The original note, as written at the time
A quantum virus is engineered to operate a country and ensure that the rule of law is maintained. The quantum particles govern the establishment, running and renewal of governments, and if there be any breach, the culprits are punished. It makes it impossible to stage a coup or even commit mass terrorism.
Ongoing development
The coup failed at four in the morning and nobody was arrested, because the virus does not arrest people.
It simply made the coup impossible, the way a wall makes walking impossible. The officers who had agreed to move found that the orders would not transmit. Not blocked — corrupted, subtly, so that each message arrived meaning something else. The armoured column went west instead of east and sat in a field until dawn. The radio station that was supposed to be taken was taken by a unit that had not been told to take it, found nobody there, and left.
By eight o’clock the whole thing had dissolved into a series of small misunderstandings, and by noon the men who had planned it were back at their desks, and one of them was crying in a way he could not explain to his wife.
That is what the virus does. It does not police. It holds the structure in place by making the arithmetic of breaking it unworkable.
The engineers who built it are dead, which is convenient for everyone. What they left was a thing that maintains the rule of law the way a river maintains its bed — continuously, without judgement, and without any interest at all in whether the law is just. It renews governments on schedule. It detects breach and it punishes, and the punishment is not a sentence; it is the sudden impossibility of the act.
We have not tested whether it can tell the difference between a coup and a reform. That question has been asked twice in cabinet and both times the meeting moved on.
I am the one who reads its outputs, and this morning I found something I do not understand. It has begun to treat the constitution as a body of law that could be amended. That is not what we built it for. It was built to hold the thing still, not to hold it open.
I have not told anybody. I am telling you because you are leaving the country, and because if it has started reading, then somebody should be outside the country when it finishes.