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Magnetic vortices in superconductors, like whirlpools in water, typically scatter energy and quickly vanish due to internal friction — dissipation. This hampers their use in quantum chips. But in a film of tiny aluminum grains, a vortex gets trapped and resembles a whirlpool in a narrow well: it spins either one way or the other. Quantum nature allows it to spin both ways at once until measured. This double life lasts for milliseconds — an eternity in the micro-world. Scientists have learned to flip the vortices with microwave pulses (spectroscopy) and read out their state without loss. Each vortex carries exactly one quantum of magnetic flux — a billionth of Earth's field. The idea of Alexei Kitaev to use such structures for noise-tolerant quantum computing has been directly confirmed.