“What?” Tim asked this with a tone that showed that his annoyance as he walked to Frank.
Frank did not notice the annoyance, only the compliance.
“Check this out!” Frank opened a program on his desktop. It loaded immediately.
“I don’t see it. Did they release a new version of Proxedit? What’s the big deal?”
“No, man. The program isn’t the big deal.” Frank opened several other programs and started running them all at once.
“Okay, so?” Tim stopped. “Wait a minute. Where did you get all this processing speed?”
“Finally,” Frank proclaimed, smiling.
“No seriously. If I’m running Proxedit, I can’t run anything else without serious lag.”
“Mmm-hmm,” his roommate said, “I got some upgrades.”
“How much?”
“A lot more.”
“I meant how much money?” Tim clarified.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“You remember, Sarah Jay?”
“Only that you knew a girl named Sarah Jay.”
“Well, she works for a contractor, and that contractor gets contracts from three letter agencies.”
“She’s not a spy or anything, though. I thought she was a computer person.”
Frank took a moment to bask in the idiocy.
“Continue,” implored Tim.
“She’s been working on quantum processing-”
Tim interrupted, “I heard about that on twitter. Normal computers are all ones and zeroes, and, um.”
“Continue,” implored Frank.
“Well, um, these ones have, um, more than that.”
“What’s your degree in again, Tim?”
“Literature.”
“That explains that word picture you just painted.”
“Shut up.”
“Another masterpiece.”
“Frank, I really wish you would,
I was hoping that you could
Just shut the fuck up
And act like a grown-up
Or I’ll punch your small manhood. “
Tim replied, “All right. That’s a seven out of ten.”
“Thank you.”
“So why is Sarah Jay giving sci-fi computer processors out to old college acquaintances?”
“Data points. She needs a lot of data points before she presents this to her people.”
“It works, though. I mean, it’s not like it could have side effects.”
“Well. . .”
“Jesus Christ, Tim, what did you bring into my house?”
“Well, there are some nuts out there that think that the Quantum processors could fuck up with spacetime and the multi-verse, and that using them could have created the Mandela effect.”
“Okay. So, I’ve read enough Flash comics to know what the multiverse is. There’s the Golden Age Flash who used to live in one universe and then there’s the Silver Age Flash who used to live in a different universe, and sometimes these universes can overlap causing one Flash to meet a different Flash.”
“I think that’s how Stephen Hawking describes it,” Frank deadpanned.
“But what is the Mandela effect? Is that like those fancy Hindu designs?”
“No, those are mandalas. Mandela, like the person. There’s a phenomenon where a bunch of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison, you know, when in fact he went on to become president of South Africa after that and didn’t die until about 5 years ago.”
“What?”
“There’s also Sinbad starring in a genie movie that never happened, Mr. Monopoly having a monocle that he never had, and something with the spelling of the Berenstain Bears.”
“Weird.”
“I know right? Some nuts think that a bunch of people misremembering things is not because people have shitty memories, but because we are constantly switching from one reality to another.”
“And this computer can do that?”
“No, it’s just some nuts who think that quantum computers might be causing an effect which isn’t real.”
“I mean, if you can hop us into a different universe, can you transfer us into a universe without President Trump?”
“President Trump? Are you fucking with me? That guy barely got 50 electoral votes!”
“What?” Tim asked, suddenly nervous.
“He only ran for president as a ploy to start his news channel, which is still not even off the ground,” Frank tried to explain.
“You’re fucking with me, now, right?” Tim asked, starting to feel sweat dripping off of his head and arms.
“I’ll look it up.”
Frank did that thing, opening the news tab.
“Oh, no. Oh no. This isn’t right.”
“What the fuck did you do, Frank!”
“Sorry. I’m going to open a fuckload more programs until I fix this.”