After the Fall, seg. 1

Alright, so this is a story idea I've had floating around in my mind. I'm not one to usually do bleak-sci-fi-future-stuff, but a bunch of ideas have been bouncing around my mind in just the right way to convince me that they just might coalesce into something good. I'm... not frightened, but for lack of a better word I'm (as of now) frightened to post this on Protag. Maybe it'll find its way over there, but for right now it's staying right here.
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Much of the work we do is for our progress, for our apparent advancement in this universe. We strive to move ourselves ever forward, not pausing to take a good look back. Sure, we bring some things along for the ride, history and art and principles and what-not, but we constantly look for ways to "improve" it, to make it "fit."

This is especially true with science. It's based on the basics laid down by the Greeks, the other "ancients" in all those textbooks, Newton. Even Einstein used these principles, using them to chip in his own ideas and expound on others.

Advancement. Ha! Progress. Ha! The only progress we've seemed to make is to backpedal. And that's my opinion on a rare good day. If you catch me on most days, I'd say we're progressing alright: progressing right into our own rendition of The Inferno. The stupid Computer screwed everything up. In our rush to go forwards, all it's led up to is a launch backwards. Sure, the calenders say it's 2062 (at least, that's what they said last I checked who-knows-how-long-ago), but that's just a number. Numbers could care less if the world's more like 1062. 1562, depending on where you are, and if you're lucky.

Maybe a brief history lesson would help. I'm not sure of all the details, or even if the details I have are correct, but it's all we have to work with right now.

Back in the day, before The Fall, my mother was in high school. From what I understand she was pretty bright, loved school. Among her many loves academia was her physics class. She claimed that it twisted her brain into knots and really made her think, but she loved it. Close friend of the teacher, too, Patrick Hewlett. At one point he told her about the effect the quantum computer would have on society. It would be able to predict seemingly-random events such as the weather, the stock market, the lottery, and such. The way he put it, if one person could single-handedly control the stock-market, the economy would collapse because once it got out that someone knew exactly what would happen, what would be the point in investing? Everyone would pull out. Down comes the stock market, down comes the economy, and then down comes most of society as we know it. And, in Hewlett's mind, this person could probably control what remained of society.

Ain't that a comforting thought?

When the idea was introduced in-class, some wondered, "If quantum computers'll be the end of the world, what about the end of the Mayan calendar?"

"Maybe they'll be developed at the end of the Mayan calendar," she suggested half-jokingly.

Anyway, fast-forward to my mother's sophomore year in college. She picked up a copy of a newspaper, and looked at a tiny side-bar article She nearly fell out of her chair in surprise. I still have the page, faded and tattered as it is.

The New-York Times. Saturday, December 22nd, 2012.
Late last night bore witness to a momentous occasion. A brilliant individual, who wished to be unnamed at the time of publication, has claimed to have completely developed the long-awaited quantum computer. Earlier versions of this machine have been able to execute simple functions such as addition and subtraction, but, "this has limitless potential," the developer said. One of the known functions, the developer told our reporter, is its ability to predict weather with such accuracy, it can predict the exact temperature, amount of precipitation, and dew-point for one side of town, and the same figures for the other.

The text at the end of it gets blurry, but I think it was something like big corporations and labs and such had offered "the developer" astronomical sums of money, but "the developer" refused.

Needless to say, my mother was a bit flipped out. She double-checked the date of the paper; it still said December 22nd. Nah, it can't be, she thought at the time. Now when I think about it, nearly fifty years later, I say it had to be. There's an odd connection between the supposed Fiery End and the rise of The Computer.

Do you see it?