The Universe is Hostile to Computers

a plane plummets out of the sky a speedrunner inexplicably jumps to a higher platform what the what the and an election recount is triggered all because of the same invisible phenomenon that permeates the Universe on May 18th 2003 voters in Belgium went to the polls in many regions voting was done on a computer something the belgians had been experimenting with for over a decade but the system had a backup each voter would insert a magnetic card into the machine and make their selection on screen their vote was saved both to the computer and the Magnetic card which they dropped into a box for redundancy late that night as the votes were being tabulated one of the election officials detected a problem with the results from scarbeck a municipality in central Brussels Maria vindevogel a little known candidate with her own party received more votes than was mathematically possible they knew this because of the way the preferential voting system works so they took out the magnetic cards and started a recount one by one they fed each of them through the machines again and after several hours the recount was complete the vote totals for every candidate were exactly the same as before except for Maria vindal in her case the recounted number of votes was less than the original by 4,000 96 so what went wrong how had her original tally been inflated by over 4,000 votes computer experts were brought in to run extensive tests on the software they combed through the code but could find no bugs they got the computer that had made the initial erroneous tally and tested the hardware again and again but they could not replicate the error everything about the hardware seemed to be in perfect working order and this left only one one possible explanation and it is seriously weird the clue comes from the excess number of votes Vogal received 4,096 computers work using binary strings of zeros and ones each coresponding to a power of two so somewhere inside the computer tabulating all the votes was a string of bits representing the number of votes Maria received it started the day all zeros and then as each vote for her came in it would increment by one physically this is done by turning on a transistor for one and turning it off for zero ...