Somebody in-house was checking on him. Like he couldn’t be trusted.
Like he was a criminal. Like he was a suspect. “Oh boy, oh boy.”
Otto jumped up and snapped his fingers as he paced the room. He was close. But he was frightened. And he thought that he might be going seriously crazy after all. Some of Stenzel’s tests had been terrifying. They’d been so close to cracking open something inside of him that his skin crawled thinking about it. He stopped at the end of the table and stared at the door. “Oh boy.” He suddenly stopped snapping his fingers and looked down at his hands. He saw blood.
Gallons of blood. He stepped back and tried to wipe his hands on his shirt, but still the blood flowed like a river. Over his feet. Above his knees, his waist, his chest. He was drowning in his own blood.
Otto charged out of his office, raced down the aisle between machines and burst into the Office of Computer Security Research. The permanent study research group had been his idea, but it was independent of him now. A half-dozen men and two women were lounging around the large dayroom. They were arguing about a series of complex equations that filled several white marker boards attached to the walls. The room was a mess. They were the Company’s eggheads, who, like Otto, lived in their own worlds. Conventions such as regular mealtimes, cleaned and pressed clothing, haircuts and the like were meaningless distractions.
For them the chase for the most perfect encryption program was life.
Even Otto’s encryption programs could be broken sooner or later. He’d formed the group to come up with ever increasingly complex arrangments.
All we can do is stay one step ahead of the bad guys until we come up with something really nifty, he’d told them. Now they had turned on him. They had become spies. “Who’s been fucking with my computers?”
he demanded from the doorway. The windowless dayroom was furnished with a couple of long tables, a broken-down leather couch, several raggedy easy chairs, a coffee machine and a couple of soft-drink-vending machines. One of them had been filled with beer.
The team looked up in mild amusement. Just lately Otto had been throwing a lot of tantrums. His outbursts were becoming routine. “What are you talking about?” Ann McKenna asked, grinning. She was dressed in jeans, a loose sweater and sneakers. Her long hair was up in a bun, strands flying out everywhere. She looked twenty years older than she was. “Somebody messed with one of my personal programs. Who was it?”
“Did they get very far?” John Trembly asked, curious. He was the head mathematician in the group. “Far enough,” Otto mumbled. It wasn’t anyone here. He could see that now. These kind of people just didn’t know how to dissemble. But it was somebody like them. Somebody smart.
“Interesting proposition,” Ann McKenna said. “Maybe we could backtrack. Set a trap. Even now.”
Otto’s attention strayed to the equations on the blackboard. He stood looking at them, following the logic. But something was wrong. It was sloppy.
“We’re trying something new,” Trembly said.
“Keep it simple, that’s the game,” the other woman, Sarah Loeffler, said. She’d got her Ph.D. in chaos mathematics from Harvard two years ago when she was nineteen. She still had pimples on her round, chubby baby face.
“Stupid, stupid,” Otto said. He went to the first board, picked up a marker and before anyone could stop him, began checking off the correct expressions in the equations, and crossing out and fixing the wrong ones.
***2x = — CR3 + 3CX2R = — C(R2-3X2) 2x R6 R2
2y
2x 2Y 2Z A = + = 0
2x 2Y 2Z
? _ = ^ +A = o 2x2 2y2 2z2
0 is a function such that
Y 20 20 20
— A. - I = — Zj = 2x’ 2y’ 2z’
Otto glanced over his shoulder, then wrote: “Does anybody recognize this?” he asked. “The Laplace equations,” Trembly said irritated. “That’s what we’re working on here. We’re looking for an approach to the three-body problem. Gravitational potential. Might be an avenue to explore as an encryption model. Three-body, then four, then N bodies?”
“If you want to keep it simple then watch your stupid mistakes,” Otto said. “And why fuck with the field equations you’re deriving from Newtonian mechanics? Go to the source, man. Einstein.” He turned, erased all the work from one of the boards and started writing very fast. ox’ = ax cos wt asinwt w(sinwt + ycoswt) a tay = asin wt + oxos wt + w(xcos wt — y sin wt) a t “That’s for two events in a homogenous space,” Otto said. “Come on, guys, basic physics. You can work it from there. But it’ll come to Einstein’s tensor equations for the separation of two bodies. You should be able to use the same mechanism for three bodies or more, if that’s where you want to go with it.” He turned back to the board: gllox2 + g22cry2 + g22 0z2 + g44 at2 + 2gaxay + 2gl3oxoz + 2gaxat +2g23 Tyaz
“Each of the little g’s, eleven through forty-four are ten terms in four-dimensional space.” Otto put down the marker and turned around again. “You want to keep it simple, there it is.” He glanced at his work. “Tedious, maybe. But, oh boy it’s pretty.”
Nobody said a thing. The approach wasn’t particularly novel, and they probably would have gotten around to it sooner or later. But this was sooner. Rencke had pushed the fast-forward button for them.
“Oh boy,” Otto said darkly. He lowered his head and stalked back to his own office. He’d made a fool of himself again. The back of his neck was hot, and he could feel people looking at him. He could almost hear their whispers. Their laughter.
Somebody was waiting for him in his office. Coming around the corner, he spotted the pair of dark brown walking shoes and tan gabardines in front of one of his monitors. “What do you think you’re doing?” Otto demanded, his anger suddenly flaring. They wouldn’t leave him alone.
Dick Yemm had been staring at the lavender tombstone display. He turned around, a Dutch uncle smile on his face. “Waiting for you.
Where have you been?” He was here with bad news or more advice. Otto wanted neither. “Next door. They were having a problem.” Yemm nodded patiently, as if he knew that there was more, and he was willing to wait for it. He was like a cobra, swaying hypnotically, on the verge of striking at any second. Otto never knew what to do with his hands when Yemm was around: stick them in his pockets, fold them over his chest, clasp them behind his back. Of all the people in the Company, Yemm was the most invulnerable now. He was tough, he was aloof and he had the ear of the boss. He was almost always right there at Mac’s shoulder, watching everybody and everything, almost daring something to happen. “It was an encryption problem. None of your business,” Otto said defensively. Yemm shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he said, in the same patient manner. “But that’s not what I meant.” “Then what?