What are the prime factors of the number 4029024443608723347516445192808189472887297972844919394406678174087690091529522993441652278453905702637716052509821382938153046395969188607671858225369520?
That is a question whose answer was solved to great and horrible consequences.
In the old days, there was a time when technology flowed freely throughout the classes. Rich and poor would spend hours with their faces glued to various illuminated display screens. Information, games, movies, anything could be made available to the whole world with little more than the press of a button. It came to be that as time went on, the technology became integrated into almost every aspect of life—communications, leisure, and, most consequentially, banking. Anyone could and did have access to these devices, the information literally floating through the air. You might be wondering what exactly prevented other people from claiming the ones and zeros that at the time constituted the foundations of a human life. And the answer was the question: what are the factors of the number 4029024443608723347516445192808189472887297972844919394406678174087690091529522993441652278453905702637716052509821382938153046395969188607671858225369520?
This question and questions like it kept that free-floating information from being anything more than a scrambled mess. Everyone sees the number, but without knowing the numbers that made it, you can’t unscramble the mess, so everyone’s information gets to float around as an open secret. If you could figure out the prime numbers that made up the very large number, that is, the factors, then you would have the key to unlock those open secrets. Any device could solve these sorts of problems, given a long enough time, but it wasn’t until the invention of the quantum computer that it could be reliably solved in less time than it takes to rob a bank. It had been a race between all the biggest corporations, each too afraid of missing out to seriously ponder the question of why. As technology does, it scaled and shrank and polished until it could answer such a question in less time than it takes to grab candy out of the hand of a baby. The first black quantum computer came online shortly thereafter, and all those ones and zeros became defenseless. With no privacy with no ability to exchange financially, the system collapsed in spectacular fashion. There had been other forms of cryptography, ones companies and governments largely failed to implement in time. As was the nature of vast bureaucracies, they had dragged their feet. The adoption they had undertaken was partial, all one needed do was find the weak spot, the division that dug their heels in. Ultimately it mattered little. Would-be robbers were swift-footed in finding the right algorithms to crack these patchwork defenses. It was perhaps an irony that the collective efforts of these thieves left their stolen treasure little more than ice on the equator. Foolproof quantum cryptography was possible, but given that the devices only operate in temperatures approaching absolute zero, they weren’t exactly portable or practical for individual use.
This was the first great uninvention.
The second occurred in a garage of one Samuel Smith. On a sunny afternoon of tinkering, he had done it. With a final turn of a screw and the flip of a switch, his neighborhood and the city it housed fell into darkness. So was born the very first device dubbed by its creator as the Jolly Old Lightning Trap. It was relatively cheap and easy to make for an enormous electromagnetic magnetic pulse bomb. It would later be scaled to the point that a competent high school science team would have a good shot at rendering useless every complex electric device within a small country. Since each country had its fair share of holy kooks, revolutionaries, as well as the standard run-of-the-mill miscreants, global darkness soon followed.
In the immediate aftermath of J.O.L.Ts blooming all across the world, electric cars, which had become the norm, stopped working; modern planes often found their pilots struggling to land what essentially became very large hang gliders and remaining computers and screens were turned into intricate paperweights. Restrictions were, of course, tried, draconian ones at that, but it proved a seed of chaos too easy to acquire. In the end, transistors and capacitors were pretty much out. Electric motors could still be used. However, even though simple motors would not be destroyed by an EMP, they would still be disrupted, and there is nothing quite like the sheer chaos of entire road of cars suddenly losing all power and control. Cars and planes that could not continue to function during an EMP blast were banned in most parts of the world, by whatever governments still existed to ban them.
Electric-heated steam-powered vehicles, in particular, became the new vogue. While it is quite possible to build internal combustion engines that can withstand an EMP attack, without technology such as fuel injection, many of the efficiencies they had gained over the years had gone away. Besides, by this point in time, fossil fuel technologies had been primarily phased out as people had come to the collective realization that, in fact, it would not be better to make the earth Pliocene again.
Having electric-heated steam engines, though more wasteful, was considered much safer for transit, as a temporary loss of the heating element would not mean a sudden drastic loss of power or control. Steam power is about hot water, and with a temporary loss of power, the water is still hot, so the user retains power and merely needs to press the restart button for it to be as if nothing ever happened.
Technology still advanced. But now, the rules of the game saw that it did so firmly under the hands of a few for the benefit of the few. In daily life, tube amps, landlines, gear logic, newspapers, physical books, simpler engines all made a comeback in a big way.
An old news report interviewing Mr. Smith showed that he had this and only this to say—
“Well, it sure was fun.”
Society was plunged into chaos, and out of that chaos came, as it so often does, a terrible order.
Homo Economicish 