Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  I sprinted back to the armory and the storerooms beside it and started digging through cardboard boxes and tool kits. I was in luck: not only did I find nails, wire, and duct tape almost immediately, but I also found a box of batteries, which would save me the trouble of jury-rigging a safe voltage from a wall socket. Twenty-eight minutes. I started to breathe more easily.

  I hauled everything back to the garage and tossed it in a pile next to one of the roll-up doors. I sat on the cement floor while I wound the wire, going as fast as possible. Fatigue tugged at my muscles, and my chest and head still ached, though I tried very hard to ignore them.

  My left hand twinged more every time I pulled another coil of wire tight around a nail. The bandage over the burn was caked in dust and starting to come off. I ignored that, too.

  I connected up my batteries to the wire-wrapped nail and stood up. I might need speed, but I needed care more. I cupped the battery and wire-wrapped nail in one hand and brought my first little electromagnet near one of the sensors, testing the field strength very, very slowly.

  Not good enough. I pulled the wire back off the batteries and wrapped another few coils around the nail before holding it up again and judging the slight tug against my fingers. If my magnet was too weak, it wouldn’t do shit.

  But the equal-and-opposite vector diagram lined up this time, telling me I was good to go. I duct-taped my magnet onto the frame in the skinny space between the explosive wiring and the door itself, wedging the nail up right next to the sensor. Then I repeated the process three more times for the other sensors on the door and stood back.

  Time to spare: I had more than nineteen minutes left. My little wire-wrapped nails poked up cheerfully next to the door magnets. I should be able to open it up now.

  As long as I hadn’t missed a sensor or a failsafe.

  I scanned the door one more time, wishing I could see electric and magnetic fields instead of only having their concentric lines spring up mathematically once I felt their strength empirically—what the hell? Who can see EM fields?

  Laughter echoed in my memory with an edge of maliciousness, a scrawny dark-skinned girl arrogantly twirling a voltmeter across her fingers—

  Dammit. Stop wasting time. I rechecked the wiring, trying to estimate a probability calculation of the likelihood I was missing something, but there were too many unknowns. No help; I had to go for it.

  I put my hand on the chain. Took a deep breath. I probably wasn’t about to get blown up.

  Probably.

  What the fuck are you doing?

  For an instant the errant thought felt like another pointless scrap of memory, a voice from the endless past. But no. The vast net of explosives surrounding me suddenly mocked my nonchalance, bearing down on me with the weight of what I didn’t know, of how much I might have missed, that any tiny error would see me blasted into bloody fragments blended with bite-sized concrete. The brutal calculations spun through my senses, extrapolating just how I would die.

  I paused with my right hand gripping the cold links of the door chain, my palm against the metal going slick with sweat. This was a job like any other, I told myself. I always took risks for jobs.

  A job? You’re not even getting paid, and you’re about to blow yourself up? This is ridiculous.

  I had the sneaking suspicion the voice was right, but it was a moot point. I needed a way out of here, and this was a solid one.

  Probably.

  Besides, I thought pettily, if I blew myself up maybe Arthur would realize he should’ve appreciated me.

  The voice of caution—or sanity—in my brain shook its head in disgust and departed.

  I tightened my grip on the chain, and before I could second-guess myself I leaned my whole body weight on it and hauled.

  The door screeched up on its tracks with a violence that made adrenaline spike into my bloodstream. I found my four little electromagnets with my eyes to make sure they’d stayed in place, even though if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t very well have had time to look.

  I pried my damp grip off the chain and staggered back a few steps. A dusty breeze blew in from the alley outside, turning the perspiration on my face clammy. Without warning the urge to vomit redoubled itself, and my legs wanted to melt while my left hand started burning like a motherfucker.

  Apparently my body knew how dumb I was being, even when I didn’t. And it wanted nothing more than to walk right out and not look back.

  But I still had eighteen and a half minutes, and fuck it, the dangerous part was over. I had my exit, and the batteries wouldn’t drain in the time before the building pulverized itself. No reason to waste the opportunity.

  I shoved down the nausea and sprinted back to the computer lab. As I might have expected, all the machines in the outer room had their drives pulled already, and I wasn’t about to touch the one running the detonation code, but I went back into the inner office anyway. This looked like the place the boss had nested; any other information I could use would probably be in here.

  My primary interest was in any pointer that would help me find where they’d taken Halliday. I hadn’t seen any sign of her presence here, but then, I hadn’t gotten a chance to search every room. Or who knows, maybe they’d kept her on the third floor.

  The first file cabinet opened smoothly, unlocked, and it was obvious why—the contents had been pulled and taken, with not even an empty hanging folder left. Dammit. I’d been hoping for a list of shell corporations or real estate holdings, but I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. I checked the rest of the drawers, but they were all empty.

  Fourteen minutes. I turned to the bank of binders on the wall and pulled some off the shelf to drop them open on the desk.

  Math.

  I stared. What the fuck?

  Someone had printed out scores of mathematical journals and put them in binders. It was obvious why these had been left: they weren’t a secret, and would be more than easy to access again, print out, and put in more binders. But why would a gang of AK-wielding bad guys have them?

  They’d wanted Halliday. They’d wanted her proof. But I’d assumed—and still assumed—that they wanted it to make them rich. The math I was looking at wouldn’t do that, not in the least. I was familiar with these proofs, and many of them were abstract enough to be meaningless from any practical standpoint.

  How many people, even smart people, chose to read about the computability of subshifts in their spare time? Who were these guys?

  I spot-checked more of the binders and found the same: the inner office had an entire wall devoted to advancements in modern mathematics. I kept flipping through, trying to see if I could find a pattern in what was being studied here, but the subjects of the papers bounced around without focus, touching on one subfield only to go haring off into another. In a few places penciled notes were scribbled in the margins with connecting ideas, as if the reader was trying to understand the proof, but at least half the notations were clearly clueless, irrelevant scrawls with no understanding of the subject under discussion. Given the breadth of mathematics here, what boggled me wasn’t that someone wouldn’t be able to understand it all, but that a person would be so audacious as to try. Whoever this was had learned some levels of higher math, but was now determined to play at understanding every single corner of the field whether the attempt made sense or not. Halliday had spoken truthfully when she scorned such a thing as being nearly impossible—well, except for someone like me. And it certainly wasn’t working out for the person here.

  The only thing the handwriting did tell me was that the binders were all for one individual: the mathematical quirks of the slants and loops and jagged points among the scratch work told me only one hand was responsible for all of the notes. I tore out a few pages and pocketed them, leaving the rest.

  A little less than eight minutes. I left the office and turned toward the end of the first floor that I hadn’t walked through yet. I was extremely good at keeping track of time; I wasn’t worried about
running things too close.

  I moved down the hallway and through a broad set of double doors to my left.

  “Christ almighty,” I said aloud, and froze where I was. I’d stumbled into their explosives lab. A whole room filled with half-finished contraptions and experiments and tangles of wiring and dynamite and Semtex and who knew what else.

  Holy crap. Someone had a hobby.

  Some of this might get triggered when the building went. I made a mental note to be far enough away to give myself a margin of error and began to edge back toward the door.

  A shadow moved off to my left. I spun on the spot, Colt in hand, and aimed before I saw who was there.

  “Freeze,” said the large, hard-faced woman who had her own handgun pointed directly at my center of mass. “Place the gun on the floor and put your hands on your head. Slowly.”

  Chapter 11

  “I could say the same to you,” I said evenly. The woman’s aiming stance screamed law enforcement, which was both good and bad. She likely didn’t want to kill me, but on the other hand, she’d likely be very happy to put me in prison.

  “Federal agent,” she said, confirming my suspicions. “Gun on the ground. Now.”

  I’d probably have to acquiesce eventually, but I still had six and a half minutes. “NSA?” I hazarded. Goddamn Pilar and Arthur.

  “Put down the weapon,” she repeated. Wow, she really had a one-track mind. “Put it down, and we can talk.”

  “I’d rather talk right here,” I said.

  Her eyes flicked around the bomb lab.

  “I’m not one of the people who built this place,” I assured her. “I’ve been tracking them down, just like you.”

  “Identify yourself.”

  I should have been more suspicious of her sudden willingness to talk, but I missed it. “You first.”

  “Department of Homeland Security. If we’re on the same side, put down the weapon.”

  DHS. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than the NSA; I didn’t know much about federal law enforcement. I also didn’t know how willing she’d be to shoot me if I didn’t comply. “We don’t want to fire guns in here anyway,” I said, shifting my weight so I moved toward the door by an inch. “Who knows what might go off?”

  “I said freeze.”

  I stopped moving.

  “That’s a .45,” the agent observed.

  The non sequitur threw me. “Nineteen-elevens usually are.”

  “I just came from a scene where twelve people were killed with a .45.”

  Technically only seven of them had been killed with the gun. The other five had been napalmed. I swallowed. If they thought I was responsible for a mass murder…I’d whipped the gun up into a two-handed stance, but my left hand suddenly started to go stiff and numb and angry-feeling. I flexed it against the grip, trying not to be too obvious.

  “The work looked like self-defense to me,” said the agent, surprising me. “But it was also a sensational disruption of an active investigation.”

  I licked my lips. “I’m guessing that ‘disruption’ is what led you here.” And through the door I’d conveniently left open for them. I tried to be pissy about that, but if they’d tried to come in another way, I’d be dead, too. “I’m guessing you’d still be chasing a lack of leads without it.”

  “And I’m guessing it’s what tipped them off to leave this place an empty death trap.”

  She had a point. I didn’t like it. “Well, if you saw what happened to those guys, you know how good I am. You probably want to point that thing someplace else.”

  “If I did that, you might turn around,” she said.

  “Put your weapon down slowly and place your hands on your head,” said a male voice behind me.

  Oh, shit. So that was why she’d kept me talking. She had a fucking partner.

  I started to lower the Colt when a click echoed through the room, far too loud in the quiet, tension-filled space.

  My brain identified the sound before I’d finished registering it—some long-ago memory connected immediately, danger, warning, stop, lost!—but the female agent’s reaction confirmed it. Her expression went still and pale and tense and she actually took her eyes off me.

  Her partner had stepped on something that was going to go boom.

  Fuck.

  “Sloppy,” I said aloud.

  “Drop your weapon!” yelled the woman, apparently unable to react to both her partner’s imminent death and me. “Drop your weapon, or I will riddle you with holes! We’ll get the bomb squad in here—”

  “There isn’t time,” I said. “This place is going up in just under five minutes.”

  “Stop it!” cried the woman. “Turn it the fuck off, or you’re not getting out, either!”

  “What? It’s not my bomb!” I protested. “I told you, I’m not with these guys—it was rigged before I got here!” I turned slightly so I could see the partner. He still had his sidearm aimed vaguely in my direction, though now he kept glancing down at his feet, and sweat had popped out all over his pasty face. He was young. Not even thirty, I thought. The junior partner, maybe even a rookie.

  And he was standing on some sort of pressure plate. I scanned the tangle of wires and equipment and explosive material at his feet—I wasn’t sure, but as far as I could tell this was not only live, it was liable to go up if its unhappy victim so much as shifted his weight.

  He was lucky. Most floor triggers didn’t arm the instant you stepped on them; they detonated. This type of device—well, it was all very Hollywood. I recalled my fleeting thought from before, that these bad guys had “cool” as their top priority.

  The female agent was babbling something at me about putting my hands on my head, her weapon still targeting me as she dug out a cell phone.

  “No time,” I said again, suiting my own actions to my words and tucking my Colt back into my belt as the mathematical puzzle crystallized. Weight, pressure—I knew what to do. “And put that away; a cell signal might trigger a detonation in here. Go to the armory—down the hall that way a hundred and twenty-three feet, turn left, and it’s on the right. Bring back as much ammunition as you can carry.”

  Without waiting for a reply I scanned the long lab tables for raw materials. Most of what was left was connected up in ways I didn’t want to disturb, but I spotted an orange brick of Semtex on the floor that had been overlooked in the hasty clear out. I dashed to grab that and a detonator.

  The DHS agent hesitated for much too long and then turned and sprinted through the double doors. I followed suit, slicing at the Semtex with a knife as I ran. I swung through the empty computer lab and back into the inner office, where I mashed a little slice of my plastic explosive onto the large bolt on the squat, heavy floor safe, the kinetic energy and fracture strength overlapping in a fast back-of-the-envelope estimate.

  I pressed the detonator in, got behind the desk, and pushed the button.

  The bang shot bits of metal and flooring and debris against the walls of the office. I came back around to the safe, kicked the remains of the bolt away, and heaved the thing in my arms, the open door banging against my hip. I staggered and almost dropped it—holy crap, the thing was heavy. One hundred and three point eight pounds. Perfect.

  Three minutes and fourteen seconds.

  I shambled down the hallway as fast as my shuffling feet would go without unbalancing the safe. The burn on my left hand felt like I was putting a knife through it where the corner of the thing dug into my palm.

  I made it back to the explosives lab and thunked the safe to the floor as gently as I could, open side up. The DHS woman was only a few seconds after me, pushing a wheeled cart stacked with ammo cans and cases. Good. I’d been afraid they hadn’t left enough behind. Eight grams for a round of 7.62—and multiply—

  “A hundred and seventy-three pounds, right?” I said to the man on the pressure plate, who was sweating so much he looked like he was boiling from the inside. A hundred and seventy-three point…four, I tho
ught, including his gear.

  “Something like that,” he got out. “This won’t work. It’s not as simple as—”

  “Then you have nothing to lose,” I said, starting to tear the ammo cases open.

  Two and a half minutes.

  “I saw some blast shields back there,” I tossed to his partner without stopping what I was doing. “Go grab some.” This time she didn’t hesitate before sprinting away.

  The math here wouldn’t be difficult. Just simple division: weight and volume. And then watch like a hawk to see where my darling victim was putting his weight so I could match it. The massively hard part would be the juggling act itself. And fuck, I’d probably pull a muscle.

  Whatever. Man’s life, and all that. Arthur was a bad influence.

  I heaved over the first ammo case. The dimensions of the fire safe gave it a volume of just over five gallons, which would be enough, barely. I poured the cardboard box of ammunition inside, my senses alert to double-check the weight and keep track of where I was at. The rounds tinkled over each other as they filled the bottom of the safe.

  “I’m telling you, this won’t work,” the male agent said again, his young voice hoarse and dry. “Go. Just go.”

  I ignored him. I was too busy updating the calculations and staying alert for any weight irregularities in the ammunition as it streamed in.

  The other agent returned with a couple of blast shields. “What can I do?”

  “Leave one of those here and get out,” I said, without looking up.

  “Like hell. Cliff—”

  “Do it,” said her partner. “You’re not going to die here too.”

  “Noble of you,” I said, then snapped at her, “Ninety seconds, go.” She drew back and then hoofed it, thank Christ. I concentrated on Cliff, tossing the last few rounds into the safe one by one. Tink. Tink. Tink. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to work. When I say go, you’re going to start transferring your weight off the plate very, very slowly. As smoothly as you can. Got it?”