The tablet had a camera.
Samantha sat on the step and looked at it in Marcus’s hands through the open door. A picture of a page went up as one file. It didn’t matter how fast she typed. It only mattered how much she could write by hand before two o’clock.
The list was three pages. The algorithm had never been written down anywhere.
She went inside and took Doug’s notebook off the couch. There was a pencil in the drawer by the stove, worn down to a stub. She sharpened it with Doug’s paring knife.
“What are you doing?” Marcus asked.
“Sharpening a pencil.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m going for a run,” she said.
Vlad looked at the notebook under her arm. He didn’t say anything.
If it went wrong, she wanted it to be hers. She went out the door before either of them could ask her anything else. Cooper went with her.
She jogged until the cabin was out of sight, then walked down through the aspens to the creek. Cooper went straight in up to his chest. She found a flat rock above the water and sat on it with the notebook on her knees.
She held the pencil over the first line for a while. Then she looked back up the hill, where the cabin was, and started writing.
It took longer than she’d thought. In her head it was one idea and a lot of steps that followed from it. On paper every step needed the one before it spelled out, or nobody would be able to follow it. She wrote the setup on the first page and crossed half of it out. There was one step in the middle she had never had to explain, even to herself, and she had to work out how to say it in words. It took twenty minutes and most of a page.
Cooper brought her a stick and dropped it on her shoe. She threw it into the creek without looking up. He brought it back. She threw it again.
A train came up the valley below the road and blew its horn for the tunnel. She stopped and watched it go in. Railroad signals weren’t on her list. She turned back to the list and added them at the bottom. That made forty-two.
She finished at twenty to one. Nine pages. She went through them twice from the top, the way she’d check somebody else’s code. It was all there. Anybody who could follow it could run it.
“Fuck,” she said quietly.
Then she unzipped her jacket and took out the list and unfolded it on the rock next to the nine pages. She had written FIX ORDER across the top of the first page that morning, without thinking about it. Building controllers, the boxes on the poles, traffic signals, door locks.
It was the same list. Vlad had asked her who else wanted it, and she hadn’t answered him because she knew. She had put the worst things first.
Cooper lay down in the water. It was quarter to one. The noon window was gone. Two o’clock was the last one before she had to make a decision about what to do.
The people who owned the boxes could unplug them today. They could pull a cable, swap a part, push a fix signed with something new. The people who wanted to break them still needed a machine and a week. She thought the head start was real. She didn’t know if it was enough.
If she was wrong, a traffic light would go green both ways at an intersection with somebody’s kid in the back seat.
She folded the list back up and put it with the nine pages inside her jacket and zipped it to her chin. For the first time it was somewhere other than her head. Anybody who took her jacket had it. She called Cooper out of the creek and walked back up to the cabin.
She would send it to pqc-forum first. That was where people who fixed things hung out. It was where Vlad had posted his sampler.
Vlad was on the porch when she came up the two-track. He watched her the whole way up.
“That was a long run,” he said.
“I stopped at the creek.”
“You did not run.” He looked at Cooper, who was soaked, and then at her. “You are not even wet.”
“I didn’t go in.”
Vlad went back inside. Her heart was going hard. She breathed in slowly through her nose and out through her mouth until it slowed down.
Marcus was on the couch with the tablet.
“Eleanor wrote back at noon,” he said. “Two lines. ‘Please think quickly. If you are coming, tell me by two where to send the car.’”
Two o’clock was four minutes.
“She said please,” Marcus said. “That’s new.”
Samantha held her hand out for the tablet. He gave it to her without asking why. She liked him so much right then that she almost told him.
“I’ll do two o’clock,” she said.
“I can count from the couch. I’ve been doing it all week.”
“I’ll do it.”
At ten to two she picked up the case. Marcus started to get up.
“Stay there,” she said.
She carried the case out to the rail by herself and set the dish on its spot. She took the nine pages and the list out of her jacket and laid them on the porch boards, one at a time. She held the tablet over the first page.
Through the window she could see Vlad in Doug’s chair, watching her.