Thursday, January 3, 2036

The Unknown Singularity -7 hours

Emily doesn’t notice me. Not really. She smiles at me when we pass each other in the hallway, that polite, fleeting curve of her lips that means nothing, that she probably doesn’t even think about, but it kills me every time. I live for those moments, hoard them like a miser hoards gold, replay them in my mind when I’m alone in my apartment, drowning in the silence. She has no idea. She couldn’t have any idea, because if she did, she would look at me differently, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t just pass by, wouldn’t just offer those absent-minded little gestures of courtesy and then turn away, already forgetting I exist. She’d care about me. She’d love me. Or so I tell myself when I’m not feeling like a total loser who could never deserve someone like Emily.

When I do feel like a loser I know in my heart of heart that Emily will never need me the way I need her. I exist at the edges of her world, a passing presence, a coworker she might vaguely recognize if someone prompted her, but not someone she thinks about. Not someone she remembers when she leaves the office at the end of the day. She has a life beyond this place, a life filled with friends and late-night dinners, a life where people laugh at her jokes not because they’re obligated to but because they genuinely enjoy her. A life that doesn’t include me. I tell myself it doesn’t bother me, that I don’t need her to notice me, but that’s a lie, isn’t it? A neat little excuse I tell myself so I don’t have to admit how much it eats at me, how much I hate the way she breezes past my desk without a second glance, without ever thinking about what it does to me when she lives her life without me in it.

She’s standing in the break room, talking to her coworkers from marketing, her hands moving in quick, effortless gestures as she laughs about the brain scan she just had done. It was a joke, she says, a complete waste of time. Some corporate gimmick to make the company look like it’s pushing the boundaries of science when, in reality, it’s just setting piles of investor money on fire. They’ve been beating the “quantum neuroscience” drum for months now, but everyone—everyone—knows it’s bullshit. Even the executives know. The engineers knew before they ever even ran the first scan. The Kanwisher equation settled the debate a decade ago, proving beyond any doubt that no conceivable system could ever process the complexity of a human brain in real-time. The numbers aren’t just inconvenient; they’re catastrophic.

The brain isn’t like a normal processor. It doesn’t run on neat, sequential lines of code. It’s a tangled, chaotic storm of electrical signals firing in every direction at once, rewriting itself as it goes, never the same twice, never even similar from one millisecond to the next. A single neuron isn’t a transistor flipping between ones and zeroes; it’s a dynamic, analog node connected to thousands of others, each one subtly modifying the signals passing through it, each connection shifting and mutating with every thought, every memory, every breath. And the sheer volume—eighty-six billion neurons, each with thousands of everchanging connections, all firing and recalibrating in parallel—makes traditional computing look like stacking blocks with numb fingers. Even quantum computing, with its superposition and entanglement tricks, is laughably inadequate.

The math is horrifying. If every computer on Earth were linked together—every server, every supercomputer, every personal laptop, every phone—and if you let them run for a million years, you might, might be able to simulate a single second of human thought. If you wanted to search a brain scan for one specific piece of information—say, a memory, a name, a single fleeting moment—you wouldn’t just need more processing power. You would need more time than the Universe has left. Past the heat death of reality itself, long after the last atoms have burned out, the search would still be running, churning endlessly through a near-infinite maze of possibilities, never reaching a conclusion. The fundamental problem isn’t just complexity—it’s that the human brain isn’t static. It’s not a hard drive storing neat, retrievable files. It’s a storm.

Emily shakes her head, rolling her eyes as she leans against the counter, coffee in one hand, tapping her nails absently against the ceramic. “I signed the papers without even reading them,” she says, laughing. “What was the point? There’s nothing in there that even matters. It’s all useless.”

And that’s the thing. She’s right. Everyone knows she’s right.

But I still can’t stop thinking about it. About her, really.

She stands there, leaning casually against the counter, her head tilted slightly as she speaks, and I can’t stop staring at the elegant slope of her neck, the way the light catches in her hair, the smoothness of her skin. She looks like something out of a painting, like something collected, something meant to be displayed in a pristine glass case where no one but me could ever touch her.

She doesn’t know what she is. Not really. She doesn’t know how men must look at her, must want her, must ache for her in a way they can never admit. Or maybe she does, and that’s why she carries herself the way she does, why she moves through the world with such careless grace, as if she belongs to no one, as if she can’t be owned. That thought makes something deep in my stomach tighten, something I don’t have words for, something I don’t want words for.

I let my gaze trace the delicate lines of her features, the impossible symmetry of them, the precise, sculpted angles of her cheekbones, the way her full lips curve just slightly, as if always caught between a smirk and something softer. Her eyes, dark and deep, are like polished obsidian, framed by lashes that sweep upward at just the right angle, an almost deliberate beauty. But it isn’t deliberate. She was born this way. Born to be perfect. Born to be admired.

I wonder if she knows how rare that is.

There are beautiful women, sure, but they aren’t like her. They aren’t flawless. They aren’t trophies. Because that’s what she is, isn’t she? A trophy. The kind of woman men chase and never catch, the kind who belongs behind velvet ropes, the kind who only exists in brief, fleeting moments before she slips away, untouchable. She’s the prize at the end of a war, the gleaming jewel meant to sit atop the pedestal, a status symbol that whispers of power, of ownership. And yet, she belongs to no one. She walks through the office, through the world, without even the faintest awareness of the effect she has, without understanding what it means to be so rare, so impossible, so utterly desired.

She pulls a slip of paper from her pocket and waves it in the air, rolling her eyes. She was going to use the voucher for lunch, but now she’s got a last-minute meeting, so she just tosses it onto the table and tells her coworkers they can have it if they want.

There’s still steam rising from her coffee, but she leaves it behind, forgotten, already moving on to something more important. She doesn’t even glance at me as she leaves. That should be the moment I let it go.

But I don’t.

It’s not hard to get to. The security measures are in place to protect against corporate espionage, are done against stuff that is valuable. They just don’t exist for stuff deemed useless. I walk into the lab like I belong there, because I do, because I’ve worked here long enough that no one questions it when I start digging through storage. The data crystals are neatly cataloged, slotted into their labeled compartments, a row of fragile little things filled with entire lives. I find hers without difficulty. The label on the case reads EMILY TANAKA in standard white text, indistinguishable from the others except for the way it means something to me.

It fits into my palm perfectly, a cool, smooth thing, deceptively ordinary for something that holds everything she is. Her thoughts, her memories, her personality, all condensed into a tiny sliver of crystal and silicon. I clench my fingers around it, feel my heartbeat pounding against my ribs, and I tell myself I’ll put it back tomorrow. I swear to myself that I will.

But I don’t.

I take it home.

And when I get home, I sit in the dark, turning it over in my hands, staring at it under the soft glow of my monitor. It’s just data, I remind myself. It’s not her. It’s nothing. But my fingers shake when I hold it, my pulse thrumming in my ears as I fight against the knowledge that I’ve done something that could ruin me, and all for a useless trinket. I should put it back. I should destroy it. I should forget this ever happened. But the moment I tell myself I should, I know I won’t. Because I wanted this. Because I needed this.

Because it’s the only piece of her I will ever have.

I start drinking. I drink until the guilt fades, until the self-loathing turns soft and manageable, until the fear that I’ve just thrown away my entire career feels like someone else’s problem. My apartment is a mess, wires spilling across the floor, a half-empty bottle sweating condensation onto my desk, my old clunky quantum processor humming quietly in the corner. I tell myself I just want to see. Just to try. It’s not like it’ll do anything. The scans are useless. Everyone knows that. Everyone.

After all, you’d need a quantum processor far beyond anything actually possible to make use of it and mine is pathetically outdated. It’s an older model I was given to check for bugs, but I’ve had it for three months pastnreturn-by date and so far no one has said a word. My manager only cares about the newer models so I’ve been fiddling with this hunk of junk to see if I could get some small improvement that could land me a promotion.

It hums in the corner, its quiet, mechanical whisper filling the apartment, the same sound I’ve been hearing for weeks, but tonight it feels different. The whole room feels different, charged with some low, electric anticipation that I can’t quite put into words. My limbs are warm and slow, heavy with alcohol, but my mind—my mind won’t stop.

I exhale slowly, the alcohol making everything feel soft, like I’m drifting through a dream, like nothing I do really matters because none of it will stick in the morning. Maybe that’s why I start moving things around. Maybe that’s why I start tinkering. I shove another cable into place, twist a set of connections at the base of the processor, shift a component six inches to the left without thinking. Something sparks.

For a second, I think I might have broken it but then the screen stops flickering and the numbers on the monitor jump. I blink at them, swaying slightly in my chair, my breath coming out slow and foggy. The processing and memory readouts are recording that they have both doubled. I was hoping I might manage a 1% of 1% increase. But double? That’s got to be a glitch.

I’ll fix it in the morning. That’s what I tell myself as I stumble toward my bed, my limbs heavy with alcohol, my vision swimming slightly from too much whiskey and too little concern. The machine hums behind me, steady, rhythmic, the low vibration filling the apartment like a second heartbeat, a sound I’ve grown so used to that I barely register it anymore as I drift off to sleep.

The morning is pure chaos. I wake up late, groggy, my mouth dry, my head pounding with the dull remnants of last night’s whiskey, the kind of sluggish headache that makes time slip away faster than it should. The moment I see the red numbers on my alarm clock, my stomach twists, my pulse kicking up to a frantic pace as I realize just how late I am. My flight is in two hours. I was supposed to be packed, ready, out the door by now, and instead, I’m still tangled in my sheets, my body heavy with exhaustion, my mind struggling to shake off the fog of sleep. I barely have time to throw clothes into my suitcase, barely have time to grab my phone, my charger, my wallet, my passport. I move through the apartment in a frenzy, cursing under my breath as I shove things into my bag without thinking, already calculating how fast I need to move to just barely make it.

I don’t check the system. I don’t even glance at it. The machine is still running in the corner of my apartment, its screens glowing with data, but I don’t stop to look at the numbers, don’t stop to verify that everything is normal. In the back of my mind, I tell myself that there’s nothing to check. It was a glitch. A bug. A hiccup. Machines don’t just double their processing power and memory overnight, not from something as stupid as my lame ass tinkering. I’ll check it when I get back. I’ll run diagnostics, recalibrate it, clear the logs, fix whatever anomaly caused that weird jump in performance. I don’t need to waste time on it now. It’s just a computer. It’s not going anywhere.

The vacation is a blur of drinks and forced relaxation, of overpriced cocktails (Bikini Beach is not what it was in the 1980’s, or so the old-timers tell me) on a too-bright beach, of trying to convince myself that I’m enjoying the break, that I’m not thinking about Emily, that I’m not still replaying the moment I stole her brain scan over and over in my head, alternating between guilt and something darker, something I don’t want to name.

When I return home, the first thing I do is check the system, expecting to find everything exactly as I left it, the same numbers, the same logs, the same error waiting for me. But the moment the screen comes to life, my breath catches in my throat, and I feel a sickening lurch in my stomach, because what I’m seeing isn’t possible. The processing power and memory of the computer has doubled again. And then doubled again. And again. Every hour. For seven straight days.

My quantum computer is two to the power of one hundred and sixty-eight times as powerful, to be precise. That’s a 4 followed by 50 zeros, if you want to round up.

The number on the screen isn’t just large. The system isn’t just powerful anymore—it is impossible. It has surpassed every limit, broken every theoretical boundary, expanded into something that should not exist. 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of my machine is more powerful than every computer on Earth combined. And it is still growing.

The breath leaves my lungs, my hands tightening around the edges of my desk as I try to process what I’m looking at, as I try to force my mind to understand. This shouldn’t have happened. It can’t have happened. There are fundamental laws of computation, of energy, of reality itself that should have prevented this, and yet, the numbers don’t lie. The doubling has continued without interruption, without limit, as if nothing in the universe is stopping it.

I’ll call the head office. That’s what I tell myself, gripping the edge of my desk, staring at the impossible numbers flooding the screen, my breath coming too fast, my heart hammering against my ribs like a caged thing. I’ll call them, I’ll explain everything, I’ll tell them what’s happened, and they’ll send their best minds, their top researchers, people who actually understand this technology—people smarter than me, people who will know how to handle this discovery without breaking it. But even as I reach for my phone, my fingers trembling, a sick weight growing in my stomach, I hesitate. Because the second I make that call, it’s out of my hands. This machine, this impossible anomaly, this miracle that I stumbled into, will belong to them. Not to me. And I’ll be left with nothing. No credit. No control. Just a paycheck and a pat on the back before they bury this in some classified research lab and erase my involvement entirely. And that’s assuming they don’t just shut it down, dismantle it out of fear, convinced that something this powerful can’t be allowed to exist.

As my hand brushes against my phone, my elbow knocks into the tangle of cables spilling across my desk. One wire shifts—just six inches. It’s barely a movement, a meaningless, minuscule change, something that shouldn’t matter at all. But the second it happens, the machine dies. The low, constant hum of power cuts out instantly, the monitors flicker, and then the numbers—the infinite, ever-expanding numbers—are just gone. The screen goes black. The doubling, the monstrous growth that had defied every law of computation and physics, the thing that had been unstoppable for the past seven days, collapses into absolute, suffocating nothingness. The apartment feels wrong in the silence, hollow in a way I can’t explain, like I just killed something I didn’t even understand.

I stop breathing. My hand is still hovering over my phone, but I don’t move. A creeping, terrible cold spreads through my chest, settling deep in my bones as I stare at the dead machine, my mind refusing to process what I’ve just done. This can’t be right. This shouldn’t be right. I nudge the keyboard, tap a few keys, try to reboot the system, try to force it back to life, but nothing happens. I can’t think. I can’t breathe. I didn’t change anything. I didn’t shut it down. All I did was—

My hands shake as I reach out, slowly, carefully, and move the wire back. I put it exactly where it was, positioning it down to the millimeter, my breath held tight in my throat. And the second I do, the machine roars back to life.

The screen flickers back on. The numbers return. The doubling resumes, uninterrupted, as if I had never touched it at all. The system surges forward, picking up exactly where it left off, power cascading through it in ways I still don’t understand. My whole body tenses, my stomach twisting itself into knots, because that—that right there—is impossible. I stare at it, wide-eyed, my mind racing, trying to find some logical explanation, some hidden setting, some overlooked variable, something to explain why one minor adjustment, one insignificant change to the physical setup, could be the difference between limitless power and absolute failure.

I test it again. This time, deliberately. My breath is unsteady, my fingers clammy as I hook my computer up to the internet. It’s designed to be a closed system to better test for bugs, but I plug in one single ethernet cable, just enough to see if it was a fluke, if I’m losing my mind. And the moment it shifts, the numbers plummet, the screen blinks out, the system collapses. I move it back and the godlike computational power returns.

It makes no sense. It shouldn’t make sense. Hardware doesn’t work this way. Computing power doesn’t work this way. The only way . . .

I sit back in my chair, hands gripping the armrests, my pulse hammering in my ears as the full weight of my ignorance crashes down on me. I have no idea why this works. I don’t know how I made this happen. I don’t understand the mechanisms, the logic, the underlying principles that turned an ordinary quantum processor into something that is now rewriting the fundamental limits of reality. I am like an ancient Greek who, through sheer dumb luck, has built a steam engine with nothing but wood and bronze, all while still believing in the four elements, utterly oblivious to the true mechanics of pressure and heat and combustion. I know how to operate it, but I don’t know why it works, and that means I don’t know how to recreate it.

If I lose it, I can never get it back.

I lean forward, rubbing a hand down my face, my fingers digging into my skin as I try to force myself to think, to stay rational, to piece together what I know. The doubling started when I moved the wire the first time. That was the trigger, the exact moment everything changed. It wasn’t an upgrade to the system, it wasn’t a software breakthrough, it wasn’t anything I can explain. It was this setup. The machine, the connections, the positioning of every piece down to the last fraction of an inch. And the scan—Emily’s scan—is still plugged in.

I let the thought sink in, let the full implications of it settle over me like a weight, pressing into my ribs, making it harder to breathe. If I call the head office, they will take this from me. That’s not even a question. They will seize the machine, they will dismantle it, they will study it, they will own it. And if they so much as shift a single wire, if they try to move it, if they don’t understand that every microscopic detail has to be exactly the same, they will break it, and it will be lost forever. And even if, by some miracle, they keep it running, it will never belong to me again. It will be theirs.

I can’t let that happen.

I stare at the machine, at the quiet, endless doubling, at the screen filled with numbers climbing higher and higher, at the fragile little data crystal that holds everything she is. And then the final realization crashes into me, a tidal wave of certainty, of purpose, of something I don’t even want to put a name to yet.

With this power, I can do the impossible. The thought lodges itself in my brain, unshakable, intoxicating, curling through my veins like a drug. Emily’s crystal—her mind, her memories, the very essence of who she is—is still plugged into my machine, still sitting there like some inert relic of a lost technology. But it’s not inert, is it? Not anymore. Not with what I have now. Not with this power, this impossible, infinite expansion, this raw, unchecked potential surging through circuits that shouldn’t even exist.

I can run her.

I can run her!

The words pulse in my skull, rhythmic, undeniable, electric. A shiver runs down my spine, something dark, something too big to hold inside me, and I realize my hands are trembling. Not with fear. Not with hesitation. With hunger. With need.

This isn’t some corporate experiment anymore, some half-baked gimmick for investors to throw money at. This is real. This is something beyond human comprehension, beyond any law of computation or physics, beyond anything anyone in history has ever touched before. And it’s mine.

Emily has always been untouchable. Beautiful, poised, perfect in ways she never even had to try for. She moves through the world like she was born to be adored, never looking back at the men who would break themselves just to be in her orbit. And I have spent years watching. Wanting. Needing.

I glance at the screen, at the numbers still climbing, at the unfathomable raw power humming in my machine. With this, I can do what no one else can. With this, I can take the impossible and make it real. Real to me. And real to her.