I will never forget the day.
The day my TOTP - those
Six random numbers in an
App - were a sequential fragment...
Of my phone number.
A million permutations.
Functionally random. And
Valid half a minute only.
And yet, right there,
Those digits unique to me.
What are the odds? Really?
Of an authenticator spitting out
A sequence from within
The number you'd dial only
To reach me, and me alone.
About six in a million. Asterisk1.
If you watched your phone for
About forty days straight,
You'd probably see it too,
More likely than not.
But I actually saw it. Me.
One chilly autumn morning,
Blessed by circumstance,
Through my phone, briefly
Watching the Universe turn.
It's inevitable. Mathematically.
There is no other way. Surely,
I am one of many. And yet,
For thirty seconds, I was, what?
The luckiest person alive.
Footnotes
1 The odds are actually much more-complicated than that, with pseudorandom numbers. There must certainly exist seed keys for the TOTP algorithm that will never produce any of a set of six particular permutations of digits: not all possible outputs are necessarily available for all possible inputs. But the maths are much too complicated for this particular security engineer slash poet to consider, so for the purposes of artistic license, I've treated TOTP generation as being "random enough". Random enough that it can be treated like an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of numeric keypads, I guess. Although in practice, real monkeys are not particularly good at producing random output. But you know what I mean.
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