Quantum Songstress Sample

Hello Dreamers

Below is Chapter 1 of Quantum Songstress. Give it a read if you like. Consider buying the book when it comes out if you like what you read.

You can also listen to chapter 1 on YouTube

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Chapter 1

The Quantum Web - a form of the internet where quantum computing allowed for a massive increase in speed. Sure, one could always do what the internet had always done in older days, like load up articles to read, buy cheap crap, or watch porn on a screen. Due to the transfer of speed, alongside modern computational paradigms centered around quantum computing, this internet could do so much more.

The 2030s gave us the AR revolution, where the environment, regardless of where you actually were, could be altered from your point of view. The computational power allowed for not just what you saw or heard to be simulated, but also what you smelled or felt when touching surfaces. A meal made of polymers could easily look and taste like steak, chicken, or even caramel and peanut chocolate ice cream so long as you are fine with cutting ice cream with a knife and eating it with a fork – the technology doesn’t actually change the composition of the protein polymers, just how it's perceived.

With the AR revolution came the evolution of VR technology. Entire worlds are simulated for people to walk in. Entire scenarios are crafted to literally place someone in the shoes of another. Combined with the evolution of AR, it allowed for anyone to literally be a badass, fighting dragons with a sword. No, you didn’t press a button to swing the sword like in olden days, you think you are holding a sword and you somehow have the strength to swing it. With VR, you plug in, and you are that person, the avatar as it's called, with whatever abilities the creators of that VR environment deemed necessary. Yes, there have been avant-garde creators who programmed avatars to be physically disabled as part of the ‘profound experience’! Of course, it's completely unreal: eating food in VR will not fuel your real body.

Virtual Augmented Realities, commonly called VARs, create what most recognize as the Quantum Web. Such can simulate other people, translating their avatar information as objects you can interact with. Yes, you could shake their hand, give high-fives, hug and cuddle them, and even have sex with them – one of the first uses of this technology, of course.

This world Iris lived in, breathed, ate, and slept in.

Iris, in all fairness, wasn’t that poorly off. Her morning started with her phone’s alarm wailing at seven forty-five am. It wailed for some time as she debated whether she should even bother waking up. It wasn’t like the physical world had anything to offer her, after all. But, if she still wanted her readily available access to the Quantum Web, she needed to wake up and get dressed. So she sat up in the bed, ending the alarm ping in her mind. For a brief moment she saw the room for what it was: a cheap, plastic bedframe with a thin mattress covered in white sheets and blankets, with a simple wardrobe made of particle board. The moment passed, the VAR in her apartment activated upon detecting that Iris woke up.

From out of a mahogany wardrobe trimmed in rose gold she pulled out the matted blouses and black, thin-fabricated, pants that made up business casual.

It’s ridiculous that mega-corps insist I should be in the office at all, she thought as she ate cinnamon-raisin oatmeal that she knew in the back of her mind was actually a white substance known as protein polymer. With the Quantum Web and its speed fast enough to simulate every minute detail about reality, coupled with virtual private networks that allowed the segregation of this space, why even have offices? The only reason anyone would want to be in the office was if their R-Bell connection failed. What does an in-person meeting offer that an AR call can’t?

As it was hump day, she needed to be in the office, so out the door she walked from her single-bedroom apartment and to the elevators. Five floors down and she was in the small room lined with mailboxes that led to the outside.

She walked through the smog-infested streets of Toronto, tripping over homeless people covered in blankets on top of subway grates along the way. She could play a game where she tried to guess which ones were drunk, or high on opium, or just that broke and without a lord. Instead, she put an AR overlay on blaring music and dressing obstacles drowning out the grimy dirt of the cleanest city in the advanced world.

At the subway station, she filed in to be pushed into the next available car. Being in such close proximity to others almost made her gag. Their sweat stank of smoke. Fumes from perfume and cologne. Piss and shit. She almost jumped at the sound of someone coughing and sneezing, even if they did so in their hand or elbow.

God, how can people stand themselves in meatspace? She commonly thought, nevermind fucking!

She cursed the site of the Twin Towers as she always did – a waste of space developed on behalf of some bank twenty years ago. Construction started on it before the pandemic, and when it came to the first world’s attention that many white-collar jobs could be done remotely, they pushed to fill office space, favouring obsolete forms of business and tent cities to, say, affordable housing – condos even!

Into the space, and up the elevator, smushed by the heat and sweat of gross penguin-suited humans. She tried to figure out which ones were augmented and which ones were still all-natural – the tech had evolved to the point where it wasn’t easy to tell.

Still, she got to her office floor. From the elevator shutters, she only saw grey cubicle walls outlining a labyrinth all the way to sheets of transparent glass overlooking the streets of Toronto. Florescent tubes made her squint her eyes as she strolled along a floor of cheap hardwood, all to navigate the maze before her to her workstation, where she logged in and locked her possessions into the provided drawer next to her black mesh office chair.

Once in, she locked her machine and walked through more maze to the centre of her section of the cubicle farm for the daily standup. The standup was a reminder from a time where workers were always in the office, and this ‘touch-base’ meeting, too short to justify a meeting room, was held within the centre of the farm. Now, you only had to ‘stand up’ when forced into the physical office. Remote, these meetings took place via AR Meeting.

Gavin, one of the senior engineers, stood in front of a whiteboard with a green marker in hand. Dressed in a red, plaid, dress shirt and khaki pants, he was a classic middle-aged white man with brown eyes and greying brown hair. As part of this ritual, he asked, “How’s everyone?”

Not a person would claim anything other than ‘alright’.

He carried on. “Ok, Richard, how’s the cloud incident coming?”

“Just talking to the developers to get the hotfix deployed,” a younger, white man in a blue plaid dress shirt and denim jeans calmly replied.

“Super,” Gavin nodded. “And Guarav, figured out the login outage last night?”

A darker-coloured man in a white shirt and black pants looked towards Gavin with dark eyes. “Still working on it.” He spoke with a south-Asian accent. “We think it’s related to a hardware fault.”

“Keep us posted.”

Cindy, a woman with skin the colour of off-cream, held her hand up and said, “The automation script to get the incident counts has been launched. Still monitoring.” Something about the excitement in the hooded eyes of this woman looked too added in.

“Great!” Gavin then looked to the team and said, “Any roadblocks?”

Unless some bureaucrat was being pedantic there usually weren’t. As with anywhere, a second person had to sign off on something you did just to make sure this ‘corruption’ thing that totally wasn’t happening didn’t happen. Given horror stories from InfoSec, like the broker who could approve their own loan requests, this permission system was just to shut up journos and governments.

There weren’t any roadblocks.

“Alright, everyone; get to it!”

She walked back to her workstation and took a look at her inboxes, starting with the work email system. Old but effective. Like anything that calls itself the mail, mostly junk: chatter between development teams in bugs that did not concern her, work clubs with activities she could care less about, and seriously, who wants to hang out with their coworkers outside of office hours? She couldn’t be the only person that hated them. Items concerning things like Alice in Analytics wanting to know when that script in Python will be ready, and a policy update worth reading waited for her.

Next, she accessed several dashboards. One followed the status of tech tickets. She looked at the ones assigned to her as an escalation from a frontline TSR that ruled it a system issue. A program that printed stock reports kept stalling, they needed a bash script to be written to replicate between systems, and Alice still needed that Python script. Other tickets, like one about the cloud and one concerning incidents and problems, sat without anything of note.

With the stock report program checked out in the version management system, she got to work, prepping yet another change list as she ran, then re-ran the program, looking for which line was breaking.

She did her best to ignore the office gossip from people she did not care about or even like on any level. Course, it wasn’t hard to overhear conversations:

“Vandi’s on a verbal. Something about being late too many times.”

“He needs to get his act together or he’s going to be fired!”

“Fired? Naw, he’ll be sent back to India where he can burn in the hot sun!”

“Janice from accounting might have eyes for Rick!”

“No!”

“Heard they got caught in the broom closet last week.”

“Oh, they couldn’t wait ’til outside office hours at least?”

“More restraint than the CIO at least.”

“Can someone explain why some yahoo in the CAS wants nothing to do with the USA over ‘freedumb,’ then want to live in a theocracy stricter than Beijing?”

“Still wanna know how long California and Washington hold out before either Merica swallows them.”

“You think Arizona’s going to take out California?”

“Texas might.”

“You need a map? Texas doesn’t border California!”

“Isn’t Arizona part of the CAS? Texas can march people through.”

“Will miss the Freelands of Western America.”

“Heard Washington wants to join Confederation? Would be hard for Texas to help them.”

“They mean Canadian Confederation, not Confederate American States!”

And so on.

The clock struck 13:00, or 1:00 PM depending on who you ask. Iris locked the workstation and walked down to the meeting room for the mandatory in-person meeting meant to justify forcing her out of bed to come to this place. The manager, Lucy her name was, sat at the head of a rectangular table in a room walled in glass – not to look pretty but so a passerby could tell no one was being raped in there.

“Alright, so here we are in the development road map,” she started saying, “With the optimization of the report deliveries, more and more of it will be scripts and not manual work, reducing human error.”

And humans, Iris couldn’t help but think. The C-Lords cared more about reducing human labour than if said labour was any good.

She put up on a projector screen a slide showing a colourful gantt chart with boxes and numbers. “By the end of the month, we should be getting the code for the combined dashboards in testing, and ensure accuracy of the data...”

Iris zoned out, having heard some of this before and already, and really didn’t care what the middle-managing lice thought her work should be at. Perhaps that’s why the weekly in-office shifts were a thing: so those C-Lord wannabe parasites still had a reason to exist?

She mentally woke up to hear Lucy continue in her drone: “So, as a heads up, there is worry at the upper level about the economic downturn happening lately. There had been a drop in sales numbers for several months now, so there will be some restructuring to reflect that...”

‘Drop in Sales Numbers’, ‘Economic Downturn’, ‘Downsizing’, ‘Restructuring’ – call it whatever you like, Iris heard these threats so often she became numb to them. They lay her off? Well, at least it's in her employment record as ‘Termination without Cause’ so she could go find some other feudal lord to eat the table scraps of.

Gavin asked in this meeting, “You think we could be laid off?”

Lucy’s gave a blunt response: “We’re in the backend, not critical, and a cost of resources, so...”

“Don’t the C-Lords know how important what we do is? We aren’t a ‘cost of resources’ or is there no value in things not breaking?”

“I agree, but all they see is the bottom line, and they aren’t going to remove the salesforce that makes them money. They’re removing a support department that loses them money.”

Iris chipped in her two cads: “Business one oh one: all occupations can be categorized as one of two things: sales, and sale-support. Sales is what gets consumers to buy your product or service, while sales-support maintains pipelines and infrastructure so to make it easier for the sales jobs to sell. I can’t be the only person disturbed by how few supposed business experts understand this.”

“I know, Iris, I know.” Lucy nodded, her face pursed in defeat.

Richard added, “Kinda hard to sell the web if it’s not working, right?”

“Even though Rogers-Bell routinely lay off technicians, only to hire them back after a massive multiday outage? Clearly they think they can sell the web without it working,” said Cindy.

Gotta feel bad for Lucy, Iris thought, Sure, she’s a manager and a bitch, but she only has so much power.

The meeting ended and Iris returned to her desk to respond to an email from Alice about how the output of her script should look.

At last, the day ended and she could leave. Along Front St she approached a vendor inside a sheet of plastic. He sat next to an automated flipper sat with a slight line of rust attached to a propane grill. The human operator, a tan-skinned gentleman, overdressed due to being more accustomed to warmer places gave Iris a nod as she held out her phone and only said, “A hot dog, please.”

The operator punched a button in, and Iris held her phone to a white block just outside the plastic until it beeped, spending fifteen cad. The operator took out a foot-long pre-cooked sausage with the case removed, threaded a metal thermometer on one end and placed it on the grill. As she waited, two more people approached and ordered Italian sausage, going for twenty-five cad each, and a can of pop, another five cad. Ritzy! she thought as uncooked meat in intestine also had thermometers inserted and placed next to her hot dog on the grill.

The automated flipper gripped each with tongs and turned them, basing when to turn on information relayed to it from the thermometers, and which kind of meat was placed on the grill. A few minutes passed before the vender placed her hot dog on a bun, removed the thermometer, and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she said as she squirted a bit of ketchup on it and started walking for the subway. A smile came over her face at the feel of the animal fat dripping down her face and the taste of generic meat filled her mouth. Not much, but every week it would be her only real meal – food undisguised by an AR routine.

She tapped her phone to use her transit pass, allowing the plastic doors to open and allow her in, trained to only open on a tap to keep the homeless out. Once crammed inside, she turned an AR overlay on to distract from the mass of humanity pressing into her space. Once her stop arrived she battled her way out of the train car while giving a nod to people who stepped out, not because it was their stop, but to give room for people to manoeuvre out of the tumour of humanity.

She walked from the dirt, concrete, station to the street. There, in the navy darkness, she walked a cityscape with buildings under construction and robots scuttling along, their insect-like limbs scaling scaffolding, carrying materials and tools. Well-dressed people lined up at a terminal, each pressing buttons and tapping phones for a real-world experience. Overhead, drones carried boxes and vehicles without people passing by.

She knew that DevOps could not be replaced by AI, no matter how good at programming the damned things got. However, once robots with functional AI came around, a lot of jobs were lost – anything that required a combination of heavy lifting and minimal thought got outsourced to machines.

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Interested? Book is available for download April 30th on Amazon and this site. Paperbacks available May 1st. See https://www.spacewhaledreams.com/books/quantum-songstress for more!