When the Quantum Internet Stopped Being a Marvel and Started Being Plumbing

We are bad, as a species, at noticing the moment a wonder becomes a utility. The quantum-secured network — the Q-Net, as the desks now call it without a second thought — arrived in the 2090s draped in the language of miracle. Unbreakable encryption. Physics itself standing guard over your message. Whole conferences convened to marvel that the act of eavesdropping would announce itself, that the channel could be made honest by the deep grammar of the universe. And then, quietly, over about fifteen years, the marvel did what all successful marvels do: it stopped being discussed. By 2110 the Q-Net had won the only victory that lasts, which is the victory of the wall socket. No one thanks a wall socket. It secured the banks, the grids, the migration ledgers, the twelve-minute letters from Mars, and it did so invisibly, and invisibility is the truest measure of a technology's triumph — and its danger, for we defend fiercely what we still find astonishing, and forget entirely what we have decided to take for granted. It is worth remembering, now and then, that the plumbing was once a miracle. The century runs on things it has stopped being amazed by.