Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  I forced everything back in its compartmentalized box, ignoring the edges and corners that stuck out jaggedly and jammed against the lid I tried to slam on them, and gave Checker the rundown of the past few hours. He searched for any security footage around Zhang’s house immediately, but there was no sign of Dr. Martinez. Either she’d been smart or she’d been lucky—either way, it made things easier for Arthur and his story.

  “They’re probably going to drill you on the timeline,” said Checker. “To make sure you and Arthur and Professor Sonya all match. Make sure you’re clear on any time you had a phone call with anyone and on when you met up with Arthur, and on whatever you might have witnessed. I’ll help you. Cas?”

  “Yeah.” I pulled my jacket tighter around me. My clothes were still wet from the sprinklers. “Yeah. Okay.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Arthur’s story worked—well, at least insofar as the Feds eventually decided I didn’t know anything of value. They arrested Dr. Zhang, but Arthur had gotten the party line to him before turning him over, and he stuck to that story like gangbusters. The mess quickly evolved into a staring match between Halliday and the Feds, with her refusing to rewrite her proof again unless they let him off, and them disinclined to agree this time.

  I didn’t care. I stayed as far away from the safe house as possible.

  I thought about walking off this endless job entirely—quitting, letting Arthur keep looking into Martinez on his own if he wanted to bend over backward for Halliday. She didn’t want the damn proof back anyway, and finding someone only to demand an explanation and then possibly help hide her from the federal government—pro bono, no less—sounded like the most pointless commission ever. But every time I thought about quitting, a nudge in my brain reminded me exactly what would happen the moment I stopped working.

  This wasn’t going to be like most spans of unemployment, which I dreaded only for their unfocused, alcohol-soaked monotony. This time…

  This time, I was afraid. Afraid of what would happen once I lost the focus of a job. Afraid of what my own brain would do.

  I kept working.

  Checker and I had fallen into a fragile truce; we kept our conversations strictly to the case and never strayed off it. But the days stretched into weeks with no sign of Martinez—it was as if she’d disappeared off the face of the earth. I settled into a cycle of working myself to exhaustion with Checker in the Hole and then dropping into sleep on his couch when my muscles wouldn’t support me anymore. The extreme fatigue didn’t stop the nightmares, which, if anything, had worsened—cluttered with dangerous silhouettes and a horrible sense of urgency and failure, and a dark man I didn’t recognize who appeared over and over to plead: Stop, Cassandra, stop, you have to stop.

  It wasn’t restful.

  Arthur eventually felt safe enough to search Martinez’s apartment and office. He brought me whatever of her work he could find—it wasn’t much, and it only took me a few glances through to see it was all old notes, research that had gone circular. Any true breakthroughs we found were ones Martinez had already published.

  “Looks like she had stuff missing,” Arthur said, standing behind me at Checker’s kitchen table where we’d spread out her notes. “Maybe she took the current stuff with her.”

  “Maybe she’s an old, washed-up mathematician who can’t do her own research anymore, so she started stealing other people’s,” I said, leafing through a stack of clearly recreational notebooks. Martinez had apparently enjoyed playing cryptographic games with people—long strings of pattern matching broke down into keys pages later, and she had one notebook of zany code ideas and another filled with sheets of letters. I strongly suspected that last one was a booklet of one-time pads, cryptographic keys of perfect security to be shared between only two people.

  Arthur watched as I flipped. After a few minutes he dug into his pocket and held out a sheet of white paper that had been folded so many times it had been creased into a tiny square. “Did also find this on the table. It’s a note to Sonya.”

  I unfolded it. Martinez’s handwriting was cramped and meandering; she didn’t stay to horizontal lines but wrote in slanting angles and curled around the edges of the paper. My dear Sonya, the note began. I have done a terrible thing…I destroyed everything you have worked for. The world is dust, I made mathematics dust, your mathematics, our mathematics…I wish I knew whether you could forgive me. I do not know if I will be able to forgive myself. ‘Forgiveness’ is such an emotional term, is it not? When I say I do not know if I will be able to forgive myself, I mean that in the most literal terms, as I do not know if ‘forgiveness’ is the right word: I am lacking definitions, and I find myself lost. But I digress…perhaps I can still apologize in the absence of fault, that I broke your world. I am sorry.

  The note rambled on in much the same vein, without paragraph breaks, until it ran itself up against the bottom corner of the page. There it was signed, With love, also ill-defined but here applicable by hypothesis, Rita.

  “Can’t make head or tails of most of it, but sounds like she’s sorry,” said Arthur. “You think she ain’t mean to do nothing with Sonya’s proof after all?”

  “Or she already did it, and that’s why she’s apologizing,” I pointed out. “It could be we just haven’t seen the fallout yet.”

  He sighed heavily and folded the note back up to tuck in a pocket. “I’ll bring it to Sonya.” He turned to go, then came back and leaned on the table. “Do me a favor?”

  “I thought I was already doing you one,” I said, not entirely without bitterness. “Isn’t this whole job a favor?”

  He huffed out a breath. “Talk to Checker?”

  Fury clawed up in me, shockingly hot, clogging my head until my scalp prickled with it.

  Arthur twitched back. “Not about that, Russell. Not talking about you. I swear.”

  I clamped my jaw down on what I had been about to say. “What, then?” I growled through my teeth.

  Arthur hesitated, his fingers pressing against the laminated pine of the tabletop. “This thing with the Lancer. Was hard on him.”

  “It was hard on him?” I repeated. “Excuse me, was he shot at and locked up and also almost blown to pieces three separate times?”

  “He could use a friend, ’s all I’m saying.” He made a vague gesture and headed out the door.

  I turned and leaned my head against the wall. Arthur had too high expectations of me, as always. I wasn’t in any condition to be a friend to anyone. I’d never been very good at being a friend to anyone.

  Scraps of memory sparked from the past few weeks. Checker updating me on Interpol’s reports. Checker asking oblique questions about the explosives lab I’d seen. Checker telling me he’d checked and that the Lancer had submitted dozens of fallacious proofs of the P versus NP problem—all with different conclusions—to various places, thus confirming his obsession.

  I’d figured the updates were just because he was curious, or keeping tabs for us, as he did. Or, hell, I hadn’t figured at all—I hadn’t even thought about it.

  Fuck. I pushed off the wall and went out to the Hole.

  “Hey, Cas.” Checker had dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was shaggy and spiky with sweat. I hadn’t noticed before now, but he’d been matching me hour for hour in our push to find Martinez. And it wasn’t like I was getting a healthy amount of sleep.

  I glanced over his shoulder, and he blanked the screen, asking, “What’d Arthur say?”

  “Eastern Europe.” I responded to what I’d seen him looking at instead of the question. “There’s no reason to think Martinez is there. Arthur’s right; you’re still looking for the Lancer.”

  He was silent for a moment. “So what if I am? He’s dangerous. He very well might come after you and Professor Sonya again.”

  Far too slowly, shreds of a conversation with Pilar came back to me. It felt as if I was dredging them up from a lifetime ago. “The Lancer,” I said. “Or…the little guy blowing up all the
buildings. D.J. You went up against them before?”

  Checker’s hand froze on his mouse. “Who?”

  “The Lancer had a pyro expert. Short, black, rotund, way too excited about dynamite. Someone you know?”

  Checker still hadn’t moved. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “It, uh, it slipped my mind.” I swallowed. Guilt nibbled at me. I had the distinct impression Checker had tried to say something to me about this before, and Pilar certainly had, and I…well, it somehow never occurred to me that I should try to be a friend back. “Do you need a hand? We’re not making much headway on Martinez; if you want to—”

  Checker moved his hands too quickly, and the keyboard banged against the desktop. “Did Arthur put you up to this?”

  “What? No!” I rewound what I had already let slip. “Well, he said—”

  “God, typical.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Arthur and his goddamn need to fix everything.”

  I was confused. And stung. “If you need help—”

  “Arthur thinks if we all share and bond we’ll end up singing kumbaya and it will all be hunky-dory,” Checker interrupted loudly. He was staring at his hands, not looking at me. “Cas, I don’t know who you are, and that wouldn’t be such a problem, except you don’t know who you are, and that scares the ever-living shit out of me.”

  I took a step back.

  “Something happened to you, and we have no idea what, or—for all we know you could be a ticking time bomb. We have no idea whether—”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “You can’t tell me you know every little thing that has ever affected you—and if we’re talking about Pithica, Arthur was just as much—”

  “I’m not done! This isn’t about me being afraid for me, or for Arthur, or for anyone else, even though God knows I am. I’m afraid for you, Cas. Can you understand that? At all? You can’t ask me to be friends with you and watch you ignore this!”

  “Who said you have to?” The words were out before I could think about them, ugly and saw-toothed. “If you don’t like being friends with me, fine. No one’s forcing you.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Cas.” He sounded bitter and frayed and exhausted. “Do you even know why you can do what you do? You are not possible. And you can’t remember why, or how you ended up here, or if there’s any sort of reason tangled up with you shooting people without asking questions or having a drug and alcohol dependence Bane would envy—”

  “If you have a problem with the way I do things—”

  “You should have a problem with the way you do things! Or at least with the fact that you have no idea why you do them! What are you going to do, hop from job to job and grab for more dangerous fixes until you get killed doing one or the other? Is that your goal in life?”

  My fists were clenched so hard my fingernails stabbed into my palms. “Who asked you? Maybe I like my life just the way it is!”

  “And maybe whatever made you lose your memory has something to do with why you can’t do math anymore!”

  Everything stopped. The retort I had been about to spit curdled and choked me. Checker’s words hung in the air, echoing.

  He took a deep breath, straightening and blinking rapidly as if he was only just hearing what he’d said. But he set his jaw and let the words stand, meeting my eyes defiantly.

  “What did you say?” I whispered finally. Dangerously.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. But—”

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. I banged out of the Hole. My tires squealed against the asphalt as I peeled away.

  Chapter 27

  Everything was wrong. Crumbling. Disintegrating.

  Enough emotion welled up to swallow me, drown me. This job was nothing, my life was nothing…I was nothing. A speck of dust in a hurricane. Powerless.

  We couldn’t find Martinez, and we didn’t even know why she had stolen the proof in the first place. I was mathematically and mentally broken, and to top it off I couldn’t even finish one goddamn commission and track down one seventy-year-old woman. And Checker…what Checker had said…

  I couldn’t have cared less about my memory. My brain shied away from it. Not remembering was just fine with me.

  The math, though. The math was everything.

  If only I could fix that, then nothing else would matter. Not the two-decade long blank spot in my head, not the fact that I was failing so miserably in my work, not that fact that I’d left myself a note in a freakin’ graveyard like some kind of sadistically creepy fortune-teller…not the fact that my so-called friends only seemed to give a damn about me as suited their own needs.

  Not the fact that something in my head had prevented me from even noticing how crippled I was until the work with Halliday.

  Fuck. Just fix the math—it all sounded so simple, when I put it like that. So simple, for something so fundamentally unattainable. I might as well wish myself to Mars.

  Mars I’d have a better chance at. After all, I could do the fucking math.

  I drove around the city for a while with an aimless vengeance, going in circles as if I were on a mission to wear out the car. I ran out of gas, refilled the tank, and kept going.

  Where was Martinez? That was the only problem I seemed to have any shot at solving right now. The only thing I might not be useless at, even though I’d had less than zero success at it so far.

  I drove to her condo.

  I didn’t know why I was here. Arthur was far more observant than I was; I wasn’t going to find anything of relevance that he hadn’t. I broke in and walked back through the rooms, looking for something, anything, that would give me a clue as to where she had run to.

  I passed by her shelves in the living room, running my hand along the dust fronting the empty spaces. She’d denied anything was missing, but she’d clearly been lying. Why? What did that mean?

  I had no idea.

  I let myself out the back door. The building had a small paved area behind it, the plants in proscribed plots around the cement almost making it a backyard. There was a high fence that gave it a false sense of privacy and solitude, some lawn furniture, and a portable fire pit in the corner of the patio. It was all pleasant and well-groomed and totally generic. I turned to go back inside.

  “Are you a friend of Rita’s?”

  A little old man had appeared. A permanent stoop bent him over his cane, and he had scraggly white hair and a face that was more liver spots than skin. He leaned on the cane as he took a shuffling step toward me. “Yeah,” I said, and made to move past him.

  “She in some sort of trouble?”

  “No,” I said automatically, and then paused. “Why would you say that?”

  “Well, ’cause those government people were here asking about her. When the other lady got snatched. I didn’t tell them nothin’.” He grinned at me. Half his teeth were missing, and the other half were yellow. “Are you her daughter? She never talked about family. Painful, it was. I could tell. I think the government murdered them.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because I don’t trust them. They watch us, you know.”

  Well, yeah, but I still thought it highly unlikely the government had randomly murdered Martinez’s family. “I’m not her daughter,” I said. “I’m just a friend.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I have such respect for her people, you know. So in tune with nature all the time.”

  I wondered what Martinez would have thought of that. To be fair, I supposed mathematics was the greatest natural law of all.

  “The government doesn’t like her kind. I think that’s why she was in trouble. Maybe why she burned everything.”

  “Wait, what?” I said, my brain latching onto the one cogent piece of information. “She burned everything? What do you mean?”

  He poked his cane at the fire pit in the corner of the patio. “Night after night. I watched her do it. I thought, something’s gone wrong, good for you, you burn that evidence, you show them
how it’s done. Are you her daughter?”

  “No,” I said again, and then wished I’d lied. “I’m, uh, a really good friend. When was this?”

  “Last week? Two weeks ago? Or was it longer…I get confused sometimes. What kind of trouble is she in?”

  “Big trouble,” I said absently, heading toward the fire pit. “Do you know what she was burning?”

  “Papers.” He coughed mightily, wheezing. “I asked her once, she said it was her life’s work. She must have been in some mighty big trouble.”

  Martinez had burned her own work, too? Or something else?

  I crouched by the fire pit and poked at the ashes. They were cool and crumbled at my touch. I only found a few edges of paper that were even partially legible. Both looked like mathematical language—bits of Greek letters and brackets and the words “for every” and “there exists a unique.” Definitely math. In Martinez’s handwriting.

  Why would she have burned her own work?

  “Did she say why she was doing it?” I asked.

  Martinez’s neighbor limped creakily to my side and looked over my shoulder. “She said it was too dangerous. She said it would, uh. She said it would ‘break the world.’ I said we’d already done a damn good job of that, what with the global warming and the economy and the aliens putting chips in our heads. She said no, this was different, that she was saving everybody.”

  “Saving everybody from what?” If she’d burned Halliday’s proof with the same sentiments—maybe she thought someone nefarious would get a hold of it, inevitably, and that person would take down the whole economy. Maybe she thought the NSA having it would be evil enough. Could she have discovered a similar proof simultaneously with Halliday and burned that as well, burned everything?

  “She told me it was her greatest desire, and it ruined her life,” said the old man. “She was lonely, I think. Her life was her work. Her work, her life. Then it made the world ugly, she said, and I think it broke her.”

  It took me a while to untangle that statement, and when I did, it didn’t ring true. If Martinez had discovered the same factoring shortcut Halliday had, she should have been ecstatic, even if she ultimately decided to keep it to herself. Something wasn’t adding up.