Somewhere in Oxfordshire, a computer chip the size of a fingernail sits close to ten millikelvin in temperature — one hundredth of a degree above absolute zero. The cold matters; quantum effects are fragile, and heat shakes them apart. Chill the chip that far and it performs calculations no classical computer can match. Calculations like simulating a new drug molecule atom by atom; designing a battery material that doesn't yet exist; cracking the encryption today's banks rely on. This is a quantum computer, and for the first time, it is nearly here. Britain's stake in that race is the National Quantum Computing Centre. Founded in 2020, its job is to build the science and ready the country for what comes next. And at the 2026 Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard, the work goes public as part of FOS Future Lab presented by Randox. Daisy Shearer is NQCC's quantum computing outreach and education lead, and has spent considerable time persuading children, parents and the occasional dinner party guest that quantum is not, in fact, code for ‘we don't really know’. "Quantum is all about the things that we see at the really tiny scale of life. And actually, everything around us in the world is quantum mechanical. It's just that we're too big and noisy to see those effects," says Shearer. It sounds a bit like The Force in Star Wars, but we're the wrong size to notice it. Where a regular computer thinks in ones and zeros — the binary running every screen you've ever looked at — a quantum computer thinks in qubits. A qubit is a one and a zero at the same time, until you measure it. Shearer explains with a coin. "Rather than having to use heads or tails, one or zero, we can now