Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  I got my foot down on top of Arthur’s, and he tried to get out from behind me, but I just ended up sitting half on top of him. It would have to do. I glanced in the rear view mirror—it wasn’t hard to spot the car that had nailed us. A black SUV with its front end smashed in careened dementedly through traffic, a deranged monster set on plowing through anything to get to its prey.

  “Hang on!” I shouted.

  Possibilities. Probabilities.

  The quickest way to lose them would be to leap the cement median—nothing to it, just hit the correct angle, bam—and zip down the busy freeway in the opposite direction. We’d get away free and clear, but I knew from experience that a lot of drivers would spin out of control trying to avoid me, completely ignorant of the fact that I was perfectly well able to avoid them. I might not lose sleep over the collateral damage, but Arthur was in the car, and he definitely would.

  If I was looking for as few civilian casualties as possible, that meant getting off the freeway now.

  I glanced to the right, the cars overtaken in my vision by their velocity vectors, arrows of speed screaming down the lanes. I yanked the emergency brake to lock us up and spun the wheel, sending the car into a sideways skid again across three lanes of full-speed traffic like we were Super Frogger, the cars just missing us as they zipped by. Horns blared, but I didn’t hear any other crashes. I whipped the wheel the other way to seesaw Arthur’s sedan onto the exit ramp, my mind already racing ahead. The freeway had been okay, but LA traffic isn’t a possibility; it’s an inevitability. Once I hit the streets I might have a parking lot to deal with.

  I glanced in the rear view again. The SUV was swerving onto the ramp after us, and someone was leaning out the window with, of all things, a grenade launcher.

  What. The. Fuck.

  Options, options—where were we in the city? I hadn’t been paying much attention, but I briefly remembered seeing signs for the 5…

  The river. We could make it to the river.

  We hit the end of the exit ramp and I aimed for the edge of the road, thanking fate that Arthur had been driving an older tank of a sedan. I wrenched the wheel as I felt the jaw-jolting bump of the curb and spun us up on two wheels, slamming the car onto its left side as we slued around the backlog at the end of the ramp and onto the street. It was jammed, as expected, but we flew through the intersection and I pointed the car at the sidewalk, our right two wheels walloping down onto it so we were straddling the curb. Arthur grunted behind me and people screamed outside. I laid on the horn and popped the accelerator to jump the curb completely and come off the road into a car park.

  We were in some sort of industrial area. I zigged through the rows of parked vehicles trying to get us westward—it couldn’t be far now. Another glance at the mirror showed the SUV had been slowed by the intersection, but it was still dogging us, their gunner trying to line up a shot with the freaking grenade launcher—

  I hit a bank of railroad tracks and we thumped over them, the sedan almost shaking loose from its frame, and then the river was ahead.

  During summer, the Los Angeles River can only be called that charitably. In the midst of the high heat it’s a trickle of water through a wide, high-walled concrete ditch; instead of a river it looks more like something that was built for an industrial park to keep a thin stream of toxic waste away from contaminating anything.

  I jammed my foot down on the gas pedal until it hit the floor, and we sailed off the high bank of the concrete trench. The car’s wheels spun uselessly in the moment of weightlessness before gravity took hold, and then we belly-flopped on all four wheels into the bare cement at the bottom of the channel.

  I’d been running stress calculations, but there was some guesswork here. I didn’t know enough about Arthur’s car, and it wasn’t as if I could stop to look under the hood. Fortunately, the tough beast of a sedan took off like a shot, and I floored it northward along the river. I was still half-pressed against Arthur behind me; I could feel him shifting and struggling to hang on.

  Behind us, the SUV flew out onto the edge, and couldn’t stop in time. Whoever was at the wheel made the idiot decision of trying to brake, and the ponderous vehicle flipped up over into a nosedive and plunged headfirst into very unforgiving cement.

  The person with the grenade launcher must have thought fast—about to die a flesh-crunching death, he still managed to aim and pull the trigger.

  Grenades aren’t quite as fast as bullets. I had a precious millisecond to see just how it was going to impact us. I saw the explosion, shock waves, concussion, outlined in concentric circles of force like it was a diagram on a map of the impact. I saw the overlapping patterns of death depending on what type of grenade it was, and how far we would have to move to be outside the radius of danger.

  Saw the infinite options of how I could move the car in the split second I had, and that none of them would be enough.

  I jerked the wheel one last time and bounced us into the wall of the concrete channel. And then fell as the car flipped.

  Metal screamed and glass shattered as the car skidded up onto its left side and screeched down the riverbed. I clung to the steering column like a monkey to avoid being scraped off with the side panels; behind me, Arthur jammed his fists against the roof.

  The grenade hit.

  I’d mooned it with the bottom of the car to protect us. The impact exploded against the river wall and the concussion cannonballed into our undercarriage—

  —with way, way, way more force than I’d anticipated. Even with the most generous estimates. Even for a high-explosive round.

  The shape of the blast imprinted itself mathematically in my brain as it clipped the sedan and slammed us into a barrel roll. But the equations didn’t do me any good. I found fancy ways to obey the laws of physics; I couldn’t rewrite them.

  A rolling car is sheer mass. So massive its momentum can’t be stopped, so massive the force of gravity smashes it into the earth like a rag doll, so massive that a person, no matter how strong or skilled or mathematically-knowledgeable—a person couldn’t stop it. The sides and top of the car imploded alternately as we crashed into the concrete again and again, and there was nothing I could do. I tried to brace myself but only managed a local optimum—I saved myself from being crushed to death but didn’t avoid a three-hundred-sixty degree beating by twisting, reaching metal.

  The car teetered in what I knew would be its last roll, balancing on its side in an infinite moment of indecision, and then pancaked over onto its roof.

  My body smacked down into concrete and metal and glass in the twisted hole where the windshield had been, and everything stopped.

  My ears rang in the silence. I tried to roll over, glass crunching beneath me. Arthur was upside down, hanging from his seatbelt, blood smeared across his skin from minor cuts but no major injuries visible. He was scrambling at the seatbelt release, yelling something. Yelling my name.

  “Hey,” I said. “Look at that. I saved us.” I passed out.

  Chapter 4

  “Hey, girl. You with me for real this time?”

  I batted weakly at the wet cloth being dabbed against my face. “I was going to be that,” I slurred.

  “Russell? You was gonna be what?”

  I came more fully awake and tried to sit up. The room spun immediately. Lines of space and time crisscrossed each other in sick, twisted, impossible ways. I had no warning before I was turning to the side and vomiting up every meal I’d ever eaten, and then vomiting up stomach lining. At least, that was how it felt.

  “Whoa! Whoa, sweetheart. Lie back down.” I kept my eyes shut, listening to Arthur’s voice as his hands guided me. The stench of sick filled the air. “I’ll clean up. Lie still for a touch.”

  I heard him start moving around and cautiously tried cracking my eyes open again. Everything was still squiggly and strange, but at least it wasn’t so wrong anymore. I was lying on a pallet in the corner of some sort of empty industrial warehouse.

  A
rthur finished what he was doing and came back; he supported my head and tilted a cup of water against my mouth. “Easy, girlfriend. Take it easy.”

  I took a few sips and then pushed it away. “Status.”

  “Got you out, grabbed another car, got you back here. Ain’t seen no one on our tail.”

  God bless bad LA traffic and horrible police response times. “Where are we?”

  “Bolt hole. Mine.”

  “Wait, since when do you have bolt holes?” I’d been after Arthur to keep safe houses for years; I was shocked he might’ve actually listened to me. He tended to think I was paranoid.

  Arthur cleared his throat. “Just the one.”

  “Thank Christ,” I grumbled. “See? I told you so. It pays to be prepared.”

  “Stop gloating.”

  “Fine. What about Halliday?”

  “I reached her. Told her to lie low. She’s going to her friend’s, Dr. Martinez’s—says she’s safe.”

  “Good.” Well, unless Dr. Martinez was the one responsible for all this, I reminded myself. Fuck. I pushed my fingers against my throbbing temples. The violence was escalating so quickly…“Why wouldn’t they have just killed Halliday in the first place?”

  Arthur flinched. “From what you said about deciphering the math, maybe they knew they might need her. ’Sides, the authorities would investigate a murder. They must’ve figured intimidation would work better.”

  “And if they kill us, it doesn’t connect back to Halliday if no one knows about the proof, because there are a thousand other good reasons people might want one of us dead. Plus maybe killing us intimidates her more,” I said, thinking aloud. A ploy like that could have worked out very well for them, if they hadn’t failed at the killing-us part. “How did they even know she talked to us?”

  “Ain’t no stretch to think they’re watching her. They track my license plate, find out I’m a PI…”

  “Then they figure they’ll knock you off, and she’ll be real reluctant to hire anyone else,” I finished. I pushed myself up into a sitting position, and my stomach bucked and heaved again. I swallowed hard against it and almost choked. Stupid body and its stupid limitations. “We should go pick her up,” I said.

  “Was just waiting on you. You good?”

  I wasn’t, really—every time I tried to hang onto a coherent thought, my brain got all loopy, as if it wanted to do what my stomach had done. Concussion, a pretty bad one. A lot of other things wanted to hurt as well; I pushed it all away and stood, steadfastly ignoring the way the world wobbled. “I’m always good. Let’s go. Hey, you have an unburned phone?”

  Arthur fished a disposable out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Talked to Checker already. I think I was able to explain the gist. He’s looking into what he can.”

  Maybe someone had left electronic fingerprints on Halliday’s emails or something. Worth a shot. “You still want to crime-scene her house?”

  He hesitated. “Might be too dangerous now. Let’s get Sonya safe first; then we can figure out what next.”

  Two cars were parked inside the warehouse—one, presumably, the stolen car that had gotten us here (I started making mental bets on whether Arthur would find its owner and apologize afterward), and the second a boxy old compact. I reached for the driver’s door.

  “Not a chance,” said Arthur. “You’re concussed.”

  “I’m still the better driver.”

  He squinted at me. “You gonna be making calls?”

  Jesus, my head was pounding enough already without him arguing with me. “Yes, and I’ll still be the better driver. What if they try to run us off the road again?”

  “And what if the cops see you on the phone? This car ain’t registered. Can’t get stopped.”

  I felt a brief moment of pleasure at Arthur’s law-breaking—my paranoia was rubbing off on him; excellent—but it was eclipsed by frustration. “We’re not going to get stopped. I’ve never been pulled over for that.”

  “You want to take the risk?”

  “You want to take the risk we get attacked again?”

  A muscle in Arthur’s jaw twitched. “Speakerphone, then,” he said, and went around to the passenger side.

  “Fine,” I groused.

  I dialed Checker as soon as I figured out which way I was going and manhandled the clunky old car onto the freeway. Arthur kept glancing over at the speedometer, but for once he didn’t tell me to slow down—probably too worried about his friend.

  Checker picked up on the first ring. “Arthur?”

  “It’s Cas.”

  “Cas! Are you okay? Arthur said—”

  “I’m fine,” I cut in. “Arthur gave you the lowdown on what’s going on?”

  “Uh, yeah. And holy crap. I’m buying gold as we speak.”

  “Hopefully it won’t get that far. Have you found anything?”

  “A little,” he answered. “The professor’s home and work computers were both woefully insecure, despite the fact that she works in cryptography—shocking, I tell you. I read through all her recent communications—”

  Arthur made an uncomfortable noise.

  “Was that Arthur?”

  “Yeah, you’re on speaker,” I said apologetically.

  “Right,” said Checker. “Uh. Sorry, Arthur—we need the intel, right?”

  “Find anything?” said Arthur unhappily.

  “Aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure whoever stole her notes cloned her hard drives, because it would be easy so why not do it, yes, I did. First of all, the note she showed you guys was emailed to her first, probably right after the robbery.”

  “She didn’t mention that,” I said.

  “Because she didn’t see it. It went to spam. That’s probably why she didn’t get the note until the next day.”

  Hmm. How had the perpetrators known their email had gotten spammed? Maybe they’d left spyware on her computer. It didn’t seem likely they would’ve broken back into her office unless they’d known they needed to.

  “Also, you know the email she sent to her friend at the NSA?” Checker continued. “The reason she approached him wasn’t that she was robbed. She started talking to him about the proof a few weeks ago, way before the burglary. I’m guessing she thought to start checking in with him about NSA possibilities after she finished the proof, but maybe she wanted to sit on the result for a little while before turning it over. Point is, that’s a pretty big coincidence.”

  “What is?” I said.

  “The timing,” said Arthur. “You think the NSA stole her proof?”

  “I think the NSA is probably listening in on this conversation, but I don’t think they’d try to run you off the road with military hardware,” said Checker. “No, I think someone else read that email and drew the right conclusion. She wasn’t talking about this proof to anyone else, right? So how did the thieves know about it? As sexy as higher math can be, somehow I doubt they were randomly spying on a theoretical mathematician just in case she discovered something with applications.”

  “We should talk to her NSA friend,” said Arthur.

  “How do we do that without giving Halliday away?” I asked.

  “Good point,” said Arthur. “I’ll think about it. Meantime, can you do a deep background on the friend?” he asked Checker. “And find out who might’ve had access to Sonya’s emails?”

  “Already on it.”

  “Hey, Checker,” I said, “If you had her proof—how long would it take you to make it start working for you?”

  “You mean, how long to code it into an algorithm?” Checker ruminated for a few seconds. “Oh, geez. Um…it sounds like it’s pretty long, so even if I managed to understand it—and there’s also the issue of figuring out the best way to attack—I’d say weeks, at least. Maybe longer.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Except not,” Checker contradicted. “Because, seriously, what’s our plan here? They have the data. They’ve probably made digital copies of all her notes by now
, whether or not they understand the proof. Even if we get the original work back, we can’t ever be sure we’ve recovered the actual knowledge—in fact, we can be pretty sure we haven’t.”

  “One step at a time,” said Arthur. “Let’s figure out who has it.”

  “Well, Pilar’s on her way over here; we’re going to fine-tooth all the data we can get our hands on.” Pilar was Arthur and Checker’s office manager, and a damn good researcher, even if she didn’t tear through firewalls like tissue paper the way Checker did. “We’ll find out who’s behind this, Arthur. I promise.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Maybe you guys should go somewhere else. If they figured out who Arthur is, they might come after you.”

  “Unlikely,” said Checker after a heartbeat. “I’m not digitally connected to Arthur or the business at all. I keep that wiped clean.”

  “You do?” I said.

  “Yeah. Arthur has enough interactions with, uh, unsavory people that it just seemed best for all concerned. I mean, most people who know me personally know I work with Arthur, but anyone who can make the connection in the other direction is probably someone I’d have to go off the grid to be sure of avoiding, and unless we know there’s a danger I think it’s more important right now that I have access to all my equipment. And I doubt I’d be anyone’s first priority if they wanted to…uh…”

  “If they wanted to get to me,” said Arthur heavily.

  “I’m keeping tabs,” Checker assured him. “On everyone—uh—you know. I’m tracking Professor Sonya’s phone, too. She’s been staying put.”

  “Good. Thanks,” said Arthur.

  “I do absolutely promise I’ll run away if it looks like there’s going to be any danger to us, though—running away is an excellent and noble option that you two should try more often. Oh—Pilar’s here. Anything else? If not, we’ll get to it.”

  “Call us if you find anything,” I said.

  “Of course I will.” He hesitated. “Hey. Arthur.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but this might be a job for the authorities. Especially since the bad guys probably aren’t going to be able to make good on the note’s threat yet. I know you want to protect the professor and all, but an agency like the NSA would have resources we can only dream of, and they’d be able to start putting safeguards in place, at least for the most sensitive government systems. I might like to say I favor anarchy, but when actually faced with the prospect of an economic meltdown—”