The Holo Earth

Chapter 13

After another hard day at the office, Liam slumped into the old recliner in the living room. He'd spent hours testing the game on his laptop, and now his mind rebelled against any more cognitively demanding activities. He needed to face the stark reality of his finances. With a sigh, he closed the game and opened his financial dashboard. A flicker of hope ignited as he did so-perhaps, just perhaps, there might be a sliver of unexpected income or a savings account somewhere to rescue him from the looming abyss.

His eyes lingered on the row labeled "Roth IRA," a vestige of more optimistic times. He'd opened the account years ago when he first started working, heeding the advice of financial gurus who preached the importance of saving for retirement.

But reality had been harsh. Month after month, Liam had to choose between contributing to his IRA and paying for essentials. The balance in the account was pitiful-less than $5000 accumulated over years of sporadic $200 and $500 contributions whenever he could squeeze them out of his tight budget. Perhaps he should take the little bit that was there out and pay a couple of bills with it. It wasn't doing anything here.

He couldn't look at it any more and he turned the laptop off and opened his grandfather's journal. The worn pages crackled as he turned them, each one a window into a past.

His eyes fell upon an entry dated before his grandfather had founded O'Connell IT Solutions.

===

November 30, 1993

The potential of AI is staggering. Not just for business, but for humanity. Imagine a world where decisions are made with perfect rationality, where morality isn't clouded by emotion or self-interest. That's the world I want to build. That's the legacy I want to leave for my children and future generations.

===

Liam's throat tightened. His grandfather's ambition, his vision for a better world, it was all there on the page. He read on, finding descriptions of early experiments on home computers, the excitement of breakthroughs, the frustration of setbacks.

Then, he found it. The entries he'd been hoping to find:

===

December 4, 1993

Found something strange on the sidewalk in front of the house a few days ago. A pendant, old looking but in excellent condition; could have been made yesterday. My name was inscribed on the front and the letters ZLK on the back. Then the next night I met Zolok. He says he's not human, that he exists beyond our understanding of time and space. It sounds crazy, but after what he helped me do today, I'm inclined to believe him.

'Look closer, Robert,' he said. 'The stress distribution isn't what you think it is.'

I looked at it the following day. I zoomed in on the area he indicated, and suddenly I saw it. A subtle miscalculation in the finite element analysis. If we hadn't caught it, the vertical stabilizer could have failed under certain extreme conditions. The consequences... I shudder to think about it.

I immediately called an emergency meeting with the team. Explaining my 'intuition' about the problem was tricky, but once they saw the data, everyone agreed. We spent the next 72 hours redesigning and re-analyzing.

The lead engineer said it was a one-in-a-million catch. If that flaw had made it to production, it could have led to catastrophic failures. We're talking about potential tragedies that would have cost hundreds of lives and set commercial aviation back years.

As I drove home that night, exhausted but relieved. Zolok's claims were extraordinary, bordering on the impossible. But the evidence was undeniable. A part of me was exhilarated by the possibilities, while another part was deeply troubled. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was crossing a line, delving into territory that humans were not meant to explore.