A Cursor Story

Chapter 7: The GRIID Interrupted

'Yes, I do understand, although these programs took a humongous amount of computing power but GRIID's processors capable of quantum computation. GRIID powers the computing devices from all over the world. People connect their devices to the GRIID to get their computing tasks done on a payment basis.' Mitt explained to the customer on telephone.

'Mr Mitt, I am not able to get the summary of a document using an AI based program utilising the computing power of the GRIID. Earlier these tasks used to take split seconds. We have rewritten our companies' all mobile apps, web apps for optimal usage of the GRIID. Our company has invested a lot in the process. We also gave you the Bitcoin $ 12 million in advance. We have targets to meet. Our development work has been migrated to the GRIID expecting that it will be completed on time. If you cannot bring it online it is better to return the advance.' The voice on the other side of the telephone said.

'We are working on it and we hope to fix this in an hour,' replied Mitt, putting down the call abruptly cutting the conversation.

'But we have already run the usual system checks just a few days back. Everything was alright', Ryan was not ready to accept that the GRIID can go down. There was another call on Mitt's land-line.

'Hello Mr. Mitt, my child has an exam today so I decided to test his knowledge. I am afraid to know that he doesn't even know how to calculate square roots. Thank you for switching off the GRIID, I just taught him how to do it.' The voice on the telephone could be heard by the person standing next to the person holding the receiver.

'We are working on it and we hope to fix this in an hour,' Mitt replied mechanically.

'Mitt, she was thanking you for not switching on the GRIID.'

'Ryan.,. whatever... I know that all that, but you heard my reply on the phone. Now just go and fix it.'

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Ryan and his two-member team went into the basement of the GRIID Inc. It was a big underground room with a dimension of at least 100 into 100 meters. There was humming sound emanating either from the equipment kept there or the room itself was vibrating at its natural frequency. Ryan came into after going through the biometric check based on DNA at the entry door. His other team members also came inside the room after DNA check. There was a team of around a hundred quantum computing technicians working inside the basement. Ryan felt that the team was in a bit of disarray with Ryan inside the basement at this time but neither he nor the quantum computing experts disturber each other.

Behind the entry door it was stacks of cable running into a central box of 10 meters into 10 meters size, golden in color, fumes were coming off its sides from everywhere. It was the quantum processor, the biggest leap of science since human beings arrived on earth. The whole box had three-layered insulation to keep the heat of the environment out. If even the minutest amount of heat enters the system inside the box the coherent patterns of qubits would get disturbed and the quantum processor won't work. But the biggest danger was the internal heat of the system. This is because each and every molecule or atom has its own heat. The whole quantum computer box was cooled at a temperature below negative 230 degrees centigrade by using liquid nitrogen. Power used in cooling the system at this cold temperature was humongous .. about 1 GW per day. There were superconducting wires connecting the cooling system with power. The quantum computer was connected with the outside world through only superconducting wires. A row of computers at the left wall of the basement room showed the internal states of the quantum computer.

Ryan inspected all the reading on the computers at the left everything was fine according to his expectations. Ryan then headed to the team of quantum computing technicians.

'Sir welcome to the quantum processor section of the GRIID, I am Radcliff,' the young man replied with a British accent.

'I have checked all the reading I don't find anything wrong, why the GRIID is off?'

'Dear Ryan, the quantum computer is working fine, we were able to bring it up within fifteen minutes of the attack.'

'Attack?' Ryan's eyebrows flew upward upon hearing the word 'attack'.

'Yes, sir there was an attack on our systems, it was a Disproportionate Asset Allocation Attack by a cyberagent.'

'This means that it was an attack to use a disproportionate amount of computing power on just one system.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Were you able to locate the origins of the attack, who was behind it?'

'Our cybersecurity team is working on that sir, but we could not locate it so far. It could be an inside job.'

'Ok, so restart the system, use the backups which were deployed as per our risk mitigation plans.'

'We are just doing that sir, it is the GRIID itself which was down so it took some time to manually redeploy the resources and bringing the GRIID online. GRIID will be online in the next 3 minutes and 7 seconds.'

'Great.'

Ryan shook hands with the lead quantum computer technician and ran out. Who could be the insider who has the capability to attack the GRIID? The Cyber Security Agency would be called in to investigate the outage of the GRIID.

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