At the front desk Pittman took the pen on its chain and wrote Vlad’s name in the visitor log, and under it his own, and the time, and signed him out. He did not look at Vlad while he did it.
Then he drove to Boulder with both hands on the wheel and the heater up too high. The Boston bag was in the back seat where it had been since the mountains. By the time they reached the highway he had probably lost his job for it, and he had the look of a man who knew that and didn’t like it. He didn’t say anything.
Vlad wanted whatever he was about to do to be worth what it had cost Pittman. He thought he knew how Pittman was feeling. He’d been there himself multiple times in the last two weeks.
NIST was a low building on Broadway with a flag out front and a guard who wanted two forms of ID Vlad did not have. Pittman put his badge on the counter and said Vlad’s name. The guard made a call. A man came down and took them up without saying a word.
The room was on the third floor, too small for the number of people in it, with four screens on one wall and a landline on the table. Eleanor Voss had the receiver against her shoulder and a coffee she was not drinking. Seth was at the window.
Seth saw him and visibly relaxed.
“You’re not in a cell,” Seth said.
“Not yet.”
“I drove that truck to a federal building this morning and I keep waiting for somebody to arrest me.” He looked at Pittman. “Is he going to arrest me?”
“He used to be able to,” Vlad said. “I’m not sure anymore. I don’t think he is either.”
Eleanor put the receiver down. There was a page from a notebook on the table, torn along the spiral, four lines on it in handwriting Vlad knew. He read it. It was right. It was hers.
“You’re kolobok,” Eleanor said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Then you write it. You know that code better than anyone on the call, and we have until twenty hundred to put it in front of the key. Two hours.” She pushed a laptop at him. “It’s night where they are and they’ve been up since this started this morning. Write it clean and don’t make them read it twice.”
The call had Hanne on it, and Tomas, and a man from Ostvik who ran the thing that held the key, and a woman who would not say what part of the government she was with. Vlad put one earbud in and opened nib. His sampler was still in it, under the name he’d signed it with at seventeen. He had not looked at the file in years.
The change was not the hard part. Samantha’s two lines were straightforward. Stop believing an update unless it also carried a signature of the other kind. Stop believing a receipt unless the real log had it written down.
Writing it took twenty minutes. Getting it believed was the rest.
nib did not merge a change because kolobok was fast. Two maintainers had to read it. The same source had to build to the same bytes on two machines, so anyone could check that what shipped was what he wrote. Tomas read it on the call, line by line, in English that got worse as the hour got later, and found one thing. Vlad had the two checks in the wrong order. It made no difference to whether it worked. Tomas made him swap them anyway. Vlad swapped them. That cost four minutes.
Pittman had sat down in the corner where he was out of the way and watched the screens for a while.
“He fixed the number last night,” he said. “What’s this.”
Vlad answered without looking up. “Last night stopped the next key from leaking. It did not take back the one that already leaked. They have that one. So does everybody. This teaches every device to want a second signature they cannot make. Once a device takes it, nobody gets in without both. Not them. Not me. Not Ostvik.”
“And if their thing lands first?”
“Then the device wants their second signature, and ours never gets in. It is a race to each box, one at a time, a few billion times.”
“Who’s winning?”
“I do not know. That is why I am typing as fast as I can.”
The man from Ostvik wanted to send it to the big fleets first — the phones, the browsers — because those reported back and you could watch the number climb.
“No,” Vlad said. “They fix themselves. Send it to the ones nobody can watch. The pump in the basement of a hospital. The box on a pole at a substation. The thing welded shut in a factory in 2019 that wakes up once a day, looks for something signed, and takes whatever has arrived.”
“Those are the slowest,” the man said.
“Those are the ones they went for.”
“You don’t know that.”
“That’s what I would have done.”
Eleanor said it into the room, not the phone. “Quit arguing. Send it where kolobok says.”
An hour before the vault closed, the build came out of the two machines with eleven bytes different. The room got quiet.
Vlad found it in nine minutes. The build wrote the time it was built into itself, the way it always had. The two machines had finished a second apart. He told them to zero it. The man from Ostvik did not want to change how the build worked an hour before he signed it.
“Then we sign a build we cannot check,” Vlad said, “or we do not sign at all. Pick.”
While the man thought about it, Vlad looked at Pittman. He had a look of bewilderment on his face, like he was trying to understand a different language. And he looked tired.
Vlad said, “Decide. We have only forty minutes left.”
The Ostvik man zeroed the time and started it over. The room was warm and all Vlad wanted to do was curl up in a ball and go to sleep. His hands had started to shake, so he sat on them and watched the two machines chew through the same source again. The second build came out the same bytes on both with eight minutes left. Tomas read the two checks one more time, in the order he had made Vlad use, and said yes. The man from Ostvik had his key holders in the room and the new key already made. He put the build in front of them.
At three minutes to twenty hundred the gate was signed and went out to the forty-one companies, who began to do with it whatever each of them did, fast or slow, in whatever order their own machines woke up.
It was out.
Vlad took the earbud out. The room on the other end was loud and he couldn’t understand anything being said. The phones would have the gate within the hour. The pump in the basement would check whenever it checked, tonight or next week, and take whatever had reached it first. His was in the pipe. So was theirs. He had sent his to the hard ones first. He did not know if first was fast enough.
He was scared. He stood up.
Seth was still at the window. “I’ll get word to Sam you’re all right,” he said. “First time the dish is up.”
“Tell her she was right,” Vlad said.
He went over to Pittman in the corner.
“It is sent,” he said. “To the ones that matter, before theirs. That is what you bought with your job.”
“Did it work?” Pittman asked.
“We will know when nothing breaks.”
He sat down to wait. He had nothing left to type and nowhere to be, and no idea whether the people upstairs would let him walk out of the building when they were done with him.