The email said Informal discussion: the Hale result and went to forty-one people. Priya forwarded it to Nadia with one line on top.
The funeral is at noon. I’ll save you a seat.
The JILA auditorium was half full when Nadia got there. People were eating sandwiches out of their laps. The screen at the front had twenty faces on it in little boxes, half of them with their cameras pointed at the ceiling. Priya was in the fourth row with her feet on the seat in front of her and a bag of pretzels.
“You came,” Priya said.
“You said funeral.”
Hal Brenner stood at the front with a NIST badge clipped to his belt and no slides. He said nobody was deciding anything. The council was meeting at three, and Eleanor Voss had asked for the sense of the community before then. He would write it up and send it to her himself.
“The sense of the community,” Priya said under her breath. “Good luck.”
A cryptographer from the NIST side said it should never be written down anywhere, by anyone, and that whoever had it should be asked to stop. A theorist in a fleece said you couldn’t classify arithmetic, somebody in Shenzhen or Zurich would have it inside a year, and the only question was who had it first. A woman from the Department of Energy on the screen said it should go to the council and the council only, under the same rules as anything else that could kill people.
A first-year in the back row put his hand up and asked if they should be shutting down their machines.
“Your machine can’t factor twenty-one,” Priya said, loud enough for him to hear. A few people laughed. He sat down.
Somebody asked where Hale had run it, since nobody’s array was big enough. Three people had theories. Two said Colorado.
Nadia looked at Priya. Priya ate a pretzel and kept her eyes on the screen.
Nadia said nothing. Eleanor had called her first. She had said no.
“Are you going to say something?” Priya asked.
“Maybe.”
It should be published, all of it, every step, so that people could check it and nobody had to carry it around. If it had been in the literature on day one, a man with a card from a risk firm would never have walked into her office. She would never have given anyone Priya’s name.
She put her hand halfway up.
A box on the screen unmuted first. The name under it said Jake Kessler, Lattice Point Capital.
“Can I just say the obvious thing,” he said. “Publish it. Today. Anybody still running R2 has had years of warning. The people who didn’t move deserve what’s coming. That’s how markets work.”
Brenner asked him to keep it to the science. Kessler responded that it was the science since you could no longer separate the markets from science.
He had said almost exactly what Nadia had been about to say, except for the market part. He said it like he’d be fine either way.
She hated it. She put her hand down.
“He’s going to make so much money,” Priya said. “Actually, he probably already has.”
Nadia’s phone buzzed in her lap. Next to her, so did Priya’s. It was CU Facilities, to every lab manager on campus.
Out of caution, building automation controllers are being taken offline across campus this afternoon, building by building, after a vendor reported an unauthorized update signed with an older key. Heating and cooling will run on manual settings. Labs with temperature-critical equipment should expect drift and contact Facilities.
Her shield room was in the Duane basement and held twenty degrees to a tenth. The box on the wall that held it there was one of those controllers. If it went off, or did something it hadn’t been told to do, the room would increase by a degree within twelve hours. Her probe’s baseline would be ruined. That was three weeks of calibration.
On the screen Kessler was still talking.
Nadia stood up.
“My building is one of the ones you’re talking about,” she said.
The room went quiet. On the screen, Kessler looked at the wrong corner of his monitor.
“Then I’d move,” he said.
Somebody laughed and stopped. Brenner said he would send Eleanor a summary.
“Of what?” Priya said.
Nadia picked up her bag. “Your room’s on the same controllers.”
“I know. I read it too.” Priya was already on her feet.
They went through to Duane together without their coats. At the stairwell Priya went up, and Nadia went down to the basement two steps at a time.
The box was on the wall outside the shield room door, gray, the size of a paperback, with a green light and a network cable coming out of the bottom.
She had no idea whether it had ever taken the new key, or whether Facilities would get to Duane before somebody else did.
She pulled the cable out. The green light went amber and stayed amber. The display on the box still said 20.0.
She set an alarm on her phone for every hour until morning, went into the shield room, and sat down at the bench to wait.