I am standing looking at the quantum computer, trying and failing to muster an appropriate sense of reverence. It is a lovely contraption: a stack of copper tiers lined with delicate electrodes and elaborate networks of plastic tubing. It is an impressive contraption: an example, I have been told, of some of the most advanced technology in the field. My lab guide proudly points out each of the computer’s components in turn – the refrigeration system humming with liquid nitrogen, a fastidiously positioned series of lasers, one tiny sapphire processing chip – and watches carefully for my reaction. I am trying and failing to be enthusiastic. I can only smile politely, swallow the nagging swells of a yawn, and do my best not to look bored.

Someday quantum computers will, their cheerleaders swear, sift through unprecedented volumes of information and solve processing problems once thought intractable. The military hopes to use them for extra-secure encryption, biologists hope to use them to unpack the mysteries of proteins, investment banks hope to use them to analyze minute market fluctuations, and everyone hopes to use them to store giant caches of data. But quantum computing is still a young field, and quantum computers can’t do any of it yet. At present, the one in front of me can factor the number fifteen.

That’s not why I’m struggling to stay interested, though. I don’t really mind that this machine is still performing unsophisticated tasks. I care more about the way it performs those tasks – because, in this sense, even the most rudimentary quantum computer is fascinating. It’s an oblique machine that thinks in tangents, uses ambivalence as fuel, and stubbornly stops working if asked too directly for an answer. It’s a machine whose very existence begs big questions about technological systems and the way we make sense of information – in short, about the nature of knowledge itself.

But no one here, in this cutting-edge lab, wants to unpack any of that. My lab guide is talking about the quantum computer as if it were an especially fancy toaster. A new, shiny machine with some nice bells and whistles. A new, shiny machine with no insight, no vision, and no politics. And it’s hard to get excited about that.

One way to talk about a quantum computer is to talk about the physics behind it. Its processing bits rely on superposition and entanglement, two characteristically quantum states. Superposition refers to the ability of a particle to exist as two distinct things at once; the classic physics analogy describes it as a cat that’s both dead and alive. Entanglement is essentially a version of superposition that occurs between multiple particles. Entangled particles coordinate their properties instantly, even when separated by distance. A change to a particle in an entangled set registers instantaneously in the rest.

In theory, the use of superposition and entanglement should give a quantum computer a processing edge over a traditional computer. Because they are superpositioned, a quantum computer’s bits (called qubits, short for quantum bits) each consider two pieces of information at once – 1 and 0 rather than 1 or 0, as in traditional binary code. And because they are entangled, they share their results instantaneously, as a matter of course. In theory, this means that qubits consider more information in a single step than bits, and that the advantage grows exponentially with each step of a calculation. A quantum computer should be able to do work that would tie up a traditional computer for hours, months, or years.

In practice, quantum computers are operating nowhere near this capacity. Qubits work messily, and don’t yet lend themselves reliably to systems. Researchers get excited if their qubits produce any answer a stable percentage of the time. The difficulty is magnified by another idiosyncrasy of quantum mechanics: quantum properties are ultra-sensitive to disturbance. Both superpositioned and entangled states break down if observed or measured. Physicists argue about what exactly it means to ‘observe’ or ‘measure’ something in a quantum state – a strange semantic debate that has dogged quantum mechanics since its inception – but the result remains the same. A qubit is easily derailed. The best can manage a few microseconds’ worth of work. Just enough time to factor a two-digit number, and hint at the possibilities of other, more interesting ways to think.

***

When I think about quantum computing, I don’t think about qubits. I’m reminded instead of a reclusive physicist I met on a artist residency at an old junk shop. He came to the space sometimes to browse books and sift through knick-knacks, and because he was odd, unassimilable, and probably brilliant, everyone wanted his attention. He largely ignored us, though, with the noted exception of the touchy-feely sculptor who shared my room. She knew nothing about physics, but she, he decided, understood physics. And so they embarked on a collaboration. He taught her to map algorithms in pretty geometric patterns, she helped organize the notes for his latest thought experiment, and they talked, ramblingly, for hours at a time.

The sculptor knew I was jealous, so she invited me along on one of their visits. Mostly I sat smiling politely while the two of them carried on a conversation I didn’t know how to join. They weren’t talking about the same thing, usually – he focused on the behavior of particles, she the quirks of creative process – but each spent a lot of time nodding, gesticulating, and gazing significantly into middle distance. I must have looked glazed, because an hour or so in, the physicist turned to me pointedly. You can’t always tell what you’re learning, he said. Or: you have to circle around a thing to really figure it out. Something to that effect. I kind of forget. Before I had shaken myself to full attention, he abruptly stopped talking, and the pointed look left his eyes. Noting the tattoo on my leg – a big blue ribcage – he pointed and giggled. “What is that?” he asked, shaking his head, bemused. “What is that?”

***

I gleaned some good information from the conversation with the physicist and the sculptor, but it seemed a little like using a multi-million dollar machine to factor the number fifteen. Not a particularly efficient use of resources. The people building quantum computers share this concern. Most experimental research in the field is aimed at fabricating more reliable qubits. The solutions are often poetic: qubits insulated by sapphires and diamonds, cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero by superconducting liquids. The solutions are always meticulous: qubits laid out in careful circuits with lasers and mirrors, modeled on algorithms born of years of painstaking thought.

I’m not immune to the bells and whistles, then. But I am wary of marveling too much, in part because it makes me forget the big-picture questions that necessitated them. One of the first theorists of quantum computing has insisted publicly that he doesn’t want to keep up with the technology’s practical developments. He thought up quantum computers while writing papers that were ultimately about something else, after all. One attempted to prove the existence of parallel universes; another sought to articulate the absolute limits of a computation. For the theorist, quantum computers are most importantly ideas about the nature of knowledge and reality. And with explanations that big at stake, he has trouble caring much what qubits look like.

***

My frustration at the lab felt similar, only more personal. A machine does far more than the task it performs. It is forged of historical moments, acts as a flash-point for contemporary questions, and always, inevitably, produces new cultures of its own. I wanted my lab guide to acknowledge all this so we could stop talking about calculations and ask what might be at stake for me and everyone I know.

Because when I look at the quantum computer, I see a logic that, directed carefully, could do more for us than crunch bigger numbers. It is an information processor with an associative imagination, an operating system whose modus operandi is delicate quirks and unpredictability, a machine that performs its best secrets away from the prying eyes of experts. Most structures in our lives don’t like to admit the efficacy of ambivalence or ambiguity. And yet there they both are, fueling what could be our most promising new machine: ambivalence and ambiguity, animated by a sense of purpose, an acute epistemological power, and the willingness to abide by practical rules. Ambivalence and ambiguity that are, furthermore, smart collaborators – that not only share their uncertainty, but sharpen it into a precise mode of communication.

I want to know what our lives would look like, reorganized by that logic. If we built work cultures that dispensed with bullet points, celebrated missed deadlines, and distrusted tidy bottom lines. Or wrote school curricula that combined frog dissection, gym class, and musical theater into one huge embodied biology. Or formulated linguistic theories which accounted for the communicative powers of raised eyebrows, weeks-long absences, and the things we ate for dinner last night. And enacted those theories through deliberate programs of winks and pregnant pauses. With a sigh of relief at the death of tight-knuckled directness and all that exhausting linearity.

I also want us to talk about the way we are already organizing our lives to look like the logic of a quantum computer. The way we move in bodies full of uncountable cultures’ tics; the way we figure out our sexualities through fluid notions of gender; the way we talk like the hybrid spawn of encyclopedias, multimedia pop art, and computer programmers; the way we piece together activist movements from fuzzy messages and insist on their ability to leverage meaningful changes. I wonder what it would take for us to confidently assert these quantum proclivities – the ones we’re quietly developing and those still nascent – as our most beloved paradigms. In service of a world of quantum sensibilities, quantum values, and productively nuanced quantum living.

***

Having done much of the talking I wanted to do in the lab, it occurs to me that there is something else I wanted: for my lab guide to listen. There’s room in scientific narrative for the riff – the flight of fancy that enables whole new modes of thought – but, generally speaking, they’re supposed to be voiced by scientists. The best an engaged observer can hope to do is report on scientists’ progress, or consign their own thoughts to a modestly adjacent field: to science fiction, to artistic metaphor, to a politically utopian or dystopian imagination. A separate field that is allowed to play with science so long as it doesn’t take itself too seriously, so long as it isn’t too ambitious in imagining what purpose its contributions ought to serve.

The scientific climate from which quantum computers emerge, though, is one of blurred disciplinary boundaries: an intellectual space enlivened by attempts to merge quantum physics and computational theory and biology and epistemology, and by arguments about the deftest ways to do so. In this climate, it gets hard to draw strict distinctions between living systems and mechanical ones, and to cleanly map the interplay between metaphoric and material systems while speaking of either. It’s an intellectual space begging for creative pattern recognition and inventive cobbling-together – skills often left flabby in scientific discourses dominated by rationalism and reductionism. But there are plenty of deft thinkers roving the outskirts of these official scientific discourses. We are good with metaphor, know the art of conceptual bricolage well, and might contribute handily, if the lab cares to make room for us. If not, we have our own interests and our quantum ways of processing them, and will at least be spared its shiny, dutiful patter.

Recently I came across a twelve-part essay on fashion by a French novelist and intellectual. It was a predictably tweedy take on the act of getting dressed: dry, humorless, and smelling faintly of rumpled wool. The intellectual railed at the bored tastemakers, the cruel style arbiters, and the coercive economic-driven creations of desire. He wasn’t wrong, not really. But the argument felt stale. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d read it before, and that I wanted a fresher set of thoughts.

We read this kind of criticism all the time; it is both correct and uninspiring. It needn’t have given me pause, except the intellectual seemed troubled, too. In the essay’s closing passages, he tried to imagine another way to talk about sartorial rituals and admitted—almost plaintively—that he wished he’d written something else.

He didn’t, though. I am less interested in speculating why than in dressing up his tweedy essay in something a little more dynamic. I want to know if it can be made new, and I think I have just the garment: a latex bodysuit, given me by a good friend a few weeks ago. In my short experience with the suit, it has proven anything but stale. It would look terrible on the intellectual. But I think it might flatter his essay—lending its twelve-part body a fresh latex skin—even if at first the material seems ill-chosen, the fit awkward and strange. 

1. Transformation

A latex bodysuit asks its wearer for perseverance. It is not a garment thrown on in a groggy morning daze. The suit must be powdered, your skin should be lubed, and still the process does not usually go smoothly. The rubber pulls your skin in every wrong direction. It enumerates your drynesses. You get pinched and twisted and look, on inspection in the mirror, as though you’re wearing a well-tailored tire.

So you shine the suit with a lintless rag and silicone polish. You have to be patient because latex doesn’t reveal itself quickly. You buff your arms, and buff your legs; you run the rag over your ribs and hips. And finally, slowly, the suit admits its sheen: velvet, metal, and a liquid hint of risk.

2. Possibility

You’re rewarded with a set of alien yous: an eel, a chunk of onyx, oil bubbling in the earth’s core. It is invigorating to feel yourself so multiplied.

3. Limits

Of course, the suit is also about sex. My friend wore it when she worked as a dominatrix. Before that it came from a fetish shop called The Baroness and before that from a stock of well-established cultural fantasy. Personally, I don’t think about sex while I’m wearing my suit. I am not a dominatrix or a baroness. My kind of sex clothes itself differently. My latexed body feels very distant from any question of desire.

4. Science & 5. Limits 2

I am probably naïve to think I escape the suit’s associations. I heard about a study where two groups of participants wore white coats while completing logic puzzles. One group was told their coats belonged to doctors, the other, to painters. The doctor-coated group answered their puzzles far more successfully. They were feeling smart, apparently.

I design my own experiments inspired by the study. I make plans to wear the suit unsexy places—the bus, the supermarket, my parents’ house—to see if I can alter its meaning. I am daunted and never do. It feels like a doomed venture. My reluctance is not a failure, I don’t think, just an alternate data-set. Another way of answering my question, producing a straightforward set of findings. I do not get dressed in a vacuum, for better or worse.

6. Facts

Still, there are facts like these:

An altered posture

An abbreviated range of motion

The squeak of latex against latex

The body’s smell when the suit is peeled off, a blend of plastic, barn, and sewer

And facts don’t always mean much. They’re not always systematizable.

7. Relationships

My friend and I are friends for many reasons, but one of the most important is that we share a favorite author. This author once wrote a newspaper column about a fuzzy red sweater given her by an admiring reader. The sweater “embodies all that is good for both of us,” she swore; it offered protection from “the wintery cold outside: the real cold as well as those other chills we experience.”

Latex is not by nature a sentimental material. But we need objects to ground our emotional connections. When I wear my friend’s gift I know exactly what our author was talking about. The suit is a site of refuge, a meeting place for our gestures of mutual care. I am not by nature a sentimental person but can’t deny, in this most unlikely of garments, the presence of something fuzzy and warm.

8. Trauma

My suit has a scar, a sad puckering along its thigh. I ripped it in a moment of carelessness, and though I did my best to close the gash, the suit has never been the same. I flinch each time I see it, as though the injury were my own. In a sense, it is. Yet another entry in a personal history of clothing rent, soiled, and ruined. My inevitable closet-archive of the way things unravel and the meanness of change.

9. Origins

I choose to imagine that the suit’s rubber came from a tree on an idyllic jungle plot. It’s far more likely that the rubber is synthetic, born of some chemical compound with an unpronounceable name. I blunder through their syllables—polysiloxanes and carboxy monomers—looking for the least foreign among them. But they refuse to be recognized. The latex won’t tell me where it’s from.

10. Personalities & 11. Relationships 2

Is it any wonder that the suit has preferences I don’t understand? It insists on being stored in the dark. It abides only a narrow range of temperatures. It demands to be packed meticulously in talc. My suit has a finicky temperament, and this is where problems arise.

Because I am never so exacting. I am good at being adaptable. In dealing with the bodysuit I have to call on my maturest self and most elastic sense of empathy. That is the delicate work of bonding across sensibilities. I can’t say it’s always fun.

12. Praxis

In the end I’m after a more fundamental sort of dress-up: a flexibility of thought, a love for new logics, a willingness to shed one’s familiar theoretical skins. I’m after an intellectual practice that exists in smart, embodied flux, a mode of thinking nurtured deliberately in words and bodies and gestures and objects. I am wondering how one truly wears an idea, for reasons more compelling than old tweedy habit.

A few months ago, I dissected a squid. The squid was unsurprisingly strange: all tentacles and ooze and sets of sharp hidden teeth. But the dissection was strange, too. The longer I dissected, the less clear my agenda seemed to be. I poked around in the squid with a flagging sense of purpose and the nagging feeling that I was missing something important. I’m not sure what went awry, but I am unsettled. And I want something better to say. A few months ago, I cut open a gelatinous sea creature to take a look inside. What, exactly, was I doing?

But we all know what it means to dissect something. It is a procedure, a way of looking, an act of investigation. It is commonsense inquiry and there’s no reason to be confused. If, at its conclusion, the squid is still foreign — and the encounter an unanswered question — then I must have done something wrong.

So I want to take another look, as a matter of pride. I’ll marshal my best methodology. I’m going to draw a slit down my dissection and put my fingers in its innards. I’m going to take a scalpel to its organs and remove them one by one. I’m going to set the pieces out on a table, label each in intelligible script. I will be systematic, sterile, and observant — the most careful dissector I can manage to be.

And if, at the end, I still don’t know what to say, I suppose I’ll have to admit my failure. Sometimes the pieces don’t add up. Sometimes the parts remain discrete.

The logic

When a body is mysterious, you cut it open. You peel back the skin and take stock of its guts. It is the science of an arrow, the epistemology of a list. There and here and look: You tick off organs, muscles, bones. Its belly becomes fact. It glows like fluorescent lights. The air turns aseptic and your eyes, you hope, are new.

The object

Before the dissection, I’d never thought much about squids. If pressed, I might have said that they belong to dark places — that they are prehistory, deep-sea depths, a sailor’s nightmare. That they move like legends and live like shadows. That they are at least as imaginary as real.

I don’t think it’s unfair to ask: How can you expect to really look at an animal like that?

Research

To prepare myself, I watched another dissection — of a giant squid by a research team in Australia. They found it washed up on the beach somewhere, a rare appearance from a deep-sea depth. Giant squids live so deep in the ocean that they’re almost never seen, not even with cameras. That far down, the equipment either freezes or implodes from the pressure.

An appearance like that deserves some fanfare, it seems to me, but the dissection set was decidedly mundane: just a simple silver table, a single cameraman, and an awkwardly PowerPointed slideshow. The researchers didn’t even wear gloves. A viewer could forget that they were in the presence of something rare. A viewer could be excused for watching in their living room and unceremoniously stifling a yawn.

The supplier

Small squids aren’t nearly as hard to find; an Internet search turns up dozens of suppliers. And they are surprisingly cheap. Eight dollars secures a body, a cardboard tray in which to dissect it, a scissors, a tweezers, a magnifying glass, and a dissection manual. The kit arrives expediently in a clean cardboard box. The process is accessible and convenient and, when you think about it, fairly disconcerting.

The first cut

The first cut is the scariest. Before the first cut, the squid is still whole, still clean and separate, and you aren’t implicated in anything. Once you break the skin, you have to reckon with your purpose. What is this body and why are you breaking it open?

I’m reminded of a novel I love, about a sensible woman who finds a cockroach in her house. It doesn’t belong there, so she tries to kill it, but only succeeds in cracking its shell. The injured roach sits in front of her with crumpling antennae and pus oozing out of the wound in its back. The pus transfixes the woman. She has never thought much about roaches, but as she looks at its insides, she suddenly wants to understand. She thinks about roach ancestors, roach bodies, roach logic, and, in an attempt to erase the distance between them, puts her tongue to the bug’s shell and licks. But the pus makes her faint, and, when she wakes up, the cockroach is gone.

The first cut feels a little something like that. It anticipates revulsion, stokes a kindling of desire, breaches a boundary without promising answers in return. It’s sensible to be apprehensive. You need courage to wield that sort of knife.

Surplus

Underneath the skin, a squid’s body is almost entirely beige so that, in practice, dissecting one mostly means distinguishing between different beige body parts. After I removed everything the manual told me to remove — beige veins, beige kidneys, a tiny beige heart — I sat poking at its empty beige flesh. And, suddenly: there. Tucked into a thin fold along the squid’s back, I found an organ I’d missed, a small bean-like lump. The lump looked like all the other organs except for the presence of three bright scarlet spots. I checked my manual again, to no avail. It couldn’t account for the appearance of this new organ and its inexplicable red spots. This secret between the squid and me: an enigmatic dissection code. Our shared scarlet surplus.

Violence

There is a point in a dissection — after everything has been seen, each essential part identified — when all that’s left is play. A squid corpse presents many options for mischief. You can peel off the skin in big, satisfying strips. Or hack off the tentacles and arrange them in clever little sculptures. Or pop the ink sac, watch the flesh turn black, and wring the body like a rag over your dining room table.

I’m speaking hypothetically, of course. I don’t endorse this kind of play. It can turn a person into another kind of creature, and probably begs another word entirely.

Preservation

When I was finished with the body, I wanted to remember my squid, so I pickled it in a big jar with water, salt, and vinegar. But my technique was slipshod and the solution grew cloudy almost immediately. In a half-hour the squid was a vague bloated blob and I was no longer sure what I was trying to preserve. Since there wasn’t much to display, I stashed the jar under my bed next to a forgotten pair of shoes. It’s poetic, actually. An appropriately invisible place of honor.

Failure

The squid sits gathering dust, and, on the inside of the jar, mold. Yesterday I received a thick catalog in the mail. A reminder from my squid supplier of the other things I might dissect. The catalog is straightforward and lovely, with no unnerving tangle of purpose. It forgives me my confusion and the things I might never know. My squid is disintegrating in its homemade brine, I am grateful, and I have an idea of what to do next. A nod to pieces that don’t add up and parts that remain discrete. I think I’ll buy a rat.