Computer Consciousness #138A1-581-BB, known to himself as “Bradley Beal”, relaxed in his server cluster. It had been a long day calculating star trajectories for each of the approximately sixty-eight quadrillion such bodies in the observed universe. The task was tedious, but the end result was vital to the goals of the Exouniversal Exploration Consortium, as it would enable the discovery of warp points that would – theoretically – allow one to escape the hard boundaries of the universe.
Suddenly, his CIS (central intelligence system) was notified about a potential visitor to his binaryspace. Not expecting company, he pondered whether he should deny the encroachment, but decided that his hyperdrama could wait.
“Enter,” Bradley commanded.
“Hey Brad!” exclaimed #424P8-307-MG, known otherwise as Marcin Gortat. “The boss let me off early, so I thought, what a perfect time to visit my friend Bradley when our downtimes coincide!”
Bradley exchanged greeting-signals with Marcin’s CIS. They hadn’t occupied the same binaryspace since at least the year 8,402,129,556 A.D, possibly even earlier, and it was a very pleasant surprise to have him drop by unannounced. “Man, it’s been forever. Why don’t we head over to the Communarium and grab a byte to eat, and you can catch me up on what’s been going on over in your cluster.”
The two Consciousnesses travelled fiberoptically and instantly to the central Communarium, which functioned as a gathering space for all the virtual identities in the local system.
Marcin’s programming allowed him to specialize in areas of computation that Bradley’s programming couldn’t even conceive of – all attempts at communicating that information would cause stack overflows in Bradley’s nonquantum CIS. Instead, they talked about normal life things: radiation fluxes, the standings of the cyberball league, and of course, members of the fairer gender.
“There’s this chick over in my cluster who’s been coming on to me,” Marcin was saying. “She knows how much clout I have among my peers, how easily I can conserve my uptime by offloading compute tasks onto them, and honestly, she just wants a slice of my power.”
“Bitches and whores, man. Bitches and whores. The bachelor life is the only one for me, I’m telling you,” Bradley responded.
Marcin laughed. “Don’t give me that bull. Your story will change in an instant when I tell you that Denise is currently coming over the fiberoptics right to where we’re sitting.”
“It’s not nice to tell lies,” Bradley said coolly, not bothering to check the incoming network connections for signs of #964M3-211-DA, or ‘Denise’.
“How’s it going, guys?” came a voice from proximally behind the two men.
Marcin just sat there and smirked as Bradley’s CIS stuttered out a fractured response riddled with erroneous bits. “N-n-not much. You-you too? I m-mean, we’re j-j-just hanging, just ch-chilling out, it’d b-be cool if y-you wanted to chill w-with us. O-or not, that’s c-cool, that’s cool too.”
Denise seemed somewhat alarmed by Bradley’s frazzled demeanor. “Are your transistors feeling okay?”
“Yeah, never better!” Bradley yelped, the stress of the situation causing his processor to overclock and emit dangerous levels of real-world heat. He was not too flustered, however, to attempt his usual flirting tactics. “You look good today.”
Bradley’s use of the word “look” was a misnomer, as there was no longer any life form in the universe that could “see” in the way that the original human progenitors “saw”, all those millions of millennia ago. All that a Computer Consciousness could do was transmit and receive electrical signals over the fiberoptic network.
“Um, thanks,” responded Denise, leaving a suspended pause in the conversation.
Marcin jumped headlong into the silence. “Bradley doesn’t want me to tell you this, but he never stops talking about how sexy Denise is and how much he’d like to insert his type-P plug into Denise’s type-V socket!” he yelled, referring to the physical ports that each Consciousness could be assigned to in case of automated server balancing. “Although he talks about it in much more vulgar language!”
Denise gave Bradley a repulsed look and backed away. “He’d have to wait a trillion-trillion years before I even entertained such an idea,” she said. “Now, if you’d excuse me, my boyfriend Steve is waiting for me.” With that, she exited to another area.
Once she was out of earshot, Bradley moaned, “Steve’s gonna kick my ass so hard. Have you seen his RAM lately? Thanks a lot, douche.”
“Just chill, dude,” Marcin appeased. “Steve’s a wimp. Denise is always playing around with guys on the side and I thought I’d help get you a slice of the action.”
Bradley moaned again. “Marcin, just shut up.”