“What do you mean gone.”
“The Bitcoin,” she said. “The target. It moved. It’s in a block.”
“Okay.” He sat up, his body slowly catching up with his brain. The room was dark and he didn’t turn on the light. “Okay. Walk me through it. Start at the top.”
She started at the top. Persephone had returned a real private key off a real public one. She’d pointed his harness at the address to double-check. The harness had spent the coins.
His harness.
He skipped past that, avoiding the implication.
“So it works,” he said.
“Marcus —”
“No, I hear you, it’s out, I get that. I’m just — it works. Persephone works. On a real curve.”
The silence on the line told him she’d already been all the way around this loop and out the other side.
He yawned, got up, and walked to the window. Basalt was fast asleep, like it was every night. The dark shape of the mountains sat where they always sat. Nothing out there had changed. Yet everything had changed.
He took a deep breath. Sam did the math, but he needed to do the next part. He’d raised eleven million dollars telling rooms full of serious people a story about a machine that might one day do something useful with very cold atoms. He had never once, in any of those rooms, told the full story, because he didn’t think they would believe that if it worked, it would break every digital lock on Earth.
It worked.
Every signed software update. Every certificate behind every padlock in every browser. The login at his own bank, which he’d checked from an unencrypted network at CC’s Cafe yesterday like an idiot.
The problem was extremely hard but Sam had figured it out. He knew she could, but he hadn’t thought about what happened after. And he hadn’t been careful with the harness because he didn’t think it would just work.
The proof was now published and couldn’t be taken back. Not described, but proven, on the one ledger that would be guaranteed to be watched. It wasn’t a rumor or a white paper, because it was a fact now, sitting in a block.
Marcus realized Sam wasn’t saying anything. He could hear her breathing. She was waiting for him.
“How long,” he said, “before someone smart sees it for what it is.”
“Minutes probably. Maybe an hour. It depends who’s looking. The transaction’s anonymous. There’s no name on it.”
“There’s no name on it yet,” he said, gently, because she was the smartest person he knew and she was also exhausted and scared and wanting it to be smaller than it was. He knew that want. He fed the opposite of that want to investors for a living.
Then his phone buzzed against his ear. A notification.
He looked at his phone. A Signal notification.
Marcus took a sharp breath. While he’d installed Signal two years ago for a paranoid reporter, he never really got into it. Sam rode him constantly that he wouldn’t keep the encrypted stuff running, wouldn’t do the dance, used green-bubble texts, and used his actual name for everything because that was how you stayed reachable. He was CEO - being reachable was his job.
The sender had a name he didn’t know. Daniel. No last name. No photo.
“Sam, hang on, I just got a Signal message.”
Marcus — saw what moved tonight. Quite a thing. You’ve got more friends than you think, and fewer than you’ll need. Before anyone else gets to you, we should talk. There’s a clean version of how this goes for you and your partner. I’d hate for you to find the other one first.
He read it to Sam.
Sam said, “Shit. The coins have been in a block for less than ten minutes. Who is Daniel?”
“I have no idea. He’s a stranger. You know I don’t use Signal.”
He stared at the message. Your partner. Not a co-founder. Not the company. Partner, like the man had been in the room.
Silence. Marcus stared at the little box on his screen. The warm part of him, the part that woke first, the part that had never once met a person it couldn’t talk to — that part wanted, very badly, to type back.