Foresight

The detective took a long drag on his pipe. He squinted at a screen, sucking words off a page like an anteater at a colony, and the marijuana helped him connect and synthesize those words into a lens that filtered reality.

He subscribed to science and forensics journals, scribes on theoretical physics and practical applications of quantum computers, and often he would read these and spin off on fantastical tangents that would fail to materialize in the real world the next day when he awakened to his sober self.

After that he laid off the herb and stopped reading so much, started going about life in a cyclical way, losing himself in work and allowing himself to observe the patterns inherent in the world. He would often ponder this confluence of technologies and philosophies governing how the universe fits together and what tools we have at our disposal to access that configuration to no avail...then one night he had the answer.

There was a machine he could build that would allow him incredible powers.

How long it would take him to make? If he could even figure out what it had to be? He wasn't sure how many years he had left. He recognized how short and insignificant something like a "year" was and laughed to himself, taking another puff. He'd cut back, but that didn't mean he didn't like a little bit once in awhile.

He had the insight one night after a few too many, dancing drunkenly in an Irish bar with a slender girl who paid him barely a glance. He slunk out, considering cosmic microwave background and quantum computer modeling.

What he'd heard about the cosmic microwave background was that it was the remnants of the big bang, and a map of which particular way the universe exploded, from our perspective. What he'd heard about quantum computer modeling was that you could calculate in more than two dimensions which might mean you could simulate a universe, or load in a universe. With a combination of the two, he surmised, it should be possible to somehow capture the universe in some kind of file format, then load it into the quantum computer.