[FlashFiction] Digimon 2390 Snippet

This is a bit of practice for a Digimon story I want to write someday. Right now I'm trying to figure out a good perspective for the main character, and see if some ideas sound good on paper in addition to in my head. (For those of you who read my main Digimon fic, chapter 6 is coming. I wrote this tonight as a warm-up to start writing again.)

So yeah, Flash Fiction!

*****

Jana's computer screen was filled with a string of 'ffffffffff…' that was nearing 400 lines in length, each line consisting of 100 characters. This was because she had been holding down the 'f' key for approximately twenty minutes. She figured that at line 500 she would switch to 'u.'

Suffice it to say, Jana was frustrated. As a graduate student at New Boston's School of Quantum Computer Science, she was used to most kinds of programming-related frustration. She coped with most of this frustration by hanging on the comforting knowledge that no class asked for any impossible feats, and that when doing research it was always okay to write a paper on why something was probably impossible after all. What she was trying to do now was a different animal altogether.

Jana swore, hit a few keys, and the f's were gone, making visible again her messy, incomplete, ill-conceived program. She knew it wouldn't compile correctly, and even if it did she was sure she had most of the theory wrong anyway.

It was now three in the morning, and realizing this Jana dropped her forehead to the table. She rolled her eyes to the left, and saw that Carson was still asleep. They were ostensibly working on this thing together, but he hadn't contributed a single thing of any substance. Half of the time she was just trying to explain the quantum computing theory to him. The rest of the time involved wrangling advanced math and physics, and she did that all herself as Carson would need to take three more classes to even know where to begin.

It was stupid. She should have been working on the Hyperspace Problem, or some other Q.C. application that could possibly pan out and pay for her education. Instead, she had let this naïve eighteen year old take her old dreams and drag them back to the surface, and now she couldn't think about anything else.

She pulled her eyes back to the computer screen and tried attacking their memory allocation problem again from all the same angles, as if basic asymptotic complexity and arithmetic had started following different rules since last she checked. No matter how she sliced it, there was just no quantum computer on the planet that could handle what they wanted to do. She kept staring, kept running over the same numbers until her eyes stung and she started to forget the fundamentals. From experience, this meant it was time to give up and go to sleep.

Jana put her head down again, and this time closed her eyes. She couldn't stop thinking about the program, though. She could see it working as clear as day: a set of artificial physics so precise that anyone would think it was real, but just loose enough to allow for staggering wonders. It would be both grounded and fantastic, and she would watch as new life in strange and majestic forms arose as inevitably as it had on their own planet, without explicit direction from anyone. And it would run in real-time with none of this five-years-to-simulate-five-seconds nonsense.

But the computers were too slow. More than four hundred years since the first microprocessor, and it was all still too slow. All of her optimizations and exploitations of the natural, perfect randomness of quantum bits and she still couldn't do it. Where would she put it, this absurd dream? This Digital World?

Hi there, fellow Digimon writer! Pretty soon I'll be working on my own.

As for this practice piece, I can tell that this other story you're planning is going to be a little more on the technical side. There were some terms that flew over my head, especially since computers and technology are just not my interest. Still, if there's more to the story, then the few terms that aren't easily recognizable won't ruin it.

I remember you saying that was your worry with this story, so I figured that you would appreciate hearing one opinion on it.

Other than that, I don't have much else to say. It'll be interesting to see where you take this story and what Jana does with her idea.

I think you did well in conveying the feeling of coding frustration, something I can relate to well. (Also the frustration of working with someone who doesn't understand what you are meant to do or the like. >_>) I also think that this perspective for the character you were perusing is a decent one, so go for it! I didn't get confused by the terms, but that's probably because they're familiar to me in some way.

Suffice it to say, Jana was frustrated.

Click to expand...

I am not sure if the 'it' there is necessary. Probably could go without?

Nothing else to point out like the above. Overall I liked the piece. =)