Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  “May God protect her,” murmured Halliday. “What will the NSA do to her, if they find out?”

  “Sounds like we’re talking major national security stuff,” said Arthur. “Ain’t know what they would think.”

  “Well, we’ll find her first,” I said. “And we can decide whether to hand her over or just make her cough up the proof. What she wrote to you, Professor—she was trying to save you. You’ll be our way in.”

  “No.”

  I turned sharply to Halliday. “What?”

  She’d clicked off the light, leaving only her silhouette visible in the darkness. “I don’t want to go after her. Let her go.”

  “What? What the fuck are you on?” I exploded, so harshly Arthur winced. “This is P versus NP! This is it! It’s everything! It’s—”

  “And Rita made her decision.” Halliday took a breath. “It was clearly a decision she did not undertake lightly.”

  “How can you let her—she screwed you over! She stole all your work. At the very least, don’t you still want it back?” If Halliday wouldn’t help—

  “Well, she burned it, didn’t she?” Halliday’s voice had a caustic bite to it. “So whether or not we find her, it’s already gone. I could rewrite the factoring proof again now, thanks to you. The rest, her papers—those were hers to destroy.”

  “And you’re just going to accept that?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This had to be impulsiveness, the madness of a moment—Halliday would come around, she would see—“Your friend Dr. Zhang was right. This is too big to be left to one person’s whims, especially when that one person is a senile old lady!”

  Halliday sniffed, hard, but when she spoke her voice was steady. “Rita was as sharp as ever. And she wanted to solve the P versus NP problem more than anything in her entire life. If the knowledge terrified her this much…” The dark shapes of her hands tightened on the papers she held, crumpling them. “I have to trust her.”

  “No,” I said. “You really, really don’t.”

  “Then let me rephrase. I’m choosing to trust her. If she says this broke the world for her, if she says she was only trying to protect me—”

  “You’re not making any sense!” I cried. “If her proof was valid, then P equaling NP is true whether or not you’ve seen the reduction. Besides, how could you not want to know? Her emotional response is immaterial—for Christ’s sake, the Pythagoras cult thought irrational numbers were demonic and refused to accept them; that doesn’t mean—” I stuttered, out of words, out of ways to explain. “This isn’t right, what she’s doing. The world should know. Even if all you do is turn it over to the NSA, the knowledge should be out there. You can’t just delete it from the world; it’s wrong!”

  But I didn’t care about the world, if I was honest with myself.

  I needed this proof.

  Without it, I was nothing. With it, with the algorithm Rita Martinez claimed she had…I could discover any result, make mathematics unfurl before me, answer the most profound questions in the universe.

  With it, I could do real math.

  And that was all that fucking mattered.

  “Arthur, talk some sense into her,” I said, desperate and no longer caring. We’d already tried everything else to find Martinez. Now we’d caught on that the best and maybe the only thing we could use to lure her out was Halliday herself, and we knew what she had, and Halliday was saying no?

  “Dr. Martinez stole your work,” I added to the professor. “She stole your work, and it led to you getting kidnapped, and even then she said nothing. If she’s got a polynomial-time reduction, she might have halved the search time we took tracking you down—” We might have avoided the Feds entirely; I might have avoided getting almost killed—

  “She didn’t know what you can do,” Halliday pointed out. “She didn’t know how you were searching.”

  “Yeah, because a Hamiltonian cycle isn’t one of the most famous NP-complete problems of all time! She left you to die! If she’d rubbed two brain cells together, she would have known we were using some type of search algorithm and that her math could have helped—”

  “She probably didn’t think about it,” Halliday said. “Rita doesn’t…sometimes she doesn’t see the things in front of her. She’s too lost in the mathematics. I can’t fault her for that.”

  “Or for ruining all your research?”

  She turned away from me slightly. “She was trying to do what was best for me.”

  “Arthur,” I said again, “You convince her. Convince her!”

  He’d shoved his hands into his pockets. “This what you want?” he said to Halliday.

  She nodded.

  Arthur faced me. “I ain’t going to go against Sonya’s wishes here. Way I see it, Doc Martinez ain’t giving that proof to no one, so it ain’t like the world’s in any of that sort of danger. If Sonya wants to respect her choice, I’m on board.”

  I was stunned. “And what if the Lancer finds Martinez? Is he just going to accept the fact that she doesn’t want to tell anyone about it?”

  “Lot of things can go wrong in this world,” said Arthur. “Ain’t mean we can’t all make our own choices. Ain’t mean Dr. Martinez can’t make this one.” He looked down at Halliday. “Martinez wronged you, but I get why you’d forgive her. I ain’t got a beef with her beyond that.”

  “You’re only saying that because you don’t understand what this means!” I accused Arthur. We couldn’t give this up. We couldn’t. I tried to temper my tone and played one last hole card. “Professor, if you’re so concerned about her, we should go after her. If we get to her first, then we can help her escape the Feds. She’s not going to know how to stay off the grid, but that’s one thing I’m exceptionally good at—I can help her.”

  Halliday hesitated. Then she said, “No. Let it go. She’s smart, and she’s clearly figured out how not to be found. If we keep digging after her…no. Just let her go.”

  No. To find myself so close to salvation, and then to have it destroyed by people who didn’t understand…

  Arthur turned toward me, his face unreadable. “Job’s over, Russell. Thank you. For your help.”

  I half expected him to offer me money. I think I would have punched him if he had.

  I wheeled around and stormed off, back from the lake, away from the safe house and back to my car. This job was over when I said it was fucking over. If Arthur didn’t want to help me find Martinez, if Halliday didn’t want to take advantage of her connection—well, screw them. I would do it myself.

  I drove in the opposite direction I wanted to, switched cars, and made sure no one was following. Not that the NSA wouldn’t be able to pick me up again if they were interested, dammit. They knew where Checker lived, as much as Arthur had tried to keep the impression that he wasn’t on this case.

  Of course, when I got to the Hole, Arthur was waiting for me. Goddammit.

  “Russell,” he said.

  “What?” I tried to brush past him, already checking my bug detector.

  “Talked to Checker already.”

  I stopped.

  “Don’t pursue this. Let her go.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s the decent thing to do, Russell.”

  “Decent?” I burst out. “Decent! She has a proof that could—” I clamped down on the words.

  “Revolutionize mankind, I know,” said Arthur. “What are you gonna do? Twist her arm until she shares it with you?”

  “You don’t get it!” I cried. “You say ‘revolutionize’ like you understand, but you aren’t getting this. This is—it’s bigger than splitting the atom, or the combustion engine, or—or the invention of electricity, or whatever other technological revolution you’re thinking of. You don’t understand what this proof would mean!”

  “Then maybe Martinez is right,” said Arthur, “keeping it to herself. Maybe that’s the right call here.”

  “That’s never the right call!”

  Checker pulled
open the door to the Hole and came out. “Cas. Hey.”

  “You’re going along with this?” I cried. “You? Mr. ‘Knowing is Always Better Than Not Knowing?’ Did he tell you what we found?”

  “Cas—”

  “This is bigger than you, than me, than all of us!” I ignored the guilty twinge acknowledging that wasn’t the reason I wanted it, and stabbed a finger at Checker. “You should understand that!”

  And he should understand what it meant for me. He should know. The fact that he should have connected how important this was for me but was still siding with Arthur—it hurt, a deep and private pain I buried ruthlessly under my anger.

  “I do—I get it; this is…” Checker trailed off and waved his hands limply, as if he couldn’t figure out how to encompass something as huge as P equaling NP. “Cas, how can this not terrify you? If this proof is right, if Turing machines are that much more powerful than we thought—will human innovation even mean anything anymore? Not just in mathematics, but everywhere—engineering, new technologies—there’ll be nothing left human intelligence can offer above a computer. Nothing. And then what? Humanity becomes superfluous? Dr. Martinez said she thought this would break the world; what if she’s right?”

  If she was right it wouldn’t matter, because in the wake of the new apocalypse, I would be whole again. A true mathematician. Hell, I’d be more than a mathematician—I’d be a god.

  I didn’t say any of that. “Coward,” I said instead. The word came out bitter. Hateful.

  “Yes,” Checker admitted frankly. “I am. This scares me. Beyond belief.”

  “And when has that ever stopped you?”

  He hesitated. “If it were my decision, I’d…you’ve got a point; I’d probably close my eyes and take the leap, and scream while I was doing it. But Arthur’s right. It’s not my call. I’m not the brilliant mathematician who made the breakthrough. It was her accomplishment, and she made her decision pretty clear.”

  Arthur made a small, approving noise.

  “Stop parroting what he said to you,” I said.

  A flush crept up Checker’s face. “I’m not.”

  It had never occurred to me that Checker wouldn’t back me up. Arthur didn’t know what he was saying, didn’t grasp all the ramifications, but Checker—he should have been knocking me over in his desire to find Martinez. He should have been shouting at Arthur about this, throwing every resource he had into it, insisting. The fact that he wasn’t…he was betraying all of mathematics, betraying computer science—betraying me.

  “If she found it, someone else will,” I said, aware I was blatantly contradicting what I’d told Arthur and Halliday earlier, but feeling too vicious to care. “And you’re making me hope that person does as much damage with it as they possibly can, because it’s your fault we won’t be ready.”

  I started to stomp off, then turned back and added to Checker: “And you. You’ll let one old woman decide the fate of the whole world without a fight, but you won’t let me decide what’s right for my own life. Fuck you. I’m done.”

  Checker tried to stutter a response, but I was already striding away.

  I didn’t need them. I’d worked on my own long before I’d ever met Arthur or Checker. I would find Martinez somehow, with or without Halliday’s help, and I would pry the goddamn proof out of her if I had to lock her in a room and extract it.

  Then I’d figure out if I wanted to share it.

  Chapter 29

  I made it back to my car and stood there on the darkened street. I wasn’t sure where to start.

  Fuck. In the past two years, I’d started to take it for granted I had Arthur and Checker around. I had a secure computer back in my apartment, courtesy of Checker, but I wasn’t much better than basic search engines.

  Checker was right, damn him—I should have taken the time to learn. Computers were just math, weren’t they? I ignored the small voice in my head reminding me I’d never have the patience to keep up with the latest hardware, let alone memorize any sort of programming language.

  And I couldn’t take the time now anyway. Fuck me twice.

  Before Checker, I’d had an information guy. His name had been Anton Lechowicz. The last case I’d involved him in had killed him.

  My hand twitched, and I wanted to put my fist through one of the car windows. I hated thinking of Anton.

  And I’d never cultivated any backup contacts. I didn’t like working with people I didn’t know.

  I got into the car and drove home, mulling as I did so, trying to remember who else in my line of work I remotely trusted. The list wasn’t very long. As soon as I got back I pulled a new phone out of a drawer—I’d burned the old one; Checker would be tracking it and I didn’t want him to—and called Ari Tegan, my friendly local forger. He was seriously competent and had desisted from giving me up to the Mafia the year before, which I didn’t really understand but which made me like him even more. He seemed to like me, too, for some reason. I wasn’t sure why.

  “Tegan, it’s Cas Russell,” I said when he picked up.

  “Cassandra! Hello! How are you faring?”

  I winced. Tegan’s use of my full name had always bothered me, but now it echoed with the man from my dreams, the one who kept calling and pleading for something I couldn’t deliver, echoed against that name on a graveyard cover stone saying I’d died and the signature on the bottom of the note inside. I tried to let it roll off.

  “Fine,” I said shortly. “I need an information guy. Someone good at tracking, data mining, that sort of thing. Can you give me any recommendations?”

  “I usually send people to Arthur these days. I thought you worked with him as well?” I was one of the few people Checker knew in person and allowed to call him directly—most people just knew that one of the services of Arthur’s private investigations business was electronic data gathering.

  “He’s busy,” I said. No need for Tegan to know the details.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Mickey McTaggart is quite good. But she works for the Lorenzos. I gathered you resolved things with Mama Lorenzo, but are you still persona non grata with them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  “Then I am unsure.” He thought for a moment. “If you require sensitivity to discretion, I do not know of anyone else local I would trust, at least not anyone I would recommend as having a high level of skill. I do know of perhaps a surprising number of people who work virtually, who have been clients of mine or who have partnered with my services on occasion, and whose abilities have impressed me. I stress that I do not know their bona fides, only that they have been honest in their business dealings with me, and as far as I can tell would have the expertise you require.”

  “I guess that’s better than nothing.” I preferred to meet people in person, in case I needed to track them down afterward for any reason. Particularly any reason that involved putting a gun to their heads. But there was some saying about beggars and choosers. “Anybody I can check out another way?”

  “You might see if Arthur can check the names for you, if he is too busy to take the case,” suggested Tegan. Yeah, right. Fat chance of that. “I’m afraid they work pseudonymously, under screen names, but they do depend on those screen names for their reputations. Let me think. Griffon, Two Key, Doctor Yee, General Zephyr. Grep, Shift, the Lancer, Hijack, a newer gentleman called Lincoln—”

  “Wait,” I said. The Lancer. Holy shit. “Go back.”

  “I can email you a list,” Tegan offered, oblivious. “With their contact information, such as it is. You may give my name, if you like.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said.

  I hung up and stared at my computer screen, not seeing it.

  One of the tidbits Checker had dropped while we searched for Martinez was that the Lancer had gone underground, unwilling to make contact with unknown entities for fear someone was an NSA plant. But if I had a reference from Tegan…if the Lancer could be assured I wasn’t a National Security agent
in disguise…

  I wasn’t very good undercover, but that was in real life. Virtually, it would be a lot easier to lie.

  Holy crap. I might be able to track the Lancer when even Checker and the NSA couldn’t. Like I’d told Arthur, this job was over when I said it was, and I owed the Lancer a broken face.

  Of course, none of that helped me find Martinez. I wondered if the Lancer was looking for her, too. If he’d figured out what she’d really proven.

  Maybe I should tell him. With his obsession over the P versus NP problem, he’d stop at nothing in order to find her. Unlike Checker.

  But then what? Letting the Lancer get his hands on the proof—or on Martinez, I reminded myself guiltily—wasn’t the most appealing option.

  Except he would publish it. He’d tried so many times with his amateur work; he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. He’d get the algorithm out of Dr. Martinez, steal it, and publish it himself, and the whole world would be able to see.

  The whole world. Including me.

  Arthur wouldn’t approve, said a voice in my head. Scratch that, not only would Arthur not approve of me sending a kidnapper and murderer after a slightly dotty old woman, he’d probably go as far as pulling a gun on me to try to stop me. I’d beat him, but that wasn’t the point.

  Isn’t it? Arthur was just the one saying everyone should get to make their own decisions. Well, I should get to make this one! The justification echoed in my head, sarcastic and mocking. I knew that wasn’t what he’d meant.

  But Arthur had backed out of this whole case, so I should get to play it just like I would if I were going it alone. I remembered my sardonic promise to leave out the plastic explosives if I was working for him—well, I wasn’t working for him anymore, and that meant he didn’t get a say.