Entanglement: A Modern Frankenstein | Creation

1.1: Quantum Connections

Austin, Texas | April | Lexa

"Have I been hacked?"   

Lexa suggested it loudly enough that Tristan poked his head into the room and asked, "What?"

"I don't think so," Lexa continued to herself, "but something just isn't right."

Lexa shouted as though the perpetrators were in the unoccupied downstairs portion of her house. "If I discover someone's been prodding my account, I'll make them pay."

"Are you sure it's a hacker?" Tristan said from behind her in the room.

"No. I'm not sure, lurker!" she snapped.

"Hey, hey! I just came in to see if I could help. You've been cursing up a storm for twenty minutes!" he responded, backing away with hands protecting his chest even though he must have known she would never throw anything. "I'm sure not. You've got some solid code, there."

Lexa's long fingers fluttered over the keyboard, but not as fast as her mind desired.

Lexa Livingstone always drew attention by stringing together lines of code at breakneck speed. She stood out for her skill long before any other factors. Her frame was best described as thin from her head and nose down to her ankles. Based on physical attributes alone, she could go unnoticed. But even non-techies could tell there were impressive gears working behind her piercing gray eyes. It was not her appearance, but her presence that commanded a room.

"You know, Tristan, having written a few functions of code for this does not make you an expert in the whole thing," Lexa said, turning to the blonde-haired man behind her. Tristan was about the same age as her, the same height as her, and also thin in frame like her, but he did not possess the bearing of Lexa. If there were a single light source in the room, he would be in Lexa's shadow. He did have a prominent patch of scruff he was experimenting with for a goatee, but Lexa and her sister, among others, had been quick to warn him against it.

"Yeah, but the code works, doesn't it? You never have to worry about that linking issue again, do you? I'm just glad you remember I did something."

Indeed, even though Tristan worked on his own separate project, he had offered to help her in the early days with a sticky problem. He had written a small section of code that had addressed the situation until they found another way around it. It was the only code he had written for her and it nagged her that Tristan liked to remind her of it. Those reminders only served to make her think of all the code they someday had to revisit and refactor, which was what developers called rewriting a portion of the code to be more effective or efficient in one way or another. There was always old code serving as a temporary bandage to a problem in the logic. Bandages turned out to be less than temporary. The hurdle was finding the time to go back, find those places, relearn the intended logic, and fix them without creating bigger issues.

"But I couldn't say what it does. I'm not even sure we are still using it," Lexa chided as she laid down several additional lines of new code on one of the screens in front of her.

"Well that makes me feel good," Tristan said in a sigh.

"I'm not here to make you feel good," Lexa said. "A successful entrepreneur like yourself shouldn't need a struggling entrepreneur like me to make you feel good."

"Duly noted," Tristan muttered behind her.

Lexa also muttered, but at the computer as though instructing her fingers on what to do next. She didn't feel like her nervous system was functioning as fast as it needed to. Sometimes, she wished for a direct connection from her brain to the code.

She needed this project to work because her funds were running low despite cost cutting. She had bought this small family home in a quiet neighborhood almost a year before with the proceeds from her previous employment. As she began her project, she wanted more financial security. Tristan had come along at the right time, looking for a quiet place to live and work on his own project. Lexa had assumed that being in the proximity of a serial entrepreneur would help her. She did not know back then that "serial" was a stretch. She now perceived Tristan more of a "one hit wonder" as he struggled to make ground on his second venture. Regardless, she appreciated his rent payments in exchange for the master bedroom. Other than attention, Tristan did not require more at a time when she needed to focus on making progress.

"Is it just my internet?" she whispered as she tried other configurations, settings, ping tests, and other coding efforts.

She yelled to the room, "Tristan! Is your internet working? Tristan!" She waited for a second until she knew he had left. She cursed, then spoke to her monitor since she was alone in the room now, "I'll kill someone if this issue is just the internet connection."

Lexa imagined her commands going through her local WiFi network, across miles of cables to the Xeries Data Center, through their firewalls, and into her environment there. She thought through each component in that environment to identify where the current issue might reside. Even though she was not in the same room as them and had never seen them with her own eyes, she imagined hovering over each component as though inspecting each distinct piece for the source of her current failures.

Xeries housed and maintained servers and storage devices. On each server was a motherboard with processors—many high power processors for the type of work she was doing. The physical server was divided into many virtual "instances", which were mini computers sharing those processors but acting like their own computer with their own operating system.

There were also databases that ran on their own virtual instances with their own storage devices. The data living there was intended to be mined by her instances to produce valuable output data. The mining process— as soon as it succeeded on the instances she created— would generate output data and leave that data in those same databases.

At the heart of these components was the quantum processor, which completed the complex complications at the request of her computing instances. The key was a set of functions she had written and dubbed "Q-connect" that connected every instance to that same quantum processor.

She already had one successful instance running. As long as that instance was generating output and other metrics, she could leave that one alone. She was trying to get one more like it. Even though few people could (or needed to) understand the complex logic she was running, connecting a second instance to that quantum processor should not have been difficult. She had the first working one as an example, after all.

"Hey, Dmitri, are you there? Can you connect to the instance?" She received no response.

Lexa was buried in monitors. Four large monitors created a wall in front of her and two more flanked the side. An assortment of bobble-head dolls from various sci-fi shows and cartoons flanked the gap below the monitors and her laptop was branded on the back with stickers of different software applications which only a true software geek could know, let alone use.

"Maybe it's just the internet," she uttered after several more rounds of entries.

"Better freakin' be," she said as she considered all the funds she had put into this project. She had spent months on this code and it had worked once, but it was not working again as though something was broken between here and the quantum processor. Granted, it had only worked the one time. Something had to be different about that environment or some software code Dmitri pushed into that environment that was somehow not reflected here.

As much as she was frustrated, she fired on all cylinders in challenges like this. She loved the process of trying new things, failing, trying something else, failing again, and eventually succeeding. She knew she was on the forefront when she posted the first questions on topics in online forums.

(continued)