This page, and the two after it, are largely to introduce us to Tam. Tam is all about perception and thinking, so I figured it was better to show some of her thinking. As I have been fleshing her out, so to speak, I have found that she is even more intimidating than I expected.

The thing about encryption may need some clarification. One theory of quantum computing holds that they might be very good at breaking codes. Most modern encryption attacks use one of two broad classes of attacks, either brute force or vulnerability. Vulnerabilities are stuff you hear about in the news, where a hacker uses a technical trick to make a code easier to break than it should be. Brute force is just trying password after password until the hacker gets the right one. Brute force attacks are why you shouldn’t pick simple passwords. With modern encryption it is supposed to take much much … MUCH longer to find the right password by randomly guessing then it does to encrypt data in the first place. However, with quantum computing it may work that multiple passwords are tried simultaneously.

This is what Tam is doing, when ever she is presented with a password barrier she tries ALL of the possible passwords at the same moment, but only the instance where she has randomly picked the right password is the world that ends up actually existing. It is not actually clear if this is something that is possible in the real world, but some current quantum theories seems to indicate it could be possible. If you want to read a really good piece of Science fiction that explores some of that you could check out Anathum by Neil Stephenson. Toward the end of the book a character who is in tune with the quantum copies of himself goes through a password protected door using exactly the method I just described where he selects a code at random, and then works to make the world where he picks the right code the ‘real’ world.

She went ahead and broke into all of the available Wi-Fi networks so that she could access the internet in parallel and get better bandwidth. I am fairly sure she can’t read all the pages simultaneously the way she guesses codes as when she was done she would have only read one, but she does read very very fast.

↓ Transcript
The scene starts with Kay rowing away from the sailboat to a fairly distant shore.
Tam: There he goes.
Tam: yes.
Tam: I'm Bored already. investigating Internet.
25 usable Wi-Fi networks identified....
investigating security .... broken.
Accessing networks.
Tam:I think I may have been created to break encryption.
Tam: Maybe
Tam: Wikipedia looks useful and internally consistent.
Reading Wikipedia.
Scene show montage of Kay rowing away.
Tam: Done. The real world is too slow. It's going to be forever before I talk to Kay again.
Tam: Yes.
Scene zooms out to show that Kay has gone about a third of the distance to shore, maybe 100 meters.