Search Terms: Alpha Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Title

  Notes & Thanks

  CHAPTER 1 - Unboxing

  November 26, 2014

  I was kicking the crap out of aliens from an unpronounceable star system when the doorbell rang. I thought it was an alarm in the cockpit alerting me to a missile lock, or maybe a burnout in the ship’s life support. I was pretty sure of it when my ship began to make a loud banging noise. Except some part of my brain wondered why my starfighter would be made of mahogany. As I hit the afterburners and banked into a fifty-G turn, the alarm sounded again, this time insistent.

  I opened my eyes and blinked. The remnants of my weird dream, based no doubt on too much gaming that I’d binged on since Thanksgiving break had started, dissipated instantly as I literally hopped out of bed and into my shorts. Wait wait wait, I chanted to myself as I hopped into the living room, still unable to get my right leg into the proper hole. I looked through the window above the peephole to see the FedEx man walking back to his white truck.

  “No no no,” I said aloud as I grabbed the doorknob and yanked. I finally got my leg into the right hole, nearly falling out of the house and onto the steps. “Hey. Hey!” I yelled, hoping I didn’t sound like a desperate junkie watching a dealer walk away.

  The driver turned back to me with a half-frown, half-smile. I noticed a red dolly behind him with a stack of boxes loaded on it. I’m sure the half-frown was his display of irritation that I’d messed up his calculated-to-the-last-second delivery schedule that some mainframe at the FedEx data center had planned for him. The half-smile was because he knew he was delivering a load of brand new computer components and it was Thanksgiving break. The driver looked barely out of college, and I assumed he was a gamer-nerd like me.

  “You’re lucky,” he said as I approached, freezing my ass off. Well, freezing everything else off. At least my ass was covered with shorts. “I normally don’t even knock twice this time of year.” He winked at me, the half-frown curling up to become a full smile at my nearly-naked predicament.

  “Hey, thanks for knocking twice,” I said, out of breath from my rush to catch him before he drove off, teeth chattering as I began to realize it was probably too cold to snow. I rubbed my hands together and did a little dance, foot to foot, trying to keep either of them from staying on the cold sidewalk too long.

  “No problem, just sign here,” he said, handing me the electronic clipboard.

  I scrawled my name, my shivering fingers producing a couple of jagged lines on the tablet. I handed it back to him and rubbed my hands again.

  “You want me to wheel it back up to the door?” he asked.

  “Nah, you can leave it here. I know you got a schedule to keep. But seriously, man, thanks for waiting.”

  “Going to be a pretty sweet computer, eh?” he asked.

  “Totally,” I said, no longer paying attention to him. I was focused like a bird dog on the stack of boxes.

  He laughed. “All right. Let me get my wheels.”

  He pulled the dolly out from the boxes and gave me another smile before climbing into his truck. I heard the dolly bang around as he secured it, then the familiar grind of metal, a standard feature of every single delivery truck I’d ever heard, when he shifted into gear and pulled away from the sidewalk. I stood in the cold, grey morning, still doing my little dance, trying to calculate how many boxes I could carry at once. I finally settled on the top three, let out a little shriek as the ice cold cardboard pressed against my arms and chest, and practically ran back to the front door.

  I felt the hot air rush past me as I opened the door and deposited the boxes on the carpet. I thought for a moment about grabbing my shoes and a shirt. Instead, I ran back to the sidewalk, grabbed two more boxes, and jogged back to the door. I saved the biggest box for last, an expensive, custom aluminum and steel case to put all of my new bits into. It was light enough that I almost tossed it over my head picking it up. I felt my face flush and looked around, hoping none of the neighbors were watching the weird college kid running back and forth to the curb to grab boxes like an ant carrying crumbs to its nest.

  After I got the last box in the house and closed the door, I went to my bedroom to get some real clothes. Old sweats, a shirt, a hoodie, and some thick, warm socks surrounded by the best pair of slippers I’ve ever owned helped me warm up quickly, though I’d almost forgotten about it within the first minute of sorting through all of the boxes. I wanted to hug each and every box. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since the college gave me a refund check for a class that had been canceled the first week into the semester.

  My current desktop computer was a few years old, and barely able to play any of the last-gen games, let alone the newest and greatest ones that were coming out for the holiday season. Delta-9: Global Conflict was already on my pre-order list, but there was no way the game would even start on my current machine. I had a nice laptop, but it wasn’t for gaming. It was for my sophomore year of college, and it was already a year old.

  I pawed through the boxes one more time, then went to the kitchen to grab a knife.

  “Who was at the door?” my mother asked.

  I looked around, annoyed for a second that I’d nearly had to chase the FedEx guy down naked when she could have answered the door. Then I noticed the apron and the perpetual scowl my mother always got whenever Thanksgiving rolled around and it was our turn to host.

  “FedEx,” I said, pulling a knife from the block. She nodded and began pulling pans and cannisters from the cupboards.

  I returned to the living room and began carefully slicing through all of the packing tape, gently pulling each component from its shipping box and setting it on the coffee table. Until I opened one of the smaller boxes and pulled out what was supposed to be my new Intel processor. I looked at the box for a few seconds, trying to figure out what I was seeing.

  Instead of the standard blue packaging of all the Intel cpu’s I’d ever seen, I was holding a fiery red one that was twice the size a cpu box should have been. According to the logo on the package, I was holding… something… made by Infinitia Technologies. Below what I was sure was the company logo, it said “Nova 4-Qbit.” Below that was the model number, “X-QI.”

  “What the…” I mumbled as I turned the package around in my hands.

  The standard trademarks and copyrights in small print on the bottom of the packaging seemed normal, as did the praise from various online tech sites hailing it as the “Best of the Best” and such. I placed it on the floor and went to the next box. What was supposed to be my new super silent one thousand watt power supply, was instead something called a “Flow-Chron Energon Power Cell.” I expected a hefty weight when I pulled it from the box, as computer power supplies, the good ones anyway, are generally pretty heavy. The power cell box felt like it might have something made of plastic in it, but it was too light to be a real power supply unit.

  I began to get angry. I’d waited months to be able to order my components, timing it so they would arrive at the very beginning of Thanksgiving break. I’d planned to put it all together today before my relatives started flooding the house with their inevitable presence, bitching at and about each other, getting tipsy, and stuffing their faces full of food. That would give me an entire extended weekend to start psyching myself up for Delta-9. With my new top-of-the-line computer, I’
d not only be blown away by the game’s next-gen visuals and audio, but I would actually get to play without it becoming stop-motion animation.

  Whatever the hell was in these boxes, it wasn’t a very funny joke. I could see how someone would think it would be, and I even had to chuckle once, thinking about how I’d love to play a joke like this on one of my geek buddies. But it wasn’t funny because it was happening to me. I knew I shouldn’t get so worked up about a computer to play video games on, but if you had a class load like I did, a consistent over-achiever, you’d have an idea of the kind of academic stress I put myself through every semester.

  I needed my gaming time. It gave me a few mindless hours where I didn’t have to calculate formulas, remember the important influences of long-dead Greek poets, or pull my hair out because I couldn’t find enough sources to qualify my English Comp project for a passing grade. When I was piloting starships and blowing up alien Varlinium refineries, or humping through the jungle trying to not get taken out by a sniper, my mind was free to relax. My familiarity with the games and my muscle memory reflexes put my thinking brain into a sort of suspended animation. My parents never understood my obsession with video games, but they’ve never said much about it since my report cards have always come back with straight A’s and an occasional B.

  I slammed the power cell package down on the floor beside the joke processor. The next box was smaller, containing what should have been my hard drive and my memory modules. According to the packages inside, I was now the proud owner of a “2 Yottabyte Storage Interface.” Whoever is messing with me could have at least come up with a more believable name, I thought, dropping it on the carpet next to the others, not caring if there was a hard drive in it anymore. The memory modules were another joke. Instead of the long, thin sticks of memory, it seemed like my new “Infinitia Type-R Quantum Memory Cubes” were what I was supposed to use. Hah hah.

  When I put the latest package on the floor, I looked up to the items on the coffee table. I blinked, not sure how I missed it when I’d pulled them out. Instead of the 3D gaming video card I had ordered, I’d received another bogus component. Same for the audio card and what I thought was a Blu-Ray burner.

  “Fucking shit,” I growled.

  I opened the smaller of the two remaining boxes, growling more when I pulled out the “Infinitia 4-Qbit System Interface.” Not the top-end motherboard that I’d ordered. I put it with the rest, then worked on getting the computer case out of its large box. As I removed the styrofoam protective panels, I grinned. It was the exact case I ordered. Then I frowned, realizing it was utterly useless with a bunch of shit components that were probably empty packages, or packages with bogus plastic parts in them.

  “Tyler?” my mom called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “I hear you in there making angry animal noises. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “TechTerritory sent me a bunch of weird stuff instead of my computer parts.”

  “If you need to send them back, you better hurry.” I heard the bang and clatter of dishes and a stifled curse from my mother.

  “Why’s that?” I asked, grinning as she let out a few more colorful insults toward both the dishes and the holiday.

  “Your father says it’s going to ‘snow like hell,’” she said.

  “All right. I have to go to their website and start an RMA.”

  “RMA? Goddammit I hate this piece of shit.” This time I heard the the plastic shelf at the bottom of the refrigerator door fall off again, spilling jars and containers onto the kitchen floor. “Your father said he was going to buy me a new one!”

  I laughed. My father had been promising her a new refrigerator for over a year, but always found some excuse or other to not actually do it. He wasn’t a mean husband or cruel father at all, just a bit… frugal. He’d grown up poor, and as far as he was concerned, if it still worked, even with a few flaws, then there was no reason to buy another. He simply couldn’t grasp the concept of needing a new fridge just because one of the plastic shelves in the door fell out every other time the door was opened. Mom would get angry at his laughter whenever it happened to her, and he would make peace with promises of a new Kenmore, Frigidaire, GE, whatever she wanted.

  I got up and walked into the kitchen. “Return Merchandise Authorization,” I said, kneeling down to help her recover pickles, mayo, and something that looked like soy sauce with Korean writing on it. “I have to get ‘approved’ before they’ll accept a return and credit me.”

  “You have to get approval to send back items they screwed up on?” she asked, wiping a strand of hair from her face, frowning when it stuck to the perspiration that coated her skin. “Did I ever tell you how much I hate it when it’s our turn to host Thanksgiving dinner?”

  I put the last jar back in the door and closed it. I reached over and hugged my mom, both of us still kneeling on the kitchen floor.

  “What’s this about?” she asked, pushing me away enough to look at my face.

  “Nothing. I love you is all. I’m sorry you hate Thanksgiving.”

  She gave me a strange look. Then smiled. “I don’t hate Thanksgiving, just whenever the clan shows up at our place. Next time, we are all going to a restaurant.”

  “You say that every time.”

  “Next time I’m sticking to my guns.”

  I stood up and reached down, helping her up. “You say that every year as well.”

  She gave me a dangerous look, then her expression softened. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, wiping another strand of hair from her cheek.

  “Yeah. Just bummed is all. I was really looking forward to building my new computer.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Ewww, you’re sweaty.”

  “Damn right I am,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “And it’s perspiration, not sweat. Women glow with perspiration. We don’t sweat.”

  I laughed at the way she treated the word sweat as if it were a racial epithet.

  “You stink, too. Kinda.”

  I laughed and ducked from her swipe and went back to the living room to grab my laptop. While Mom banged around the kitchen, I went to TechTerritory’s website and logged in. I checked my order history, making sure I hadn’t screwed up somehow, but the components list was exactly what it should have been. Proper processor, memory, video card, power supply, sound card, case, motherboard, SSD hard drive, and Blu-Ray burner. I looked over at the pile of nonsense on the coffee table and the floor below it.

  I clicked on the RMA link, then had a thought that I should see if any of the items in my living room were actually for sale on the site. After a couple of minutes, I was frustrated even more. None of the components were listed at TechTerritory. I opened another tab in my browser and went to Google. My frustration mounted with each new search. Google happily suggested plenty of other items and search results with each brand name, but there wasn’t a single web page anywhere that had any of these items listed.

  Not even the tech forums where nerds like me went to learn things like how to build computers, how to ‘overclock’ them, kind of like what other men do to muscle cars to make them faster without putting a new engine in it, and to verbally masturbate about all of the latest tech that was on the horizon. Nothing. All “Infinitia” brought up was some global investment firm, and a bunch of Facebook and Tumblr pages.

  “Bullshit,” I said to myself and walked over to the pile of computer parts.

  I wanted to kick them as hard as I could out of pure anger. Instead, I sat on the floor and picked up the processor box. I knew from being a science fiction fan and gamer what quantum computing and qubits were. Okay, so I didn’t really know what they were, not as a theoretical physicist would, but I knew they were supposed to be this thing where binary bits could exist in both 1 and 0 states at the same time
. I didn’t really understand quantum entanglement and such, as most of it led into true headache-producing, mind-bending discussions like string theory. The quantum stuff I was familiar with had to do with AI neural cores and supercomputers capable of opening wormholes in space, time travel, science fiction shit like that.

  I opened the box and pulled out the inserts that kept the cpu safe during shipping. A small manual fell out of the bottom of the left insert. I should have grabbed an anti-static band to ground myself, or at least touched a grounded metal object, but I didn’t care. I was going to send the damn thing back anyway. Static electricity blowing out silicon transistors was the least of my worries.

  The processor wasn’t a cpu of any kind I’d ever seen. Instead of a flat, wafer-like piece of silicon and metal, it was a square cube made of some kind of plastic, or maybe it was crystal. I tapped it with my fingernail, but couldn’t tell. It felt cold, but it had been riding around in a FedEx truck all morning. I held it up to the light and squinted as I tried to see if there was anything in it. It looked like a translucent block of glass. I set it on the coffee table and reached down for the manual.

  “Welcome to the latest generation of quantum computing!” the manual practically shouted at me with its big block letters on the cover. “The next level is here!” was what greeted me when I opened it to the first page. I decided to go along with the joke and see just how far someone would go to make it seem like a real product. After the first page, I was convinced some Stanford or maybe M.I.T. geeks had taken a holiday temp position at TechTerritory’s shipping center, and had decided to have a lot of fun.

  By the second and third page, I was impressed at the level they, whoever they were, had taken it. I was pretty good at college-level calculus, but the technical data in the manual was far beyond anything I’d ever had to tackle. Maybe. The data might be as made-up as the brand names themselves for all I knew. Within a few minutes, I’d opened the motherboard box and had taken a look at it before reading its manual. The board itself was a thin wafer of PCB, but unlike other PCB boards I’d ever seen, this one only had a few solder traces on it, and almost no capacitors, voltage regulators, or resistors.