Ulrich Albert looked up from the desktop screen at the noise at the door.

“Time to go,” Jasper Vanteegard noted.

“What you mean? It’s not even 5PM.”

“Well, everybody else is gone. And the cleaning crew doesn’t show up until 7PM.”

Ulrich sighed.

“I blame remote working.”

“And August. Still means you’re the only one.”

Ulrich lazily waved him off.

“Get out then, Van. I’ll finish this. Then I promise, I’ll get out.”

“You know, one day, they’re going to find your desiccated skeleton in the building.”

Ulrich Albert ignored his colleague and plunged back to his console. As usual, trial runs were all fucked, and he was the sysadmin with the credentials to unfuck them.

Runs were important, because that’s what Q-plus used in-between redesigns, renting their experimental setup to other companies. After all, The Quantum Core™ was one year away from production.

It had been one year away from production since Ulrich had joined eight years ago. By now it was a recurring joke. And two years ago, the investors in the startup had decided to “get synergy” by merging Q-plus with an East Coast startup in AI.

Thirty percent of the staff had been laid off, and the staff of the company Q-plus had “purchased” had taken over all the admin layers. Ulrich, along with most of the designers had remained, while the AI geeks from the former “N-power-N Computing” company had poured over the designs, laughing all the way about insane algorithms that went with quantum computing.

The culture clash had reduced much, but the AI geeks were jokers. Jokers with ideas, but jokers nevertheless.

That was the goal of the current project. A feedback loop between AI and quantum computing. AI redesigned the hardware links and operation, as only an unthinking, unprejudiced, AI would. Ulrich remembered the early silicon compilers, who would create chips with unconnected transistors, that nevertheless failed to work if you removed the unconnected circuitry – because it affected the behavior of other transistors by quantum effects.

And, in turn, The Quantum Core™ ran AI algorithms in the insanely parallelized world of quantum mechanics, to design the next generation of AI. Or, more often, to create a new variant of GPT-5, like the ones he’d spotted in the middle of the fucked run. Like the last time he’d seen that kind of stuff. This time, someone wanted a RPG generator. “Take physics, and design an RPG for it”, using every single RPG sourcebook or even every single novel about RPGs ever written as the input. As if a neural network, quantum or otherwise, was going to make sense of what made a truly good RPG.

And with one too many runs scheduled in parallel, the machine learning clusters that took “models”, did math, and injected q-bits configuration were choking on it.

The software was supposed to keep multiple learning batches from interfering with each other, but, of course, the thing leaked memory like a 2010’s era webserver.

Ulrich was one ENTER-key away from validating the new run configuration when he noticed the status window. According to it, The Quantum Core™ had a current effective power of 2000 q-bits. Which, for a hardware of 256 physical q-bits, was pretty impressive.

That was what The Quantum Core™ was supposed to be about. Rather than add more q-bits, which only result in quantum collapse faster, they tried virtual q-bits. Offloading the already fuzzy q-bits to entangled particles outside of the hardware, trying to squeeze more power per “real” q-bit than allowed by common sense.

“Okay, what’s going on?”

He was pulling on the flow diagram generated by the automated configuration creators when he noticed that the status window’s number were creeping up. 3000. 3500. 4,000. 5,000.

By then, he knew something was wrong with the monitoring systems. To have that number of “available” q-bits, you’d need to entangle the central, physical core with most of the rackmount it was located in, despite the lack of suitable hardware. There was no way, even with “spooky interaction at a distance”, as the first quantum physicists had called it, you’d get those numbers. And they were climbing too fast anyway to be real.

He cancelled the new run configuration he’d just set up, and fired off the email client before he did anything else.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Disciplinary action required against Joe Maris

Hello,

I’ve exhausted my store of patience when it comes to Maris. That is the fifth time this year I’ve got him sneaking unplanned and purposeless jobs in the queue for the core prototype.

Every time, I grill him. Every time, he says he won’t do it. Obviously, every time, he still does. I wouldn’t bet he has done more jobs that I haven’t caught.

At this point, it’s a HR problem, not a system problem. It’s your job to do whatever you want, but I want you to keep make him stop. Do it, or I’ll escalate that to upper management.

Sincerely yours,

Let the HR weenie, Douglas, deal with the one-too-many joke loads aficionado. Ulrich had more on his plate. Like hitting the full reset. Dump all the software, reboot the servers, and then painstakingly restart the current load of tests, only without the offending RPG job.

At least the East Coast where those AI jokers were was after 8PM and he shouldn’t be there to sneak back in.

The screen went black before he hit ENTER.

His first impulse was that Maris had created some watchdog software, resetting his desktop if Ulrich messed with his latest steal of processing time.

But then, he noticed the neon light was off as well. And the hum of the AC, not entirely needed even in late August, was gone as well.

“Well, power’s out,” he muttered, to no-one whatsoever.

Then the realization hit him. If power was out, then The Quantum Core™ was on battery power. And he needed to shut it down properly, because letting it heat up passively was going to require a week to clean the hardware and restart it, instead of 20 hours or so if you did a proper shutdown. And management would scream if there was an entire week of unplanned interruption.

He stood and went out. He hesitated – he hadn’t picked his keys to lock the office since the badge-powered locks would not work. But there was no one around anyway, least not until the cleanup crew arrived, found the power off, and goofed off since they couldn’t run their vacuum cleaners.

The corridor wasn’t too dark. The architects, back when money wasn’t tight, had made a glass ceiling, both here and the upper floor, so late afternoon daylight still poured enough to see. Which was good, because for some reason, even the emergency exit signs were out. They were not supposed to, you had batteries checked every year for that. But out they were. Something to complain at general services once power was restored.

He walked, heading toward the server room. Just before it, he hesitated. The room was supposed to be enterable in case of power off, just for the reason he came. But the handle opened up and he almost stepped into the server room, stopping immediately as he took the spectacle inside.

The racks near the door were looking more or less normal, but the central set of racks, those holding the main servers and the core’s hardware proper… were gone.

Instead, there was a bulging of… blue light. A kind of actinic blue that wasn’t quite right. He instinctively raised his hand, and immediately realized he was still seeing the blue light… through his own hand.

Realization hit him as he started to feel some strange sort of cold heat.

Fuck, radiation. That’s… what’s this blue stuff called? Cherenkov?

He immediately backpedaled, slamming the door closed. He turned and started, feeling the heat rising inside him.

Then his head bumped on the ceiling.

Wait what?

He raised his hand, trying to feel the glass ceiling. Then he freaked out, because of what he was seeing.

His right hand had six digits.

Shit, mutations?

Then he realized life wasn’t a comic book. You didn’t mutate and become green when exposed to gamma rays or something. You burned, your insides turned to mush, or, maybe, if you survived cancers, your kids would get born full of mutant malformations unless they died in the womb.

You certainly didn’t grow an extra digit. In maybe five seconds.

Then a pulse of heat came from behind him, and he started to turn, as the entire glass ceiling exploded over him, showering him with fragments.

“SHIT!” he yelled.

He raised his other hand, feeling in the half-darkness, and felt wetness. No, more than wetness. There was liquid flowing from his side. And he felt weak suddenly.

Ulrich Albert dropped on the floor, his vision already greying. Major blood vessel to the head cut, no more oxygen and pressure for the brain, he thought briefly.

As the last vestige of sight ended, he briefly thought he’d seen something. Like blue on blue letters, like a Windows bluescreen of sorts. Then he though no more, and the vision ended.

Ulrich Johann Albert

Male evolved, 37 years, 2 months

Unspecialized (sysadmin)

Level: 0

0 unallocated skill point

XP: 998,778