Free Search Terms: Alpha by Travis Hill Page A

there’d be some federal agents knocking on my door, wanting to know just how it was that I’d guessed with such accuracy.
    I frowned, but then smiled again. The stock market. I could win one lottery, no one would ever be suspicious of that, and then start playing the stock market. If the quantum computer really was able to do some kind of digital or informational time travel… where would the limit be on how much money I could make? The warning center in my brain remembered an old fable about being granted three wishes, and one of the wishes was for more wishes, which turned into a never-ending cycle. Would I be satisfied making a billion dollars trading stocks and bonds? Ten billion? A hundred billion?
    With that much money, I’d have almost unlimited power. I could practically buy governments, whether outright or in secret. Would such ultimate power ultimately corrupt me? I thought I’d be pretty benevolent, but I’d never had access to maybe a trillion dollars in liquid assets. What if someone really pissed me off? I could pay a hitman ten million dollars to snuff that person out. Hell, I could probably order up a drone strike or a special-ops team to take care of it. I’d have Senators and Prime Ministers and Police Chiefs in my pocket.
    My head swam from the swirling thoughts. I stood up and left my room, going out the back sliding glass door to the patio to get some fresh, cold air. The urge to run back in the house and start becoming the richest, most powerful man on Earth was so great that I thought I might have to cut off my hands and feet just to keep myself from walking to the computer and typing anything in. I could still touch the search box with a stump and use voice commands , I thought.
    I’ll cut your fucking tongue right out of your stupid head , was the warning I gave my brain in reply. I knew I was going insane. No one stands in the freezing cold arguing with himself, threatening self-inflicted bodily harm, unless they were crazy. I wondered if this is what it was like to be schizophrenic or have some other mental illness. I stood on the patio for almost ten minutes until I was shivering so much that I bit a small chunk of skin off my tongue with my chattering teeth.
    I walked back to my bedroom and sat down. It took another ten minutes to warm back up completely, but by the time I’d stopped shivering, I’d made up my mind as to what to do. I wasn’t going to win any lotteries. I wasn’t going to play the stock market. I wasn’t going to bet on sports, become a psychic, or anything else. Not yet. First I had to make sure that my strange little quantum computer really could see into the future.
    I touched the search box and typed in “August 1, 2100.” Qwerry instantly alerted me to the fact that there were no web pages available for this date. I grunted, and typed in “NASA 2050” and tried that. No results. I wasn’t sure if I was doing something wrong, or if the computer couldn’t see that far into the future. I tried a few more searches, hoping beyond hope that mankind had figured out how to travel the stars, or maybe aliens had landed and said Nanoo-Nanoo or whatever it was that they might say, should they have mouths. Nothing. Every search came back with zero results.
    I sighed and gave up. I had an entire page full of results in my notebook to check as the weekend approached. I wasn’t sure how I’d react if every single detail came to pass. My mind began to creep into the schemes of becoming filthy rich. My daydreaming was interrupted by the ding from my phone.
    I miss you ;) <3
    Kassandra. I hadn’t even thought of her in my crazy quantum fantasies. Which brought me to a new problem. A few actually, but the first one was whether or not I should tell her about the computer. I decided that was a bad idea, and put it out of my head. My problem solving drifted into daydreaming as I went from trying to explain to her how I was suddenly rich, to buying her anything and everything