Vlad got up out of Doug’s chair, went to the sink, and ran the water until it was cold. He drank a glass of it standing up. His face had gone cold from the inside, starting at his forehead.
“Vlad,” Samantha said behind him.
“I heard you. The new root leaks.”
“You look like you’re going to throw up,” Marcus said from the couch.
“I’m fine.”
He filled the glass again. The clock on Doug’s microwave said 1:46. He wanted it fixed before any of them knew it was his code.
“At two I will get nib,” he said. “The source. Then I will know.”
“Know what?” Seth asked.
“Where.”
Seth was at the stove again, scraping the pot. “There’s oatmeal.”
“No thanks.”
“Cooper ate Sam’s.”
“Cooper also eats deer shit.”
He took the black case out from under the chair and opened it on the floor. He uncoiled the cable and laid it out straight along the boards. He didn’t need it for another fourteen minutes.
The summer he was seventeen, NIST had picked Falcon. Everybody serious was writing about it. Vlad had a twenty-dollar STM32 Discovery board on his desk and wanted Falcon to sign fast on it, faster than anybody’s, without giving anything away in how long it took. The hard part was the sampler. He wrote it in eleven days. It was the best code he had ever written.
He wrote it for the small key because that was what was needed on chips like the one he had. A month later somebody on NIST’s pqc-forum asked if it did the big key too. Vlad wanted to solve it before anybody in Europe woke up. At three in the morning he copied the whole file and changed the sizes. He ran it a thousand times on the board. Every signature verified. He pushed it and went to bed.
Samantha came and crouched next to the case with the tablet against her knee.
“You didn’t even look at it,” she said.
“I looked.”
“For twenty seconds.”
“It is a short table.”
She studied his face. He looked at the cable.
Years later, at MIT, he had read the AUTHORS file in nib. It said sampler: kolobok. The next year the HSM vendors started shipping nib inside their boxes. Banks and certificate authorities bought those boxes. He had been very proud of himself but hadn’t told anybody.
At two he put on his jacket and picked up the case. Cooper got up off the rug and came to the door with him.
Vlad looked at the dog. Then he let him come outside with him.
The frost was gone off the rail and the sun was on the porch. He set the dish up and powered the tablet. While it looked for satellites he typed in the address for the nib 4.2.1 source, nine hundred kilobytes. The bars came up. It took six seconds. He powered the dish down at one minute and ten seconds, coiled the cable, and closed the case. Then he sat down on the top step with the tablet on his knees.
Cooper lay down on the boards with his back against Vlad’s shins.
He opened the sampler file and went to the top.
fast. constant time. you are welcome.
kolobok
He had been fifteen when he picked the name, for the chat networks. The man in Belgrade had sent a motherboard to kolobok, at his mother’s address. Those old chats were open now. Anybody who had kept them could follow that name to her door.
He scrolled down to sigma. 165.7366171829776.
Vlad was ashamed. He had never felt that about code before.
He wanted to scream and throw the tablet off the porch into the aspens. Cooper sighed and shifted against his legs.
The fix was one number. 168.38857144654395. He didn’t know how to get one number into every one of those boxes without anybody asking where it came from.
He deleted the source off the tablet, all nine hundred kilobytes. Without the dish, nobody in the cabin could get it again.
He went back inside at ten after two with the case in one hand and the tablet in the other. Cooper went straight to Samantha.
“You were out there ten minutes,” she said.
“Cooper had to pee.”
“And?”
“You are right. It is the sampler.” He set the case down under the chair. “Somebody wrote it for the small key and copied the file for the big key. They changed everything except that number.”
“Who maintains it?”
“Many people. Volunteers. It is very popular.”
Marcus had Doug’s notebook open on his good knee, at the page with the line through it.
“First thing anybody we tell is going to ask is who wrote it,” Marcus said. “They always want a name. Does the file say?”
“No.”
Samantha was still looking at him.
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
“Yes. It is one number.”
“One number in how many boxes?”
“I do not know.”
Marcus wrote under the crossed-out line for a minute. He erased one word and wrote it again.
“Read it to me,” Vlad said.
“‘PQ1 is broken. nib 4.2.1 uses the small key’s sigma. The fix is one number. Author unknown.’” He looked up. “That right?”
“Yes,” said Vlad.