second, but within the neuron itself, I mean we don’t know how a neuron does what it does, it could be operating at the Planck level, right?

The problem is that a neuron does not have anything of a nearly high enough energy to probe physics at the Planck scale. Not even the Large Hadron Collider is able to get anywhere near to Planck scale. This is 20 orders of magnitude bigger than the Planck scale, then yeah it is not ruled out.  There could be all sorts of weird quantum phenomena taking place in a neuron, but then one would then have the burden of showing that any of those phenomena were important for consciousness, as opposed to just being like another source of thermal noise, effectively. So that’s where that discussion is. If you want us to have a quantum account of consciousness, I think that there are further difficulties. The first thing is you have to have a reason why is that [needed], what does that help you to explain that was previously unexplained?

The answer to that might be along the lines of, there seem to be sorts of problems that the human brain can solve that don’t seem to be solvable by a Turing machine.

I’m not sure that that’s true actually. Now I would say we don’t know the answer to that. I mean the famous ‘halting problem’ that proveably no Turing machine is able to solve, but I can’t solve the halting problem either. If I could then I could immediately win the field medal in Math by resolving thousands of famous unsolved math problems. I try to solve math problems, but it’s very much hit or miss, so what we know from the work of Godel and Turing and those people is that you could never build a computer and some people have seized on that point.

Some people like Roger Penrose have seized on the observation by Godel and Turing that no machine can be a perfect oracle for mathematics. In order to say that the brain or at least the mathematician’s brain must be doing something that a Turing machine can’t, but the obvious problem with that argument is that humans are not perfect oracles for mathematics either to put it very mildly. To achieve the dreams of AI, a computer would not need to be a perfect mathematician, it would merely have to be as smart as or smarter than us.

So, we haven’t really talked about what a quantum computer would be used for, what it would be useful for, but that feeds into this debate as well about quantum mechanics and consciousness, because an issue is that the types of problems that we know that quantum computers would be good at, do not seem like a good fit to what human creativity is good at. To say it very briefly, the main applications that quantum computers are known to have are simulating quantum physics and chemistry, breaking public key encryption systems, and getting probably some modest speedups for optimization in machine learning type of problems. But the most dramatic speedups are for breaking public key cryptography and for simulating quantum mechanics, which I hope you agree are not exactly the things that humans evolved towards to help us survive on the savannah.

Right, well clearly birds don’t use quantum effects to navigate because quantum computing’s only good for breaking public key encryption, not for navigating north to south. You’re just saying that what we’re building machines to do in the Model-T era of quantum computers doesn’t seem to be what the brain does. Ergo, the brain is not a quantum device.

Well, I’m just saying that these are the burdens that this hypothesis has to pass to get taken seriously. You need to show where the quantum effects could actually be used in a computational way in the brain, and then you need to explain what they’re for that the brain could not be doing just as easily classically, and what you gain by postulating.

Fair enough. I think the answer to that, like if you really boil it down is, people say, “Well, we have consciousness, we experience the world,” and how that comes about does not seem to be a question we know how to ask scientifically, nor do we even know what the answer to that would look like scientifically, and so it seems like this big asterisk in the log book of life. Then you all of a sudden get this theory that has all this other weird stuff going on. You say that’s weird too. Maybe the two weirds are paired together, so I think it’s an intuitive thing more than anything.

Right well, that does seem to be what the argument boils down to. Consciousness is weird, quantum mechanics is weird, ergo maybe they’re related. I mean the problem is, as I was saying is just a bare quantum computer, it doesn’t seem a lot easier to understand how that could be conscious than to understand how an ordinary computer could be conscious. It seems like there’s a mystery in the one case just as in the other.

Regarding consciousness and quantum phenomenon, you talked briefly about some of the things that we plan to use quantum machines for, but surely Google and IBM aren’t investing all of that money because they want to break the public key encryption, right?

Right, that’s absolutely right. I think to be perfectly honest, Google and IBM and the other players are not completely sure themselves what the applications are going to be. They’re very excited about the applications to machine learning and optimization. To  be honest it’s sort of a question mark right now. Even if you had a perfectly functioning quantum computer with perfect coherence and millions of qubits, we’re not really sure yet exactly how much speed up it could give you for optimization and machine learning problems.

There are algorithms that might give a huge speedup but we don’t really know how to analyze them. We may just have to try them out with the quantum computer and see how they perform, and then there are algorithms that can’t be analyzed, that do give huge speedups, but only in very very special situations, where we don’t really know yet if they will be relevant to practice or not. What you typically can get for optimization and machine learning is a square root speedup, so you can typically solve those sorts of problems in something like the square root of the number of steps that a classical computer would need, and that is using one of the most famous quantum algorithms, which is called Grover’s algorithm, discovered in 1996.

A square root speedup is very useful that sort of doubles the size of the problem instance you could handle if you’re trying to do computational optimization. What used to take  two to the ‘n’ steps, now only takes 2 to the n over two. Okay, but that’s not an exponential speedup. The exponential speed-ups that we know about seem to be much more special. They do include breaking essentially all laws of public key encryption that we happen to use today to secure the internet, so that’s probably the most famous application of quantum computers. That’s called Shor’s algorithm, which was discovered in 1994, but even there there’s a lot of research today on building quantum-proof public key encryption systems, and actually NIST (National Institute for Standards & Technology) is going to have a competition over the next few years to establish standards for quantum resistance encryption, and it looks like we may actually migrate to that over the next decade or two. So, that is a solvable problem. I think the current encryption we use is vulnerable.

Now you know what I think is probably the most important application of quantum computing, at least that we know about today is actually the first point that Richard Feynman and the others thought of when they proposed this idea in the 1980s, and that’s simply to use a quantum computer to simulate quantum mechanics itself. That’s something that, it sounds almost too obvious to mention, it’s what a quantum computer does in its sleep, and yet that has an enormous range of applications.

If you want to design high temperature superconductors, we talked before about how current super conductors only work at close to absolute zero, well what if you wanted to solve that? That is a quantum mechanics problem. If you wanted to design higher efficiency solar panels, if you wanted to design better ways of making fertilizer, where it could be done at lower temperatures, these are all sort of, many body quantum materials and quantum chemistry problems, where, even with the best super computers that are available today, there’s only a limited amount that we can learn because of this exponentiality of amplitude.

So a quantum computer can give you an enormous new window into simulating physical chemistry and that is something that can have a lot of industrial applications. That’s not something that directly affects the end user in the  sense that you’re going to use it to check your email or play ‘angry birds’ or something, but that is something where, to improve on any of these sorts of material processes, could be billions of dollars of value.

Why is it that we don’t know more about what we would do with quantum machines? Because it would seem to my limited mind, that we know what we’re trying to build, we just don’t have the physics down on actually building it. We know in theory how it would behave, so is it that we don’t know how the machine will work, or we don’t have the imagination at this point, it’s just too soon to have thought it all through?

Well, one hypothesis would be that the quantum computers only do give you a speedup for certain specialized applications, and we have discovered many of those applications. That might be the truth of the matter. A second possibility would be that there are many more applications of quantum computers that haven’t been discovered yet, and we just haven’t had the imagination to invent the algorithms. I would guess that the truth is somewhere in between those two.

People have been thinking about quantum algorithms seriously now for about 25 years, so it’s not as long as people have been thinking about classical algorithms, but it’s still a significant chunk of time, and there is an immense body of theoretical understanding about quantum algorithms, what they can do, and also what they can’t do in various settings. We know we understand some things about what sorts of tasks seem to be hard even for quantum computers, but some people are disappointed that the set of maybe the most striking quantum algorithms have been in place since the 1990s.

Shor’s algorithm, Grover’s algorithm, quantum simulation and all of these things have been enormously generalized and applied to all sorts of other problems but there haven’t been that many entirely new families of thought of algorithms to be discovered. There was maybe one in 2007, something called the HHL algorithm for solving linear systems, and that led to a lot of other developments. The truth is that we’re not even very close to understanding the ultimate capabilities of classical algorithms, let alone quantum algorithms.

So you’ve probably heard of the P versus NP question? We can’t even rule out that there’s a super fast classical algorithm, they just solved the traveling salesman problem, to solve all these other NP-complete problems, although most of us believe that that doesn’t exist, but it’s a measure of how far we are from really understanding algorithms, that we can’t rule it out. Far less do we understand the ultimate capabilities and remits of quantum algorithms, but there’s a lot that we do know, and check back in another few years. I hope that we’ll know more.

Alrighty well, that’s a good place to leave it. Tell the readers how they can keep up with you and your writing. You mentioned your blog, can you throw out some?

So I’m pretty easy to find, my homepage is www.scottaaronson.com. I write a blog about quantum computing and also all sorts of other things, that’s www.scottaaronson.com/blog. If you go to my blog, I’ve got the links to a bunch of popular articles and lecture notes about quantum computing, and then I have my book, “Quantum Computing since Democritus,” which came out in 2013.

A reference to, ‘there’s nothing but atoms and the void?’

Yeah, that’s right.

Alrighty well thanks a bunch, Scott.

[babbleuk]

Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limits: An Interview with Scott Aaronson

Scott Aaronson

GigaOm CEO Byron Reese recently sat down with  Scott Aaronson to discuss Quantum Computing. Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin, where he also directs the UT Quantum Information Center. Prior to UT, he taught Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Aaronson’s research focuses on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity.

Byron Reese: Welcome Scott.

Scott Aaronson: Thanks, great to join you.

So it seems like you’re on a one-man crusade to dispel all the popular notions of quantum computing. Why don’t we start with that?

Okay, well I write a blog and basically what happens is that every time there’s some really outrageous claim about quantum computing, that gets into the press, which is often. People start emailing me and they ask me to respond to it. So just by circumstance, and because no one else sets out to do this, it became me who did a lot of the responding.

And so, the thing that you often have to respond to is this idea that a quantum computer can be zero and can have all these qubits that are zero and one simultaneously, and therefore they can solve really complex problems by looking at every possible combination of those all at once, and that’s not true. So explain why that isn’t true or what is true, how ever you want to do it.

Well, it takes some time to explain…

Take all the time you want.

All right, so a qubit, which is the quantum version of a bit, is advanced as can be in what we call a superposition of the zero and one state. So it’s neither definitely zero nor definitely one. And the main problem is that people always want to round this down to something that they already know. They’ll say, “Well you just mean that the bit is either zero or it’s one, and you just don’t know which,” right? And then you look at it and you see which one. Well, if that’s all there was to it, it wouldn’t be so interesting. And this is what the popular articles often do: they switch to saying, “Well it must be both zero and one simultaneously, it must be both,” Then well if I had 1,000 qubits, then they could explore let’s say ‘two to the 1,000th power’ if possible simultaneously and that must be what is producing this enormous ‘speedup’ that quantum computation promises.

That is gesturing towards something in the vicinity of the truth, but the problem is, that when you measure a qubit, you only see one result. You see a zero or a one; you don’t see both, and what quantum mechanics is at the core, is a way of calculating the probability that you’re going to see one outcome or another one when you make an observation. Now, the key point is that quantum states don’t obey the normal rules of probability that we know. So a probability is a number from zero to one, so you could have a 30% chance of rain tomorrow, but you never have a -30% chance, right, that would be nonsense, okay? But quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive or negative. In fact, they can even be complex numbers. So when you make a measurement, these amplitudes turn into probabilities, and so the larger amplitude becomes a larger probability of being something, but when a system is isolated, the amplitude can evolve by rules that are very unfamiliar to everyday experience. That is what pretty much everything you’ve ever heard about the weirdness of the quantum world boils down to.

So what a qubit really is is it’s a bit that has some amplitude for being zero and some amplitude for being one, so it has one of these complex numbers attached to each of the possibilities. If I had 1,000 qubits, likewise then there would be an amplitude that I would have to assign to every possible setting of all 1,000 bits. So there’s this sort of, quantum mechanics has been telling us since the 1920s, just to keep track of the state of let’s say, 1,000 measly particles, there is an immense object beneath the surface, and nature is somehow keeping track of this list of ‘two to the 1,000 power’ complex numbers if you like, which is more numbers than can be written in the entire observable universe. But again the problem is, when you make a measurement, you don’t actually see these numbers, you just see a single probabilistic outcome, so you could create what we call an equal superposition over all possible answers to your hard problems, that’s actually a very easy thing to do with a quantum computer.

The problem is if you just did that, then when you measure, then quantum mechanics tells you that all you’re going to see would be a random answer, and if you just wanted a random answer, well you could have picked one yourself with a lot less trouble, right? So the entire hope for getting a speed advantage from a quantum computer is to exploit the way that these amplitudes work differently than probabilities.

The main thing that amplitudes can do, that probabilities don’t do, is that they can interfere with each other. This is most famously illustrated in the ‘double slit experiment,’ which we were just discussing before the show. This is the thing where you shoot a photon one at a time at a stream with two small slits in it, and you look at where they end up on a screen behind it, and what you find is that there are certain spots where the photon never appears, almost never appears, and yet, if you close off one of the slits, then the photon could appear in those spots.

To say that again, like decreasing the number of paths that the photon could take to reach a certain spot, you can increase the chance that it gets to that spot. This is the thing that violates any conventional understanding of probability. If the photon was just going through one slit or the other, this would be nonsense, okay, whereas if you observe which slit the photon is going through more generally, if the information about which slit it’s going through, leaks out into the external world in any way, then again the photon can appear in these spots, and then you stop measuring to see which slit it went through and then it doesn’t appear there anymore. So the quantum mechanical explanation for this is that the photon has some amplitude of reaching the first spot for the first slit and some amplitude of reaching it for the second slit, and to find the final amplitude that it gets to a certain place, you have to add up the amplitudes from all the ways it could have reached that spot. Now if one of those amplitudes is positive and the other one is negative, then those amplitudes can, as we say, interfere destructively and cancel each other out, with the result being that the final amplitude is zero, and so that event doesn’t happen at all, whereas if you close off one off the slits then the amplitude is positive or it’s negative, and so then the photon can appear there.

Okay, so, that’s quantum interference, which as I said, is behind pretty much every goofy quantum effect you’ve ever heard about. Now the idea with the quantum computer, is to do something like the double slit experiment, but on a much more massive scale, where instead of just having one particle, we might have thousands or millions of particles, which could all be correlated with each other. The quantum version of correlation is called ‘entanglement,’ okay, and so the state of 1,000 qubits as we said, it involves two to the 1,000 amplitudes and so forth.

Now what they’re trying to do with every quantum algorithm, is you’re trying to choreograph things in such a way that for each wrong answer to your computational problem, some of the paths leading to that answer have positive amplitude, and others have negative amplitude, so on the whole, they cancel each other out, whereas the path leading to the right answer should all be ‘in phase’ with each other. They should all have amplitudes of the same side, say all positive or all negative. If you can mostly arrange for that to happen, then when you measure the state of your quantum computer, then you will see the right answer with a large probability. If you don’t see the right answer, you can simply keep repeating the computation until you do.

So nature really gives you a very bizarre ‘hammer’ that I think can be explained in five or ten minutes as I did, but it doesn’t really compress well to a one sentence output. People always want to round it down, whereas the quantum computer just tries all of the possible answers at once, but the truth is that if you want to see an advantage, you have to exploit this interference phenomenon. It was really only in the 1990s, so more than a decade after physicists like Richard Feynman, first proposed the idea of quantum computation, that people finally started figuring out: What are some nails that this hammer can hit? What is this interference ability good for?  Then that’s what really started quantum computation as a field.

And where are we with it now? Quantum machines exist right?

Oh yeah absolutely, so…

And how many are there?

Yeah well, so people have been doing experiments in quantum computation since the 1990s, and just within the last 3-4 years, it’s starting to see really serious investment, where it is no longer just the sort of academic pursuit it was when I entered this field around 2000. It is now Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, a bunch of startup companies, all are investing on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Why are they so expensive?

Well, you’re trying to build a technology that’s never been built before. At a bare minimum, so there are many different approaches to quantum computing, but if you’re doing superconducting qubits, which is maybe the most popular approach today, then at a bare minimum, you need to cool everything down to 10 mKB, or so, so that your chip superconducts and you see the quantum behavior, so that means that you need to see an enormous cooling system. Then you need all these custom electronics to send signals to the qubit. Now what people are trying to do is integrate a large number of qubits and it’s a serious operation.

And who’s the current record holder right now? How many qubits?

It’s a mistake to just look at the pure number of qubits, because there’s a tradeoff. What we really care about is the quality of the qubits, so the qubit that maintains it’s quantum state for a long time, without leaking it into the environment is a very good qubit. A qubit that just sort of leaks its state really fast is a bad qubit.

Like a discount qubit.

Yeah exactly, so, a bad qubit you can’t use for very many steps of computation, right? You can maybe do a few steps of quantum computation but then the qubit will just die, it will just revert to being a classical bit. So you really need to look at quality. If you just cared about the sheer number, there’s a startup company called D-Wave that notoriously has been selling devices with 2,000 qubits. A few people have bought them, but analysis over the past 5 years has found that the qubits do not seem to be of a good enough quality to see a clear speed up over a classical computer, when you do a fair comparison.

What players like Google and IBM are trying to do right now, is something similar to what D-Wave did, mainly chip with a large number of integrated superconducting qubits, but now with qubits of a much, much higher quality. So roughly the D-Wave qubits could maintain their coherence for some nanoseconds, and the new generation of superconducting qubits can maintain their quantum coherence for a scale of tens of microseconds, which doesn’t sound like a long time but that’s tens of thousands of times longer than nanoseconds, and it gives you a lot more room to view interesting quantum operations.

So to answer your question, with this new generation of qubits, I think that Google and IBM and Rigetti have all built chips on the order of 20 qubits, which work reasonably well, not as well as you would like, and they’re right now in a race actually to scale this up to about 50-70 qubits. The biggest question (they will surely be able to do that) is how well will these qubits perform when they’re all integrated in one chip? Will they still maintain their quantum coherence long enough for us to actually execute interesting algorithms and see an interesting speedup?

So when you say they become just a plain old ordinary bit, is that like a light bulb burning out and then they’re not good for anything, or is that like a reset button?

There’s a reset button. You can always re-initialize the qubit, but then again you have a very short time to try to do quantum operations before the qubit leaks into the environment.

So, how big are these machines? If you went into Google, and said, “show me.” Because we tell all these stories about how the first computers filled a room.

Yeah well I was just out there a few months ago in their lab in Santa Barbara. It does fill a room, but it is I guess a device, each one is the size of a small room, but almost all of that is just the cooling system, and it’s the controlled electronics and the actual chip where the qubits are the size of an ordinary computer chip.

Is room temperature quantum computing, would that ever be a thing?

Conceivably. There are proposals, including optical, photonic quantum computing, yeah that if one could get them to work at all, then they could work at room temperature. The superconducting approach which is maybe the furthest point along right now, does currently require very low temperatures, and trapped ions which is maybe the second approach after superconducting also requires very low temperatures right now.

Is the development of these machines progressing along a Moore’s Law kind of arc? Are they doubling by some measure in some capability every X months?

I think it’s too early to identify any Moore’s Law pattern. I mean for god sakes we don’t even know which technology is going to be the right one. The community is not converged around is it going to be superconducting or trapped ions or something else? You can make plots of the number of qubits and the coherence time of those qubits, and you do see a strong improvement. But the number of qubits, let’s say it’s gone up from one or two to 20, it’s kind of hard to see an exponential in those numbers.

Actually the coherence time, if you plot it over the past 20 years, I think the error rate has been going down more or less exponentially, so there is sort of Moore’s law there. Basically the rates of de-coherence — unwanted interaction between the qubits and their environment — are still too high. They’re still higher than they need to be for us to scale this technology up to say millions of qubits, but on the other hand, they are orders of magnitude better than they were 20 years ago when people first started doing these experiments.

That sounds exponential.

Well yeah, so I think there is there, but the error rates — we know first of all they can’t be pushed down forever, but secondly they don’t have to be. This is actually a very important point: there were physicists in 1990 when quantum computing was brand new, who said, “This could never work, not even in principle, because you will never perfectly isolate a qubit from its environment, and if it’s not perfectly isolated, then you can only do so many steps until everything is dead. You’re never going to be able to scale this up.”

Now what changed most people’s views, was a fundamental discovery in the mid 90s, which was called quantum error correction, and quantum fault power, and what that said is you don’t actually need to get the rate of coherence down to zero, you merely need to make it very small. Let’s say initially it shows one in a billion chance of an error per time per logical operation would suffice. Now I think the estimates are more on the order of one in a thousand, but as long as the decoherence rate is well enough, what was found is that if you can encode the logical qubits, you care about across the collective state of many physical qubits, using a clever error-correcting code, in such a way that even if it’s any, let’s say 1% of your physical qubits are in a dock, go out like that lightbulb, you can detect that. You fix it and you recover the information that you care about from the remaining 99%, and then you just keep going.

The main engineering goal in this field, since the discovery of fault tolerance, is to get the physical decoherence rate to be well enough that you can start using these error correcting codes, and then push the effective decoherence rate down to zero. So we’re not quite there yet. Basically if you just look at one or two qubits in isolation, then the Google group and others, just I think four or five years ago, have gotten the decoherence rates good enough, that if you just looked at the qubits in isolation, it looks like they’re you’re already good enough, you’re already past the threshold for fault tolerance. I mean that itself is fairly recent.

But now the problem is that when you try to integrate a large number of qubits into a single chip, like let’s say 50 of them or 100, then you need much more controls that are electronic, there are much more interactions, and that pushes the rate of decoherence back up. So now the challenge is to maintain that decoherence rate where you could apply these error correcting codes while integrating a huge number of qubits in a single system.

Where is the United States compared to other countries in terms of investment and accomplishments?  Is the majority of the activity in the field here in this country, or are we just a small part of it?

I would say that the U.S. is the leader. The efforts of Google and IBM and Rigetti and the group in Maryland which is the leader in trapped ions, are all US-based. Also many of the leading theoretical groups like MIT, CalTech, Berkeley. Canada also happens to be a huge player in quantum computing, particularly the University of Waterloo, which may be the world’s biggest center for this field.

Besides that, Europe is a big player. In fact, they recently got a $1 billion quantum information funding initiative for the EU, so the Netherlands especially, well the UK (that will no longer be a part of the EU) and a bunch of the countries in Europe. China has, for whatever reason,  focused much more on quantum communication which is a different area than quantum computing, and I would say China is now the world leader on quantum communication. They had a breakthrough last summer where for the first time, they could send a quantum state up to a satellite and back down to Earth and so from one end of China to the other end, it hasn’t maintained its quantum state, maintained its coherence, and that could be useful for various applications, but of course that’s a different thing from quantum computing.

That’s an entanglement thing. You flip it one way in Shanghai and it instantly flips the same way in Beijing and in theory in communications, it can’t be hacked?

Okay well wait, there’s  a bunch of things to disentangle there so to speak. The first thing is the Chinese did actually demonstrate distributing this quantum entanglement across thousands of miles, which was a distance record for entanglement. But you have to be careful again, because entanglement cannot be used to send a signal faster than light, so if I have two entangled particles, I can measure one of them, and I see some axon like zero and then instantly I know that the other one is also zero. But it’s not like I got to choose that the outcome should be zero. It was going to be zero or one randomly.

But it is faster than the speed of light?

Well it’s instantaneous, but it is not a channel of communication, what it is is it’s a form of correlation, which you can actually use to produce correlation between far away particles that you could never have produced classically. That was the famous discovery made by John Bell in the 1960s that there were certain experiments that you could do on entangled particles that could never be explained by any sort of theory where the particles would just sort of agree in advance, ‘Listen if anyone asks, I’ll be a zero and you’ll be a one.’ Right? There’s no theory of that kind that explains the results of these experiments, so entanglement is a real phenomenon in the universe but it’s not useful for actually sending instantaneous signals right?

Einstein’s speed limit: you can’t send a signal faster than light is still upheld. Then the other thing you alluded to was quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, which is a different idea in quantum computing that involves having a theoretically unbreakable cryptography that you would get by sending qubits from across a channel, that actually doesn’t require entanglement. It can be done with current technology.

There are even companies which sell quantum cryptography devices today. So far there’s been only a very, very small market for them, because first of all, it doesn’t work over the standard internet. You need a special communication infrastructure to do it, and the current devices, the ones that use a fiber optic cable, they work over systems of about 10 miles. After about 10 miles, the photons lose their quantum coherence, so, it’s good enough for the financial district of a city, but not for really connecting the whole world. That’s why people were excited when China managed to do this to and from a satellite over thousands of miles. Unfortunately though, the bit rate I think is still extremely poor.

And it’s been argued by some that human consciousness is itself a quantum phenomenon. Does that mean anything to you?

It’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t think there’s good evidence at this time for consciousness involving quantum computation, and there are several difficulties that any theory of that kind would have to overcome. The first one is that the brain seems like an incredibly hot and wet and noisy environment. It seems like no place for a qubit.

But the answer to that has been that they do believe now that quantum phenomena are occurring like in a bird’s navigation systems and things like that.

Oh yeah, that’s right, there is no question that there are quantum effects that are important for biology, that is not in dispute for bird navigation.  Also green plant photosynthesis is a quantum effect, but maybe this is not so surprising, because all of chemistry is based on quantum mechanics right? So of course when you go to a small enough scale, you’re going to see quantum phenomena. What’s cool is that evolution was sometimes able to exploit these phenomena, but now the problem is if you want [to see a] human thought display, the brain is a very large system. This is not on the molecular scale, and once things are resolved to the level of a given neuron is inspiring a signal, across an axon or it’s not firing one, right, then that seems like very much a classical event. It’s an event that leaves records in its environment, that’s what I mean by that.

But to jump in on that one for just a second, but within the neuron itself, I mean we don’t know how a neuron does what it does, it could be operating at the Planck level, right?

The problem is that a neuron does not have anything of a nearly high enough energy to probe physics at the Planck scale. Not even the Large Hadron Collider is able to get anywhere near to Planck scale. This is 20 orders of magnitude bigger than the Planck scale, then yeah it is not ruled out.  There could be all sorts of weird quantum phenomena taking place in a neuron, but then one would then have the burden of showing that any of those phenomena were important for consciousness, as opposed to just being like another source of thermal noise, effectively. So that’s where that discussion is. If you want us to have a quantum account of consciousness, I think that there are further difficulties. The first thing is you have to have a reason why is that [needed], what does that help you to explain that was previously unexplained?

The answer to that might be along the lines of, there seem to be sorts of problems that the human brain can solve that don’t seem to be solvable by a Turing machine.

I’m not sure that that’s true actually. Now I would say we don’t know the answer to that. I mean the famous ‘halting problem’ that proveably no Turing machine is able to solve, but I can’t solve the halting problem either. If I could then I could immediately win the field medal in Math by resolving thousands of famous unsolved math problems. I try to solve math problems, but it’s very much hit or miss, so what we know from the work of Godel and Turing and those people is that you could never build a computer and some people have seized on that point.

Some people like Roger Penrose have seized on the observation by Godel and Turing that no machine can be a perfect oracle for mathematics. In order to say that the brain or at least the mathematician’s brain must be doing something that a Turing machine can’t, but the obvious problem with that argument is that humans are not perfect oracles for mathematics either to put it very mildly. To achieve the dreams of AI, a computer would not need to be a perfect mathematician, it would merely have to be as smart as or smarter than us.

So, we haven’t really talked about what a quantum computer would be used for, what it would be useful for, but that feeds into this debate as well about quantum mechanics and consciousness, because an issue is that the types of problems that we know that quantum computers would be good at, do not seem like a good fit to what human creativity is good at. To say it very briefly, the main applications that quantum computers are known to have are simulating quantum physics and chemistry, breaking public key encryption systems, and getting probably some modest speedups for optimization in machine learning type of problems. But the most dramatic speedups are for breaking public key cryptography and for simulating quantum mechanics, which I hope you agree are not exactly the things that humans evolved towards to help us survive on the savannah.

Right, well clearly birds don’t use quantum effects to navigate because quantum computing’s only good for breaking public key encryption, not for navigating north to south. You’re just saying that what we’re building machines to do in the Model-T era of quantum computers doesn’t seem to be what the brain does. Ergo, the brain is not a quantum device.

Well, I’m just saying that these are the burdens that this hypothesis has to pass to get taken seriously. You need to show where the quantum effects could actually be used in a computational way in the brain, and then you need to explain what they’re for that the brain could not be doing just as easily classically, and what you gain by postulating.

Fair enough. I think the answer to that, like if you really boil it down is, people say, “Well, we have consciousness, we experience the world,” and how that comes about does not seem to be a question we know how to ask scientifically, nor do we even know what the answer to that would look like scientifically, and so it seems like this big asterisk in the log book of life. Then you all of a sudden get this theory that has all this other weird stuff going on. You say that’s weird too. Maybe the two weirds are paired together, so I think it’s an intuitive thing more than anything.

Right well, that does seem to be what the argument boils down to. Consciousness is weird, quantum mechanics is weird, ergo maybe they’re related. I mean the problem is, as I was saying is just a bare quantum computer, it doesn’t seem a lot easier to understand how that could be conscious than to understand how an ordinary computer could be conscious. It seems like there’s a mystery in the one case just as in the other.

Regarding consciousness and quantum phenomenon, you talked briefly about some of the things that we plan to use quantum machines for, but surely Google and IBM aren’t investing all of that money because they want to break the public key encryption, right?

Right, that’s absolutely right. I think to be perfectly honest, Google and IBM and the other players are not completely sure themselves what the applications are going to be. They’re very excited about the applications to machine learning and optimization. To  be honest it’s sort of a question mark right now. Even if you had a perfectly functioning quantum computer with perfect coherence and millions of qubits, we’re not really sure yet exactly how much speed up it could give you for optimization and machine learning problems.

There are algorithms that might give a huge speedup but we don’t really know how to analyze them. We may just have to try them out with the quantum computer and see how they perform, and then there are algorithms that can’t be analyzed, that do give huge speedups, but only in very very special situations, where we don’t really know yet if they will be relevant to practice or not. What you typically can get for optimization and machine learning is a square root speedup, so you can typically solve those sorts of problems in something like the square root of the number of steps that a classical computer would need, and that is using one of the most famous quantum algorithms, which is called Grover’s algorithm, discovered in 1996.

A square root speedup is very useful that sort of doubles the size of the problem instance you could handle if you’re trying to do computational optimization. What used to take  two to the ‘n’ steps, now only takes 2 to the n over two. Okay, but that’s not an exponential speedup. The exponential speed-ups that we know about seem to be much more special. They do include breaking essentially all laws of public key encryption that we happen to use today to secure the internet, so that’s probably the most famous application of quantum computers. That’s called Shor’s algorithm, which was discovered in 1994, but even there there’s a lot of research today on building quantum-proof public key encryption systems, and actually NIST (National Institute for Standards & Technology) is going to have a competition over the next few years to establish standards for quantum resistance encryption, and it looks like we may actually migrate to that over the next decade or two. So, that is a solvable problem. I think the current encryption we use is vulnerable.

Now you know what I think is probably the most important application of quantum computing, at least that we know about today is actually the first point that Richard Feynman and the others thought of when they proposed this idea in the 1980s, and that’s simply to use a quantum computer to simulate quantum mechanics itself. That’s something that, it sounds almost too obvious to mention, it’s what a quantum computer does in its sleep, and yet that has an enormous range of applications.

If you want to design high temperature superconductors, we talked before about how current super conductors only work at close to absolute zero, well what if you wanted to solve that? That is a quantum mechanics problem. If you wanted to design higher efficiency solar panels, if you wanted to design better ways of making fertilizer, where it could be done at lower temperatures, these are all sort of, many body quantum materials and quantum chemistry problems, where, even with the best super computers that are available today, there’s only a limited amount that we can learn because of this exponentiality of amplitude.

So a quantum computer can give you an enormous new window into simulating physical chemistry and that is something that can have a lot of industrial applications. That’s not something that directly affects the end user in the  sense that you’re going to use it to check your email or play ‘angry birds’ or something, but that is something where, to improve on any of these sorts of material processes, could be billions of dollars of value.

Why is it that we don’t know more about what we would do with quantum machines? Because it would seem to my limited mind, that we know what we’re trying to build, we just don’t have the physics down on actually building it. We know in theory how it would behave, so is it that we don’t know how the machine will work, or we don’t have the imagination at this point, it’s just too soon to have thought it all through?

Well, one hypothesis would be that the quantum computers only do give you a speedup for certain specialized applications, and we have discovered many of those applications. That might be the truth of the matter. A second possibility would be that there are many more applications of quantum computers that haven’t been discovered yet, and we just haven’t had the imagination to invent the algorithms. I would guess that the truth is somewhere in between those two.

People have been thinking about quantum algorithms seriously now for about 25 years, so it’s not as long as people have been thinking about classical algorithms, but it’s still a significant chunk of time, and there is an immense body of theoretical understanding about quantum algorithms, what they can do, and also what they can’t do in various settings. We know we understand some things about what sorts of tasks seem to be hard even for quantum computers, but some people are disappointed that the set of maybe the most striking quantum algorithms have been in place since the 1990s.

Shor’s algorithm, Grover’s algorithm, quantum simulation and all of these things have been enormously generalized and applied to all sorts of other problems but there haven’t been that many entirely new families of thought of algorithms to be discovered. There was maybe one in 2007, something called the HHL algorithm for solving linear systems, and that led to a lot of other developments. The truth is that we’re not even very close to understanding the ultimate capabilities of classical algorithms, let alone quantum algorithms.

So you’ve probably heard of the P versus NP question? We can’t even rule out that there’s a super fast classical algorithm, they just solved the traveling salesman problem, to solve all these other NP-complete problems, although most of us believe that that doesn’t exist, but it’s a measure of how far we are from really understanding algorithms, that we can’t rule it out. Far less do we understand the ultimate capabilities and remits of quantum algorithms, but there’s a lot that we do know, and check back in another few years. I hope that we’ll know more.

Alrighty well, that’s a good place to leave it. Tell the readers how they can keep up with you and your writing. You mentioned your blog, can you throw out some?

So I’m pretty easy to find, my homepage is www.scottaaronson.com. I write a blog about quantum computing and also all sorts of other things, that’s www.scottaaronson.com/blog. If you go to my blog, I’ve got the links to a bunch of popular articles and lecture notes about quantum computing, and then I have my book, “Quantum Computing since Democritus,” which came out in 2013.

A reference to, ‘there’s nothing but atoms and the void?’

Yeah, that’s right.

Alrighty well thanks a bunch, Scott.

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2019/01/17/quantum-computing-capabilities-and-limits-an-interview-with-scott-aaronson/