Seth tried calling Marcus one more time while his coffee was brewing. Once again, the call went straight to voicemail. Seth sent a quick text for Marcus to call him and went back to his elaborate coffee ritual.
The text from Marcus had come in at 3:14 in the morning.
We have figured out something monumental — call me when you wake up.
Seth saw the message after brushing his teeth and called Marcus immediately. The call went straight to voicemail. Not four rings and voicemail. Just straight to voicemail.
Seth was planning to go for a morning run but wanted to know what this was about first. His coffee was done and there was no text from Marcus. Seth tried Samantha. The same. He tried Vlad, which he knew was a joke, because Vlad never answered his calls. He wasn’t surprised now when he went straight to voicemail.
He sat down on the living room couch and nursed his coffee. Cooper, Seth’s favorite dog some of the time, curled up next to his feet. While Seth stared at his phone wondering what was going on, Cooper whined and gave Seth the “when are we going running” look.
Marcus was the most reachable person Seth knew. Marcus answered on airplanes. He answered from the dentist’s chair. Seth wondered if Marcus would answer the phone during sex, but then decided he didn’t want to know.
Marcus liked to hyperbolize, but monumental was a new one. All three phones weren’t answering. Dark. Off. Out of range. That was deliberate.
Basalt Labs built a neutral-atom quantum computer, and Samantha wrote the algorithms that ran on it. Seth had provided the seed funding four years ago after meeting Marcus and Samantha with Vlad joining a little later. They’d all put a ton of thought, energy, and time into this since then. Samantha was one of the smartest software developers Seth had ever met and Vlad, while deeply mysterious, was extremely competent.
Marcus fit a certain CEO archetype that Seth got along with, but didn’t really like much. Over time, Marcus was maturing and becoming less of a classical tech-bro. Fortunately, his ambition was unbounded, which was critical for a CEO. Marcus seemed to listen to Samantha and clearly was terrified of Vlad.
So monumental could mean anything, or nothing, but all three of them suddenly being offline meant something.
Samantha had been coy recently about what she had been working on. Seth was on the podcast circuit because of all the quantum investing he did and the last few months had been all about more qubits and bigger machines. Whenever he brought that up with Samantha, she waved him off and said they had plenty of machine and compute. Her eyes were glazed the last time they were together so he knew she was cranking on math, but she wouldn’t walk through anything with him.
She came from a wealthy family and had never indicated any interest in money, so Seth doubted she was working on the quantum breaks Bitcoin trope. That might be a side effect of her work, but that was just a bad quarter for crypto. At this point, there have been so many crypto winters that Seth didn’t care much about it anymore.
He never talked about some of the bigger “quantum breaks thing X” publicly because he knew he’d just sound unhinged. Seth preferred other investors and founders to take up that airspace, so he could focus on actually finding, and funding, the potential breakthroughs.
Could Samantha and the team finally have landed on something profound? Seth had built a successful career on betting on people and technologies, including some that no one believed were possible. That’s what he was hoping for here.
Seth tried Samantha again. Nothing. He was not going to sit here in Boulder and do nothing while the three of them — well — he had no idea what they were doing. His arrangement with founders the day he first wired them money was simple. Unless they broke his trust, their problems were also his problems. Whatever they were up to, if they were in trouble, it was his trouble.
Marcus had reached out. Clumsily, at a terrible hour, but Marcus had reached out. So, regardless of what was going on, and what Seth had scheduled for the day, his priority was to figure out what was going on and help them.
Seth decided to call Nadia. She ran an atomic-physics lab up the hill at CU Boulder and had forgotten more about coherence than Seth would ever learn. She was discreet and had carried other people’s secrets for Seth before. If a frontier machine had done the impossible in the last twelve hours, the quiet channels she lived in might already be humming with it.
She picked up on the second ring. “You’re up early.”
“Tell me the quantum world is boring this morning,” Seth said. He kept it loose, unhurried — the voice he used when he wanted the truth instead of a performance. “Anything moving out there? Anything you’re hearing that doesn’t add up?”
A pause. He could hear a fan, a keyboard. “Funny you should ask. There’s a thing on the chain people are chewing on. A wallet that can’t move, moved. Nobody can explain the signature.” Another pause. “Maybe a bug. Some people are saying that. Others are saying it’s the end of the world. And, everything in between. It’s crypto after all.”
A signature nobody could explain. Seth thought of three people whose phones were off who might be able to explain it.
“But you don’t think it’s a bug,” he said.
“I said maybe a bug.” She let it sit. “Why. That’s your careful voice, Seth.”
“Nothing. Bad dream. I didn’t sleep well and now I’ve had too much coffee.” He kept his voice easy. “Do me a favor. Ask around a little — quietly — and tell me if anything becomes clearer or more definitive. Leave my name out of it.”
“Always.” He could hear the problem grabbing hold of her. “I’ll make a couple of calls.”
“Thanks, Nadia.”
He hung up. He had been careful. He had not said Basalt or mentioned Samantha, Marcus, or Persephone. Nothing in writing, nothing to forward, nothing to leak.
He reassured himself that he had only made one call from his own phone — and asked her to make a couple more.