Finding the Lost

Quantum Searches for Lost Children

Walking home from school, Yvonne's best friend waved goodbye and Yvonne continued on her way home. She loved third grade so far. She'd made two new friends who joined her at lunch and recess every day.

A van pulled up next to Yvonne and before Yvonne could react, a man had her around the waist and mouth, stifling her scream.

Before the man had closed the door, advanced quantum computers, running programs nicknamed Eigenweasels, had already identified a situation for analysis. The road Yvonne walked on had security cameras feeding the Eigenweasels data. The Eigenweasels collected more data a second than humanity had produced in its first twenty years in the digital age and followed its programming to identify inconsistencies.

A child being grabbed by a strange man and dragged struggling into a van was an inconsistency. Before the van had rolled through the first stop light, the Eigenweasels had identified Yvonne as a local resident who walked this route every school day. They used their thermal annealing processes to solve quantum optimization equations that identified the man as a resident of another state. The data reached a critical mass and notified a human.

Officer Francis saw the notification, watched the video, and put out an APB. The Eigenweasels never stopped following the man, providing law enforcement with the license plate, the direction of travel, and a constant GPS feed.

Within four minutes, the van was surrounded by police. In six, Yvonne was on her way home.