For a few months now, readers have been asking for more explanation around the technology in the book.
Terri Lonier, back in the first chapter: I might need one sentence that brings the newbie reader into the crypto, or I lose them. Bill Falloon, a few chapters on: two words sent him off to look things up, Persephone and mempool, and he wanted the quickest layman’s definition to carry him forward without feeling lost. Sean Wise, chapter after chapter, the same small flag in different words: will a non-technical reader know what this is? Logan Cundiff, reading the moment a public key becomes a private one, said non-technical readers need to see why that single step would take down digital society.
Then Stephen Bradley, leaving his first comment after a long time reading, said he gets lost in the quantum machinery and the cryptography, wanted to understand more, and would happily take an appendix with some tutorials that explain the basics of what is going on in the technical passages.
Bob Baskerville’s email motivated me to finally do this. He wrote that when I finalize the story I might want to include an appendix on how public and private keys work, that it might broaden the audience and teach something at the same time.
So I wrote the appendix. It is live now, and it is called How It Actually Works.
It does the one thing I think a non-fiction appendix should do. It tells you what is real and what is not. Almost everything in the book is real - the quantum computing, cryptography, the way it breaks, and the reason the world does not end. There is exactly one invented step, the leap that makes the break happen in the span of a thriller instead of a decade. Everything around it is as true as I could make it, as of this week, in a field moving fast enough that some of it will be wrong by spring. Or tomorrow.
This is my first novel, and I am still working out how to write this inside the dialogue without either boring the people who know it or losing the people who don’t. The appendix is my backstop while I figure this out.
If you read it and I got something wrong, highlight the line and tell me there. I would rather fix it than defend it.
Read How It Actually Works. You do not need a word of it to enjoy the book. But if you have ever wanted to have a layperson’s view of how some of this stuff works, hopefully this helps.