CHAPTER 26
New York, United States of America
Oh . . . God. I don’t know who I am or what my name is,” said the banker, whose name was Rachel, not that she could remember that just now.
“Why am I in the office?” She collapsed into a chair and went headfirst into one of the doughnuts on the tray there, even though she hadn’t touched the doughnut display in all the eight years she’d worked for the bank.
It was what happened when the phone threw you out of bed and into the office at three a.m.
The overhead lights were hell. She wanted to slide under the table and die.
Through the huge windows opposite, she could see into the next tower, and the offices inside.
A few lights were on, but nobody was there.
The hotel beyond was almost wholly dark.
She hadn’t known Manhattan was ever so quiet.
“Have you seen the TikTok videos about the coins?” said Harry, who was somehow the same as he always was: the tech robot in the seventies-looking diamond-patterned pullover that he always wore no matter what the weather was doing outside.
Around his neck were the same headphones he always had, the pink ones with starfish stickers on them. “They always land on heads?”
“No, because I’m not nineteen,” said Rachel, mostly into the doughnut. She wasn’t sure how old Harry was. It was hard to tell when a person was made mainly of ears, however much they tried to distract you with a magnificent Afro.
“Ugh, what’s happening?” demanded Jamal, limping in just like she had done. She held out the doughnut tray. “I love you,” he said, zombie blank.
“Throw me another one,” said one of the Hong Kong traders, who had no excuse.
Surely they were always up at this time.
Rachael threw a doughnut at him. He made an ineffectual grab for it, and it splatted right into his chest with a splosh of powder sugar.
He peeled it off, nibbled his tie thoughtfully, and nodded.
Rachel stared at nothing. She could have gone to art school. But no, finance was a much more stable career, she’d been so sensible . . .
“There’s about to be a worldwide economic crash,” said Harry.
They all looked around.
He swallowed, but under his normal anxiety, there was a determination like Rachel had never seen on him before.
“As you know, banking encryption is secured with random number data. You need random numbers to make an encryption key nobody can break, even AI, and you need a constant stream. Now . . . unlike most banks, we generate our own random numbers for our encryption keys. We do it with a thing called a Quantum Random Number Generator. We take photons and split them with a laser, and then we have equipment that measures how they scatter.”
He put something on the table, a device that looked like nothing more complicated than a little box with a few circuits stuck on it, a small lamp, and a couple of panels.
“That scattering is random, or it should be.” He tapped something on his phone. “If you hook the data up to speakers, it normally sounds like this.”
The phone played some crackling white noise.
“Okay?” said Rachel.
“We convert it to sound as a quality control check,” Harry went on.
He was shaking; she could see his phone juddering.
“With the sensors and methods we use, there’s always a chance of accidentally reducing the randomness of the data that—never mind, the point is, it should sound like static.
No patterns at all. But if I turn it on now and hook it up to the speakers . . .”
He pressed a switch. A sharp light came on, shining through the circuitry box. Dimmer light reflected onto the panels. He plugged a wire into his phone. The crackling noise started again.
“The panels measure where on their surface the photons fall,” Harry said. “It should be totally irregular. Photons zing around, but . . .”
The crackling was resolving into something else.
Voices.
They were singing.
It was like no song Rachel had ever heard before.
It was huge and fractured, and swelling, and ecstatic.
It lifted and fell through a range no human choir ever had.
The longer the lamp stayed on, the stronger the sound became, until the whole meeting room thrummed with it.
She forgot that it was three A.M., forgot how tired she was, how annoyed that the doughnut was going to make her crave sugar all day.
The song was so beautiful that her eyes prickled with tears.
When Harry turned it off, she felt bereft.
“You’re saying—that the light is making that sound?” Jamal said into the awful silence.
“Yes. That is the sound of a stream of completely ordinary photons being split into two by a completely ordinary laser and bouncing off a completely ordinary surface,” Harry said, his voice beginning to break.
“It started last night. I’ve been running checks since then, and double-checking, and triple-checking.
It isn’t our equipment. It’s that—it’s that randomness isn’t working. ”
“What do you mean, randomness isn’t working?” Rachel managed.
Harry was leaning on the back of a chair, digging his fingertips so hard into the leather that it was tearing.
“I don’t know how it’s possible, but it is what’s happening.
And the fact is—the fact is, nobody actually knows why randomness happens.
It just . . . does. It’s baked into quantum physics. Normally.”
“You said the economy was about to crash,” the Hong Kong trader said. He was still fiddling with his tie, trying to brush off the powder sugar. “I feel like I might get it, if it wasn’t the middle of the night, but . . . it is.”
Harry pressed his nails into the ripped leather of the chair.
“Our encryption, everyone’s encryption, for every financial transaction in the world, relies on a good supply of random numbers.
Devices like this. Data from lightning in the atmosphere .
. . even the movement of wax inside lava lamps.
But the random numbers aren’t random anymore.
I’ve called weather stations, I’ve called random number generation sites, everything I could think of, and it’s all the same.
If you listen to the data . . . it’s this song. ”
Rachel sat back slowly. “What is it? Who’s singing it? How?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Harry said. “The point is: no encryption in the world is secure anymore. You might as well leave all your money in the middle of the street.”