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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2137230-System-Idle-Process
Rated: E · Fiction · Sci-fi · #2137230
Budget meeting leads to a breakthrough idea
Budget Scenarios

Bud Hawkins sat at his desk with his headphones blocking out the incessant buzzing of his lab partners ancient workstation. His boss had chewed out the entire department in the meeting that morning, and everyone had retreated to their calming place. Bud just happened to enjoy the alpha state inducing sounds that his computer was making for him with real time feedback from the scalp EEG net built into his thinking cap. Bud had done extensive studies on brain enhancement through external electromagnetic stimulation and had designed tested and began daily use of his “Thinking Hat”. It stimulated his imagination along with the inspiration center of his brain resulting in intuitive leaps that had brought him 3 promotions thus far.

Performing another search variation, Bud decided to allow the computer more leeway and left open the sources and simply requested potential ideas that would allow his department to frontload the next 16 years of budget requests into the next 3 and a half at most. Along with page after page of internal emails and notes to self from various government employees and corporate finance flunkies, was a link that had a completely different genesis. It was an email written to the author's own email account in a seemingly note to self method that let him establish a time and date when the idea first occurred to him. Some of them though including the one highlighted seemed to be more of a purposefully note to government bodies that might be snooping. We were and this particular idea made my face nearly split in two in its simplicity.

Bud had problems resisting the urge to grin as he caught his buddies eyes out of the corner of his eyes as he signed in at the Security Station. He had gone through this multiple times before and so none of the extensive procedures surprised or phased him. He was just putting his shoes back on when Omar walked towards him with his jacket and hat on clearly wondering why he couldn't simply have waited the 15 minutes for Omar to be free to head out to lunch. Bud didn’t try to hold in the grin this time and put up a finger to his lips and simply pointed at his visitor badge and it's clear indication of Secure Room visitor Access. Omar shrugged and led Bud back into the rear area that led to the secure suites.

Once they had the room setup and the normal Bug Free sensor sweep performed Omar bit first by asking “What the hell man. You know we only have an hour for lunch and you go and pull something like this?”

Buds grin broke into a full on smile and he replied “I don’t think you will want to be anywhere you can’t talk freely for the next few hours at least.”

Omar took a moment to assess if it was possible that Bud was simply pulling his leg and ended up nodding and getting out his ubiquitous pad and pencil. “Go” was all he said.

Bud began with the initial budget forecast that began his search logic and ended with the nationwide replacement of all government and military organizations grid tied electricity with solar concentrating molten salt storage power systems. Due to their dangerously high temperatures and invisible swaths of concentrated deadly sunlight the entire area was extensively guarded by state of the art fencing and electronic surveillance to prevent the trespassing and death of the unwary stranger. Each of these stations was made up of thousands of heliostats capable of maintaining real time optimal positioning for solar capture.

The real purpose of these are the night time activities. The Solar capture locations are covered to prevent radiation of captured heat and just happens to uncover the most sensitive photoreceptive surfaces man is capable of producing. These fractal mirror light gathering systems can be tied together with the next generation of quantum computing systems to produce enhanced imagery with enough detail to produce sub millimeter resolution of any location on earth off of the reflection of any of the mars orbiters. If we place purpose built mirrors in orbit or even encourage the use of solar sails to provide numerous mirror bodies for multiple solution paths for requested imagery location requests.

Omar had stopped listening and was already thinking of the ramifications of this idea. the entire flight budget of the spy sats teams could be rolled into this easily. If the system was scaled up for civilian use as well it could quintuple the surface area covered without any need to fund it if they could get it passed into law as a requirement for federal monies for power companies in trouble. The computer situation would be an even bigger coup as no one was aware of how quickly the quantum computers scaled as they were networked. They would be able to build billions of times more computing power simply by asking for next year's budget to go towards these being ordered instead of the next line of cpus from whoever won the bribery this year. There was one thing that annoyed him though. Somehow his office had not discovered this mystery author. The last piece of paper that Bud had laid out on the table was probably another short story style missive to the powers that be to notice and please introduce if they aren’t already. It hinted at the systematic harvesting of the wasted trillions of cycles of every computer in the world by simply earmarking all of the system idle time for distributed computing tasks that the end user was never even aware of.

System Idle Process....

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