Miniaturization. A process that became popular in the early 20th century. A process doomed to reach an abrupt halt. After a while it became obvious that you can only make things smaller to a certain point. Practicality finally became an issue, as man realized his microchips were getting microscopic and his notebooks were getting so thin they could break like a plate of glass. Cell phones were so small that you could hardly press the buttons. DVD players were the exact same size as the disc itself.
There was a time when computers were so big they filled the whole room. They were slow and could hardly do anything. Then only NASA computers were so big they filled the whole room. They were powerful and incomparable to ordinary PCs. Now the NASA uses a single laptop the size of a 10 cent paperback novel to calculate the upcoming trip to Mars. Extremely powerful computers are in every household and PC became an insult.
In 2059, a square inch of integrated circuitry did all of Wall Street’s accounting. Von Neumann’s scheme was long gone and nanotechnology was on its way. AI was in the works. And in this time of absolute miniaturization and near perfection, the JCN 3001 was built. A computer the size of a five-storey building. It was so powerful, that only a computer of equal size would be capable of precisely counting its capabilities. A power plant had to be built next to this behemoth to keep it running. But it was worth all the trouble, as the task it was to fulfill was even more monumental than the engineering feat that made it possible.
JCN, short for Joint Computing Network, was going to tell us the future. By determining the exact position of every single molecule, it was in theory possible to predict their position at any given point in time using complex equations that are not unlike those used to forecast the weather. What this means is that we could know, with absolute precision, what will happen to anyone or anything, anytime. A house might burn down, a book could get stolen, a president assassinated. We would know the position of the bullet a second before it hit the target. A minute before. An hour after. I could tell the names of the grand grandchildren of the policeman who bagged the bullet as evidence.
Needless to say, the project was top secret. What might be unexpected, though, is that the project was completely private. It was the government that didn’t know about it. For once, the military was kept in the dark. And we, scientists from all over the world, were determined to not use the information for good or for evil, but for studying. We wanted to know everything. But when we turned the JCN on and initiated the computing process, we did not learn much. Actually, we were as clueless as ever.
It was programmed to give us data for the next day and then wait for further instructions. We compared the data with what really happened as the day unfolded, and we were amazed. Everything was perfect. Our super secret super computer predicted the future. We turned it on again and waited. Watched and listened, as the giant structure silently whirred, fed with electricity from its own power plant and cooled with jet engines surrounding it from all sides. And then, JCN 3001, greatest thing man ever built, spat out data for a week and shut itself down.
And at the end of all that data, all those numbers and coordinates for every single molecule, all of which needed to be translated into understandable form, six letters appeared.
The End
We stared silently.
