Ticked

Part 1

Nathan Jifford was sitting in his office, as profs are known to do, waiting for a student to appear during his office hour. His office was small and organised. Well, it was as organised as an ad hoc system can get. To the untrained eye the piles of papers on the desks would appear thrown there casually, and some would call it 'messy'. Every scrap of paper; however, was very precisely positioned in the mind of Mr. Jifford, who could find what he was looking for with a moments notice.

Aside from the papers that cluttered the office, coated the desk, filled the cabinets or layed there lifelessly in the shelves, Mr. Jifford has only one adornment on his wall: the infernal ticking clock. Having a computer on his desk and watch on his wrist, Mr. Jifford really does not need a wall clock to tell the time. He really only bought this one because it was pretty damn cool. It was battery operated and self charging. It charges itself very much in the way his wristwatch does, by taking advantage of the tremors that occur when people walk. The ingenious part about the wall clock is that it is far more sensitive than the wristwatch. It can pick up the footsteps of people walking past the office. Thus the clock always remains charged. Overall, this is a good thing.

The only bad thing about the clock was that it ticks and tocks much louder than it ought to which drives Nathan mad. Naturally this has nothing to do with the story.

This story begins when one of Mr. Jifford's graduate students, a Josh Newman, runs in in a state of excitement.

"Sir! I've found something completely and utterly amazing!"

"Playing with the infinite quantum computer again? You have to be careful with that, you could end existence, you know."

This gave Josh no pause as he had heard it all before. A quantum computer had been built in Europe and, when the word got out, all of academia went into a frenzy. It was designed with infinite memory and processing power, tapping into the fabric of existence itself. It had some amazing properties that let it simulate the development of the universe from scratch. The program that did this was horribly complicated. Suffice to say, it could theoretically end the universe if misused, something Josh was aware of while doing his research.

"I'm aware of that, but hear me out," said Josh as he started scribbling heavily on the whiteboard. He explained quickly. "You know how in most computer languages that if you know the name of something then you can control it? It's something that some programming paradigms are based on. So I got to thinking, what if you could do that with real objects?"

To be continued...

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