The Jeep took the first switchback on Frying Pan Road too fast. The back end of the Jeep floated on the loose gravel the plows had pushed to the outside of the curve all winter. Samantha instinctively adjusted the wheels. She’d driven this road since before she’d been legal to drive.
Marcus had the faraday bag in his lap. Vlad was behind her with his pack and the case they didn’t talk about. He hadn’t said a word since they had passed Frying Pan Anglers.
She’d left her truck in Marcus’s driveway. She’d looked at it for a few seconds thinking about where she should ditch it. But she knew it didn’t matter — anyone could easily figure out the connection between her and Marcus. She had grabbed her pack, tossed it on top of the bins in the back, and gotten in the driver’s seat. Marcus was a shitty driver and was too tentative in four wheel drive for her taste.
“It wasn’t following us,” Marcus said. He’d been trying to rationalize this since they got in the car. “I watched the mirror the whole way through town. It never moved.”
The radio was on ’70s on 7, which reflected Marcus’s lame taste in music. Samantha thought about changing it to Lithium, but decided to turn it off instead.
“It didn’t need to move,” Vlad said. “It already knows where you sleep.”
Samantha checked the mirror anyway. Nothing behind them but the dark, pale scar of the road dropping away.
“Okay,” Marcus said, and she knew he was going to change to Marcus the salesman and try to convince them of something. “So we’re driving. Good. But driving isn’t a plan. At some point tonight we need to decide what to do with it.”
“We delete it,” Vlad said.
“Vlad —”
“All of it. The notebooks. The calibration logs. The machine, if we can get back to it, which we probably can’t. We never speak of it again. We get very far apart, and become extremely boring people.” He was monotonic, like reading a grocery list. “That is the only move that doesn’t end badly for us.”
“You can’t delete it,” Samantha said. “I’m sorry. You can’t.”
“I know exactly how to delete a file.”
“The file isn’t the issue.” She slowed down so she could stay calm and keep her voice level. “It was never the machine. The algorithm is in my head. I’ve been working it out in my head for two years. You” — she found his eyes in the mirror — “you could rebuild it from what I’d tell you over a weekend, and you know it. The only reason the planet found out is that the coins moved. That happened. Deleting our copy doesn’t make the world un-see Satoshi’s wallet wake up.”
Vlad clenched the case tighter and said nothing.
“That,” Marcus said, “is exactly why we don’t delete it. Instead, we control it.” He turned in his seat. “Daniel said there’s a clean version of this. A path forward. Somebody powerful enough to keep us safe. Sam, this is the most valuable thing any human being has ever made. We could —”
“You want to sell it,” Vlad said.
“I want to not die broke and hunted when we could —”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Vlad leaned forward between the seats, staring intently at Marcus. “You beautiful idiot. Do you not understand what we have? What will happen when we try to sell it to someone? There is no good guy with a checkbook this size.”
“Sam.” Marcus turned to her, pleading in his voice.
She drove silently. The headlights pulled the next switchback out of the black, an arrow sign bent from some old impact.
“There’s a third option,” she said.
She blurted it out.
“We put it out. The whole algorithm. Tonight. Everywhere. No name on it.” She talked faster, almost manic. “Right now we are the only people who have this. By sunrise, everyone will be looking for us. Every government and every — everyone is about to spend all of their energy trying to take it from us. If everybody has it, nobody needs us.”
“You want to give away —” Marcus started.
“You want to hand a loaded gun to eight billion people simultaneously,” Vlad said. Marcus nodded.
“I want —” She didn’t finish, because she didn’t know if she wanted it or had only just heard herself say it.
The bright lights came around the switchback in front of them. It was coming fast. A truck was driving in the middle of the road, assuming no one else was out at this time. Samantha’s foot was off the gas and onto the brake and the wheel was already turning, left, toward the mountain and away from the drop to the river. The Jeep’s tail broke loose for real this time. Marcus said something indeterminate. Samantha steered into the skid and let the back come around, fed it a little gas to straighten out, and then slammed on the brakes. Suddenly, the truck was past them, a horn dopplering, gone, and they were stopped at an angle with the passenger tires half off the pavement.
Quiet.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck. Everyone okay?”
“Yeah.” Marcus, thin. “Yeah.”
Vlad had a hand flat against the roof. “I’m alive. That is the most I will commit to.”
She looked in the mirror. Two red taillights shrinking down the road behind them, swaying, and then gone around the next curve. A truck. Some local running the canyon too fast at four in the morning. Not a tail. Not someone coming for them.
She steered the Jeep back onto the road and tentatively drove forward. Her heart rate was coming down to normal, but she was shaking.
Nobody picked the fight back up. Marcus stared out his window at the moon reflecting off the Frying Pan. Vlad sullenly withdrew.
They were stuck. Delete it and unless someone killed her, it could be recreated. Sell it, and they’d be owned by morning. And giving it away to everyone just made the potential for global chaos real.
She sped up as they climbed the hill to the Ruedi Reservoir. The whole thing was insane. Maybe she’d just turn the wheel aggressively at the top and end it for all three of them.