Family dinners had evaporated along with my parents’ jobs. The contract work they got in pieces sometimes kept one or another away at suppertime, but the real reason was that they were trapped in the house together all day, and half the time I was there with them, and so no one much wanted to spend an hour at the table playing pass-the-peas. There just wasn’t much small talk available to us. “How was your day?” was a painfully stupid question when the farthest apart you’ve been since getting up is about five yards.
But everyone put in an effort when Ange came over. My parents really liked her. Hey, so did I. Plus it was fun to watch her eat.
“Smells great!” she said as she came into the kitchen, as she always did. She already had her mister in her hand. When I’d met her, she was mixing up her chili oil at about 200,000 Scovilles, as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. But she was always in training, working her way up to higher heights of culinary daring. She mixed up a new batch of oil once a month, starting with a lethal, tight-stoppered bottle of crushed Red Savina Habanero in a few ounces of oil. She diluted this a little less every month, playing with the levels until it was just right. For Ange, “just right” was the temperature that made sweat appear on her upper lip within a minute of putting a drop of oil on her tongue.
A couple times a year, she’d actually taken the temperature of her oil, mixing a little alcohol in with her month’s dose, then progressively diluting it in sugar water until she could barely taste the heat. The last time she checked, she’d been up to 320,000 Scovilles. It was around then that I started insisting that she brush her teeth between her eating and us kissing. I was starting to get chemical burns on my lips.
“It’s just chips and sausages,” Mom said. “Proper British comfort food, you know.”
“Cooked by an American, no less,” Dad said from the stove.
“Oi! I put the chips in the oven, didn’t I?” Mom said. When Mom says “chips,” she’s speaking British and means “fries”—specifically the sweet potato oven fries she makes herself and freezes. I have to admit, they’re pretty awesome.
“Yes, my dear, you certainly did. Plus, you supervised.”
Dad set down the platter of faintly sizzling meat on the table. He once did some freelance work helping an organic meat cooperative with its data mining and ecommerce tuning, and when he’d written to them asking if they had anything else for him, they’d taken pity on him and offered to sell him some meat at employee rates. So we had all the emu, venison, and buffalo sausage we could want, as often as we wanted. I especially liked the venison, which tasted very good, assuming you didn’t think too much about Bambi while you ate it.
Dad went back to turn off the stove’s extractor fan, which had been humming loudly while it sucked out all the delicious meaty smoke and steam. Then he smacked himself in the forehead. “Wait, Ange, you’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?”
I hid a smile. Ange had gone veggie at the start of the summer, but Burning Man had brought out her inner carnivore—especially the trips to camps where they were handing out kick-ass barbecue.
“It’s okay,” Ange said. “Beef is just a highly processed form of vegetable matter.”
“Riiiight,” Dad said, and forked a couple of sausages onto her plate before sitting down himself.
It felt curiously wonderful to be having dinner as a family again, with a big plateful of food in front of me and my parents making bright conversation as though they weren’t in a mild, continuous panic about the mortgage and the grocery bill.
But it couldn’t last. I had to say something stupid.
“I saw the coolest thing the other day,” I said. “It was from a history of crypto in World War II and there was this chapter on the history of cipher machines—Enigmas and such—at Bletchley Park, in England.”
“Which ones were they again?” Mom said.
“The ones the Nazis used to scramble their messages,” Dad said. “Even I know that.”
“Sorry,” Mom said. “I’m a little rusty on my Nazi gadgets.”
“Actually,” Ange said, swallowing a huge mouthful of buffalo sausage, “the Enigmas weren’t exactly ‘Nazi.’ They were developed in the Netherlands, and sold as a commercial product to help bankers scramble their telegrams.”
“Right,” I said. “And all the Axis powers used them. So the first generations of these were, you know, beautiful. Just really well made by some totally badass engineers, copying the Dutch models, but after adding a bunch of cool tricks so they’d produce harder-to-break ciphers. There were about ten iterations of these things, the Enigma and its successors, and they kept on adding rotors and doing other stuff to make them stronger. But at the same time, they were using up all their best raw materials on killing people. So by the end of the war, you’ve got this box with twelve rotors, up from the original three, but it’s made of sandwich metal and looks, I don’t know, boringly functional, without any of that flair and craftsmanship of the first generation. I guess they were in a pretty bad mood by then. They probably spent half their time overseeing slave labor or tending the death-camp adding machines. So, basically, everything elegant and beautiful in these things was just sucked out by the war, until all that was left was something you wouldn’t call ‘beautiful’ unless you were totally insane.”
“Woah,” Ange said. “Symbolic.”
I play-punched her in the shoulder. “It was, doofus. It was like a little illustration of the collapse of everything good in a society. I’ll show you the pictures later. Those first-gen machines were awesome, just amazingly made. They were like works of art. The last versions looked like they’d been built by someone who was absolutely miserable. You’ll see.”
Mom and Dad didn’t say anything. I didn’t think much of it, then I saw a silent tear slip down Dad’s cheek. I felt weirdly ashamed and embarrassed. Dad got up wordlessly from the table and went to the bathroom, came back a few minutes later. None of us said anything while he was gone, and the silence continued after he got back, his face freshly washed and still slightly damp.
He ate a few mouthfuls and said, quietly, “Amazing how a society can just slide into the crapper, huh?”
Mom gave a brittle laugh. “I don’t think it’s as bad as all that, Drew.”
He put his fork down and chewed and chewed and chewed at his food, chewed like he was angry at it. The words that came out after he swallowed had a choked, tight feel. “Isn’t it? There were three more foreclosures on our street today, Lillian. Today. And as for slave labor, just think about how much of what we own is stamped ‘Made in China,’ and how much of our ‘Made in the USA’ came out of a prison somewhere.”
“Drew—” Mom said.
“Marcus, Ange, I’m very sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I began.
“No, I mean I’m sorry that you’ve inherited such a miserable, collapsing old country. A place where rich bankers own everything, where you’ve got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don’t get sick, where—”
He clamped his lips shut and looked away. I’d seen a bill on Mom’s desk from a health insurance company warning us that we’d lose our coverage if we didn’t make a payment. I’d tried not to think too hard about it.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said again. His skin had gone pale beneath his beard, and it made the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and in his neck stand out. He looked twenty years older than he had at the start of dinner.
“Cheer up, Drew,” Mom said. “Honestly, it could be much worse. There’s plenty who’d be grateful for our problems. Let’s have a glass of wine and watch The Daily Show, all right? I PVRed it.” When my parents got rid of their cable box, I’d built them a cheapie PVR using MythTV and an old PC. It only worked with the few HD broadcast channels that aired in San Francisco, but it automatically converted the files so they could play on our phones and laptops, and snipped out all the commercia
ls.
Dad looked down and didn’t say anything.
“Come on, Ange,” I said. We were pretty much through with dinner anyway. And there were darknet docs to plow through.
Chapter 9
If you ever want to blow your own mind, sit down and think hard about what “randomness” means.
I mean, take pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Everyone who’s passed sixth-grade math knows that pi is an “irrational” number. It has no end, and it never repeats (as far as we know):
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937
5105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067
982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128
4811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644
2881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564
8566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587
0066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903
60011330530548820466521384146951941511609 …
And so on. With a short computer program, you can compute pi all day long. Hell, you can compute it to the heat-death of the universe.
You can grab any thousand digits of pi and about a hundred of them will be 1s, a hundred will be 2s, and so on. But there’s no pattern within those digits. Pick any digit of pi—digit 2,670, which happens to be 0. The next digit happens to be 4, then 7, then 7, then two 5s. If you were rolling a ten-sided dice and you got these outcomes, you’d call it random. But if you know that 047755 are the values for the 2670th—2675th digits of pi, then you’d know that the next “dice roll” would be 5 (again!). Then 1. Then 3. Then 2.
This isn’t “random.” It’s predictable. You may not know exactly what “random” means (I certainly don’t!), but whatever “random” means, it doesn’t mean “predictable,” right?
So it would be crazy to call pi a “random number,” even though it has a bunch of random-like characteristics.
So what about some other number? What if you asked your computer to use some kind of pseudorandom algorithm to spit up some grotendous number like this: 2718281828459045235360287471352662497757. Is that random?
Well, not really. That also happens to be a number called “e,” which is sometimes called “Napier’s constant.” Never mind what “e” means, it’s complicated. The point is that e is a number like pi. Every digit in it can be predicted.
How about if your random-number generator gave you this number:
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
2222222.
Is that random?
Well, duh. No.
Why isn’t it random? Because if I said, “What’s the one hundredth digit of a number that consists of a thousand twos?” you’d know the answer. You wouldn’t be surprised.
It turns out a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a decent definition of “random.” One of the best definitions anyone’s ever come up with is “A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.”
If you just went lolwut, don’t panic. This is hard, but cool. So, take our friend pi again. You could write a program to print out pi in, like two hundred characters. Maybe less. Pi itself is infinite, which is a lot more than two hundred characters long. So the simplest way to express pi is definitely to write the “print out pi program” and not to write out all the infinite digits of pi.
And if pi is easy, “222222222222222222222222222222222222222222” and so on is really easy. In python, it’d be: “print “.join(['2']*42).” Perl’s more compact: “print 2×42.” But even in verbose old BASIC, a programming language that’s so flowery and ornate it’s practically Shakespearean, it’s:
10 PRINT “2” 20 GOTO 10 30 END
That’s thirty characters, which is shorter than 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 to infinity. A lot shorter. So if we mean a random number is a surprising one—one that has no easily expressed pattern or structure, then we can say that:
A number is “random” if the shortest program you can write to print that number out is longer than the number itself.
This has a neat compactness to it, the ring of a good rule: short, punchy, and to the point. A guy named Gregory Chaitin came up with this neat rule, then he came up with a hell of a twist on it. He was so proud of this feat that he mailed a paper to one of math’s great mad geniuses, a guy called Kurt Gödel (pronounced “Girdle,” more or less) and messed everything up by asking, “How do you know whether you’ve come up with the shortest program for printing out a number?”
Which was a good point. Programmers are always coming up with novel ways of solving problems, after all. And there may be some hidden pattern to a number you didn’t even realize was there. Say I asked you to write a program to print out this number:
6464126002437968454377733902647251281941632007684
87362517640659675406936217588793078559164787772747392
7200291034294956244766130820072925073452917076422662
10476730378631699542374551174565220227833240968035246
676631908610112067458562873174135111622920788651329412
44815471628182079877168346341322362234117788231027659
82510935889235916205510876329808799316517252893800123
78174348968321515905624933473702068322321001186373957
70567473867102173212375224325241626358034376253606808
66916357159455152781780392177432282343663377281118639
05118930759016666507429527583840085446354193171905313
63659724905158409106582201814734799022359067138146905
11605192230126948231611341743994471483304086248426913
9502336713412425123864026657258130943967621939655407
38652422989787978219863791829970955792474732030323911
64104459069079778623155183495930353059237898175158914
57650408025109479123421758482841881950138546165680301
7550355800549448948848713516053755934023457489795166
0244233832140603009593710558845705251570426628460035
Look all you want, you probably won’t find any pattern at all (if you do, it’s a product of your imagination). So is it random? Nope. It’s part of pi: digits 100,000–101,000, to be specific. Now you can write a very short program to print out that number: just add a line to the “print out pi” program that says, “only start printing when you get to the 100,000th digit, and stop 1,000 digits later.”
What Chaitin realized was that no one could ever know for sure whether a sufficiently long, interesting number could be printed out with a program shorter than it. That is, you could never tell whether any big number was random or not. In fact, maybe there were no random numbers. He called this “incompleteness,” as in “You can never be completely sure you know if a number is random.”
Gödel was already famous for the idea of “incompleteness,” the idea that mathematical systems couldn’t prove themselves. Chaitin saw incompleteness in the way we thought about random numbers, too.
As far as anyone knows, he was right. We basically can never know whether something is random or totally predictable. He is one of mathematics’ great smartasses.
Fun fact: Gödel went crazy at the end of his life and became convinced that someone was trying to poison him. He refused to eat and ended up s
tarving himself to death. No one knows exactly why he went crazy, but I sometimes wonder if all that uncertainty drove him around the bend.
* * *
I didn’t leak the docs on LaptopLock. Neither did Ange. Neither did Jolu. According to the logs, we were the only ones that had touched them.
But they leaked anyway.
Of course, Liam knew about it before I did. He pretty much ran over to my desk as soon as he saw the story on Reddit. “You went to Chavez High, right?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“Did you know this Fred Benson skeeze?”
He didn’t have to say anything else, really. By that point, I knew exactly what this had to be about. But it was worse than that. The pastebin dumps of the stuff about LaptopLock were all headed “DARKNET DOC ———” with the number of the document. The highest numbered LaptopLock document happened to be 745,120, and several people had already noted this and concluded that somewhere out there, there was a site called “darknet docs” with at least 745,120 documents on it.
We were blown.
“It’s amazing, right? I mean, can you believe it? I wonder what else they’ve got?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Huh. Wow.”
Liam dragged a chair over to my desk. He put his head close to mine. He smelled of Axe body spray, which may just be the most disgusting scent known to humankind.
“Marcus,” he said, in a low voice, “dude. You remember yesterday, when you were talking about root certs and stuff? It sounded like maybe you knew more about the subject than you were letting on.”
“Did it.”
“I mean, look, you’re Marcus Yallow. If there’s a darknet, you’ve gotta be all over that shit, yo. I mean, seriously, dude.” He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I never knew what to say when someone ended a sentence with “yo.” They always seemed to be acting out some script for a bromance comedy movie that I hadn’t had a chance to see. But Liam was so excited he was shaking a little. “Come on, hook me up, man.”