He sighed again, finished ringing up his items and paid by card. Walking out of the supermarket’s doors, he wondered what might have been if it weren’t for the bagging farce.
∆ ∆ ∆
Victor pulled the van up outside HQ, exited the cab and opened the rear doors to begin unloading. He gathered a few long pieces of metal under his arm and headed into the building.
"Honey, I'm home!" he called up the stairs and placed the metal on the floor close to their nanobot parts. He listened for the soft his coming from upstairs, then returned to the van to finish porting the metal in. Once he had it all heaped on the HQ floor, he climbed the stairs to join the others.
“That’s the frame parts dealt with.” he said, “How’s generation three going?”
"Well, it's out of our hands now," Spencer said. "It's so easy, it's like we have a tiny little workforce doing the hard part for us. With enough of these guys, we could build anything. Willy Wonka ain't got shit."
Victor looked at the swarm, which was floating in an ever growing cloud at the far end of the room. From here, it almost seemed like a magic eye image from the nineties, individual drones almost invisible to the naked eye at this distance, but the hovering groups made up the dots. It was also like looking at a 3D version of the static snow that old CRT televisions would display when not receiving a signal. Their work was creating a steady buzz of white noise almost like the fuzzy sound of flowing blood when your hands cup your ears. The powders and resin that the nanobots used to self-replicate were placed on the floor, and a steady stream of drones was flowing down to the materials and back up to the cloud.
"I hope that their hive intelligence doesn't become too advanced," Victor said. "We're not prepared for unionisation."
Chapter 16
Simon woke up in his small, yet cosy sleeping area and ventured into the kitchen space to make a morning cup of tea. His work would distract him the moment he left his bed; he had little time to spend making breakfast so he would stick to cereal. Simon poured a bowl of bran flakes, added raisins and splashed on some milk. He ate his breakfast and drank his tea while he tinkered at his workstation keyboard. The workstations had been moved further away from one another, allowing space for the data storage frame that Victor had built to take pride of place in the middle of the stations. He didn't have a lot of work to do at his terminal, but he always liked to tinker and refine the software, cementing his understanding of the new technology. With his early access to advanced gadgets, Simon became like a child with a new plaything, but then — also like a child — his playthings were a chance at gaining knowledge. Knowledge of how the objects work, how to dismantle, then reassemble them correctly. There was nothing new for him to add to the hard drive that they were building, but he enjoyed going back over the data anyway.
Once he had finished his cereal and tea, he stripped and entered the shower. Simon's OCD would affect him in counter-intuitive ways. Sometimes he could go a week without a shower if he thought he was going to be alone and there would be no one to have to put up with the smell. He would get so engrossed in his work that there was no time to spare on his hygiene before returning, half asleep, to his bed in the evening. A lot of people would claim that there weren't enough hours in a day, but it frustrated Simon no end, especially since, right now, he considered himself a master of time itself. Once he did take a shower, OCD would kick in again, and he'd be in there for forty minutes, unable to speed up his washing ritual. Counter-intuitive.
After his hour long showering, drying and dressing procedure, he was eager to return to his station. The clothes he picked out daily usually consisted of a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a design related to one of his favourite comic-book heroes, movies or TV shows. He was less concerned with fashion and more concerned with spending as little time as possible choosing clothes.
He'd promised not to start work on the data storage unit until the others arrived, they were just as fond of the new gadgets. Instead, he enjoyed giving the plans and blueprints a thorough inspection, finding ways to improve them. Just because the future had more time to create the gadgets, it didn't mean that it would be beyond his expertise to upgrade them. He wondered how many of the future's designs and schematics that they received were of their devising. The original plan was to reverse engineer the most significant innovations from the future and send them back so they could be brought into existence at a much earlier time, but the future would now contain an innovative corporation that wasn't there before; their own. Now they had a foothold in the technology market, it stood to reason that they had the resources to make their own entries into the field. He wondered if it would be considered brazen for future messages to contain indications of what their input was in the tech's creation.
They had a sixty-inch 4K TV on a stand near their workstations which they used to watch satellite programming or streamed media. One other relatively small luxury they'd allowed themselves on the company account. They wanted their business to have the kind of work environment that would regard employee morale as being of utmost importance, even if they, themselves, were the only employees. All three founders of the company had previously suffered through jobs that considered employees no more important than the stationary in the cupboard, they would never allow their corporation to follow the same methodology.
Simon enjoyed watching movies while he worked, he felt that it made him more creative. His preference was for cartoons, sci-fi and action adventure. Flicking through the streaming options on the smart TV, he settled on Back to the Future for the second time this week. Maybe he’d follow that with some Rick and Morty, his current favourite adult cartoon, which always managed to cheer him up with its hilarious sci-fi jokes. Victor and Spencer would probably not be joining him for at least another couple of hours, he was an early riser, today he arose before six. No inspiration had hit for modifications on the data storage unit's designs, so he decided to tinker with the nanobots instead. Simon switched on the mister in the drone's storage box, which let out a fine spray of water that the drones used to immediately recharge.
They had retrofitted each of the drones with microscopic liquid crystals, similar to the pixels on an Ultra HD smartphone screen. As a result, the drones could add colour to their impersonation formations; as they'd chosen to call the three-dimensional animated models that they could teach the swarms to make. With the vast number of drones they currently had ready at their disposal, they could make tight formations that were indistinguishable from the original object, unless subjected to close scrutiny. The coloured light reflections that the liquid crystals added would complete the illusion by creating a ‘skin' of pixels over the surface of the object they were imitating. The effect was a lot more convincing than any hologram Simon had seen, but then holograms were a fledgeling technology right now, not very advanced and now possibly obsolete. Plus, the drones were extremely mobile, and self-contained, whereas a hologram required a projector.
The swarm floated to the left of the TV screen so that Simon's view wasn't obscured. He tapped a few keys and clicked some on-screen buttons, and the swarm morphed into a ‘life' size representation of Slimer from Ghostbusters. The likeness made a few grunts, raspberry sounds and spoke in tongues briefly, then floated around the room aimlessly for a few minutes. Simon chuckled and clapped with excitement at the possibilities that the technology presented. He clicked and tapped a little more until Slimer morphed into a full-size replica of himself. The figure appeared to stand on the ground, though it was actually hovering a millimetre or so above, imitating a few subtle human actions to sell the illusion further. As it stood now, there weren't enough drones to make a convincing full sized human without the image being slightly transparent due to the distance between drones. They could, however, render only the part of the impersonation that faced the observer, so it still appeared persuasive. If a person were to see the swarm from the opposite side, they would see through the facade. The figure would be recessed from the back — like the
mould of a gelatine dessert — which would create an optical illusion, fooling the mind into seeing the exact same three-dimensional shape as the front view. On a profile, it would look like half a person, sliced in half, so the back portion was missing. If more liquid crystals were added to the back of each drone, they might be able to fool a second viewer into thinking the figure was whole but once you add a third set of eyes, it would make the action pointless. The only real solution was to just add more drones, enough to create a full 360 degrees of viewing around the impersonation; the figure would appear complete, but it would be hollow inside. They had enough ingredients in their storage area to make the right amount of drones, but right now that would be an over-indulgence on their part, a plaything, as they had plenty of the bots for testing.
Simon decided that looking at this facsimile of himself was too unnerving and also made him feel a little self-conscious, so he once again entered commands into his terminal, and the swarm became a baby dragon which sailed through the air of the room, occasionally breathing fire. Simon marvelled at the authenticity of the flames for a while, then tapped one last time, the swarm returning to Slimer form, his favourite of the impersonations and his default for when the swarm was in active standby mode — what Victor referred to as the screen saver.
Simon sat back to watch the movie for a while, yearning for his partners to arrive soon so they could get on with their work. It wasn't often that he couldn't find anything to work on. The next five minutes seemed like the longest Simon had gone without problem-solving in weeks. On TV, Doc Brown was talking about his flux capacitor and how he'd invented it. Simon contemplated falling off a toilet and knocking himself unconscious since it had worked so well for Doc, though that might not have been the best idea since the phone reception in the bathroom was terrible. If he hurt himself badly, he wouldn't be able to call for the ambulance. Of course, this was all a situation invented to amuse himself, Simon wasn't that stupid, but it made him think about how to make the drive accessible remotely without using the internet. The web was a risk to their anonymity and about to become insufficient for sending their data at the speeds he was assuming they would require. Victor's app was one way, the drive sent messages to their phones using their terminals as a proxy. He decided that the best way to achieve two-way data transmission with the drive would be to make another three photon pairs, one for each of them, in portable photon boxes, then they could communicate directly and issue commands to the drive. Since an entangled pair remained entangled no matter where they were, there would be no range limit — unlike his mobile in the bathroom — they would also keep transfers entirely secure.
He was almost done with the plans for putting this into practice when his business partners walked through the HQ entrance, arriving synchronously for the first time in a while.
“Hey!” Victor said, then “Look who’s up!” which was his ironic version of good morning. Simon was always up as far as Victor knew.
"Ah, you're here." Once he'd put his mind to work, the time had passed much more quickly. "Now we can start assembly on the data storage."
“Someone’s an eager beaver,” Spencer said.
“You can’t hide that you’re just as keen.”
“That’s very true,” Victor said. “So let’s get started.”
Chapter 17
As it turned out, the PRE-Innovations crew had a smaller part in creating the yottabyte drive than expected. They built the larger parts of the unit, but most of the solid state memory components were assembled by the nanobots, the team just sat back to watch. The fabrication of the drive took only two days, many carbon nanotube claws make light work. After construction was complete, the team transferred their files from the old drive to the new, and although they collectively had over two of terabytes of information on their old disks, the new drive barely registered the used storage in its total capacity. They could transfer the same amount of data a half billion times more before it filled, like adding three drops of water into an empty swimming pool.
"We should make another of these and start a web hosting service. We could be the provider for the whole world's internet files and never have to upgrade our servers." Victor said.
"Obviously, we don't have the means for serving it all from that one unit, but I get your meaning," Simon said, always the nitpicker. "We could offer unlimited online storage for home users, and I still think we could fit it all on that one drive. With enough processing power, and if we somehow had the bandwidth to serve all that data, the tech could replace the need for physical storage on the remote machine, even for installed software. Home broadband might need to catch up a bit first, in terms of speed; media files would be easy to access, but if we wanted people to be able to install their apps remotely, internet speeds would need to increase to be on par with hard disk read/write capabilities."
"I think we might have an answer for that involving entangled photons. There, another use to add to the list." Spencer said.
"Yeah, not sure how long it will be until we can release the specs on how to achieve that," Simon said.
"We haven't released anything but a drone for vain people and a new battery and charger type."
"Yes, but at least the battery might have improved people's lives somewhat. It does seem like we haven't actually achieved anything that offers global benefits yet, but it's coming. We have to retain our head start for a little while longer, we can't lose our foothold on this. It shouldn't be long until our future selves send us something that's safe to release without unravelling what we've done up to now. This new method of storage couldn't be released without also releasing the nanobots, as they're needed for construction."
"I suppose, even if we wait a little longer, the technology is still going to be years ahead of its time, then, once we've passed the buffer zone, our gear will be getting released thick and fast," Spencer said. The men nodded in agreement.
Their future selves seemed to know exactly how long it would take their counterparts to make this new drive, the next message and its attachments would be available to open tomorrow. They were once again becoming restless to find out what it might contain, but there would be no betting pool in place since they were all in agreement with Simon's theory that they were about to start work on a super-fast next generation computer; a quantum computer. It would be a logical companion to the high capacity data storage. Once they had the power of a quantum processor, who knew what might come next? Super real virtual reality? Artificial intelligence? The answers to previously unsolvable equations? All of these were possibilities, but the team's ultimate dream for the seemingly infinite applications of the computer was teleportation. The technology and theory famously used in Star Trek and countless other sci-fi classics were moving closer to reality as of late, and it could possibly become science fact within the next hundred years, but PRE-Innovations would love to give it a bump up in the schedule. The drive's storage capacity would be way more than sufficient for holding the digital conversion of an individual person's physical construction, cell by cell. Scientists have theorised that this information would only require one and a half gigabytes to store. Teleportation wasn't achieved cell by cell, however; that would require a full breakdown of the subject particle by particle, which would constitute a lot more data. Whatever they were laying down the groundwork for, they would be one step further towards their goal by tomorrow.
∆ ∆ ∆
Once the next morning arrived, the non-residents of HQ were in the building bright and early. Spencer and Victor headed straight to their stations around the drive. Since the new data storage unit at the centre of their triangular desk arrangement was six feet high and directly in their eye line, it made the work environment feel less spacious, so they had decided to build a platform around three sides of the drive. They moved their workstations onto the platform and constructed barriers around its perimeter to ensure that they couldn't accidentally wheel off the edge. The drive's chassis had room on its surface for extra monit
ors and a nanobot hive. There were steps and ramps at the platform's edge for access to their workspaces, and the whole construction had a sci-fi quality which they loved.
"Let's open this data package," Simon said with enthusiasm. His screen was mirrored at the other's stations.
"Good idea, I'd completely forgotten about that," Victor said ironically.
What appeared on their screens was no surprise, the heading of the document read ‘Next Gen Quantum Computer'. The group cheered.
"Yay!" Spencer whooped with theatrical exuberance. "We all win."
"It looks like the drones have the largest portion of work in building the electronics, yet again," Victor observed.
"Yeah. The nanobots are definitely the greatest tool for technological advancement in a century." Simon said.
Once again, Victor took a trip to the hardware store to buy the metal and parts for the casing of the computer. This was going to take a little more of their welding and metalwork expertise than the data storage's cabinet; nevertheless, it would probably be complete within a few days.
Chapter 18
Two days later, the quantum computer was fully assembled and ready for its first boot cycle; as always, right on schedule. The nanobots had worked incredibly fast, and the frame assembly had progressed more smoothly than they had expected. As it was the size of a small family car, the computer occupied the eastern corner of the large open plan room, a moderate distance from their platform. A significant portion of the machine's size was attributed to the processor's cooling system; evidently, even future computers had a penchant for overheating. The computer would communicate with the drive wirelessly via new entangled photon pairs, so proximity was not an issue. Today's standard wireless transfers are much slower than the traditional wires and cables used with computers, the photons, however, outperform both of their predecessors.
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