System Idle Process

Bud Hawkins slouched at his desk, the low hum of his headphones drowning out the ancient workstation his lab partner refused to upgrade. The morning’s meeting still echoed in his skull—his boss, Director Kessler, had torn into the entire R&D department, red-faced and bellowing about budget cuts and missed deadlines. Everyone had scattered to their coping mechanisms after that. For Bud, it was the alpha-wave-inducing tones his computer piped into his ears, synced to the scalp EEG net woven into his "Thinking Hat." He’d designed it himself—years of research into electromagnetic brain stimulation distilled into a snug cap that tickled his imagination and intuition centers. Three promotions in five years said it worked.


Today, though, he needed more than a creative buzz. Kessler had dropped a bomb: frontload sixteen years of budget requests into three and a half, max, or watch the department sink. Bud adjusted the hat’s settings, letting the computer take the reins on a search. He loosened the parameters—any source, any idea, just something to crack the problem. Pages of internal emails, government memos, and corporate drivel scrolled by, but one link stood out: an email from some nobody to himself, timestamped like a patent claim. The tone was odd, half diary, half taunt—like a wink to snooping agencies. Bud’s agency was snooping, and this note hit like a lightning bolt. His face split into a grin he couldn’t suppress.


He caught Omar’s eye across the lab as he signed in at the security station for a secure room pass. The usual rigmarole—shoes off, badge scanned, pat-down—didn’t faze him; he’d done it a dozen times. Omar, jacket on and ready for their usual lunch break, raised an eyebrow as Bud laced up his sneakers, visitor badge gleaming with "Secure Room Access." Bud just smirked, finger to lips, and pointed at the badge.


Omar shrugged and led the way to the back suites.


The room was a sterile box—gray walls, no windows, a table, and a bug-sweep sensor that blinked green after a quick pass. Omar crossed his arms. “What the hell, man? Lunch is an hour, and you pull this?”


Bud’s grin widened into a full-on smile. “Trust me, you’ll want privacy for this. Hours, maybe.”


Omar studied him, then sighed, pulling out his notepad and pencil—a relic he swore by. “Go.”


Bud started with the budget crisis, then dove into the email’s gem: replace all government and military grid-tied electricity with solar concentrating molten salt storage systems. Picture it—thousands of heliostats tracking the sun, channeling light into towers where molten salt stored heat for round-the-clock power. High temps and invisible beams of concentrated sunlight made them deadly, so each site bristled with top-tier fencing and surveillance. Clean energy, sure, but that was the cover.


At night, the heliostats flipped their game. Covered to trap heat, they exposed ultra-sensitive photoreceptive fractal mirrors—tech so advanced it could pull sub-millimeter resolution from faint reflections off Mars orbiters. Tie those to next-gen quantum computers, and you’d get imagery sharp enough to read a license plate from orbit, no spy sats needed. Scale it up with purpose-built mirrors or even solar sails—legal again if framed as power assists—and you’d have multiple angles for any target on Earth. The spy sat budget could fold into this, and if civilian power companies got mandated to adopt it for federal aid, the surface area could quintuple without a dime from taxpayers.


Omar’s pencil froze mid-scratch. “Holy—Bud, this is nuts. The flight teams would flip, but it’d work. And the quantum angle…” He trailed off, eyes narrowing. Quantum computers scaled exponentially when networked—something the brass didn’t advertise. Divert next year’s CPU budget to these instead of the usual corporate handouts, and you’d have billions of times more processing power. “We could bury this in the energy overhaul. Kessler’d kiss you.”


Bud slid the last page across the table, another cryptic note from the mystery author. This one hinted at harvesting idle cycles from every computer worldwide—System Idle Process as a front for distributed computing. Trillions of wasted cycles, funneled into government tasks, all invisible to users. “This guy’s a ghost,” Bud said. “No trace in our systems. But if he’s right…”


Omar whistled low. “We’d own the grid and the cloud. Kessler’s sixteen years? Done in three, with change.”


Two weeks later, Bud stood in the briefing room, Thinking Hat swapped for a suit, pitching to Kessler and a dozen stone-faced suits. He’d polished the plan: solar stations rolling out in phases, civilian buy-in via subsidies, quantum hubs disguised as power management nodes. The idle-cycle harvest got a nod as a “security enhancement.” Kessler’s scowl softened as the numbers sank in—$40 billion frontloaded, $200 billion saved long-term. “Hawkins,” he growled, “if this flops, you’re done. If it works, you’re running it.”


It worked. By year three, heliostats dotted the Midwest, their nightside mirrors quietly mapping the globe. Quantum hubs hummed in unmarked bunkers, and idle cycles from a billion devices cracked encryption faster than anyone knew. Bud got a corner office, Omar a raise, and the mystery author stayed a ghost—though Bud kept that email pinned to his desk, a taunt and a trophy.


Zara, his newborn daughter, arrived that spring. Saira teased him about naming her after a star he’d “seen” in a budget graph, but Bud just grinned. The department thrived, the shadows deepened, and somewhere, a system idle process ticked on, unnoticed.