(Pictured: Item 3334 testing in conjunction with AbNaval.)
ITEM NUMBER: 3334
ITEM: Quantum Uncertainty Missile
ITEM HISTORY: Item 3334 is an air-to-air (modifiable) missile weapon designed by Magic Missile Weapons Systems, a contractor that upon investigation appeared to only have one employee. Developed in an attempt to fulfill a DoD contract for an âuntrackable missile,â the weapon system appears to use extranormal elements, a direct contravention of the 1967 Magical Armaments Control Laws (or the X-CALIBER Act). The single employee of MMWS was brought into Office custody in 1993. A guilty verdict was delivered by a jury of his peers (IE, wizards) and he was sentenced to ten years in âwizpopâ federal prison.
The weapon platformâs guidance system is programmed in what appears to be a proprietary version of the common magical programming language Wand+. This home brew code was noted by Abnormal Technology Division specialists to be âincoherent, even for Wand+â and âarguably a bigger crime than the missile itself.â
Through means that are still currently unclear, the missile system attempts to fulfill its âuntraceableâ objective by transposing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle into classical mechanics - what this means in practice is that it is impossible to know for certain more than one fact about the missileâs trajectory after firing. It is possible to know the missileâs position, but not then its velocity, and vice versa. Tertiary facts about the missile - aspects of its physical design, color, shape, will all serve to confound further knowledge on the objectâs trajectory. With multiple viewers, this can manifest as the missile âglitchingâ around the sky, or even, possibly due to the weaponâs shoddy programming, âunfiringâ itself, happening approximately a third of the time.
To make matters more complicated, testing has determined that even in double-blind cases such that no one viewer should know more than one fact about the weapon, an âextra observerâ can be found to be altering the weaponâs flight path. It is currently hypothesized that the missile âknowsâ where it is, for a given epistemological definition of âknowing,â and is capable of âglitchingâ itself. Although testing has shown with a high certainty that the weapons system is not âupper caseâ sentient, it is thought that because various mundane technological counterparts to the weapon have rudimentary guidance systems capable of processing where it is and is not, transposing quantum mechanics onto that capability causes unpredictable results.
All known missiles, launchers, computer systems, and the documentation thereof have been deweaponized and assigned to storage in Archival.
