“I understand that, honey. But I have to know, just for my own curiosity: how long have you been thinking about this? The conversation we’re having right now, in my office: is it something you’ve been planning for years?”

Sophia shook her head. “Months, maybe. I mean, sure, my interest in neuroscience was piqued by all the exposure I had while I was growing up to dinner-table conversations about what you and C-plus and the others were up to concerning DB. But, the idea of actually digging into that thing and running some code? That wasn’t even on the table, technically speaking, until Hole in the Wall came online.”

“I kind of know what that is,” Marcus said. “The latest and greatest processor farm. But you’re going to have to help me out a little.”

“It’s at a place about a hundred miles from here called Hole in the Wall Coulee—an inlet on the Columbia River. Coincidentally, just a little downstream of Ephrata. They built it on the site of an old aluminum plant. So it’s got cheap juice and cold water.”

“Data centers are all over that part of the state,” Marcus pointed out. “Have been for decades. What makes Hole in the Wall a game-changer for DB?”

“It’s the first one exclusively built around quantum computers.”

“And you think that quantum computers are better at simulating brain processes?” The skepticism in Marcus’s voice was gentle but unmistakable.

“I’m agnostic on that. But I know—and there’s ample peer-reviewed research to prove—that they are better at carrying out the mathematical operations that are needed to carry out secure, distributed computation.”

“Distributed . . . in the cloud,” Zula murmured.

It was enough to elicit a little sigh from her daughter.

This was a generational thing. Zula was old enough to have lived through the transition from most computation’s being local, contained within her desktop or her laptop, to its being distributed across remote servers that might be anywhere in the world. “In the cloud” had been the buzzword for it when it was a new idea, but merely to use the term nowadays was to date yourself.

“And by ‘secure’ you mean—”

“It means that the processes—millions of separate executables running on god knows how many different real or virtual machines—don’t have to trust each other. They don’t have to know each other. When they have to communicate, they do it—” Sophia closed her eyes momentarily, maybe to conceal an eye-roll. “They do it the way all communication happens nowadays, which is through distributed-ledger-type stuff.”

“Blockchain?” Zula asked.

Actively suppressing another eye-roll, Sophia answered, “Way, way more efficient algorithms that do what blockchain was supposed to do twenty years ago. But still requiring a lot of fast computation.”