#9: “The Quantamp”

 

Quantum Anonymous 9:

“The Quantamp”

 

Remember what I told you about the Royal Electricians and Mechanical Engineers? When I signed on that dotted line, I was signing me self away to the military. That worked out both good and bad. Sometimes it’s good to be property of something that big. When problems came up, I was part of something right and well established to sort them out for me.

Unless, of course, the British Army was the problem.

In which case it was a matter of grin and bear it. This was the military, and you did what they said. Didn’t matter if you weren’t wearing a kit. We Cold War lads learned fast: once you’re in… you’re in.

The first place it played out was right there at the BBC. Fabian had brought me in under the radar. I hadn’t asked any questions about pay or hours. Had the good sense to let that sort itself out. Well, that took a moment. I’d been bashing away at the ol’ “computational machinery” for a month and was getting a bit knackered. Skipping meals, I was, not just to make time. But also for the fact that I hadn’t a bloody pound to my name!

Fabian dropped by one morning, as was his custom. We discussed CPU units a while, and I let it out that I was skint. What’s more, there hadn’t been a BBC bird bimbling by, asking for my national insurance number or any particulars for my pay pack. Fabian just reached into his coat pocket. Pulled out a hundred pounds cash and said: “That should do.”

Hundred quid was a cracking good month, those days. All I said was “thank you, sir.” And that’s how it went.

Which is how I became Fabian’s.

Bloke owned me, you see.

I wasn’t sharp enough to sort that out in my youth. A bit nervous to be meddling with things like pay and particulars at a place like the BBC. Besides, off the books was brilliant for taxes. So I just went along with it all. We proceeded in the studio, but I was officially invisible. But firmly in Fabian’s pocket. Which is just how that one likes to operate: off in the shadows and totally in control. 

From that shadowy margin we created something genuinely brilliant or truly tragic. Really, I can’t decide. All these years later, I’m still asking myself that.

Back in 1964, only question I was asking was what to call the bloody thing we were cobbling together in studio 3C. 

Fabian it was who named “The Quantamp”. Had a nice ring and made us all feel quite legitimate. 

This was quite important, as we were working from dreams.

Sir Fabian’s dreams.

Been dreaming about it for years, he had. Literally dreaming about this piece of machinery we were building.

How it happened was that he’d knacker off and wake up with a start somewhere, scribbling things down without knowing their meaning. He traveled often, so lots of that was done on hotel stationary. Later he’d line up his dreams with particular longitude and latitude lines he was sleeping along. Such calculations led him to the heart of Quantum Darkness. But that was much later. In 1964 Fabian was still brilliant. And his mess of hotel stationary sketches added up to a real Quantum breakthrough.

Most of Fabian’s theory wasn’t original. People were already arranging sonic values through “super positioned” notes in 1964. (Remember that notion from our earlier entries? Told you there was some thinking and learning with this business, didn’t I?) That super-positioned note would allow a single sonic value to exist within several octaves and tonal locations at once. Fabian’s breakthrough was piecing together a sonic process to leverage the principles of quantum interference and “geomagnetic resonance.”

That’s what really got The Quantamp rocking.

Like any amplifier, it started with a traditional analog signal from your electric guitar. But instead of amplifying that signal through vacuum tube circuits, the input was processed by a series of specialized tubes been made at CERN.

That’s right, CERN.

Still going strong today, mostly as a particle accelerator. Back then it was the bloody octopus of Quantum, reaching out every which way, trying to find its way through The Veil.

Word had it the Russians were up to the same business on their side of the curtain. So all the stops were pulled and no approach was considered too bizarre. The music element was a fringe division, sure enough, but they were still running it on legitimate military budgets.

Now mind you, what I’m explaining with clarity today formed itself from out of fog, back then. Fabian would drop a bit here and there. I’d ask a question and get something or nothing, depending on what I thought was his mood. Really it was clearance issues.

It was halfway into the year before I realized I was front and center on a military black ops project.

Off the books and in the shadows, I was. Place I’ve stayed most of my life, really. My REME backing gave me the clear, lads from CERN gave us the gear, and BBC was our cover for some rather shadowy tinkering.

Remember, these were Cold War years. Whatever we were doing, the Ruskies were doing twice as fast on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

At least, that’s what we reasoned.

So this Quantum exploration was full on. Bloody expensive stuff-- unbelievably so. Covered the business with nuclear, they did. Figured the gen pop wasn’t ready for timeline slides, and I believe they chose right.

All this black budget, reality bending business got slotted under “nuclear development” for the press. Fleet Street got their atom age/disaster stories to sell papers. In exchange, Quantum got its breathing room to develop. Worked brilliantly in the 1980s, that strategy. Here you had people protesting nuclear power plants, when the real danger was multiple reality stunts! (Mum, I had mentioned, wouldn’t be proud.)

With no heat from the press or public, Quantum was able to meander through whatever development phases were needed.

One of them involved music production. That’s not as daft as it sounds when you know your subatomic properties. Sounds are vibrations, the quantum universe is waves, and those waves vibrate on various frequencies. Working along those lines, lads at CERN had been tapping away at some rather marvelous gear that shipped our way.

They were vacuum tubes initially meant for computers, inducing quantum excitation within electron processing. Then someone in the lab asked the question:

“What would happen if they were in sound amplifiers?”

After a few rounds down the pub, I suppose, someone followed up with another question:

“What if those were guitar amplifiers in pop songs?”

Probably the idea was a top ten hit that would topple the Soviet Union.

As I says, daft to look back at, but such were the notions floating about in Cold War days.

From there, the math was elementary. Just one fellow was set to produce a pop song that would properly topple communism: Sir Fabian Kevorkian.

So off the CERN gear goes, through military channels, right to the BBC. I unpacked the lot, myself. And weren’t they something. Their main trick was converting analog audio into a coherent wave function. This was how they set about “quantizing” sound.

How that quantized sound would then be produced through the recording process was the problem Fabian and I set out to solve.

Fabian’s dream notes, believe it or not, had the gist of what would make that happen. My job was filling in the missing bits and creating some of my own, while building the gear to realize it all.

The first part was basic computer logic. Cadging some overstock pieces from the BBC computational machine, I got creative with my soldering and built up a network of quantum oscillators.

That split the sound waves into multiple, overlapping states. From there, we could manipulate the phase and amplitude of the audio signal at a quantum level, creating a very delicate interference pattern.

And wasn’t that bugger touchy! Took just the right settings to make it both stable and dynamic.

Mind you, this was pre-digital, so we didn’t have the luxury of binary precision. Spend all night twiddling knobs and banging our head to find those sweet-spots. Would you believe they changed on rainy days? Well, they did. Once we sorted that all out, I boosted things with a few feedback loops and phase shifters to hold the business together.

Now if you stopped right there, we had a cracking amp that did some bloody brilliant things with sound.

That sound got around.

And nobody could produce it but Fabian Kevorkian at the BBC.

While the sessions piled up, the money rolled in and many a champagne evening followed. Fabian was a whirl with the birds, always out on the town, leaving me to sort out what was left of the job.

This was the black magic part, really. I call it black magic but it was more like black budget and produced more than a few blasted curses while I tried to pull it into bloody shape.

Tall order, indeed. But when the lights dimmed and the BBC emptied, yours truly was at that Quantamp. Working from hotel stationary and Fabian’s dreams, I hammered away at realizing the true powers of that machine:

Quantum reality shifting. 

CERN had something to do with that… but just something. Their idea was quantum audio shifting. They imagined these layered notes might fabricate intricate subliminal messaging. Reckoning that would slip past Ivan’s radar, they planned on beaming freedom into the USSR.

Fabian is responsible for taking that notion to entirely different realms, through those hotel stationary dreams.

Which has always given me pause to ponder.

When I look back at this process, it’s not so much some blokes piecing together a Quantamp. It’s more like a Quantamp piecing itself together through some blokes.

The whole adventure has its own state of being, even in the dreams it filtered our way. How else would you reckon such far-fetched things come together?

Well, I’ll let you decide that for yourself. Me? I’m a believer.

Which brings us to Fabian Kevorkian’s dream notes. Right there out of the ether, from nowhere itself, came the breakthrough idea which changed our reality forever.

I still remember seeing the words, scratched out on some rather posh stationary from the Hotel Chậteau Gǜtsch:

 

Ley Lines

 

More the Morrow.