The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  “I won’t make you guess my age,” she began, opening a gun cabinet behind her, “but my company has been an unofficial contractor of the US government for nearly thirty years.”

  “Christ, you really are off the radar.”

  “Some may question the legality of it, but no one ever questions the great deal of good we’ve done for this country. GSR makes a profit, of course—the Lyons estate could afford to subsidize this operation for only so long. But considering the enormous benefit we’re offering our customers, the US government being one, well, you can’t put a proper price on that. Besides, Lyons is an American above all. Even his cars, as you may have noticed, are domestic.”

  She caught herself and laughed. “Listen to me, boasting about myself in the third-person-male again.”

  “Must get awfully confusing for you.”

  “You can’t imagine.” She locked the cabinet and led him farther down the hall. “It took years of work to get to the point where I could even think about recruiting someone like you. You can guess how, as a twentysomething—a girl, really—having just come into my inheritance and trying to build my own business, how few would look at me as anything other than a prospective intern or date. Even after I’d managed to get meetings with a few scientists at this or that university, they would take one look at me and have to smother a laugh. I had one guy, a very brilliant economist whom I’d admired for years, offer me a job as his secretary. He liked my ‘attention to detail.’ I was furious, of course, but as soon as my head cleared, I decided to give these guys what they wanted. And for my next meeting, I went not as myself but as my own assistant. I discovered that a few were willing to take me seriously if they believed I was working for a man. Same applied to all my meetings in DC.”

  They entered a small break room, outfitted with various appliances, including an espresso machine. “Cappuccino?” she asked.

  “No thank you.”

  “I spent a salt mine on this contraption. You’re having cappuccino.”

  She switched on the machine and rummaged for grounds and milk. “And so Nellie Stone was born—Mr. P. Booth Lyons’s indispensable right hand. I assumed that I would shed the deception, of course, as soon as I got a solid foothold or no longer looked like I was nineteen. But as I discovered, once I had created this persona, it was hard to put her back in the box.”

  “And you could sustain all this for thirty years, on a lie?”

  “Oh, it’s a harmless lie, isn’t it? And few ever questioned my story because I appeared so well informed that I simply must have been sent by someone important. As you pointed out, secrecy is part of my business model, so if anyone came at me with too many questions, I would plead confidentiality and trade secrets. Of course, my boss was always far too busy traveling to actually meet anyone in person—though when ‘he’ was absolutely required, I would send Cavet or some other equally distinguished-looking person in my place. For some reason, I always imagined my fictional Lyons as this patriot, yet vaguely European in bearing and style.”

  Or pretentious, Philip thought of saying but didn’t. He was thinking of that ridiculous condolence letter she’d sent him.

  “The day I came up here,” he said, “why bother with the whole ruse? What was the point of bringing me here if ‘Mr. Lyons’ was never going to show?”

  She pursed her lips in an effort to contain her own amusement. “I knew that if I got you comfortable enough, I could find out whether you knew where your father’s work was hidden. I could find out without Mr. Lyons ever having to arrive.”

  “I told you I didn’t know.”

  “It was slippery of me. But you see, after a while, my twin identities have become second nature. In fact, I rather enjoy being Ms. Stone.” She sighed wistfully as she tamped the espresso grounds. “This was all so much easier pre-internet, of course. These days, everyone demands to know everything instantly.”

  “Did my father know?”

  She nodded. “He was one of the few I told who wasn’t working directly for me. It was a risk, but I loved his work, and I trusted him. He, unfortunately, in the end, didn’t trust me and backed out of our agreement.”

  “By dying, you mean.”

  “By betraying our understanding,” she said coldly. “I do have a business to run.”

  He shouted above the steaming milk. “How can you be sure I’ll keep your secret?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s time for Ms. Stone to retire. Besides, gone are the days when she could use her feminine charms to get what she wanted. That kind of cheap persuasion doesn’t work for me like it once did.” She poured the espresso and foam into two cups. “Funny, that may be the last time I tell that story to anyone. I hope it clears everything up.”

  “Well, not everything.”

  “We’ll get to your father’s work soon enough,” she said, handing him his cappuccino. “What did you make of Cavet?”

  He looked down at his cup, at the Mandelbrot pattern she had fashioned in the foam. “What about him?”

  “I recruited him from the London School of Economics in the nineties, where he was doing some startling work on the fractal nature of African villages. Before Cavet, no one had bothered to look at the architecture of these settlements from above. He realized that they are remarkably self-similar, the form of the entire village repeated in the form of the neighborhood, the block, the house—”

  “I’m familiar with how fractals work.”

  She ignored him and continued. “Turns out his research applied not only to villages in Africa but also to settlements all over the world. If one knows what the outside of a town looks like, one can anticipate the interior. The military has been using Cavet’s techniques in the Middle East for years, when soldiers enter areas without satellite images.”

  “But fractals don’t get you killed,” Philip said. “Guns and bombs do.”

  “Exactly,” she said with emphasis. “Death is unexpected, isn’t it, no matter how well we plan for it? Cavet’s method is merely a tool. And where his methods end, your father’s work begins.”

  She signaled Philip back into the hallway. Drinks in hand, they clicked down the tile to another set of double doors, where Nellie turned to him with a barely suppressed smile. “I guess I didn’t realize how much I was looking forward to showing you this.”

  “His mathematics, you mean.”

  She nodded. “Can you think of anything more exhilarating than the realization that the future is, in fact, knowable?”

  And with that, she pushed open the doors.

  * * *

  Some time later, Philip sat in a leather bucket chair, picking his way through figures on a wall. He was aware of Nellie breathing in the darkness beside him, her respirations loud enough to make him feel as if his own breathing had stopped.

  The equation was of some length—so long, in fact, that its projected image spilled from the wall onto the concrete floor. Was his heart still beating? He couldn’t feel it. It was as if his body had gone into a kind of torpor so that his brain alone could barrel ahead. It was a familiar sensation that he’d experienced the few times he had a particularly exhilarating idea in his own work. At such moments, he imagined that his brain was approaching the speed of light, while the variables in front of him slowed to a standstill.

  It might have been five minutes since Nellie had flicked on the projector, or it might have been twenty, but he had needed only a few seconds to identify the equation as his father’s. It bore all of the signature refinement, the dedication to the graceful, the spare, the clean-swept. But here and there, erupting out of tidy, almost unassuming passages, was a mathematics of such delight and strangeness that it seemed to Philip to be almost a new kind of logic, created elsewhere, extragalactically—as if Isaac Severy had been chosen to introduce this brand of math to Earth. Even if this equation meant nothing, even if it were just delirious ramblings, it was beautiful.

  But toward the end of the equation, something happened. The numbers took a sharp t
urn, as if rebelling, and the accompanying symbols seemed to stick out their Greek tongues. Had he missed something? Was this, in fact, over his head? Bewildered, Philip asked Nellie to scroll back to the beginning.

  She didn’t seem to register his confusion.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” she asked in the same way she had about the lioness trophy in her office. “Of course,” she continued, “I’m no mathematician. I had to have one of my guys explain the more arcane pieces. But then it was this feeling of exaltation, like a portal opening—”

  “Where did you say you found this?” he asked casually.

  “I didn’t say.”

  “He must have hidden it well.”

  “Not as well as you’d think,” she said. “It was, however, password protected. It took nearly a week to crack.”

  “Let me guess, he left the password hidden in plain sight?”

  A pause. “How did you know?”

  “Because he can’t help himself.”

  “It was a string of numbers,” she explained, “left encoded in a simple game of checkers.”

  He smiled. “Sounds about right.” Turning back to the equation, Philip said, “I would need more time, of course. To fully process this.”

  “You can sit here as long as you like; memorize the thing if you want. I won’t be able to give you a copy, you understand.”

  “Not until I agree to work for you?”

  “You must get tired of my conditions.”

  Philip started to read the equation again from the beginning but stopped when the symbols began to wag their tongues again. He closed his eyes. Was he really too dim to process this? Is that what it had come to? “Brain rot,” he could hear his father hissing. But that’s not what was bothering him.

  Why had Isaac kept this beautiful math a secret from him?

  Philip started to speak, but he knew that if he continued, he would start sobbing. Why not break down right there? Go ahead, curl up in this very expensive chair and cry like a goddamn infant. It seemed like the perfect response to his father’s treachery, to his inability to share his work with his son, his favorite child. Why hadn’t he trusted him? Hadn’t Philip shared everything with his father, told him absolutely everything that was going on in his head? As he asked these questions, his mind conjured up Isaac’s cruel response: “Let’s face it, Philip, it’s been some time since you’ve produced good ideas in your own field. You didn’t need the distraction. You may have been remarkable once, but . . .”

  Remarkable. There was that word again.

  A squeak of impatience from Nellie’s chair. “Did you say something?”

  “I was thinking,” Philip managed dispassionately. “This could be a lot of lovely nothing.”

  She pulled her chair close. “Let’s just assume for a second it is something. And if it were something, what might that be?”

  “It’s not a traffic equation.”

  “No? How can you tell?”

  “From the bits I’ve seen of my father’s traffic project, the math is different. It’s difficult to explain.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You already know. Or you wouldn’t be swaggering around like you’ve won a prize.”

  “Say it, Philip. Say what it is.” The glow from the projection made her eyes almost manic. He had to look away.

  “It’s a predictive equation.”

  “Don’t be vague. What kind?”

  Somehow, Philip had known what kind of equation it was the moment she had switched on the projector. Perhaps for the past week, his subconscious had been working on the problem of his father’s obsessive newspaper collection. Isaac had accumulated those clippings for decades, yet the stockpile never found its way into his mathematics—at least, not publicly. But Philip knew his father enough to see that he wouldn’t have wasted his time on such a collection had it not held the possibility of a greater purpose. An end point. Isaac Severy had been preoccupied with death to the extreme.

  “It’s a death oracle, or so you’re hoping,” he said. “You may as well name it something fancy.”

  “You’re still being vague.”

  A sharp chill ran up his back. All those clippings had been of fatal accidents, but the ones his father had flagged in Sharpie had been particularly suspicious: a woman whose car brakes failed; an abusive father trapped in a discarded refrigerator while his family was away; a man who accidentally shot his fiancée while cleaning his gun. It hadn’t been mundane accidents that had fascinated his father but instead the blurred line between chance and vicious intent, between a genuine accident and a perceived one. This was what Isaac had been attempting to isolate.

  “It’s more than just death,” Philip said at last. “The math indicates intent.” He could sense Nellie beaming beside him, willing him to continue. “Homicide prediction in the greater LA area.”

  “Can you believe you just said that?” She sounded as if she were about to yank him out of his chair and waltz him around the room. “To think what we could have done with this years ago! Can you imagine how it would have been one fateful morning in September to see a map of Manhattan’s financial district light up? Or that field in Pennsylvania? Or London? Madrid? What about the Paris attacks two days ago?”

  “If such an equation were possible.”

  “If? Open your eyes.”

  “Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s clearly about control.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s my father’s attempt to control the uncontrollable, or at least predict it. As if that could have saved my brother somehow—” He stopped himself, not because he didn’t want to discuss his family history with Nellie but because he wasn’t sure that Isaac’s motivations had anything to do with saving lives. As with most everything in his father’s career, hadn’t he done it for the thrill of discovery? Isn’t that why Philip had chosen theoretical physics? How he wished his father could have shared the math that lay in front of him now—explained to him its wonders and nuances—but Philip had been robbed of that. He fought back against a renewed wave of anger and grief.

  “The best inventions are borne out of strife, Philip.” Nellie leaned back in her chair. “Why do you think I built this company? Because I’m an innately ambitious person, or because I feel compelled to correct some intolerable imbalance from my past?”

  “I wouldn’t attempt to understand your motives, Nellie. But I promise to read your memoirs.”

  “You ready to move on?” she asked.

  With a click of a button, the numbers vanished along with their wagging tongues, and in their place appeared a map of Los Angeles County, perforated with colored dots. Each one held a string of numbers: time code.

  “You created this from the equation?”

  “Oh, no. We’re not that far along yet. Your father left this for us. A gift.”

  “For you to steal.”

  “For us to find,” she corrected him. “The dots are for the month of November. They stop after that. The green ones have been confirmed by us; blue, unconfirmed.”

  “And you’re saying this actually works?” As Philip heard himself pose this question, he could suddenly see a terrible future spinning out before him, one in which control and certainty ruled every aspect of their lives. He shuddered.

  “It works exceedingly better than the LAPD’s medieval attempts at crime forecasting. We still have work to do, of course.”

  “And the red?” He silently counted nine red dots.

  “Those are happening today.”

  “How are you verifying these?”

  “Police scanners, blotters, internet, newspapers. But often we need to verify them on the scene. That’s when I send someone. I believe you know him.”

  “Someone I know is working on this?”

  She smiled. “When you join us, I will happily reveal his identity.”

  He shifted in his chair, checking his mental Rolodex for a possible traitor.

  Nellie flicked a laser pen at points a
round the city. “The Whittier dot has a time code of early this morning, and Culver City”—she glanced at her phone—“twenty minutes ago. Which, incidentally, my guy has just confirmed. A domestic murder. Very sad.”

  Philip stared, stunned by her nonchalance. “If these dots are accurate, if people are going to die, why not do something about it?”

  “What do you suggest we do? Run around the city playing superhero?”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t be funny.” Nellie clicked off her laser pen. “Our task now is to verify the equation’s power and limits. Only then can we begin to decide what to do with the information.”

  Philip squinted at the map, straining to read the dots. “Tell that to the person who’s going to die downtown this evening. Or the one this afternoon in the Angeles National Forest.”

  “I should add,” she said, ignoring his last remark, “that your father distinguished murders from homicides. All murders are homicides, but not necessarily the reverse. Murder requires intent, of course, while homicides can include involuntary manslaughter. Drunk driving, for instance, doesn’t figure into Isaac’s equation. In the end, it really comes down to intent.”

  “And suicides?”

  “Ah,” she said. “In order to create a true murder map, your father tried his best to cancel them out. Not that a suicide map wouldn’t be useful on its own, but he wanted the option to filter them. Unfortunately, he never got to it.”

  “So his equation can’t tell the difference?”

  Nellie shook her head. “When it comes to a distinction between the two, the equation is blind.” She peered at the map. “But then, suicide is murder, isn’t it? It’s in the etymology of the word, after all.”

  He frowned. “Then this means that my father’s own—”

  “Yes,” she said. For the first time that day, he detected something in her voice that sounded close to regret: “It means that Isaac’s own death was predicted by the equation.”

  Philip was silent for a moment as he tried to reconcile all he knew of his father—and his apparent suicide—with this new information. Just as an unsettling scenario opened up before him, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He saw that he had somehow missed three calls, one from the house and two from his sister-in-law’s cell phone.