Yeah, well, it's a rock 'n' roll kinda business. I returned to the firm stunned, and showed the wad to Matt, whose eyes nearly popped out his head. We drank beer and made some choice Instagrams with the $100 bills – now or never!

I just wanted to get over the stress, think things over for a few days while getting wasted and partying as long as possible.

I told Matt about the night with the girl and how she thought the primes were "beautiful"; he seemed to respect that. I also told him about the "abyss" at ten to the power of 479. He turned pale.

I said that, yeah, it was no fucking good for our business. Since each time they insisted on an increasing order of magnitude between 150 and 479, there were... I pulled out the pocket calculator from the drawer, but found it quite hard to key while drunk... There were only 329 orders of magnitude we could sell before we'd have to wind down our business.

Matt lashed out and sent the calculator flying. He muttered behind his beer: "No, it's worse than that, man. If there are no primes after ten to the power of 479... it's bad, dude, it's bad... In five or ten years machine power will get to those limits – everyone will have access to those primes... Say bye-bye to secure transactions and hello to absolute chaos: bank accounts emptied by pirates, or by foreign nations... economic wars. No more passwords, no more digital privacy. No more secrets. We're teetering on the edge, man. The rich, the poor – everyone is staring into the abyss..."

Ugh, I felt like puking... But this stuff sounded like science fiction. I asked him if it was really possible there were no more primes after ten to the power of 479... or at least no more primes for a massive interval. If such a gap was even possible.

"There being no more primes at all is impossible... though all we might find are trivial ones. But remember that the distribution of primes is essentially random. The girl's limit resembles a maximum, but it's in no way proven – and anything can happen in the infinity of numbers. It might be that our autist simply can't see any further... Those are big numbers, man..."