Nadia – Chapter I

Follow the story of Nadia, a quantum security expert in 2050 London

Nadia, a story by Miquel Morales.

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Discover our last story: Edna’s Garden

London — October 23rd, 2050.

Nadia’s eyes were red after hours with
the holovisor on. The newer models came with ocular moisturizing tech, but not
all companies were eager to take on the extra cost just for the visual
well-being of their employees. At least not yet. Her friend Sudi had one of
those fancy rigs at the office. Apparently, you didn’t even need to use your
hands to manipulate data sets and subroutines. A simple mental order would get
the job done. Nadia thought for a second of how lazy humans had become. It was
hard to imagine how, just thirty years ago, people like her had to rely on
mechanical input devices and raw code to do their jobs.    

A pulsating glow on the bottom right
corner of her field of vision brought her back from the history tour. The alert
was accompanied by a low-pitched beeping sound. She veered right with a gesture
of the hand and pulled the message window closer to her.

“Unusual log entry detected,”
said the virtual operator in a quirky and piercing male voice.

Nadia had recently configured her AI to
sound like Saneer Ziza, her and her sister’s favourite comedy actor. She had to
give it to her sister — for the first time in years, she had come up with a
pretty thoughtful birthday gift. Perhaps age was starting to weigh on her and
she was finally letting some barriers down. In any case, Nadia had been
enjoying the company of Ziza’s humour while scouting the network for potential
breaches. It made everything sound quite funny, actually. Even that alert.  

“Give me a full report,”
requested Nadia. Like anyone who deserved to call themselves a data integrity
expert, she knew better than to ignore odd entries in the system’s registry of
activity. It was one of the thousands of parameters she had trained Ziza to
monitor.

“Sorry, Nadia. The event log no
longer shows any abnormalities.”

Weird. “What do you mean by ‘no longer’? ” she asked, bothered.

“I have reviewed the records 43,901
times, and there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary here.”

“Why would you alert me of an
unusual entry, then?

“Sorry, Nadia. I cannot answer that question
without an irregularity to make reference to.”

“But you just said ‘no longer’,
which means you have memory of the irregularity being there in the first
place.”

“I was merely referencing my previous
statement.”

Nadia sighed and rolled her eyes — not a
great idea, dry as they were. These annoying bugs had become more common since
the last system update. She couldn’t wait for the next patch.

“Flag this over to maintenance, would
you?”

She took the headset off and threw
herself on the sofa. The four walls of her studio felt somewhat oppressing after
the vastness of the digital world. Stretching arms and legs, she told Ziza to
put on some music and got herself lost in thought. Tomorrow was an office day.
Plus, she had that new business meeting first thing in the morning. It would be
a big deal if they signed this client. Sunset filtered through the blinds,
projecting red and orange stripes on the opposing wall.

Nadia took a long sip of coffee and let
her gaze go from one person to the other around the conference table. A strange
bunch. Even in their formal business attires, she could tell how different they
were from one another. Two men and two women, their ages ranging from the early
thirties to the mid-fifties. She tried to come up with a background story for
each one of them as Tom from sales walked them through the proposal. Raindrops
kept hitting the glass wall behind them. It was an unusually foggy autumn day. Nadia
could barely see the building across the street.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how
we’ll solve your problem. That’s if you decide to move forward with the plan,
of course,” said Tom with a polite smile that Nadia knew too well. “Quantum cryptography
has come a long way, and we’ve been there since the beginning. Others will promise
they can do it too, but our unique encryption system is the only way to fully
guarantee that your customer’s data stays secure throughout all transactions.”

RayStar was one of those brand names all
professionals know. They were in — well — everything. Financial services,
insurance, enterprise software. Anything your average business would need. But
recently they had started focusing on the consumer market, using their machine
learning expertise and their access to most of the world’s data to develop a
new kind of personal AI assistant: Duplo.

The premise was pretty straightforward.
Who better to help you manage your everyday tasks than an exact copy of
yourself? Somehow, RayStar had managed to aggregate all your data and create an
AI that thought and acted just like you do. Of course, your Duplo wasn’t
perfect. But it was way more effective than any other AI assistant out there. Media
hype was strong.

With the product’s official release
scheduled for next month, RayStar was looking to find a security partner that
could ensure the protection of user data. AI chips had improved a lot in terms
of security, and most AIs were able to run locally on the user’s device or
network. But Duplo was simply too complex. A central quantum computer was
required to process all the assistant’s responses, and that was a major
liability considering how sensitive personal data was. The chances for someone
to intercept the information along the way were simply too high. That’s where
Nadia’s firm came in.

“Forgive me, but I fail to understand how
this, hmm, binding is the only way to protect the data 100%,” said one
of the RayStar executives. Clearly more of a businessman than a technical type.

“Ray Goldstein, VP of Compliance,”
whispered Ziza’s voice through the earpiece Nadia had on. The exec was talking
about the process by which Nadia’s company would ensure the encryption keys
remained confidential. RayStar’s CIO, a middle-aged woman with piercing eyes, looked
at her colleague with impatience, probably hoping to wrap that up quickly so
that she could move onto the next endless meeting of the day. Tom was looking
at Nadia, silently begging her to step in.

“It’s entanglement, actually,
sir,” said Nadia. “Although binding works as a concept as well,” she added with
a smile. “In very basic terms, we encrypt the data by generating two identical sets
of random numbers — or ‘keys’ — that we then send to your central system.
Your supercomputer can only read and process the data by first using that key
to decrypt it, so that…”

“See. That’s exactly what I am saying,”
said the VP. “We are trying to prevent someone from accessing the data during
transactions by sending a key, the password. But what’s to prevent them from
intercepting that key as well?” Nadia could now clearly hear the CIO’s fingers
tapping nervously on the table.

“That’s precisely why our real-time entanglement
system is the only way the secure your transactions, Mr Goldstein,” explained
Nadia. “It all comes down to quantum theory. Sub-atomic particles. Quantum mechanics
tells us that, when we generate a password, the value of that password will be
altered once we look at it. Meanwhile, the property of entanglement dictates
that two entangled keys will be tied across time and space, so that whatever
happens to one affects the other.”

“I see,” said the VP, clearly not seeing
it at all.

“Think of it as a pair of twins, if you
will,” said Nadia. “It is said that twins can feel it whenever something
happens to their other half, even if they are thousands of miles apart. Well,
here this is actually true. If someone was eavesdropping and intercepted one of
the keys, we would be able to detect it. Something would feel off.”

“Oh, I see. Interesting. I actually have
a twin, you know?”

To be continued…

Read the next chapter: Nadia – Chapter II

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