In the meantime, there was the project.

Most things are designed and built with a purpose in mind. Naecia, though, was working backwards; she had been presented with a design (by her brain) and was tasked (by herself) with constructing a machine according to that design in order to learn what it did. Only once a section or component came together was she able to draw vague conclusions about its purpose. For instance, the use of heavy copper and carbon allotropes suggested an electromagnetic shielding – the type used to prevent interference when playing with subatomic particles. This allowed Naecia to conclude that she was building a device that interfaced with the physical world on a quantum level. To do what, she didn’t know. Her brain was giving her contradictory information This, of course, was a form of torture.

What she had been able to divine about the machine was as follows: firstly, it was a device with astronomical computational power. More than anyone could conceivably need for any practical application. She’d managed, through a variety of both legitimate and illegitimate channels, to obtain seventy-two quantum deep-circuit processors, for a total of over a quintillion high-stability superpositional bits, or enough quantum memory to hold the name of every star in the Universe, their elemental makeup, spin velocity, and favorite dessert.

Secondly – and this was the part that made her feel like her mind had genuinely cracked – the machine was supposed to move things from one place to another instantaneously. Some called this “quantum teleportation”. Others called it im-fucking-possible.

To start, the machine was plainly not set up to move anything from one place to another, and, even if it was, the task was barred by science. In the end, the purpose of the machine as dictated by her mind (it’s a teleporter!) was plainly contradicted by what it had told her to build (a calculator).

Naecia surmised it had something to do with entangled particles: sibling particles linked strongly enough to interact with each other even if separated by a great distance. Manipulate one, and the other reacts. This was not a revolutionary concept: entangled particles had been used for centuries in the Pangemic system to relay communications, i.e. dirty pictures; not people.

Following unsourced notions from one’s brain wasn’t exactly a scientific approach, but it was all she’d ever had. And she felt like the device was aimed at utilizing entanglements between local particles and those light years away in order to allow for faster than light travel (impossible). But in order to do that, it would have to force entanglements with distant particles – a truly revolutionary concept that also happened to be ludicrous as it violated every law of the Universe (double impossible). Entire volumes could be devoted to the myriad reasons why the idea failed, but volume one would undoubtedly be titled, YOU WASTED YOUR LIFE TRYING TO BREAK PHYSICS – WHY?

While Naecia’s mind became more insistent as to the machine’s purpose, the build itself remained stubborn. Over the years, she had run each stage of construction through the relevant databases and conducted searches through the Pangemic system’s open access research libraries, to see if it matched with any other projects in the public domain. Coming up empty was disappointing, but not unexpected. To date, she’d built nothing more than a behemoth processor, without any idea what data was supposed to be processed. Or even how to input that data if she did. Amazing!