We Found Something Weird!

Mission 1: Enter the Quantum World. Part of the Quantum Courier Service, a free course from the Oxford University Quantum Information Society.

Last night, a QCS strike team raided an Echo Network black site hidden beneath a defunct subway station in London. We expected to find rows of classical servers, the giant data-vacuuming machines you learned about in Module 0.

Instead, we found a single, supercooled titanium box sitting in the middle of an empty room.

It is communicating, but not in 1s and 0s. When our technicians tried to wiretap the box, two separate things happened, and it matters enormously that you keep them apart. The casing has an ordinary tamper switch on it, a classical intrusion detector of the sort a cash machine has, and that is what triggered the alarm and shut the box down. Nothing quantum about it.

The second thing is the one we care about. The data the technicians pulled off the line before it died was wrong, and wrong in a way that clean equipment does not produce. Nobody was alerted. Nobody was watching. The damage simply sat there in the numbers, waiting for someone to compare notes and find it. The Echo Network has found a way to make information that cannot be read without leaving a mark on it.

You are looking at the future of espionage. To hack it, we need to understand it. Put away your classical physics textbook; where we are going, gravity, logic, and common sense are merely suggestions.