Science in the Fiction: Quantum Computers, Encryption, and Synaesthetic Code Landscapes

At the height of my hacker years, I attended a Damien Conway talk on his Perl module quantum-superpositions. He described how quantum computers work, and exactly what the capacity to perform virtually infinite simultaneous calculations at once could mean for encryption. Nutshell: the best encryption we’ve got = LOL

Around this time, I was talking with a bunch of fellow hackers, and we were bitching about how we hate management interrupting us while coding.

“Yeah, the worst is when I have all...