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  There was a small square plug at one end of the board, and a square… socket is what I guessed, in the middle of the board. I grabbed the fake processor cube and compared it to the socket on the motherboard. I gave a mental shrug then tried to slip the cpu into the socket. It didn’t seem to fit, so I turned the cube over, trying each side just out of curiosity. The fourth side of the cube grabbed the socket, as if the two items were strong magnets. I nearly dropped the thing from that alone, but the short flash of light within the translucent cube scared the hell out of me even more.

  Hands shaking, I put the thing on the coffee table. I opened the manual for the motherboard again, and began to scan it. In perfect English, with excellent diagrams, I saw how to connect all of the components I’d received to build a quantum computer. I put the manual down and took a closer look at the computer case. When I removed the side panel, I knew instantly that its interior had been customized for the strange computer components sitting on my coffee table and floor. Components that suddenly didn’t seem so fake.

  CHAPTER 2 - A New Computer

  November 26, 2014

  I could only laugh at my own gullibility. Whoever had put on this charade had gone all-out. I had to hand it to them. They’d spooked me for just a minute, actually believing I’d somehow received the components to build a quantum computer. I decided to grab my phone and take pictures of everything. I’d been making a bit of extra money on the side with my blogging, and a lot of fellow nerds followed me, as I did them. We loved nothing more than to show up at each other’s blog and read the latest posted article, then use the comments section to praise or troll the author. Sometimes a few of us took the trolling a little too far, but for most of us, it was all good fun.

  I turned on the overhead lights in the living room and began taking pictures of everything. When I got to the motherboard, processor still seated in the socket, I paused. I put my phone down and grabbed the board in one hand, the cpu in the other. I gave a slight pull, but it wouldn’t budge. I twisted a little, and a popping noise sounded as the processor came free of the socket. I checked the socket and the processor’s edge where it had been plugged in, but I couldn’t see any damage. I frowned again, something I was starting to worry about, having heard my whole life from Mom that if I did it too much, my face would freeze with that expression on it. I hovered the processor over the socket again, and again I felt the magnetic pull of the two items, and once again the cpu snicked into place within the socket. And once again, a flash of blue briefly lit the cube.

  I put it on the coffee table and took more pictures. When I was done, instead of boxing everything back up, I decided to let my curiosity drift a little further. I started removing the other components from their packaging, setting each item on the coffee table.

  “Oh, Tyler, please don’t do that in here,” my mom said.

  I looked back at her, standing half-in and half-out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.

  “I promise, Mom. I’m only going to take some pictures and then pack it all back up.”

  “Weren’t you just taking pictures?” she asked, cocking her head, trying to catch me in a lie.

  I winked at her. “I was. I still am, thank you. I’m going to put it together real quick and get a few more pics for my blog.”

  “Blog,” she snorted and turned around.

  Mom wasn’t a tech Luddite, but she didn’t really understand the whole blogging thing. I’d tried to explain to her what it was, but she always gave me the same snort. If my father was around, he’d be of no help, asking loudly why I wanted to talk about boogers online. The two of them would get each other going, and within a minute, I could walk away while they were carrying on, laughing sometimes like wild hyenas at their own comedic genius.

  Mom and Dad both were perceptive enough to understand the whole “geek living in Mom’s basement” joke, and had threatened me since puberty that they were going to buy a new house that didn’t have a basement, just so I couldn’t end up living with them until I was forty. It wasn’t like it was a one-sided thing though. I ranked them out as often as possible for being old, being grey, not understanding technology. My favorite was when one of them would ask me to hand them the remote to watch television, and I would lock it with a code.

  Dad went especially crazy, able to turn on the stereo receiver but not the satellite box or the television. The best I’ve ever been able to achieve was one day when he got so pissed he stomped around the house and threw the remote at the wall. When he heard me howling with laughter from the dining room, he hurled one of his slippers at me, which made me laugh even harder. He definitely hadn’t been an athlete in school.

  I kept the motherboard’s manual open in front of me as I opened each component package and pulled the unit out. Normally it took me around an hour, sometimes two, to build a computer from scratch. I’d had plenty of practice at it, having built the three desktop computers in our house, and at least ten more for friends. We weren’t rich by any means, but my parents trusted me enough to build them a great computer for as little money as possible. Neither could live without their news sites, social networking, videos, music, whatever else they’d become accustomed to having access to each day of their lives.

  The hard drive snapped into place inside the case. I connected it to the board with the strange fiber-optic cable that was provided. I did the same with the optical media drive, which a small part of me hoped actually worked, and actually played Blu-Ray discs. My father had just received the director’s cut of “Scarface,” completely remastered for high definition. We’d watched that movie at least twenty times before my fourteenth birthday, something my mother had always complained about. The only reason I was allowed to each time, is that I’d never uttered any of the curse words that were liberally sprinkled throughout the movie. My father had warned me when I was eight that if I ever repeated any of those words out loud, we’d go back to watching cartoons or doing nothing at all.

  I secured the power cell in the case, then connected the motherboard to it. I tried to find the extra cables to attach to the hard drive and optical drive, but there seemed to be none. After a minute of searching through the two components’ manuals, I found out why there was no cable. Apparently, the peripherals of this “quantum computer” were powered wirelessly. I couldn’t help but laugh again. I almost wanted to glance around and make sure my mom or someone else wasn’t filming me, catching me on video actually putting this… thing… together as if it was a real computer.

  Once I had everything installed, I put the panel on the case and took it into my room. I went back into the living room and cleaned up all of the packaging and shipping boxes, stacking them near the door to the garage. I’m not sure why, but I guess some part of me believed I was going to turn the stupid thing on and it would actually work. Hah hah again, I thought. The one box I’d opened but hadn’t messed with yet was the one that supposedly contained a flatscreen monitor. I was a bit disappointed when I pulled the parts out. Maybe the jokesters had run out of steam, or maybe this was the best they could come up with.

  Out of every component, the monitor was the one that screamed “fake!” the most. A small square base with a thin metal rod sticking up almost two feet from it was what I ended up putting together. I stared at it for almost a minute, wondering just how gullible I really was. I leaned forward and saw a flash of light from my desk lamp reflecting off something in the box. I leaned down and pulled on it, and a thin sheet of transparent, extremely flexible plastic unfolded and became semi-rigid, enough to keep its rectangular shape.

  It was maybe a foot square, and on what I guess was the back of it was a small piece of plastic that looked like an exact fit to put it on the metal rod that stuck out of the base. Another mental shrug later and it was attached. I sat back and looked at it, breaking into laughter over the complete cheese that it was. It seemed like one of those ultra-cheap props in a science fiction movie.

  The manual said that it too was a wirel
essly powered peripheral. I nodded, as if it should have been a no-brainer, and put the manual back in the box. The only thing I seemed to be missing was a mouse and a keyboard.

  “Damn it,” I grunted, remembering that I hadn’t ordered either component.

  I unhooked my mouse and keyboard from the old computer, and turned the new one around to plug them in. I searched the back panel of the case for inputs, but there seemed to be none. Not even the punch-outs that usually covered the holes until they were needed.

  “What the…” I said, rotating the case back around to see if there were ports on the front.

  None. This time I physically shrugged, and pushed the mouse and keyboard off to the side. I reached over and hit what the manual said was the “powered state” button. Nothing happened.

  “Derp,” I said out loud, remembering that I hadn’t plugged the power cell into the wall outlet.

  I stopped for a second, trying to remember if I’d even seen a power cord for the power cell. I walked to the pile of boxes near the garage door and sorted through them until I found the power cell packaging. Inside, at the bottom, was a thin cord that had the typical three-prong connector. I wondered if the cord itself was thick enough to even carry electricity along it without melting and possibly burning my parents’ house down. Once again, I shrugged, and found the spot on the rear of the power cell to lock one end of the cable into, then plugged the other into the power strip under my desk.

  I pushed the button on the front again, and this time the interior of the case lit up with a soft, blue glow, the same as the cpu when I’d plugged it into the socket. I squawked and fell over backwards in my chair when the monitor came to life. The screen was like a normal flat monitor’s screen, but it was more… I don’t know. It seemed so real as to be fake. It was like a hologram that was being projected about two inches from the surface of the square plastic piece I’d attached to the metal rod in the monitor’s base. The screen projection was twice as big as the plastic backing, which would, according to my estimates that were accompanied by a growing panic, make the total screen size around twenty-four inches wide.

  “Tyler?” Mom called from the kitchen. “What was that?”

  “Nothing, Mom!” I yelled from where I now knelt on the floor, keeping the newly-uprighted chair between me and whatever it was sitting on my desk.

  I waited to see if she would wander near my room to make sure, but I heard the faucet turn on and more dishes clinking. I got up slowly, walked to my desk, and stared at the projected image. A giant “4Q” was displayed, slowly revolving as if it were a globe. Below it, in futuristic block lettering, were the words “Activate Setup With Voice Command.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, then slammed it shut. I could feel my knees starting to wobble, so I sat down in the chair. A little too hard. The rush of air from the cushion made a slight farting noise. Normally, my toilet humor would kick in and make me laugh like a small child at the sound, but I was shaking. If these Stanford or M.I.T. nerds had really been having me on, I now thought they had definitely gone too far. Pissing me off by sending bogus computer parts was one thing. Fabricating some weird shit that pretended to actually work like a computer was something else.

  I opened my mouth again. “Begin setup,” I said, not sure if I was still being led into a practical joke, or if the thing would respond.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice came from… somewhere… it sounded like from the projected image, and said “Begin voice authorization.”

  “Uh… Hello,” I said.

  “Warning. Voice authorization failed. You have two remaining attempts.”

  “Shit,” I said aloud.

  “Warning. Voice authorization failed. You have one remaining attempt.”

  I almost said “goddammit” before catching myself. I leaned back in the chair, watching the 4Q logo continue to spin slowly.

  “Tyler Gallagher,” I said aloud, hoping that it was the right command, wondering if I was somehow on a good LSD trip.

  “Voice authorization accepted. Commence with setup?”

  “Uh… sure.” When the screen did nothing, I tried again. “Computer, commence setup.”

  I felt stupid. I felt like the dorks who watched too much Star Trek and did the LARP thing. Live Action Role Playing was for those that were far, far nerdier than me. I’d gone to high school with a group of them. Vampires are what they pretended to be, the type of kids (and now adults) who would hang out in cemeteries at midnight and have weird role-play battles, or maybe just acted out scenes that one of them wrote when not masturbating alone.

  “Setup commencing. Would you like the guided setup, or automated setup?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Which one is better? Easier?”

  “Unknown command. Would you like the guided setup, or the automated setup?”

  “Goddammit.”

  “Unknown command. Would you like the—”

  “Yeah yeah,” I said. “Automated setup.”

  I didn’t want to chance screwing anything up. If I could barely tell the computer what it should do, I’d probably choose a bunch of wrong or stupid options during setup. I’d set up Windows at least two hundred times, and even had some experience with Linux, but I was sure whatever operating system this one had would be different in the extreme.

  I watched the screen go through options automatically, faster than my eyes could follow. Every time I thought I saw a word or symbol that I recognized, it would be gone before my brain could be sure. After a few minutes, I reached forward, touching the projected image, jerking my finger back the first time as if it was made of acid. It wasn’t, but I was damn nervous. The whole setup routine, hell, the whole day so far, seemed too surreal. I started to wonder if I was still asleep, and the doorbell had actually chimed, but had triggered my dream to go from blasting aliens in an asteroid belt to building some weird science fiction computer.

  Three minutes passed before the screen blacked out. The blue glow inside the case winked out immediately after. I reached forward to push the button, but the glow came back just as my finger touched the plastic, the weird monitor projecting its image again a second later. I sat back and looked at the screen. It was a strange background that looked like a star field, with a couple of slowly spinning galaxies in the upper right and lower right corners. I stared at it and noticed that the stars or whatever they were would wink, pulsate, and creep across the screen. Five minutes passed, and the galaxies that had been in the lower right corner were now almost in the middle of my screen, the upper right galaxies nowhere to be found.

  “Uh, computer?” I asked. It didn’t respond.

  “Computer!” I said, louder this time. “Damn it. Uh… guided instructions? Guided manual? Manual help?”

  I felt stupid once again. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but voice commands no longer seemed to work. I touched one of the icons on the projected screen. It flashed then opened. I’d somehow lucked out and found what must have been a web browser. It opened to Google, which was weird. It was my start page on my old computer and my laptop. I checked to see if I was signed in, but the login link was in the upper right corner of the page. I felt a wave of both relief and disappointment. I touched the search box, and the cursor appeared in it. I had no keyboard or mouse, and no virtual keyboard popped up like it did on my smartphone.

  “Infinitia,” I said, hoping that voice commands still worked.

  The page instantly showed search results. It looked exactly like Google was supposed to look when doing a search. It even showed the same results as my laptop when I’d searched earlier. An investment firm, some social media user pages, and a bunch of other search results that were almost Infinitia, but not quite.

  “Quantum computing,” I said, but nothing happened. I touched the search box again. “Quantum computing.”

  The search results came back instantly, with Wikipedia at the top, a bunch of science sites below it. I touched the Wikipedia link and the page lo
aded. I walked out to my laptop and performed the same search, getting the same results. I had no idea what the hell was going on. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Then I walked into the kitchen.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah, hon?” she said, turning only her head away from the dough she was rolling out on the counter.

  “Am I awake?”

  “Are you what?”

  “Am I awake?”

  “Tyler, go play mind games with your father.”

  “He’s still at work.”

  “Then go annoy your friends online. I’m busy. Unless you want to help me?”

  “I’m being serious, Mom. Am I awake?”

  She picked up the heavy wooden rolling pin and turned to me. “Would you like me to crack your skull open and see if you wake up? If you have to go to the hospital, will you believe you’re awake?”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up, backing away from her as if she were crazy.

  “Yeah, you better back up,” she said, a wicked grin on her face.

  I cracked up laughing at her attempt to be scary. She might have pulled it off if not for the dusting of flour on her chin, and a spot of dough right at the end of her nose.

  “Run, Forrest!” she shouted as I went back to my bedroom.

  I stood near my desk, staring at the weird black case and the crazy projection monitor, the Google search results still plastered on the screen. I wondered if I shouldn’t grab my camera and take some more pictures. I thought about punching myself in the face for not recording the whole setup and voice command authorization part. Then I had another thought… how the hell did the computer connect to the internet? I hadn’t set up any of the networking, hadn’t even plugged in the ethernet cable yet. I hadn’t seen any place to plug one in that I could remember, but that was a lesser worry than the thing simply booting up and going online all on its own.