Mechanical Messiah

Jeff Sweensburg sighed as he walked into the dark, quiet basement. On the way down the stairs he stumbled and almost lost his balance. Boy would that have been a disaster, he thought as he continued down the hundred or more steel stairs in front of him, no hand railing to grab onto. Finally he reached the door. It was at least a foot thick, made of solid steel. He was required to enter a seventeen-digit password on a small keyboard that popped out when he passed a verbal alignment test. Next he put his face up to a face-shaped indentation in the door. A dozen lasers scanned it, and then finally the massive gate in front of him shot upwards, revealing at least 500,000 cubic feet of space. It was pitch black. He turned to the side and flipped a switched, hearing the echo of his movements from two or three seconds ago.

In an instance there was activity everywhere. On either side there were smooth, sleek looking machines extending about fifty feet upwards. They had the silver shine of an alien spacecraft. Neon blue lights flickered on and off slowly on the machines as a faint hum became overwhelming. Jeff staggered towards a desk work area in the center of the room. There were about ten more of them extending to the end of the room, but none of them were yet occupied. He sat down at his desk and looked around himself. His surroundings were so simple and ordered yet so complex. The only things in the room were the supercomputers to each side (which seemed almost as if they were part of the wall) and the ten connected workspaces. He smiled; it almost looked like some sort of futuristic wonderworld, everything so flashy and shiny while fake looking at the same time. Like the spaceships from old science fiction movies. Who would have thought that they were in fact networked quantum computers that existed partly in hyperspace? He rested his head down on the desk and promised himself he would not fall asleep. The hum died down as Jeff fell into the rapid eye movement stage. The computers had finished loading up. Still, Jeff did not feel lonely, for there was always a certain presence of consciousness felt in Worksite 5B2. Even when there was no one else there. . .

The project had taken years to begin. It was not so much the technology that was a problem to grasp, but the struggling with the people. Jeff and nine other members of an underground super computer development team were changing the world in this gym sized basement, 20 floors underground. It took time, but they had managed to harness the bizarre intricacies of quantum mechanics and integrate them into computers. Before, computers had used simple binary, zeros and one’s. But now, each computer used superposition's of 1’s and 0’s, so that a near infinite number of combinations were possible in any given time. Thanks to Erwin Schrodinger, a single particle could occupy two distinct points in space! Intertwining this scientific fascination with computers involved bringing a particle to near absolute zero temperatures, and then firing lasers at it until it was actually existing in two points of space simultaneously. The hardest problem to overcome had been eliminating decoherence, which made particles fly together two quickly for any sort of data to be passed through a circuit. They soon found that this was caused by unnecessary electrical fields generated by inefficient instruments, and the problem was fixed. Now, processing speeds were absolutely mind-boggling. People had feared that creating such complex thinking machines would invite ultimate catastrophe. Mostly just maniacs argued this, but somehow they managed to prevent the project from happening on the outside. They claimed that constructing such capable computers would eventually render humans useless. What if they took over? So Quantum Computer’s Co. had to go out of business. Bummer. But no problem, the project could be instigated underground.