"Okay, so if I add this side of the equation to that one, and then divide it by the coefficient, I should get..." I let the word trail off, punching in the commands as I thought of them, and then with one defining stroke I pressed the big red button mark calculate, and let the computer behind me begin buzzing as it did exactly what I told it to do. Within moments it came up with a big red and gold warning screen, and the computer behind me screeched to a halt in its calculations.
"What the haze?" I swore, pushing a dozen buttons simultaneously as I tried to bring back up the equation page, the one I'd been working on since arriving that morning. I began to go over it line by line, one number at a time, searching for the error that the computer had found, but when I found it I nearly hit myself, as it was right near the beginning of the first series of instructions, which meant an entire branch of numbers was off, all because I'd put in an equal sign where I needed a minus.
"That does it, I'm done for the day," I said to myself. This had been one hell of a day too. So many numbers ran through my head that I was finally beginning to understand why six was afraid of seven. Looking away from my screen, smiling at that small stray thought I noticed the time to be only about an hour after I'd started, which didn't seem right, and then it dawned on me that I had been working so long that the hour hand had actually made a complete circuit.
"Oh man, and I promised to meet Julian and Ko at that new restaurant too," I said to myself, gripping my eyes and trying to make the pounding in my head stop. I knew they'd both understand, heck Kokoro had done this more than once when she ran into a big equation that she just had to solve. Of course she'd at least take a break every hour or so, I'd been working overtime, and as I looked at the Quantum Computer's monitor gauge it showed that the thing was near to overheating.
"Ah, forget it, not like this isn't the first time I've worked this long," I told the gauge, hitting a nearby button marked ‘Shut Down' and walking off. I doubt I made it more than ten steps when I heard the telltale whining of the QC as it began to spin out of control, the heat gauge spiking as the system attempted to compensate for a perceived error in the drivers. As with every time before the whine then gave way to a kind of whoosh sound.
"Don't turn around, just keep walking," I told myself, after all I didn't need to worry about it, the QC was self correcting, and eventually would return to equilibrium. Still, if the system blew up, and enough records survived I would be in a lot of trouble, and so with a sigh I stopped and turned around.
"Why don't I listen to myself?" I asked no one in particular as I turned to find a very interesting looking vortex beginning to form, and sweeping up to me. If I'd just kept walked the vortex would have collapsed and I would have been able to get home to get some sleep and a bite to eat, as it stood now however I was swept up by the vortex, nearly losing my lunch as gravity began to shift wildly around me, and the sides of the vortex showed a thousand scenes at once. Not new to the experience though I was just able to keep everything down as I was spit out onto a field, and fell to earth with a resounding thud.
"Do the exits always have to appear a meter off the ground?" I asked myself, knowing only that all three times this had happened to me, both leaving and going back to my home reality. Still, it wasn't too bad this time, as the short yellow grass I'd fallen onto proved to be a better cushion then the steel plate I'd ended up on last time this had happened. It did, however, cling to my clothes far to well, and I ripped out more than a few blades standing up, and looking around I found nothing in sight other than the yellow grass.
"Great, yet another long walk. Why do I keep working with that darned computer?" I derided myself as I began to inspect things closer at hand, looking down I finally caught sight of a small black dot in among the yellow grass. It moved as I looked at it, and I realized it had to be some kind of bug, which meant life existed on this alternate Earth. Heck, as far as I knew this bug could even be the local dominant species, and so I leaned down closer to it.
"Excuse me, you wouldn't happen to know what reality this it, would you?" I asked it, and without giving an answer I could hear the dot took off into the grass, vanishing almost instantly. For a moment, just a moment I was going to pursue it, but looking around I realized that I could very easily step on the poor thing if I wasn't careful, so I decided to go off in the opposite direction, wading through the grass, which got up to my big toes as I walked farther on.
As an after thought I pulled back the sleeve of my gray jump suit and looked at the watch I wore underneath. Supposedly the watch would tell me how much time was passing in my home reality as compared to the one I was in by measuring the rotation of some vortex that moved at the same speed in all dimensions without being effected by the local speed of time. I sighed as I noticed that only about three milliseconds had past, and with it taking the computer more than ten minutes to find me and return me home, I was going to be in this place for a while.
"Wonder if they've got burger joints here?" I asked myself, rubbing me stomach. It had been more than a day since I'd eaten, and I was finally beginning to feel the pangs of hunger that went along with it, and remembering that I was supposed to have met Julian and Ko at a restaurant didn't help matters, thus did I walk off into a new world, looking for food to tide me over until I could at last get home.
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