They came up out of the trees a little after four and kept climbing.
Samantha stopped on the flat under the ridge and dropped her pack. The divide ran off south in a line of gray humps with old snow in the gullies facing away from the sun. The blue sky was overwhelming.
Marcus came up behind her with his hands on his knees.
“Please tell me that we aren’t camping here,” he said.
“No.”
“Good.”
“Look north.”
He straightened up. There were two towers of cloud stacked over the peaks, one with a flat gray bottom, the other already black.
“How long,” he said.
“Forty minutes. Maybe less.”
Vlad got the Mini out of Marcus’s pack, put it on its kickstand on a rock, and squatted in front of it. He looked at the clouds.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said.
“That’s not enough.”
“Fifteen.”
Marcus held his hand out. “Give it here and I’ll read it to her.”
“I will read it.”
“She’s standing right there.”
“I know where she is,” Vlad said.
Marcus sat down in the rocks and got his boots off. Samantha stayed behind him, where she could not read the screen. It was maybe fifty degrees up there with the wind.
“Talk,” she said.
“Wait.” He worked at it. “Okay. Handel is gone. Not paused. Gone. There is a notice from a law firm on the front page.”
“How big is Handel.”
“Third or fourth. I do not know how they count it.”
“Fourth,” Marcus said, without looking up.
“The patch has a number now.” Vlad scrolled. “Shit, now there are two patches.” Vlad paused and stared intensely at the screen. “The groups have stopped talking to each other.”
“That’s a fork,” Marcus said.
“They have not forked yet.”
“Same thing in eight days.”
Samantha turned around and put her back to the wind.
“Ethereum,” she said.
“Also. Everything that signs the same way.” He kept going down the page. “Which is most of it.”
He did not touch anything. The cloud over the peaks slid a little east and the light went off the gullies.
“Okay,” Vlad said, and went back to it.
“Has anybody died,” she said.
Vlad stopped scrolling.
“Say that again.”
“You heard me.”
He sat back on his heels. He paused long enough that Marcus looked up.
“Nobody is counting yet,” said Vlad.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know what you asked.” He put the tablet down on his knee. “There is a man in Fresno who shot himself on Tuesday and his wife told a reporter it was because of Bitcoin. That is the only one I have seen.”
“Fuck.”
“There is also a man who died standing in a line outside a credit union in Tampa. He was sixty-eight. He was in the sun for five hours and his heart stopped. They are calling it a medical event.”
“That’s not from the math,” Samantha said.
“It is from the math.”
“That’s not what I —”
“He stood in the line because of the math,” Vlad said. “You can say it is not. It is.”
Marcus was rigid with both hands flat on the rock on either side of him.
“I told people to buy it,” he said.
Vlad looked over at him.
“Not customers. I never sold it. I mean at dinner. Somebody would ask me what I thought and I would do the whole thing with the napkin. They would go home and buy some.” He was looking at his own feet. “I talked about it all the fucking time. My sister’s husband. My dentist. Even the stupid Uber driver on the way home from dinner.”
The wind came across the flat. Samantha looked up at the clouds.
“Eleven minutes,” Vlad said. He picked the tablet back up. “There is one more thing. Listen to it instead of thinking about your dentist.”
“Ok. Go ahead,” said Marcus.
“Somebody put a hundred and forty gigabytes of diplomatic traffic from 2019 on the internet. It is real. Three governments have confirmed it by being furious about it.”
“Whose.”
“It does not say.”
“Whose governments are furious.”
“Ours is one,” Vlad said. “That is all I am going to get in eleven minutes.”
“Give me the tablet.”
“No.”
“I can read three pages while you read one.”
“I know you can,” Vlad said, and kept reading.
Samantha came around the rock and crouched down, but kept staring at the sky.
“How much of it is one system,” she said.
“What.”
“A hundred and forty gigabytes. Is that one archive or is it forty archives somebody stitched together.”
Vlad checked. “One. It says one.”
She put her chin on her knees.
“That probably took about a day,” she said.
Marcus stopped rubbing his foot.
“A day of what.”
“Machine. That much traffic out of one system was locked with a handful of keys. Maybe one or two. Break the one and everything under it opens.”
“Okay,” Marcus said. “Okay. So how many days have they got.”
She held up a hand and started putting fingers down. “A key is a hundred thousand shots. That’s hours on a machine, but probably more than one session. So call it a day. A good day, on a machine you already know, with nobody standing behind you. One key.”
“One key a day.”
“One key a day per machine and that is generous. There are seventeen machines on the planet that could hold that circuit. One is ours and who knows what has happened to it.”
“Two machines, then,” Vlad said. “Twelve keys. In six days.”
“So they bought more machines,” Marcus said.
“You know that they can’t order them from Amazon. Or Dell. It took us six months to put together our machine.”
“Vlad, how many old wallets have moved since the first one.”
He looked. “Forty-one on the list I have. Nineteen of them yesterday.”
“Then thirty of those are not them.” She got up off her heels. “They’re people. Scared people who already had their own keys, moving their own coins because somebody told them to. There’s no way to tell them apart.”
Nobody said anything. Vlad was very still with the tablet in both hands.
“Say the rest of it,” he said.
“There isn’t much more. Whoever it is has spent about twelve days of machine time since this started, total. Some of that went into the chain to prove it works. Call it two. Call it four.” She got her pack strap up over one shoulder. “One of them went into that archive. The other seven or eight went somewhere that I can’t see from here since you won’t give me the tablet.”
Thunder came off the peaks, rolling ominously over the flat.
“Six minutes,” Marcus said.
“Vlad. The list. The seventeen.” She was already looking downhill for the line off the ridge. “I want to know which of them ran anything in the last eight days. I need to know who was in the room. Not who owns the machine. The people in the room.”
“Some of that is not published.”
“I know it isn’t.”
Vlad looked up at her. Then he folded the kickstand in and started coiling the cable around his fist.
“It will take me a few days,” he said.
“Take them.”
He put the Mini in the top of Marcus’s pack and cinched it down and slapped it twice. Marcus got his boots on standing up, hopping, swearing at the laces.
“Sam. Tell me I’m wrong.” He got the second one on. “You just said there’s somebody doing about one of these a day.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a person. That’s one person in a room with a machine.”
“Or four of them taking turns,” Samantha said. “It’s a room.”
Graupel came across the flat, hard white pellets that bounced off the rocks and went down into the cracks.
They looked at each other and started running to get off the ridge.