Software is executable fiction. Software development is about constructing narratives, drawing from a broad palette of paradigms and technologies, married to our understanding of the needs and wants for a system. Abstraction allows us to simplify and reify the complexity of the world into a formal description that we continually update. Abstraction allows us to ignore things about the world and about computer systems that are irrelevant or inconvenient.

But there are limits to the enchantment of code and our ability to maintain illusions. When the rubber hits the road and the packet hits the network we find universal limits are there to keep it real. Nothing can be instantaneous or infinite. Not all computations can be reversed. Not everything is computable. Not everything can be known. Every computation costs time and energy.

Accompanied by a bunch of SF and retro pop culture references (not just Star Trek — we'll be crossing the streams), let's explore the metaphors and realities of the physical world and how they play out in our software systems