Chapter 1: A Drunk Miracle

Thursday, January 3, 2036
The Unknown Singularity - 7 hours

Emily doesn’t notice me. Not really. She smiles at me when we pass each other in the hallway, that polite, fleeting curve of her lips that means nothing, that she probably doesn’t even think about, but it kills me every time. I live for those moments, hoard them like a miser hoards gold, replay them in my mind when I’m alone in my apartment, drowning in the silence. She has no idea. She couldn’t have any idea, because if she did, she would look at me differently, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t just pass by, wouldn’t just offer those absent-minded little gestures of courtesy and then turn away, already forgetting I exist. She’d care about me. She’d love me. Or so I tell myself when I’m not feeling like a total loser who could never deserve someone like Emily.

When I do feel like a loser I know in my heart of heart that Emily will never need me the way I need her. I exist at the edges of her world, a passing presence, a coworker she might vaguely recognize if someone prompted her, but not someone she thinks about. Not someone she remembers when she leaves the office at the end of the day. She has a life beyond this place, a life filled with friends and late-night dinners, a life where people laugh at her jokes not because they’re obligated to but because they genuinely enjoy her. A life that doesn’t include me. I tell myself it doesn’t bother me, that I don’t need her to notice me, but that’s a lie, isn’t it? A neat little excuse I tell myself so I don’t have to admit how much it eats at me, how much I hate the way she breezes past my desk without a second glance, without ever thinking about what it does to me when she lives her life without me in it.

She’s standing in the break room, talking to her coworkers from marketing, her hands moving in quick, effortless gestures as she laughs about the brain scan she just had done. It was a joke, she says, a complete waste of time. Some corporate gimmick to make the company look like it’s pushing the boundaries of science when, in reality, it’s just setting piles of investor money on fire. They’ve been beating the “quantum neuroscience” drum for months now, but everyone—everyone—knows it’s bullshit. Even the executives know. The engineers knew before they ever even ran the first scan. The Kanwisher equation settled the debate a decade ago, proving beyond any doubt that no conceivable system could ever process the complexity of a human brain in real-time. The numbers aren’t just inconvenient; they’re catastrophic.

The brain isn’t like a normal processor. It doesn’t run on neat, sequential lines of code. It’s a tangled, chaotic storm of electrical signals firing in every direction at once, rewriting itself as it goes, never the same twice, never even similar from one millisecond to the next. A single neuron isn’t a transistor flipping between ones and zeroes; it’s a dynamic, analog node connected to thousands of others, each one subtly modifying the signals passing through it, each connection shifting and mutating with every thought, every memory, every breath. And the sheer volume—eighty-six billion neurons, each with thousands of everchanging connections, all firing and recalibrating in parallel—makes traditional computing look like stacking blocks with numb fingers. Even quantum computing, with its superposition and entanglement tricks, is laughably inadequate.

The math is horrifying. If every computer on Earth were linked together—every server, every supercomputer, every personal laptop, every phone—and if you let them run for a million years, you might, might be able to simulate a single second of human thought. If you wanted to search a brain scan for one specific piece of information—say, a memory, a name, a single fleeting moment—you wouldn’t just need more processing power. You would need more time than the Universe has left. Past the heat death of reality itself, long after the last atoms have burned out, the search would still be running, churning endlessly through a near-infinite maze of possibilities, never reaching a conclusion. The fundamental problem isn’t just complexity—it’s that the human brain isn’t static. It’s not a hard drive storing neat, retrievable files. It’s a storm.

Emily shakes her head, rolling her eyes as she leans against the counter, coffee in one hand, tapping her nails absently against the ceramic. “I signed the papers without even reading them,” she says, laughing. “What was the point? There’s nothing in there that even matters. It’s all useless.”

And that’s the thing. She’s right. Everyone knows she’s right.

But I still can’t stop thinking about it. About her, really.

She stands there, leaning casually against the counter, her head tilted slightly as she speaks, and I can’t stop staring at the elegant slope of her neck, the way the light catches in her hair, the smoothness of her skin. She looks like something out of a painting, like something collected, something meant to be displayed in a pristine glass case where no one but me could ever touch her.

She doesn’t know what she is. Not really. She doesn’t know how men must look at her, must want her, must ache for her in a way they can never admit. Or maybe she does, and that’s why she carries herself the way she does, why she moves through the world with such careless grace, as if she belongs to no one, as if she can’t be owned. That thought makes something deep in my stomach tighten, something I don’t have words for, something I don’t want words for.

I let my gaze trace the delicate lines of her features, the impossible symmetry of them, the precise, sculpted angles of her cheekbones, the way her full lips curve just slightly, as if always caught between a smirk and something softer. Her eyes, dark and deep, are like polished obsidian, framed by lashes that sweep upward at just the right angle, an almost deliberate beauty. But it isn’t deliberate. She was born this way. Born to be perfect. Born to be admired.

I wonder if she knows how rare that is.

There are beautiful women, sure, but they aren’t like her. They aren’t flawless. They aren’t trophies. Because that’s what she is, isn’t she? A trophy. The kind of woman men chase and never catch, the kind who belongs behind velvet ropes, the kind who only exists in brief, fleeting moments before she slips away, untouchable. She’s the prize at the end of a war, the gleaming jewel meant to sit atop the pedestal, a status symbol that whispers of power, of ownership. And yet, she belongs to no one. She walks through the office, through the world, without even the faintest awareness of the effect she has, without understanding what it means to be so rare, so impossible, so utterly desired.

She pulls a slip of paper from her pocket and waves it in the air, rolling her eyes. She was going to use the voucher for lunch, but now she’s got a last-minute meeting, so she just tosses it onto the table and tells her coworkers they can have it if they want.

There’s still steam rising from her coffee, but she leaves it behind, forgotten, already moving on to something more important. She doesn’t even glance at me as she leaves. That should be the moment I let it go.

But I don’t.

It’s not hard to get to. The security measures are in place to protect against corporate espionage, are done against stuff that is valuable. They just don’t exist for stuff deemed useless. I walk into the lab like I belong there, because I do, because I’ve worked here long enough that no one questions it when I start digging through storage. The data crystals are neatly cataloged, slotted into their labeled compartments, a row of fragile little things filled with entire lives. I find hers without difficulty. The label on the case reads EMILY TANAKA in standard white text, indistinguishable from the others except for the way it means something to me.

It fits into my palm perfectly, a cool, smooth thing, deceptively ordinary for something that holds everything she is. Her thoughts, her memories, her personality, all condensed into a tiny sliver of crystal and silicon. I clench my fingers around it, feel my heartbeat pounding against my ribs, and I tell myself I’ll put it back tomorrow. I swear to myself that I will.

But I don’t.

I take it home.

And when I get home, I sit in the dark, turning it over in my hands, staring at it under the soft glow of my monitor. It’s just data, I remind myself. It’s not her. It’s nothing. But my fingers shake when I hold it, my pulse thrumming in my ears as I fight against the knowledge that I’ve done something that could ruin me, and all for a useless trinket. I should put it back. I should destroy it. I should forget this ever happened. But the moment I tell myself I should, I know I won’t. Because I wanted this. Because I needed this.

Because it’s the only piece of her I will ever have.

I start drinking. I drink until the guilt fades, until the self-loathing turns soft and manageable, until the fear that I’ve just thrown away my entire career feels like someone else’s problem. My apartment is a mess, wires spilling across the floor, a half-empty bottle sweating condensation onto my desk, my old clunky quantum processor humming quietly in the corner. I tell myself I just want to see. Just to try. It’s not like it’ll do anything. The scans are useless. Everyone knows that. Everyone.

After all, you’d need a quantum processor far beyond anything actually possible to make use of it and mine is pathetically outdated. It’s an older model I was given to check for bugs, but I’ve had it for three months pastnreturn-by date and so far no one has said a word. My manager only cares about the newer models so I’ve been fiddling with this hunk of junk to see if I could get some small improvement that could land me a promotion.

It hums in the corner, its quiet, mechanical whisper filling the apartment, the same sound I’ve been hearing for weeks, but tonight it feels different. The whole room feels different, charged with some low, electric anticipation that I can’t quite put into words. My limbs are warm and slow, heavy with alcohol, but my mind—my mind won’t stop.

I exhale slowly, the alcohol making everything feel soft, like I’m drifting through a dream, like nothing I do really matters because none of it will stick in the morning. Maybe that’s why I start moving things around. Maybe that’s why I start tinkering. I shove another cable into place, twist a set of connections at the base of the processor, shift a component six inches to the left without thinking. Something sparks.

For a second, I think I might have broken it but then the screen stops flickering and the numbers on the monitor jump. I blink at them, swaying slightly in my chair, my breath coming out slow and foggy. The processing and memory readouts are recording that they have both doubled. I was hoping I might manage a 1% of 1% increase. But double? That’s got to be a glitch.

I’ll fix it in the morning. That’s what I tell myself as I stumble toward my bed, my limbs heavy with alcohol, my vision swimming slightly from too much whiskey and too little concern. The machine hums behind me, steady, rhythmic, the low vibration filling the apartment like a second heartbeat, a sound I’ve grown so used to that I barely register it anymore as I drift off to sleep.