Chapter 14
Dear Detective Hicks
I don’t know who you are yet. And at the time of writing this letter, you don’t know who I am either.
You have no idea of my existence and no inkling of what I am about to do.
The truth is I still don’t know quite when it will begin myself.
That is why it’s going to work. That is why you’ll never catch me.
Randomness has fascinated me since I was a child, right from the moment my father brought home the simple computer on which I first learned to program and code.
I was only five or six years old at the time, but already I understood the machine and how it worked: that it was just an elaborate calculator, one that would perform whatever operation I told it to and nothing more.
Inside its cheap plastic shell, one thing led to the next in a blind, obedient process.
Every single output was created entirely by the inputs. It followed orders.
Except that one of the first commands I learned was to generate a random number. How could that be?
Even as a child, I understood it had to be an illusion.
As I grew older, my father taught me, and I made further studies of my own: of sequences and codes.
I learned how computers use pseudo-random number generators to hide their logical patterns.
A unique seed number, derived from the exact date and time, is fed through a complicated equation to produce a new number that, while derived solely from the first, appears unconnected to an untrained eye.
That new number, fed back in, creates a third.
And so on.
In such a way, a string of apparently random numbers is generated. If you know the pattern and any single number, you know the whole sequence, but, for most purposes, the illusion of randomness is sufficient.
That wouldn’t be good enough for you, would it?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the problem: how to generate a code even you won’t be able to crack.
A string for which the underlying pattern cannot possibly be discerned.
That is what I have spent months working on.
That is what I believe I have achieved. And it is finally time to test it.
On you.
As I write this, I am still waiting for the right moment to begin. The right initial seed. I do not know where or when it will be. I do not know who. That is why it will work: because I do not know yet who will die first.
But I do know it will be soon.