After four years of endless accusations from the media and the Democrat Party that Donald Trump wasn’t really elected and Russia stole the election for him, those who are raising questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election are being told to sit down and shut up.

But as Senator Hawley (R-Mo.) recently said, “74 million Americans are not going to shut up, and telling them that their views don’t matter and that their concerns don’t matter and they should just be quiet is not a recipe for success in this country. It’s not a recipe for the unity that I hear now the other side is suddenly so interested in, after years—YEARS—of trying to delegitimize President Donald Trump.”

But make no mistake: questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election isn’t about revenge. Republicans have been fighting to preserve the integrity of our elections for years, and have met pushback from elected Democrats every step of the way. We have to speak up louder than ever now because the evidence is glaring—and if they get away with it now they will be emboldened to continue.

This is a fight we have to fight, regardless of the outcome. We can accept a legitimate defeat. But a stolen election, we cannot. Without a proper audit of the elections with dubious results, we’ll never know for sure, and without knowing for sure, we shouldn’t assume the results were legitimate.

A protective relay attached to that generator was designed to prevent it from connecting to the rest of the power system without first syncing to that exact rhythm: 60 hertz. But Assante’s hacker in Idaho Falls had just reprogrammed that safeguard device, flipping its logic on its head.

At 11:33 am and 23 seconds, the protective relay observed that the generator was perfectly synced. But then its corrupted brain did the opposite of what it was meant to do: It opened a circuit breaker to disconnect the machine.

When the generator was detached from the larger circuit of Idaho National Laboratory’s electrical grid and relieved of the burden of sharing its energy with that vast system, it instantly began to accelerate, spinning faster, like a pack of horses that had been let loose from its carriage. As soon as the protective relay observed that the generator’s rotation had sped up to be fully out of sync with the rest of the grid, its maliciously flipped logic immediately reconnected it to the grid’s machinery.

The moment the diesel generator was again linked to the larger system, it was hit with the wrenching force of every other rotating generator on the grid. All of that equipment pulled the relatively small mass of the diesel generator’s own spinning components back to its original, slower speed to match its neighbors’ frequencies.

On the visitor center’s screens, the assembled audience watched the giant machine shake with sudden, terrible violence, emitting a sound like a deep crack of a whip. The entire process from the moment the malicious code had been triggered to that first shudder had spanned only a fraction of a second. //

The test director ended the experiment and disconnected the ruined generator from the grid one final time, leaving it deathly still. In the forensic analysis that followed, the lab’s researchers would find that the engine shaft had collided with the engine’s internal wall, leaving deep gouges in both and filling the inside of the machine with metal shavings. On the other side of the generator, its wiring and insulation had melted and burned. The machine was totaled.

In the wake of the demonstration, a silence fell over the visitor center. “It was a sober moment,” Assante remembers. The engineers had just proven without a doubt that hackers who attacked an electric utility could go beyond a temporary disruption of the victim’s operations: They could damage its most critical equipment beyond repair. “It was so vivid. You could imagine it happening to a machine in an actual plant, and it would be terrible,” Assante says. “The implication was that with just a few lines of code, you can create conditions that were physically going to be very damaging to the machines we rely on.”

But Assante also remembers feeling something weightier in the moments after the Aurora experiment. It was a sense that, like Robert Oppenheimer watching the first atomic bomb test at another US national lab six decades earlier, he was witnessing the birth of something historic and immensely powerful.

“I had a very real pit in my stomach,” Assante says. “It was like a glimpse of the future.”

The story of the first microprocessor, one you may have heard, goes something like this: The Intel 4004 was introduced in late 1971, for use in a calculator. It was a combination of four chips, and it could be programmed to do other things too, like run a cash register or a pinball game. Flexible and inexpensive, the 4004 propelled an entire industry forward; it was the conceptual forefather of the machine upon which you are probably reading this very article.

That’s the canonical sketch. But objects, events, people—they have alternate histories. Their stories can often be told a different way, from a different perspective, or a what could have been.

This is the story, then, of how another first microprocessor, a secret one, came to be—and of my own entwinement with it. The device was designed by a team at a company called Garrett AiResearch on a subcontract for Grumman, the aircraft manufacturer. It was larger, it was a combination of six chips, and it performed crucial functions for the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first flight this week. It was called the Central Air Data Computer, and it computed things like altitude and Mach number; it figured out the angle of attack, key to landing and missile targeting; and it controlled the wing sweep, allowing the craft to be both maneuverable when the wings were at about 50 degrees and very, very fast when they were swept all the way back.

Ray Holt was one of the engineers for the Central Air Data Computer. He is probably not someone you have heard of—how could you have? He worked on the project, one of two people doing what’s called the logic design, for two years, between 1968 and 1970, with a team that included his younger brother, Bill. He couldn’t tell anyone about what they had built. The project was kept quiet by the Navy and by Garrett for decades as other engineers were awarded credit for inventing firsts. Later, when he was able to talk about the device, people were skeptical. //

The Intel engineers who share the title told the paper that the Central Air Data Computer was bulky, it was expensive, it wasn’t a general purpose device. One expert said it was not a microprocessor because of how the processing was distributed among the chips. Another—Russell Fish—said it was, noting, “The company that had this technology could have become Intel. It could have accelerated the microprocessor industry at the time by five years." But other people around that time also wanted to claim the title of father of the microprocessor; there were some big patent fights, and not everyone even agrees on the exact definition of a microprocessor in the first place.

“The discussion,” says Fish, who today runs an IP licensing company called Venray, “is not a technical one, it is a philosophical one.” Fish at one point wrote that the 4-bit 4004 could “count to 16,” while the 20-bit CADC “was evaluating sixth order polynomial expressions rapidly enough to move the control surfaces of a dogfighting swing-wing supersonic fighter.” When I spoke to him recently, he said he had gone back and read through the documentation. “What Ray Holt did was absolutely brilliant,” he says. “Particularly given the timeframe. Ray was generations ahead, algorithmically and computationally.”

It is hard to predict how someone who is lost will behave, though it’s safe to assume—as search and rescue leaders always do—that they won’t do much to help themselves. Few people manage to do what is often the most sensible thing and stay put. Most feel compelled to keep moving, and so throw themselves into the unknown in the hope that an escape route will appear. Accounts by people who have been lost show that this urge to move is extremely hard to resist, even among skilled navigators. Ralph Bagnold, a pioneer of desert exploration in North Africa during the 1930s and 1940s and founder of the British Army’s Long Range Desert Group, recalled being seized by "an extraordinarily powerful impulse" to carry on driving, in any direction, after losing his way in the Western Desert in Egypt. He considered it a kind of madness. "This psychological effect … has been the cause of nearly every desert disaster of recent years," he wrote. "If one can stay still even for half an hour and have a meal or smoke a pipe, reason returns to work out the problem of location." When you’re lost, fight (or rather, freeze) is better than flight, at least until you’ve made a plan. //

It is common for lost people to lose their head as well as their heading direction. Stories of people walking "trance-like" past search parties, or running off and having to be chased down and tackled, are part of search and rescue lore. Ed Cornell, the psychologist who studies lost person behavior, says it is very difficult to interview someone just after they’ve been found: "They are basically scrambled" and can remember little about what happened to them.