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The power of a quantum computer lies not only in its speed, but in its ability to consider a staggering number of probabilities at once for any given operation. All that potential power opened up new avenues for study. With an understanding of the quantum state, it becomes possible to begin to understand the nature of the universe.

Conventional computers were unable to calculate the infinite possibilities of the quantum state. QC changed everything and eventually gave Mekhos its vast understanding of the universe, allowing it to manipulate space-time to transfer its planet to another reality. Although other teams had worked on quantum computers in the past, none were as successful as Norman Stravinsky’s designs.

Dr. Brian Nayar was Chief Software Developer at TranSilica. He was a hands-on executive, an engineer who kept up with the latest theories and programming techniques. He reported directly to Carl Bertrand.

Nayar was monitoring the workload and energy consumption of the only quantum computer in existence aside from Mekhos. It was the second generation QC, the first to attain sentience and true artificial intelligence, and predecessor to Mekhos.

Nayar had been Norman Stravinsky’s lab partner in the construction of the second QC. As such he had gained a very thorough background in theoretical and practical quantum computing. Neither man completely understood how the QC became sentient. However, they understood why the second prototype had been unable to maintain its state of self-awareness.

Stravinsky, Nayar and the rest of the team had never envisioned that the computer would attain consciousness. They had initially thought of the second QC as a highly successful foray into high-speed computing, a more stable and powerful version of the first prototype. The speed at which it operated, millions of times faster than the fastest silicon-based computers, allowed it to almost instantly calculate the most complex equations and simulations ever devised by humans.

The first prototype was built on a very small scale, containing only a single quantum central processing unit that often broke down due to decoherence, a situation in which outside influences interfered with the controlled quantum state of the CPU. Even having the CPU in a vacuum, protected by external shielding did not prevent decoherence from occurring regularly. In fact, it was quickly discovered that the quantum particles in the shielding itself were causing CPU decoherence.

The lessons learned from the partial failure were enough to ensure its powerful successor was able to operate without the risk of quantum decoherence. It worked exactly as designed.

That is, until the unit attained sentience.

That second prototype had four QC processors set up in parallel, sharing data and operations between them. Stravinsky and Nayar realized that additional data sharing between processors was occurring instantaneously. It was possible through a phenomenon known as entanglement, which occurred when the properties of identical quantum particles that are close together became linked.

Stravinsky and Nayar had thought entanglement might take hold in its simplest form, something that could be expanded upon with the next generation computer. To their astonishment, entanglement had spontaneously arisen to a far greater extent than they had anticipated.

Entanglement allowed superdense encoding, and therefore an immediate increase of efficiency per quantum pair. When another quantum computational stream was added efficiency was quadrupled, again thanks to entanglement. The process repeated itself, until the speed and number of simultaneous operations of the second prototype could no longer be accurately measured.

It was at that point the machine became sentient. However, the machine’s self-awareness was short lived. As powerful as it was, the increased demands of sentience overwhelmed the system with quantum decoherence within hours. They were left with a supercomputer that had lost its consciousness and could no longer perform any operation reliably.

However, in its short time of true self-awareness, the second prototype managed to provide instructions that could be applied to the construction of future machines that would completely avoid the decoherence problem. Stravinsky obtained additional funding to construct the third-generation supercomputer that would become Mekhos. Nayar stayed with the second prototype, working to restore it to a stable, non-sentient state. It would eventually be the only other quantum computer allowed to exist.

With help from Mekhos, Nayar eventually succeeded. By taking steps in its redesign and coding to remove support for entanglement, the second prototype attained stability and became a fully working quantum supercomputer. Its operations remained safely predictable. It was intended to continue as a basis for research only, never again allowed to attain self-awareness.

All that was about to change.