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“You have to get approval to send back items they screwed up on?” she asked, wiping a strand of hair from her face, frowning when it stuck to the perspiration that coated her skin. “Did I ever tell you how much I hate it when it’s our turn to host Thanksgiving dinner?”

I put the last jar back in the door and closed it. I reached over and hugged my mom, both of us still kneeling on the kitchen floor.

“What’s this about?” she asked, pushing me away enough to look at my face.

“Nothing. I love you is all. I’m sorry you hate Thanksgiving.”

She gave me a strange look. Then smiled. “I don’t hate Thanksgiving, just whenever the clan shows up at our place. Next time, we are all going to a restaurant.”

“You say that every time.”

“Next time I’m sticking to my guns.”

I stood up and reached down, helping her up. “You say that every year as well.”

She gave me a dangerous look, then her expression softened. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, wiping another strand of hair from her cheek.

“Yeah. Just bummed is all. I was really looking forward to building my new computer.”

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

“Ewww, you’re sweaty.”

“Damn right I am,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “And it’s
perspiration
, not sweat. Women
glow
with
perspiration
. We don’t sweat.”

I laughed at the way she treated the word
sweat
as if it were a racial epithet.

“You stink, too. Kinda.”

I laughed and ducked from her swipe and went back to the living room to grab my laptop. While Mom banged around the kitchen, I went to TechTerritory’s website and logged in. I checked my order history, making sure I hadn’t screwed up somehow, but the components list was exactly what it should have been. Proper processor, memory, video card, power supply, sound card, case, motherboard, SSD hard drive, and Blu-Ray burner. I looked over at the pile of nonsense on the coffee table and the floor below it.

I clicked on the RMA link, then had a thought that I should see if any of the items in my living room were actually for sale on the site. After a couple of minutes, I was frustrated even more. None of the components were listed at TechTerritory. I opened another tab in my browser and went to Google. My frustration mounted with each new search. Google happily suggested plenty of other items and search results with each brand name, but there wasn’t a single web page anywhere that had any of these items listed.

Not even the tech forums where nerds like me went to learn things like how to build computers, how to ‘overclock’ them, kind of like what other men do to muscle cars to make them faster without putting a new engine in it, and to verbally masturbate about all of the latest tech that was on the horizon. Nothing. All “Infinitia” brought up was some global investment firm, and a bunch of Facebook and Tumblr pages.

“Bullshit,” I said to myself and walked over to the pile of computer parts.

I wanted to kick them as hard as I could out of pure anger. Instead, I sat on the floor and picked up the processor box. I knew from being a science fiction fan and gamer what quantum computing and qubits were. Okay, so I didn’t really
know
what they were, not as a theoretical physicist would, but I knew they were supposed to be this thing where binary bits could exist in both 1 and 0 states at the same time. I didn’t really understand
quantum entanglement
and such, as most of it led into true headache-producing, mind-bending discussions like
string theory
. The quantum stuff I was familiar with had to do with AI neural cores and supercomputers capable of opening wormholes in space, time travel, science fiction shit like that.

I opened the box and pulled out the inserts that kept the cpu safe during shipping. A small manual fell out of the bottom of the left insert. I should have grabbed an anti-static band to ground myself, or at least touched a grounded metal object, but I didn’t care. I was going to send the damn thing back anyway. Static electricity blowing out silicon transistors was the least of my worries.

The
processor
wasn’t a cpu of any kind I’d ever seen. Instead of a flat, wafer-like piece of silicon and metal, it was a square cube made of some kind of plastic, or maybe it was crystal. I tapped it with my fingernail, but couldn’t tell. It felt cold, but it had been riding around in a FedEx truck all morning. I held it up to the light and squinted as I tried to see if there was anything in it. It looked like a translucent block of glass. I set it on the coffee table and reached down for the manual.

“Welcome to the latest generation of quantum computing!” the manual practically shouted at me with its big block letters on the cover. “The next level is here!” was what greeted me when I opened it to the first page. I decided to go along with the joke and see just how far someone would go to make it seem like a real product. After the first page, I was convinced some Stanford or maybe M.I.T. geeks had taken a holiday temp position at TechTerritory’s shipping center, and had decided to have a lot of fun.

By the second and third page, I was impressed at the level they, whoever
they
were, had taken it. I was pretty good at college-level calculus, but the technical data in the manual was far beyond anything I’d ever had to tackle. Maybe. The data might be as made-up as the brand names themselves for all I knew. Within a few minutes, I’d opened the
motherboard
box and had taken a look at it before reading its manual. The board itself was a thin wafer of PCB, but unlike other PCB boards I’d ever seen, this one only had a few solder traces on it, and almost no capacitors, voltage regulators, or resistors.

There was a small square plug at one end of the board, and a square… socket is what I guessed, in the middle of the board. I grabbed the fake processor cube and compared it to the socket on the motherboard. I gave a mental shrug then tried to slip the cpu into the socket. It didn’t seem to fit, so I turned the cube over, trying each side just out of curiosity. The fourth side of the cube grabbed the socket, as if the two items were strong magnets. I nearly dropped the thing from that alone, but the short flash of light within the translucent cube scared the hell out of me even more.

Hands shaking, I put the
thing
on the coffee table. I opened the manual for the motherboard again, and began to scan it. In perfect English, with excellent diagrams, I saw how to connect all of the components I’d received to build a
quantum
computer
. I put the manual down and took a closer look at the computer case. When I removed the side panel, I knew instantly that its interior had been customized for the strange computer components sitting on my coffee table and floor. Components that suddenly didn’t seem so fake.

CHAPTER 2 - A New Computer

November 26, 2014

I could only laugh at my own gullibility. Whoever had put on this charade had gone all-out. I had to hand it to them. They’d spooked me for just a minute, actually believing I’d somehow received the components to build a quantum computer. I decided to grab my phone and take pictures of everything. I’d been making a bit of extra money on the side with my blogging, and a lot of fellow nerds followed me, as I did them. We loved nothing more than to show up at each other’s blog and read the latest posted article, then use the comments section to praise or troll the author. Sometimes a few of us took the trolling a little too far, but for most of us, it was all good fun.

I turned on the overhead lights in the living room and began taking pictures of everything. When I got to the motherboard, processor still seated in the socket, I paused. I put my phone down and grabbed the board in one hand, the cpu in the other. I gave a slight pull, but it wouldn’t budge. I twisted a little, and a popping noise sounded as the processor came free of the socket. I checked the socket and the processor’s edge where it had been plugged in, but I couldn’t see any damage. I frowned again, something I was starting to worry about, having heard my whole life from Mom that if I did it too much, my face would freeze with that expression on it. I hovered the processor over the socket again, and again I felt the magnetic pull of the two items, and once again the cpu snicked into place within the socket. And once again, a flash of blue briefly lit the cube.

I put it on the coffee table and took more pictures. When I was done, instead of boxing everything back up, I decided to let my curiosity drift a little further. I started removing the other components from their packaging, setting each item on the coffee table.

“Oh, Tyler, please don’t do that in here,” my mom said.

I looked back at her, standing half-in and half-out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.

“I promise, Mom. I’m only going to take some pictures and then pack it all back up.”

“Weren’t you just taking pictures?” she asked, cocking her head, trying to catch me in a lie.

I winked at her. “I was. I still am, thank you. I’m going to put it together real quick and get a few more pics for my blog.”

“Blog,” she snorted and turned around.

Mom wasn’t a tech Luddite, but she didn’t really understand the whole
blogging
thing. I’d tried to explain to her what it was, but she always gave me the same snort. If my father was around, he’d be of no help, asking loudly why I wanted to talk about
boogers
online. The two of them would get each other going, and within a minute, I could walk away while they were carrying on, laughing sometimes like wild hyenas at their own comedic genius.

Mom and Dad both were perceptive enough to understand the whole “geek living in Mom’s basement” joke, and had threatened me since puberty that they were going to buy a new house that didn’t have a basement, just so I couldn’t end up living with them until I was forty. It wasn’t like it was a one-sided thing though. I ranked them out as often as possible for being old, being grey, not understanding technology. My favorite was when one of them would ask me to hand them the remote to watch television, and I would lock it with a code.

Dad went especially crazy, able to turn on the stereo receiver but not the satellite box or the television. The best I’ve ever been able to achieve was one day when he got so pissed he stomped around the house and threw the remote at the wall. When he heard me howling with laughter from the dining room, he hurled one of his slippers at me, which made me laugh even harder. He definitely hadn’t been an athlete in school.

I kept the motherboard’s manual open in front of me as I opened each component package and pulled the unit out. Normally it took me around an hour, sometimes two, to build a computer from scratch. I’d had plenty of practice at it, having built the three desktop computers in our house, and at least ten more for friends. We weren’t rich by any means, but my parents trusted me enough to build them a great computer for as little money as possible. Neither could live without their news sites, social networking, videos, music, whatever else they’d become accustomed to having access to each day of their lives.

The
hard drive
snapped into place inside the case. I connected it to the board with the strange fiber-optic cable that was provided. I did the same with the
optical media drive
, which a small part of me hoped actually worked, and actually played Blu-Ray discs. My father had just received the director’s cut of “Scarface,” completely remastered for high definition. We’d watched that movie at least twenty times before my fourteenth birthday, something my mother had always complained about. The only reason I was allowed to each time, is that I’d never uttered any of the curse words that were liberally sprinkled throughout the movie. My father had warned me when I was eight that if I ever repeated any of those words out loud, we’d go back to watching cartoons or doing nothing at all.

I secured the power cell in the case, then connected the motherboard to it. I tried to find the extra cables to attach to the hard drive and optical drive, but there seemed to be none. After a minute of searching through the two components’ manuals, I found out why there was no cable. Apparently, the peripherals of this “quantum computer” were powered wirelessly. I couldn’t help but laugh again. I almost wanted to glance around and make sure my mom or someone else wasn’t filming me, catching me on video actually putting this… thing… together as if it was a real computer.

Once I had everything installed, I put the panel on the case and took it into my room. I went back into the living room and cleaned up all of the packaging and shipping boxes, stacking them near the door to the garage. I’m not sure why, but I guess some part of me believed I was going to turn the stupid thing on and it would actually work.
Hah hah again
, I thought. The one box I’d opened but hadn’t messed with yet was the one that supposedly contained a flatscreen monitor. I was a bit disappointed when I pulled the parts out. Maybe the jokesters had run out of steam, or maybe this was the best they could come up with.

Out of every component, the
monitor
was the one that screamed “fake!” the most. A small square base with a thin metal rod sticking up almost two feet from it was what I ended up putting together. I stared at it for almost a minute, wondering just how gullible I really was. I leaned forward and saw a flash of light from my desk lamp reflecting off something in the box. I leaned down and pulled on it, and a thin sheet of transparent, extremely flexible plastic unfolded and became semi-rigid, enough to keep its rectangular shape.