Jeremie looked at the RR4 marveling at the ease at which he had obtained it. “VXC always was too confident in their immunity. Probably the best part of that system was the closed networks. But they had to go and ruin it with the merge.”
Walking over to one corner of the room he picked up the last of the computer parts that he had taken from the first warehouse. It was a large ring of gold and crystal. Even without power it seemed to glow. The center of the ring was just large enough to fit the item that lay on the beam pad. Jeremie took the ring and jumped back into the computer pit, he carefully placed it over were the taller black spire had been held to the ground.
Jeremie retrieved the RR4 from the pad and easily lifted it over the center of the ring. Slowly, carefully, he slid the blue cylinder through the ring until he met the ground. A soft click and the little amount of weight of the RR4 was lifted. After a second the white etchings began to pulse with energy. The glow spread through the pit, all around Jeremie the pieces of a new super computer shown white.
The light faded, like the coals of a fire the soft blue glow that the crystals emitted remained. Jeremie looked at his creation with pride. The fifth greatest super computer in all of human history lay around him. Jeremie leaped out of the pit and walked over to the beaming pad and stepped onto it. The beaming pads available to the public were to unstable to transport humans but VXC had made this one along with the three others that were in the factory. Jeremie had gotten these just like every other VXC retiree as a parting gift.
Jeremie taped a blue circle on the Lexscreen panel and the room faded into blue. The blue was shortly replaced by another darker room. Jeremie could barely make out the continents of the room. The broken screens and key board were gone as were the mess of weirs that connected this room to the rooms below. Instead over there the holo-dome had been 5 full-sized bioscreens now stood. The screens formed a semicircle in front of a slightly inclined chair.
Jeremie smiled at how far technology had come in his life. The LCD and plasma screens of his youth seemed ancient and crud compared to these marvels. Inside the thin layer of glass lived millions of radiation sensitive bacteria. The amount of radiation pumped through the nanites that lined the back of the screen told the bacteria in the area what color and how bright to glow. This allowed for the fastest, clearest, and most realistic picture ever. Not that Jeremie would be watching football. But even these paled in comparison to the rectangular black box that rested of a frame work of sensitized spider webs. Unless seen from the right angle the box appeared to float in midair.
But it was the box that out did every technological feat, aside from RR4, for hundreds of miles. When turned off the box seemed to contain just super fine black sand. But what it was, was an uncountable number of nano-bots. These nano-bots held a neuron framework, when the nano-bots worked together they could tell you what the time was, the temperature, the thoughts of 50 people around you, the price of stocks, the reason why the governor of Brazil would not be meeting you for your four o’ clock appointment, and why you should never have expected him to, in about three seconds, and they would spend the first two and half seconds figuring out how to tell you all this information in only a two foot by one foot area.
Jeremie though back to when he had acquired this devise. He received it on his last night a VXC, it was only a couple months ago but already it felt like a lifetime.
"Jeremie was hunched over a lexscreen poring over the last of the data from his experiments. A soft tap came from the door. Jeremie looked over his shoulder at a young man. In reality he was about five years older than Jeremie, he look a couple decades younger. The man’s name was John Haren, he was one of the few friends he had managed to make in his 5 years at VXC.“Heard your leaving.” John sighed as he leaned against the door frame. John took everything like it was life at collage.“Not much of a choice” Jeremie said maybe a little bit more resentfully than he should have.
“Look, Jeremie, no one could have predicted or prevented what happened. It was a freak accident, a blown circuit. Quit beating yourself up about it.“John, I saw him, but I didn’t just have to see him die. I could have handled that. But no I saw him tortured to human limit and then beyond. Compared to that, death was merciful, painless. He had to endure eons of the worst kind of torture. I saw his face as oblivion engulfed him. And his last words they didn’t condemn me, like they should have. No, he apologized, his dying words were say that he was sorry for not being good enough. He wasn’t thinking of death, he was thinking that he had let me down, but it was the other way around! I should have been apologizing, but it was him! That is the worst thing about it.”
By now Jeremie was crying, tears making rivers in the same places as they had all week. Jeremie hadn’t cried this much when his friends were suffering, why now. Why for someone he hardly even knew. He had been as much responsible for the lives of his friends, but then his tears had never flown this freely. Perhaps it was because he was responsible for this man that had died. Maybe it was because he was revisiting the memory of his friends. Or could it have been that this man was really dead, not ageing uncontrollably at a hospital, but dead and his family would never know how or why he had died.
John looked at Jeremie with a mixture of pity and sorrow. John had always know that the hard working and brilliant man that now sat at a desk with tears falling freely had gone through more than he let on. More than most humans. But this was finally confirmed by what he heard next.“And my friends could have had the same thing happen to them, and it would have been my fault. But I kept pushing them never realizing that this could happen to them.” Jeremie murmured finally finding what disturbed him most about this ordeal.
"Jeremie the circuit was previously damaged .It was no one’s fault. Rihab knew that there would be a chance of death but he did it anyway.” John said, this was followed by silence. Then John spoke again, “Jeremie I know you and I know you aren’t going to stop here, so I have a few things for you. John reached into the sack that hung at his side. Jeremie stared at his co-worker, he had pulled out a small rectangular black box. Jeremie did not know what it was but it obviously held significance.
“Jeremie this is the final product of a project started 5 years ago. It was my first assignment. It only took one year to design but four years for it to be completed. There are only three of these in existence until the next three come out in 4 years. This should be enough power for you to finish any project you take on. In a secure portion of the memory banks I have put a copy of the complete VXC data base. It will merge once you turn it one so that you can keep up with us.” John held out the box. Jeremie, stunned, slowly reached out and held the box. John dropped his hands and Jeremie felt how light the box was. John walked to the door, he looked back over his shoulder.
“Good luck Jeremie” And with the handsome brown haired man walked out of the room.
Jeremie flicked back to reality. Jeremie put his hand on John’s gift. Feeling a new since of anticipation Jeremie slid the switch for the first time.