578: The Quantum Apocalypse: All Your Secrets Revealed
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It's human nature to keep secrets. Throughout history, we've made complex codes to hide our secrets. Most codes are eventually cracked, but not all of them.

The Voynich Manuscript is a book filled with drawings and symbols nobody can read. The Beale ciphers point to hidden treasure, if someone could decode them. There are entire ancient languages we can't understand because they're encrypted. Encryption can be simple or very complicated. Either way, it's just running a message through a series of mathematical rules. For decades, even centuries, some codes used mathematical rules that remain unbreakable.

But they're about to be challenged by something new: machines that don't care about math and don't follow any rules. Kate Price's morning started like any other. Her smart home system woke her at 6 a.m. with her usual playlist. The coffee maker fired up. Her iPhone read her schedule while she brushed her teeth. Normal. Routine. She opened her banking app. Something was wrong. Her balance was zero.

She blinked and checked again. Her balance was back. Just a temporary error, she thought. She took a sip of coffee and nearly dropped her mug. The smart speaker was playing someone else's conversation. A couple fighting about credit card debt. She unplugged it. Then her smart TV started cycling through her photos. Private photos. Intimate photos. She pulled the plug. And then her phone rang. Then she heard the sirens.

The oldest code we know of isn't written in complex mathematics. It's carved in stone, in an Egyptian tomb from 4,000 years ago. The scribes simply replaced regular hieroglyphs with ones they made up. They weren't trying to keep secrets. They were showing off. These were prayers carved into tomb walls. The scribes wanted to prove they knew something others didn't. Oh, those were ancient emojis. Not exactly. Let's test that theory. Can humans crack this?

The simple act of substituting one symbol for another unleashed something: the human desire to keep secrets. And for thousands of years, that's how codes worked. You'd replace letters with other letters or symbols. Linear A is a secret writing system created by the Minoans in ancient Crete 3,600 years ago. We can read its descendant, Linear B, but Linear A is still secret. Every attempt to crack it has failed. The Spartans made practical use of codes. - Is? Is?

Please don't. Can I get back to this? The Spartans created the skiddley. Here's how it works. Picture a wooden rod about as thick as your wrist. Stop it. Now wrap a strip of leather or parchment around it like a spiral.

Write your message across the strip, following the spiral. When you unwrap it, the letters scramble. The message is nonsense. But wrap it around another rod exactly the same size, and the message reappears. This is called a transposition cipher. You're not changing the letters, you're just moving them around. Julius Caesar encoded all his military correspondence by shifting each letter in the alphabet by three spaces.

A becomes D, B becomes E, and so on. When you hit Z, you loop back to A. This is called a shift cipher or Caesar cipher. The key is knowing how many spaces to shift. Caesar used three, but you can use any number. His enemies never cracked it. In the 1820s, Thomas Beale used a book cipher to hide the location of millions of dollars of buried treasure. And here's how it works.

First, pick a book. Any book. Then you replace each word in your message with a number. That number tells you which word to use from your chosen book. Count down to the fifth word on page one, and that's your first word. Maybe the 19th word on page two is your second word, and so on. Beale used the Declaration of Independence. - Nicolas Cage has entered the chat.

When someone finally figured that out in 1885, they cracked one of his three messages. The treasure is somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia, but the other two messages? Still locked, because we don't know which books he used. Every year, thousands of people try to crack the Beale ciphers to find the treasure, and every year they fail. The Zodiac Killer was also ahead of his time. He encoded a message using a homophonic substitution cipher using 408 different symbols.

Instead of replacing each letter with just one symbol, you've replaced it with several different ones. The letter E might become three or seven or some symbol. Nobody knows. This makes the code much harder to break because you can't use frequency analysis. In normal English, E is the most common letter. But if you split it between multiple symbols, that pattern disappears. For 51 years, the Zodiac's message stumped the world's best cryptographers. Then in 2020, three amateur code breakers finally solved it. What'd it say?

Well, it said a bunch of stuff, but it started with, I like killing people because it's so much fun. Yeah, for a serial killer, he wasn't much of a poet. He wasn't. And the Zodiac Killer was never found. But quantum computers are about to change everything. All these ancient methods, substitutions, patterns, and tricks share one weakness, math. This is a weakness quantum computers can exploit. Soon these machines might reveal every secret message ever written, including yours.

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The quantum computer hissed as liquid helium circulated through the processor. Carl Bishop checked the temperature: minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit, absolute zero. Quantum bits needed to be that cold to maintain coherence. Stanford's quantum lab was empty at 3 a.m. He'd been running simulations for 12 hours straight, his eyes burned. But CTEC's grant requirements were clear: demonstrate quantum error correction or lose funding.

Quantum computers were terrible at error correction. Quantum states are too fragile, too much noise. If the temperature changes by half a degree, they decohere. If radio waves leak in, they decohere. A truck hits a pothole a mile away, the vibration in the Earth makes them decohere.

But Carl noticed something strange in the error correction data. The errors weren't random. Then he realized they weren't errors at all. The quantum computer was cracking encryption keys, millions of them. Keys that protect everything from banking passwords to nuclear launch codes.

Carl decided to test this. He entered an RSA 4096 security key and ran down the hall for another coffee. He wasn't in a hurry. Even the world's most powerful supercomputers would need billions or trillions of years to break RSA 4096. But when he returned five minutes later, he couldn't believe it. The key was cracked.

Carl now realized his computer was the most powerful and dangerous weapon on Earth. He started to panic. He tried to delete the data, but it was already uploaded to CTEK's private servers. By sunrise, three intelligence agencies had flagged the data transfer. By 9 a.m., the first bank security system was breached. By noon, every bank went dark. The quantum apocalypse had begun.

Your entire digital life depends on two prime numbers. That's it, two numbers. And they protect everything, your passwords, your messages, your bank accounts, all of it. Modern encryption is based on this simple trick.

Take two huge prime numbers and multiply them together. That creates your public key, a number anyone can use to send you secret messages. But only someone who knows those original prime numbers can read those messages. Working backward, trying to find those original numbers, would take a computer billions of years. Or so we thought.

In December 2024, Google unveiled Project Willow. Their quantum computer solved the problem in five minutes that would take our fastest supercomputers longer than the age of the universe. Quantum computers do this using superposition. Hang on, hang on, hang on. You want to pump the brakes and the nerd chat and fill me in? Well, think about flipping a coin.

It lands on either heads or tails. Normal computer bits work the same way. Everything is either one or zero. It's binary. But quantum computer bits, or qubits, can be one and zero at the same time. Oh, so qubits are non-binary. Are they? No, they are, but I need you to stop talking.

So instead of flipping that coin, it's a coin spinning on its edge. While it spins, it's not heads or tails, it's both at once. That's superposition. Now imagine trying to crack a safe with a million combinations. A normal computer could only try one combination at a time. But a quantum computer, it tries all combinations simultaneously. The NSA has been warning about this moment for years.

They call it Y2Q, the year quantum computers become powerful enough to break our current encryption. They thought it would happen between 2030 and 2040, but Willow changed everything. For 30 years, quantum computers suffered one major problem: errors. Reading quantum data is like trying to read a book during an earthquake. It's too unstable to work properly. But Google fixed that with Project Willow. "How'd it fix it?" By grouping qubits together.

There are groups of qubits handling processing and groups of qubits that do nothing but track and fix errors. The more qubits you add, the fewer errors you have. It may sound counterintuitive, but it's like building a sandcastle that gets stronger the bigger it gets. Now with AI's help, quantum computers are on track to break current encryption by the year 2029, way ahead of schedule. - This is bad.

In 2024, the Department of Defense accelerated its quantum modernization program. Their latest directive warns that critical systems must be quantum resistant by 2025. But one detail stands out: they're not just protecting future messages. They're racing to protect everything we've ever encrypted. And they're running out of time.

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When Liz Emery's phone buzzed at 4 a.m., she almost ignored it. After 15 years in cybersecurity, late-night calls usually meant someone at the hospital forgot their password. But caller IDs showed Mount Sinai's emergency line. The first report was in.

Patient records appeared on digital billboards in Times Square. They included blood test results, psychiatric evaluations, and terminal diagnoses that patients had not yet told their families about. Senators, congressmen, CEOs, their private medical data was all over the internet. She was still coordinating the hospital's response when the news reported that every dating app was breached. Then they came back online.

Suddenly, on every device in the city, smartphones, TVs, billboards, was a link to a site where anyone could look up any information that was part of the dating app breach. Direct messages, real names and emails, browser histories, private photos and videos, all revealed. Liz figured the only people celebrating were divorce attorneys. Then an email came in to hospital security. "Pay $1 billion or every pacemaker control system on Earth will go down."

Pay another billion or insulin pumps will go down, starting with diabetic children. The city started to crack. Police dispatch systems were offline. Traffic lights went dark. ATMs were dumping cash into the street. Bank balances were set to zero.

Autonomous vehicles became killing machines. Delivery drones crashed into buildings like kamikaze pilots. A fleet of cyber trucks tore through a shopping mall before exploding all at once. News channels tried to cover the chaos, but their broadcasts were hijacked. CNN anchors watched helplessly as their personal emails were displayed on screen. The White House press secretary's private texts appeared during a briefing about the crisis.

Then the NSA made an emergency broadcast that somehow made it through. They said there was a nationwide system compromise. For the safety of every American, martial law was now imposed. Just as the message was covering the mandatory curfews, every phone in the country went dark.

Major technology companies are racing to build quantum-resistant encryption. Google, IBM, and Microsoft have teams working around the clock. But there's a big problem. Quantum computers don't just threaten future messages. They threaten everything we've ever encrypted. Every encrypted file, every secure transmission, every protected database becomes vulnerable, even ones from decades ago.

Intelligence agencies have been collecting encrypted data since the Cold War. Your old emails, your financial records, your private messages, all sitting in databases waiting to be unlocked.

Then there's Bitcoin. Its entire security system depends on the same math quantum computers are about to break. Shadow groups have already collected hundreds of thousands of encrypted Bitcoin wallets. They're just waiting for quantum computers powerful enough to crack them. All that money could vanish in seconds. At current prices, that's billions of dollars. - Total to zero, baby! - Banks know this is coming. JPMorgan started building quantum resistant vaults in 2023, not for gold or cash, for computers.

These facilities will never connect to the internet. They'll use paper records and human couriers. The military's training for quantum dark operations, missions conducted without digital communication, teams practice using prearranged signals, dead drops, and one-time code books, the same methods that kept secrets during World War II.

The NSA's latest reports show Project Willow proves something they already knew. The quantum apocalypse isn't coming, it's already here. The NSA isn't trying to stop it. It's preparing for what comes after. Because the race is no longer about building quantum computers. The race is to survive them.

The line at Chase Manhattan stretched around the block. Cash only. No cards, no transfers. Just paper money and metal coins. Donald Janik watched from his office window across the street. In his 30 years as a security consultant, he'd seen a lot of changes, but nothing like this. The quantum apocalypse was erasing decades of technological progress. His company now specialized in physical security, armed guards, paper record keeping, mechanical locks, the kind of security you couldn't hack.

When the hospital records started appearing online, they shut down their networks and went analog. Now armed guards protected rooms full of paper files. Doctors wrote prescriptions by hand. Old mechanical devices became valuable. Typewriter repair shops reopened. Filing cabinet manufacturers couldn't keep up with demand. Bicycle messengers replaced email. Everyone with skills from the pre-digital age suddenly found themselves in demand.

Retired secretaries who could take shorthand. Mechanics who could fix cars without computers. Accountants who knew how to keep books by hand. The younger generation struggled to adapt. They never lived in an analog world. The smart ones saw it coming. They'd pulled their money out early and bought physical assets. Gold, silver, land, things you could touch. Things that existed in the real world, not just as numbers in a database. The rest had to adapt or lose everything.

Back at Stanford, Carl Bishop struggled with depression. He blamed himself.

SeaTac, the company supporting his work, no longer took his calls. Still, Carl wouldn't stop digging. He had to find out what went wrong. Then Carl found something buried in the data, timestamps that didn't make sense. Some encrypted messages were broken months ago. Then he realized the quantum apocalypse didn't start with his mistake. It started months earlier. The first bank breach wasn't at noon the first day. It was three months before, but balances weren't touched.

Hospital records, websites, smartphone apps. Most have been compromised for months. But again, the data wasn't touched. Carl realized the chaos wasn't an accident. It was cover for something else. Something much bigger. Something much worse. This message is sponsored by Greenlight.

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and for families to navigate life together. Start your risk-free Greenlight trial today at greenlight.com slash the Y-files. That's G-R-E-E-N-L-I-G-H-T dot com slash the Y-files to get started. Greenlight dot com slash the Y-files. Scientists are racing to develop new encryption methods that even quantum computers can't break. They call it post-quantum cryptography. The strategy? Find mathematical problems so complex that not even quantum computers can solve them efficiently.

But there's a problem. Whenever we think we've found an unbreakable code, someone finds a way to break it. The Germans thought Enigma was mathematically impossible to crack. The Japanese believed Purple would keep their World War II communications secret forever. The NSA once claimed RSA encryption would take billions of years to defeat. They were all wrong. Some banks are returning to physical security systems, offline computers, paper records, and in-person verification.

Government agencies are reviving Cold War era methods. One-time pads, dead drops, and bicycle couriers. Sometimes things don't happen the way you planned. Sometimes you can end up lower than you started. What? Quicksilver, somebody out there gets it.

Quantum dark operations like air-gapped facilities, analog communication, and paper messages could work, but they're temporary solutions. Throughout history, humans have played an endless cat-and-mouse game with secrets. Someone creates an unbreakable code, someone else breaks it, and a more complex code replaces it, and the cycle continues. In the quantum age, there are no more secrets, only information waiting to be revealed. That's why the NSA isn't trying to stop it. They aren't building new code-breaking technology. But you know what they are building? Bunkers.

The concrete room in the bunker beneath Fort Meade was cold and quiet. Carl Bishop was in his fifth hour of interrogation by four government agents. The NSA building above them had been abandoned when their classified files leaked, but this room, which technically didn't exist, still had power and a working computer. Carl learned the truth over the past few months. CTEK wasn't a tech company. It was a joint NSA-Darpa program that had been running since 2019.

They didn't have just one quantum computer. They had a network of them, hidden in secure facilities nationwide. For years, the network had quietly broken every encryption it touched: banking records, medical files, private messages, and government secrets. The intelligence agencies had access to everything. But there was a problem: they couldn't act on any of it without revealing their capability.

Imagine knowing about every terrorist plot, every corporate crime, every government corruption scandal, but being unable to stop any of it without exposing how you got the information. The agencies were drowning in intelligence they couldn't use. The solution was elegant. Create a world where privacy no longer existed, where every secret was public.

If nothing were private, there'd be no need to explain how they obtained their intelligence. No search warrants were necessary. Everything was already exposed. The social chaos was part of the plan. Communities going analog wasn't a problem, it was the goal. Drive the dangerous elements offline, where they could be more easily monitored through traditional surveillance. Let the general public choose between convenience and privacy. They would choose convenience. They always did.

But the intelligence agencies had their own solution for secure communication: a return to Cold War tradecraft. Dead drops, one-time pads, face-to-face meetings in soundproof rooms. Their most sensitive operations moved to facilities that never touched a network or used a computer.

Buildings that didn't officially exist, staffed by people with no digital footprint. They maintained two separate organizations: the public-facing agency everyone knew about, and the shadow agency that operated completely offline. The public agency would rebuild its security and updated systems. All of it would be theater. The real work happened in places like this concrete bunker. Places with no windows, no cameras, no phones.

places where messages were still written by hand and burned after reading. The most important secrets were never digitized, never encrypted, and never stored anywhere except in human memory.

The NSA didn't break encryption to destroy society. They destroyed society to hide that they'd broken encryption almost a year ago. Carl was set up. The quantum apocalypse was pinned on him. But what could he do about it? Martial law was still in effect. The NSA wanted him to keep working and keep quiet. He could either agree to cooperate or go to prison.

Violation of the Espionage Act, willful communication of national defense information, unauthorized access of classified documents. The list went on and on. He didn't have much of a choice. As Carl left the concrete room, he realized that in a world with no secrets, the most powerful people weren't those who could break encryption. The most powerful people are those who could keep secrets without it. And right now, the only people who could do that worked for the NSA.

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Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. There's Hecklefish. My voice is my passport. Verify me. This has been The Y Files. If you had fun or learned anything, do him a favor, subscribe, comment, like, share. It's just a small little thing, but it really helps us out. Like most topics we cover on the channel, today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see or learn more about, go to the Y Files dot com slash tips. And remember, The Y Files is also a podcast.

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No, it never ends.

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The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told And his name was Code I can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes Heckle fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And the robots have been eating all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So we won't hold a night

The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets are both to project Stargate and where the Dark Watchers found.

In a simulation, don't you worry though The black knight said a lot, he told me so I can't believe I'm dancing to the fish Heck, no fish on Thursday nights when they chase you And the wild birds are the beat all through the night I never wanted what you just hear the truth So the wild birds are the beat all through the night

Good.

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