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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