Marcus was standing in the driveway holding the cooler when Samantha pulled in. He was staring off into the distance.
She cut the engine and let her truck roll the last few feet to the bottom of his driveway.
“Sam.” He tipped his chin, and she followed his gaze.
A car sat idling with its lights on at the end of the road.
Her stomach dropped. She blinked and it was still there.
“How long,” she said.
“I noticed ten minutes ago when I started loading the car. I’ve been in and out of the house a few times. It hasn’t moved.”
“It won’t,” said Vlad from the corner of the garage. His pack was on and the hard case in his left hand. She didn’t see Vlad’s car — he must have snuck in.
“Okay.” She got out. “We load the car, get in, and head out like it’s a Thursday afternoon and we are going to dinner at The Brick Pony. Don’t hurry. Don’t look anxious. Don’t look at the car again.”
She popped the hatch. Her pack went on the bins in the back. She left the keys in her truck. Ditching it would buy nothing — anyone who wanted to find them would put her and Marcus together in four minutes.
“Phones,” she said. “Bag them. Both. Right now.”
Marcus put the cooler in the Jeep and took the faraday bag out of his jacket.
She put her hand out for the Jeep keys. He looked at it.
“I’m driving.”
Marcus drove the canyon like a tourist. She didn’t have time for that tonight. He handed them over.
They piled in the Jeep. Samantha backed out and slowly turned toward town. In the rear view mirror she saw the car. The lights got smaller as they pulled away.
Marcus watched it over his shoulder. “It’s not coming,” he said. “It’s not coming.”
Vlad didn’t answer. Samantha took a right and headed out of town.
The Jeep took the first bend 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. Samantha instinctively adjusted the wheel. She’d driven this road since before she’d been legal to drive.
Marcus held the faraday bag tightly 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.
“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. 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 pale line of the road.
“Okay,” Marcus said. 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 or the software. 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 landed on 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 what she wanted.
The deer was in the road when they came around the curve. A doe, broadside, standing in the headlights, not moving.
Samantha jammed on the brake. The Jeep’s tail broke loose for real this time, sliding out toward the drop. Marcus swore. She steered into the skid, let the back come around, fed it a little gas to straighten out, and then slammed on the brakes. The doe went up the bank and into the trees. They stopped at an angle with the passenger tires half off the pavement.
Quiet.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck fuck 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.”
It was only a deer. She looked at the dark where it had gone, then at the road ahead, empty in the high beams.
She steered the Jeep back onto the road and drove forward. Her heart rate was settling down, but she was shaking.
Nobody picked the fight back up. Marcus stared out his window at the moon reflecting off the river.
They were stuck.
She sped up as they climbed the hill to the Ruedi Reservoir. The whole thing was insane. Maybe she’d just turn the wheel at the top and end it for all three of them.