Wired had brought seven people. Four women and three men. By the time I was out in the lobby, they’d surrendered their cell phones, Fitbits, and smart watches. They’d submitted to a pat down from security and gone through a scanner we’d bought from the same supplier the TSA used. They’d agreed to use our recording equipment and had already familiarized themselves with it.

Mona Rickard scribbled in her little pad. She’d brought her own pencil. It was thicker than the ones we provided. I let it slide when I saw her grip was tangled and unusual. She needed it, and getting a transmitter into solid wood was a project a Boy Scout would have had trouble with.

“Five million,” she said, a brown curl bouncing and swaying as she wrote. “For anyone or only people registered at GreyHatC0n?”

“Anyone,” I replied. “Worldwide. We’ll accept a remote hack. Welcome the attempt, actually. I hear that on the big day, teams are logging in from Râmnicu Vâlcea. That’s in Romania.”

“Yeah. Thanks. I know. I wrote a piece on Hackerville.”

So they’d sent me a girl who at least knew something. Chalk one up for Wired.

“The Quantum Four code isn’t even based in binary,” I continued. “The circuits are built on three-dimensional thinking.”

“QuBit. One, zero, random.”

“Exactly. When the machines are released to Oracle next year, they can open them up and try to reverse engineer, but they won’t. Even the client can’t breach it.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to make that claim.”

“If the casing is cracked, the boards self-destruct. They sink and melt.”

“And production is here, in California?”

“The machines are made here, on site. We have a plan to scale when we can guarantee security.”

The team followed Raven and me to the double doors leading to the Faraday cage. I stopped in front of them and faced the Wired team.

“Do you have way to ID the winner?” Mona asked, her diamond engagement ring jogging back and forth as she wrote.

The team got into the elevator as I answered.

“We do,” I said. “A masked audit of all compliant commands. Non-compliant are going to look like shitstain on a wedding gown.”

I explained nothing. If Wired sent anything less than their most technical writer they could fuck themselves. I wasn’t wasting my time teaching her how to read metadata. She was going to have to ask one of the guys in IT.

“You have a protocol. And metaphor noted.” She looked up and flipped her brown curl away from her eyes. “You’re pretty sure of yourself.”

“I’m sure about these guys on the other side of the door.”

“I hear it’s all men.”

“I hire the best regardless of gender.”

“And all the best had dicks?”

Someone on her team snorted with laughter. The elevator doors opened, and I led the group to the cage doors.

“Google hires all the girls,” I said.

“I’m sure.” She folded her pad and pencil against her chest and smiled. We saw right through each other, but she couldn’t print what I wouldn’t say.

“We’ll be going into a foyer between the world of Wi-Fi signals and EMPs. Kind of like a lock room in the space station.”

“I’m ready if you are,” Mona said.

I tapped the panel outside the cage.

“Name.”

“I don’t give a fuck, chuckin’ my deuces up.” I chanted the song lyrics flatly.

The door unlocked with a clack.

“Suck on my balls, please,” a pipsqueak with the notepad said from behind Mona.

She spun on him like a schoolteacher. “What?”

“I had enough,” I added, and Mona gave me a wide-eyed stare. “I ain’t thinkin’ about you.”

Pipsqueak tipped his pencil to me. “Beyoncé”

I winked at him and opened the door. I didn’t look back at Mona to see if she’d gotten over it. They piled in. I closed the exit behind them.

“We’re ready. Behind these doors is a room sealed against Wi-Fi. There’s no internet connectivity. All the electrical outlets route through a secure panel. Quantum Intelligence Four is pure virgin code.”

It bleeds when breached.

We said that a lot around the conference room table, but not in front of Mona Rickard.

I opened the doors. My coders stood. On the screen I’d just stood in front of, and on the walls that usually displayed nature scenes, were the scrolls of masked code as it would appear on the Tor site. They were the only light in the room. I laid my hand on the one machine we’d left on. It was in a mini-Faraday and was responsible for the screens.

“What you see here”—I indicated the men in the room—“are the best coders alive today. And on the walls is QI4’s code. It looks like nothing because it’s masked, and it’s going to continue to look like nothing unless someone gets in.”

“Which won’t happen.” Deepak came from behind his desk with a big white smile. Charming fucker. He’d have no trouble getting laid once he had a minute to wink at a girl.

He held his hand out to Mona, and she was about to shake it when his smile melted like solder on a hot iron. His hand froze between them. I followed his gaze to one of the projections.

The code wasn’t masked.

ASCII flew down the roll. Then—

“Binary?” I whispered and stepped toward the wall. There was no binary. QI4 circuits didn’t work that way. “Shut it down!”

Scrambling. Clicking. Keys unlocking drawers where safepasses were stored. My glands opened like circuits for sweat, hormones, fight or flight, firing neurons in the face of a breach I didn’t have an algorithm to process.

“Shut it down!” The scream rattled the top of my throat.

Jack was the first to have his passkey out, but before he could type in a command, the entire system went dark with a sigh of hard drives winding down.

We all stood in the dim, windowless room.

The air crackled with silence broken only by the sound of Mona’s pencil looping over paper, like someone woken in the darkness, writing down the details of a nightmare.