Q-Day: Four Minutes to Global Collapse

Nebuchadnezzar watched the condensate clouds curl and fade behind the glass, the last trace of cold breath from a machine that no longer needed it. The lab around him was small and dark by design. No windows. The only light came from the low, humming stack in the center of the room and the line of status LEDs along the wall, like a city skyline at midnight. The old quantum rigs had filled rooms and cried out for attention with their noise and plumbing. This one sat in a black carbon shell the size of a commercial fridge, quietly warm, almost modest. On the display: Q-ARRAY: 262,144 logical qubits — coherence nominal — error rates < 10^-7. Stable. Plentiful. Years ago this number would have been a fantasy: marketing deck stuff. Now it glowed in understated system font, as if it were nothing.