Энди Вейр - Randomize

She looked away.

He sat at his desk. “Vegas gets a lot of smart people trying to cheat. Very smart people. Geniuses, scientists, electrical engineers, you name it. They come from all over the world to try their schemes. And they always have some angle we never thought of. Because they’re smart. Like you.”

He leaned forward. “You’re more intelligent than I could ever hope to be. I feel no shame in admitting it. But there’s no substitute for experience. You know all there is to know about quantum physics, but I have twenty years of running this casino. And Vegas has a hundred years of catching extremely smart cheaters.”

“You can’t prove anything,” she said. “And if you don’t pay me the money I won, I’ll take you to court.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Wow. You’re bold, I’ll grant you that.”

“This is a trivial sum of money compared to your casino’s profits,” she said. “It is not worth your time to pursue this.”

He raised his voice. “If someone stole a nickel from me, I’d spend a hundred thousand dollars tracking him down! It’s not about profit; it’s about protecting this establishment. There are a hundred other casinos out there, ready to take my customers. Any whiff of fraud or mismanagement here will blot our name and make us look second-rate. And there’s no room for second-rate on the Strip. People don’t come here for so-so casinos. They want the best.”

He took a breath and returned to his normal voice. “According to my IT manager—who is very upset right now, by the way—there’s something called entanglement that might be to blame? I can’t begin to comprehend what that’s all about, but he said our computer’s long-term storage unit must have been hooked up to the same computer as someone else’s. I’m guessing your hubby brought it to you before he brought it to us.”

“Theoretically, if that were to have happened,” she said, “the qbits on both drives would no longer be entangled, and there would be no way to see that they ever were.”

“See, there you go, being all smart again. Thinking like a quantum physicist.” Rutledge sloshed the scotch around in his glass. “I tend to think more like a criminal. Our long-term storage unit is in our vault. You’ve never been in our vault. But I bet there’s some skin cells of yours on it from when you handled it before.”

She widened her eyes.

“Yeah, the clever ones get tripped up by the simplest things. Anyway, the police are on their way.”

“What?”

“I could have security detain you, of course. But then tomorrow’s news would say ‘Vegas Billionaire Has Goons Bully a Confused Foreign Woman.’ Much better to lure you here and have the police pick you up.”

She bolted to her feet.

“That elevator only works with a key card. You’re not going anywhere.” He raised his glass to her. “Sure you don’t want a drink?”

“Give me a second… ,” she said. “I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“A way out of this.”

“Um,” he said. “There isn’t a way out. The police will be here in a few minutes.”

“Then I have a few minutes to think.”

“See, there you go, being all smart again. Thinking like a quantum physicist. I tend to think more like a criminal.”

He shrugged. To his credit, he didn’t gloat. He didn’t seem to take pleasure in it at all. He wasn’t about revenge or money. He was about respect.

She furrowed her brow. This was getting somewhere.

His casino was his life. It was his baby. A billionaire like him didn’t need to oversee the day-to-day operations of a company. He could easily hire someone to do it and spend his life gallivanting around European ski slopes or whatever. A man with his means could do anything he wanted. And what he wanted was to run this casino.

And to be respected. No, not quite. It wasn’t about his ego. It was about the casino being respected. Why? Because without that respect, the business suffered. So it was all about the business success. And her scam had put that all at risk.

There it was. The answer.

“I have a proposal,” she said.

“Pardon?”

She sat back down and folded her hands on her lap. “You call off the police and pay me the winnings.”

“And why would I do that?”

“My husband will quit his job at QuanaTech, and the two of us will start a new company—one dedicated to making specialty quantum devices for the gambling industry. It makes perfect sense with his background on the business side and my expertise of the technology.”

“I’m still waiting for why I would do this.”

“It would cost more than our winnings to start a company,” she mused. “So you would have to be an anonymous angel investor.”

He laughed. “My God! Earlier when I said you were bold—that was an understatement. You’re borderline insane.”

She pressed on. “Our new company will make quantum random-number generators. Our product will just be a box that makes a stream of truly random numbers via quantum properties and outputs them at a steady rate. No configuration. No operating system. Just a serial port.”

Rutledge raised his finger and opened his mouth, then stopped. He thought for a moment, then finally spoke. “Every casino would want those boxes. And they’d want hundreds of them. One for every video poker machine, every slot machine, and so on. It’s an excellent business model with a huge addressable market.”

“Thank you.”

“I might fund a start-up with that in mind. But not with you. You’re still going to jail.”

“No, it’ll be with me.” She thought things through as she spoke—time was of the essence. Once the police arrived, it was all over. “With us, I mean. My husband and I.”

“You literally just tried to rob me.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. So we’ve established I have a certain moral flexibility.”

“Why would I care about—”

She stood and paced. “We sell the boxes at a loss. Whatever it takes to get everyone buying them and beat any competition that crops up.” Her voice sped up. “Yes. That should get all the major casinos on board. And of course the boxes would be tamperproof. No, not just tamperproof. Literally sealed so no one can modify them.”

The phone on Rutledge’s desk buzzed. He pressed a button. “Yes?”

“Sir, LVPD are here,” came a voice through the speaker. “They say you called them?”

“Yes, send them up.” He terminated the call and looked back to Sumi. “Feel free to keep ranting.”

She knew from earlier that the elevator ride took about ninety seconds. She had that long remaining. She slapped both hands down on his desk. “At a prearranged time, a couple of years from now, all of the randomizer units will simultaneously fail. Because we’ll program them to do that from the start.”

He frowned. Was that a spark of interest? “Define ‘fail.’”

“They’ll all output a steady stream of zeroes. Most gambling machines using them will crash because their software doesn’t account for getting the same ‘random’ number every time. At the very least, they would shut down. Other systems might even remain online, giving the same result every use. That’s even worse—especially if it happens to be a player-win. Every casino in town would be in utter chaos.”

He looked to the ceiling, realization dawning. “Except the Babylon.”

“Right! Not the Babylon.” She pointed at him. “Because you already have a different system in place. You can just say you never bothered to upgrade. Lucky you. Then what happens, Mr. Rutledge? What happens when the Babylon is the only casino in Vegas with functioning machines?”