Mathématique: Chapter 44

He woke alone, beside a river.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Memory loss.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 44

He woke alone, beside a river.

The sounds of distant traffic, unseen and irregular, accompanied his view of a pale sky untroubled by clouds. Beneath his back, the ground was warm and damp and covered with grass.

He sat, and the world pitched, unstable.

Clutching a handful of grass, he waited for his visual field to sort itself out. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground. The ground that shouldn’t move. The ground that was a static reference frame. Most of the time.

His shoulder hurt.

(Quite a lot, actually.)

When visual vagaries settled into a stable landscape that seemed inclined to hold, he looked over the water, a brown tinged blue, ripples catching the light from the setting sun.

It was late evening. On second thought, maybe it was early morning? The scarcity of human activity put the odds on the latter. Like as not, it did.

The more-or-less-maintained little plot of grass on which he sat gave way to a ledged margin of reeds and water on the verge of bursting its banks. Ahead and above, a bridge rose over the river, white-painted railings decking a triple arcade of stone. A car rattled across it, half-concealed.

He considered the bridge, the only thing spanning the void of his thoughts.

The asphalt of the not-too-distant road was pale and smooth, bordered by the off-white ribbons of cement sidewalks scored with regular grooves.

Where was he?

He didn’t know.

He passed his hands over his shoulders, his chest, his hips, his legs—looking for injury, for something that might explain the state he was in. His right side was a patch job of pain, sharp and occasionally stinging, running from shin to hip to ribs to shoulder to arm, evidence he’d done himself something of a damage.

He must’ve fallen.

(Hit by a car, maybe? But he’d not woken on his right side. Or on the road. He’d woken on his back. In the grass.)

His shirt was white. Formerly crisp. Scratch that, it was still crisp in some places. His right sleeve was torn near the cuff, and blood had dried at the ragged edges of the material. He rolled the sleeve to conceal the bloody fringe and discovered a wide abrasion over his forearm. The sharp sting of his right leg beneath the denim of his jeans indicated that there might be a similar injury, and he gingerly pulled up his pant leg to reveal more abraded skin, stretching from mid-calf to knee.

He brought his hands to his face, and—the glasses surprised him. But, finding them in place, he checked their integrity, then continued, combing his fingers through his hair, searching for evidence of a head injury, evidence of—

He hit something. With his fingertips. Something hard, something made of—metal?

(Yes, it was metal.)

It was stuck to the side of his head. He pulled at it, gently at first, then harder. The stubborn thing wouldn’t come.

He stopped trying to brute force the problem before he tore a chunk out of his scalp.

Delicately, he explored its contours with the tips of his fingers. The device was small, smooth, subtle, likely concealed by his hair, and attached with a troubling tenacity. Running his hands through the hair at the opposite temple, he found an identical device.

Yes.

Well.

Right then, definitely atypical. Also, upsetting.

It didn’t seem to be doing anything?

But.

How would he know?

What kind of person had pieces of metal affixed to his head? In the face of increasing sympathetic activation, with the distraction of a racing heart and shallow breath, he couldn’t think of any class of person for whom this would be normal.

What kind of person was he?

He realized he didn’t know.

Why was he here?

He didn’t know.

Where was he?

He didn’t know.

If he didn’t know these things…who might know them?

He didn’t know.

With growing horror, he tried to recall anything about himself. Anything at all.

His occupation? Because, yes well, people had occupations, didn’t they? He looked like a person with a job, given the detailed leather of his shoes, the state of his jeans, the dress shirt that’d been pristine not so long ago, the fact he owned a pair of glasses.

Where he lived? Because he like as not lived somewhere, people didn’t wander the streets in clothes like this.

People he knew? Because he must know someone, everyone knew someone. Didn’t they?

Even in the face of a demonstrable, gaping deficit in his knowledge of himself and his circumstances, the final question and its realization seemed a long time in coming.

Who was he?

Oh god.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know.

He wasn’t feeling so well, actually, just right now.

His breathing turned shallow, the world tilted, and he pressed his fingertips against the device at his temple and tried to grind out the answers to who was he and where was he and why was he here and where was here because he was sure his mind used to know but no matter his concentration, no matter his petrifying intensity of focus, no answers came.

(Nor did any feel like they were in the offing.)

He studied the knitted strips of river, road, and sidewalk, their intersections with the curved arc of the bridge that stretched before and away from him. Turning, he followed the ribbons of lawn and water back until they overlapped out of sight behind the tumbled lines of an unfamiliar cityscape.

He was alone.

He was fair certain that when people woke up next to rivers, not knowing who they were, the next step would be to locate a hospital.

But.

He was also fair certain that when people woke up next to rivers dressed like they’d been attending a business casual meeting with devices affixed to their temples—well, perhaps a bit more prudence was in order?

He stood, feet to the grudging give of grass, and felt a sharp pain in his right knee and ribs. The green strip of choked earth and the blue of sky and water faded to slate. He leaned over, hands on knees, head down, until his vision cleared. When it had, he staggered to a nearby tree and pressed a hand against its solid trunk.

He felt sick and famished in confusing simultaneity. Was it possible he’d gotten himself wrecked? Pure wrecked? Was it possible that he was, currently, wrecked? He didn’t feel hung over. Mentally, he felt sharpish, dubious coordination aside.

He leaned against the tree.

Only then did it occur to him to check his pockets.

(Yes well, maybe he wasn’t quite so sharpish as he’d assumed.)

With one hand pressed into the rough bark of—yes well, he wasn’t skilled with tree classification, apparently, because he hadn’t the faintest—of whatever type of tree this was, he shook his head.

(Mistake.)

He held on until the world sorted itself out, then began an inventory of his pockets.

The right front pocket held nothing. The left front pocket turned up a posh cigarette lighter engraved with the words: Knock it off, won’t you? (Not useful.) Back left pocket yielded nothing. Back right pocket contained a slim wallet of matte leather, well-worn. Flipping it open, he found the California Driver’s License of “Nicholas Rush.”

A growing sense of dread accompanied his total lack of recognition at the name and features of what was likely an abstracted version of himself. He studied the picture and the description. It took him only seconds to conclude there was strong reason to believe that he was, indeed, the person pictured.

He’d need a mirror to be certain.

He grimaced and shut the wallet. He felt no sense of recognition. Absolutely none. Zero. In fact, he’d felt a distinct sense of guilt when looking at it.

Maybe it wasn’t his wallet?

(He needed that mirror.)

He gave his surroundings a once-over. Other than a lone jogger, her hair bouncing with the rhythm of her steps, there was no one to be seen.

The principle of parsimony would suggest the wallet he held was his, and therefore there was no need for guilt when examining it.

If he was Nicholas Rush, then it was a fair bet that this was California, though nothing in the restless murmur of the river or the architecture of the nearby bridge struck him as particularly characteristic of the west coast of the United States.

It should be noted, however, that his ability to judge such things was limited at best.

(So, noted.)

He reopened the wallet and inventoried its contents, beginning with the card at the upper left and working his way down and across.

A blue and white insurance card. A Federal plan, issued to Nicholas Rush.

Several credit cards.

A UC Berkeley Faculty ID card.

The business card of Victor Swift, Avant-Garde Flautist. Frowning, he turned the card over to find a message in faded pencil: What do you say we get out of here, sweetheart? The message was unsigned, but written in script, delicate and feminine.

The business card of Dr. Daniel Jackson, Ph.D. in Archeology, Linguistics, and History. No institutional affiliation.

The business card of Colonel David Telford, United States Air Force. A phone number was scrawled on its reverse side in loose ink.

A black and pink business card belonging to someone named Vala Mal Doran who purported to be a Peaceful Explorer, Personal Shopper, and Fashion Consultant.

Perhaps Nicholas Rush was a collector of notable business cards?

Alongside the unimpressive imprest of twenty-eight dollars in cash, he found a piece of paper, folded to fit with the banknotes. He opened it, revealing intricate and incomprehensible drawing signed: J. Shep, in an angular hand that very much fit the strange aesthetic of everything above it. A wistful longing haunted the edges of those freehand lines, and he put it away, uncomfortable.

None of it, not the collection of cards, not the identity or name or appearance of “Nicholas Rush,” not the drawing by “J. Shep,” nor the engraved lighter, triggered the faintest echo of recognition.

None, at all.

He shut the wallet and pocketed it with a fluid slide that leant credence to the idea that it was, indeed, his.

Possessed of slowly increasing remorse at confronting the evidence of an overwritten man he couldn’t recall, struggling with a precarious sense of selfhood, and feeling fair fuckin’ wretched, he leaned against the tree and tried to decide on a sensible course of action.

He traced the contours of the thing adhered to his left temple. He needed a mirror. He needed a mirror, some privacy, a better idea of his current location, and a place to sort himself that wasn’t an exposed strip of grass between a river and a road.

The jogger he’d noted earlier was approaching his position. In the distance, he saw another.

He wondered what time it was. It felt early. It felt like he hadn’t slept. But that was impossible. Because he’d just woken up.

Unless he’d been unconscious.

(Yes well, upon reflection, that seemed more likely.)

He pushed away from the tree and cut toward the road with its fringe of sidewalk, hoping he didn’t appear too obviously unkempt.

The morning was warm and humid. The cloudless sky promised high temperatures as the day progressed. California was warm; was that where he was? The Bayesian prior on that should be high.

He found it difficult to address anxiety that had no point or condition upon which it could be fixed.

As he walked, he traced the edge of the device affixed to his temple. The rising grade of the sidewalk was enough to make him feel lightheaded. Leaning against the metal rail at the near end of the bridge, he surveyed his surroundings.

The river, wide and blue and empty, curved through a low city skyline of red brick and white trim. Across the water, through a haze of humid air, distant skyscrapers jutted above an older stratum of rust-colored masonry.

Nothing looked familiar. That being said—

He was beginning to doubt he was in California.

The aesthetic of UC Berkeley, of the San Francisco Bay, was something—not that he personally remembered per se, but it had an aesthetic he could name—bright and glittering and crawling out of the sea. He’d be able to identify it, he was certain of that, with the same certainty he had when it came to the naming of things: the identification of cigarette lighters and wallets, water and roads.

This panorama of river and city was an unfamiliar mixture of urban and collegiate, and did nothing to locate him within the abstract geographies of his thoughts. He looked up at the nearest pair of street signs. White letters on a green background: Memorial Drive and Western Avenue.

Not helpful.

Rather than crossing the bridge and heading for the skyscrapers in the distance, he turned down Western Avenue, toward the wood-trimmed red brick jutting within, around, and through the leaves of overhanging trees.

The air was thick with invisible water. The sidewalks were uneven and cracked, made irregular by the heave of underlying roots. Brick buildings lined a narrow street choked with vehicles bearing license plates of the New England persuasion: Connecticut, Vermont, but, most frequently, Massachusetts.

A rusted box of blue metal with a transparent plastic cover advertising copies of The Boston Globe cut to a final answer.

Boston, then, or some subsidiary city.

What was he doing in Boston when he was from California?

Or, better question: what had he been doing?

(Because whatever it’d been, he certainly wasn’t doing it now.)

He needed to get a look at whatever was attached to his temples, think his current situation through in a logical fashion, and obtain as much information about himself as possible (in a manner as circumspect as possible). A public library seemed like a good start. He couldn’t be far from one, not in an area so ragingly collegiate.

In the warm shade of quiet streets, Western Avenue broadened. The trees thinned out. The buildings rose higher. Cars and runners and early morning commuters with their purposeful strides and their sunglasses became more frequent.

He wished, fruitlessly, for shades of his own.

As residential neighborhoods gave way to coffee shops, vintage clothing stores, and other such ephemera preferred by the American intelligentsia, he spied a likely-looking person—male, young, about his own height, a racket strapped to his back and green streaks in his dark hair.

He slowed, raised a hand, and the young man obligingly pulled an earbud from his ear.

“Awright mate,” he said, “we wur lookin’ tae find a lib’ry, d’ye know whaur wan might be?” Immediately, he clapped a hand to his mouth, closed it into a fist, let it fall away, stepped back a pace, and tried to recover.

“Uh.” The young man, perplexed, removed his second earbud. “What?”

Bloody hell. What was wrong with him? Because something was. Something was definitely wrong with him. He’d taken a worse turn than he’d thought. He’d had a stroke. Had he? Was he neurologically damaged? He didn’t feel neurologically damaged. But then, like as not, he wouldn’t?

“Are you okay?” the young Bostonian asked, mirroring the alarm he was certain was written all over his face.

He waved the man off and continued on, determinedly and quickly in the direction he’d been headed, resolutely not looking behind him, even when the man called after him, persisting out of curiosity, or some altruistic impulse.

“Fuck,” he whispered, in experimental alarm.

That sounded all right.

“Nicholas Rush?”

That sounded, if not perfect, at least passable.

“Excuse me,” he said, voice low, trying not to appear crazy or three sheets to it to any passersby, “but where is the lib’ry. Library. Li. Brary?” He tried to think of something else to say, came up blank, and settled for reading a nearby street sign. “Nae parkin’,” he read, trying to loosen up on his diction and listen to himself, “’tween th’ hours ah—two AM an’ six AM.”

Oh.

Oh.

He was not an American.

(Thank god.)

He had an accent. A strong one. “From the U.K.,” he tried, “eh no?” Right then. He was Scottish. He was, quite literally, from Scotland. He’d not seen that one as having his name on it. But then, he supposed he wouldn’t have, not with a California ID.

Half an hour of walking and a more articulate inquiry found him in front of the Cambridge Public Library, surveying an expansive, modernist rectangle of paneled glass, blazing a painful yellow in the light of early morning.

(The place was, of course, closed; not unexpected at something like the back of six in the AM.)

After fruitlessly trying the doors and checking the hours of the place, he retraced his steps across the pale cement courtyard and sat to wait in the shade of a low wall next to an empty bike rack.

A nonchalant twenty minutes after the official opening of the library, he straightened his worse-for-wear dress shirt and entered the building, passing into air-conditioned space with the feeling of breaching an invisible wall. Shelves of books spread, low and labyrinthine, around a central, open altar to the personal computer before they rose at the periphery of the room, creating false corridors and spaces unseen.

Children, coffin-dodgers, and dubious persons not otherwise engaged were perusing the shelves, retrieving newspapers, and opening them atop sunlit wooden tables.

This wasn’t what he wanted.

He followed the promise of the peripheral shelves, certain there must be areas less trafficked. Finally, he found a staircase. After descending to a lower level, he wandered amidst a dimly lit collection of the back-issues of various periodicals, academic and popular, before he found an isolated lavatory, tile floored, fluorescently lit, with a greenish cast implying this particular room had either escaped a drastic renovation or had been part of some other, older building, demolished to make way for the modern glass cube that now lay atop it.

He walked to the sink and regarded himself in the mirror.

Someone unfamiliar looked back at him from behind glasses he didn’t recognize, from beneath a fringe of sweat-damp hair that was slightly too long.

He gave his reflection a disapproving look.

It gave it right back,

He opened the wallet in his pocket and compared the image on the California Driver’s License to what he saw in the mirror. 

It seemed he was, indeed, Nicholas Rush, a middle-aged, underweight Scot of tastefully masculine apparel, who had, at one point, lived in California and been a faculty member at UC Berkeley. Other than a subtle scrape along the underside of his jaw, he was of unimpressive appearance—

If one didn’t consider the small, identical devices attached to each side of his head.

Those, of course, were what to focus on.

With a glance at the closed door behind him, he swept his hair aside and leaned close to the mirror to get a look at the thing on his right temple. It was small, approximately square, made of an iridescent alloy a touch darker than classical silver. There was a piece of electrical tape atop the device. He picked delicately at the edge of the tape, and, as it lifted, it revealed a shine of blue, its sky-colored glow surprisingly strong in the green bathroom.

Hastily, he pressed the tape back into position. Best not to examine the thing until he’d found a replacement method of concealment.

He braced his hands against a dusty sink, furrowed his brow, and tried to bloody think.

He’d no bloody idea what the things were. Not a clue. Parsimonious analysis would dictate that if one woke up disoriented to person and place, with pieces of unfamiliar technology attached to one’s head and positioned in such a way that suggested said technology might be capable of influencing the neocortex—the most prudent course of action would be to remove those devices.

Off they’d come then.

Careful inspection revealed two depressible regions on the superior and inferior edges of the metal. He pressed both simultaneously, and, with a sickening, stinging release, the thing came free.

He examined it intently, analyzing its form as a window into its function.

In the silence of the deserted bathroom, he heard the eerie echo of a low chord, at once alien and autochthonous.

Startled, he turned, his eyes sweeping the room.

He was alone.

He looked up at the ceiling. Down at the thing in his hand.

He whistled a cautious, perfect overtone and heard a clear difference between the sound carried over the air and the one resonating in his thoughts.

Slowly, he reached up and pried the other device off his head. As it came free—

A tonal wall crescendoed into him, dissonant and de profundis; a conquering note in its sweep across his thoughts. His back tightened in celeritous, perilous sympathy with its endless build.

He scrambled with the pair of devices, barely able to think under this crush of unhearable sound. When pressed to his skin in the correct orientation, the devices re-latched themselves. There was a sharp sting, a pause, and then—

The terrifying chord in his thoughts dampened, diminished, faded to echo.

He stood, trembling, sweating, gripping the edge of the sink, breathing in shallow gasps.

That had almost. That had nearly. It’d nearly—what?

(He didn’t know.)

He staggered backward and shut himself within the drab green confines of a lavatory stall. He sank onto a mosaic of white tile, unable to halt the tremors in his hands, his shoulders, his back, his legs.

He closed his eyes, shaking hands pressed to his face.

This wasn’t right. This could. Not. Be. Right. He lacked the context that should come with a human life but even he, even he, who didn’t know his name, who’d been forced to discover it from the things he carried, knew that none of this made sense.

Who was Nicholas Rush, that such a thing might happen to him?

He hadn’t the faintest.

After a breathless interval, he became aware again of the cool press of tile under his shins.

There were answers to be had.

(There must be.)

And none of them were here, on bleached tile beneath fluorescent lights.

He stood, unsteady, and walked back to the sink. He regarded himself again, and if there was an edgy trepidation in his expression this time, yes well, he supposed that was understandable.

“Who are ya?” he whispered. “Y’ bastard.”

As artfully as possible, he brushed his hair over the things on his head. That done, he set about cleaning himself up. He hiked the sleeve of his dress shirt above his elbow and cleaned the abrasions on his jaw and right forearm as best he could with soap and water, then repeated the process for his shin and knee, which had fared better than his arm, given the protection of his jeans.

That done, he unrolled his bloodied shirt sleeve and soaped the edges of the cuff until they were an unappealing brown, then rolled both sleeves to his elbows with all the crispness he could manage. He dusted himself off, and twisted to get a look at his back, which sported a rime of dark, fine dirt down the right shoulder. As he brushed it off, he was rewarded with the sharp pain of underlying bruised tissue.

Not much to be done about that.

Satisfied that he looked more like a Cambridge native who’d suffered a recent bicycle accident and less like an amnestic vagrant with mysterious technology strapped to his head, he turned on the water, cupped his hands, and drank as much as possible.

It did nothing for his hunger, but avoiding dehydration seemed a good idea.

When he was finished, he walked up the stairs, back to the deck of the library. He returned to the center of the place, near the entrance, and found a free computer as far as possible from the human eddies that sprang up around architectural vertices.

Beneath a roof of glass windows, with an unsettling fluidity, he typed the words “Nicholas Rush” into the waiting space of a search engine.

He paused, then sent the query into the electronic dark.

Results were instantaneous.

Nicholas Rush was—

Well known?

Quite well known.

He wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

He clicked the first link (Wikipedia) and was presented with the image of a man in a brown jacket and dark jeans, glaring at the camera over the tops of square framed glasses like a percipient bastard. He looked much the same in the image as he did at present, but for shorter hair and a more confrontational demeanor. He shifted to the accompanying text.

Nicholas Rush (born 1 November 1965) is a Scottish American mathematician and computer scientist, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in computational complexity theory. His major academic contributions include a proof of the Hadamard Conjecture, a long-standing problem in combinatorial mathematics, which he published during his final year at the University of Oxford. This achievement earned him the Fields Medal in 1986. Dr. Rush gained international prominence in 2007 with his demonstration that P=NP, a proof that has since prompted sweeping changes in cryptography and information security. Governments, corporations, and academics worldwide continue to prepare for the anticipated development of efficient solutions to problems like 3-SAT, seen as an inevitable consequence of the proof.

P equaled NP? Well, that did sound right. But then, he supposed it ought to.

He hooked his left hand over his left shoulder and dug his fingers into the tense musculature at the back of his neck. It seemed he’d been instrumental in the current or eventual obviation of most existing global cryptosystems?

He could understand why that would make him unpopular. Or, alternatively, too popular.

He continued reading, skimming the encyclopedic summation of his research (gratifyingly prolific) and searching out anything relevant to his biography.

Personal Life: Nicholas Rush was born in Glasgow, Scotland. At the age of 17, he entered New College at the University of Oxford, where he studied mathematics and computer science. During his time at Oxford, he was actively involved in the music program at Magdalen College, where he met Gloria Whitbourn. The two married in July 1987.

After completing his graduate studies, Rush joined the faculty at Imperial College London, where he worked until 1995. He then accepted a position with the Mathematics Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

During his tenure at Berkeley, Rush published two influential papers on the Hodge Conjecture in the late 1990s, solidifying his reputation as a leading mathematician. In early 2007, he achieved global recognition with his groundbreaking proof that P=NP. The following year, in April 2008, he took a leave of absence from Berkeley to work as a consultant for the United States Air Force. He is currently affiliated with Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

His wife? He glanced at his left hand. Looked like that one hadn’t worked out.

The Air Force? Looked like that one hadn’t worked out either.

He moved on from the Wikipedia entry, hoping for something a bit more useful.

Cracking the Uncrackable

NYTimes.com – Science Times – March 31, 2007

“I remember where I was when I heard it,” says Professor Dixon Clark of NYU, “and I will for the rest of my life. I was pouring myself a cup of coffee, in the middle of proctoring a midterm for Algebraic Topology when a friend of mine called me from the Joint Mathematics Meeting, called me, you understand, and he said, ‘someone’s done it. Someone’s solved it’. I didn’t have to ask what ‘it’ was.”

The demonstration of P=NP by Dr. Nicholas Rush, Fields Medalist and chair of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department, was the kind of moment that happens once in a generation. Both the presentation at the JMM meeting and the release of the subsequent paper took the mathematics and computer science communities by storm and has elevated a previously obscure problem into the cultural lexicon alongside F=ma, E=mc², and other easy-to-remember equations that have captured public imagination. But in order to understand the importance of this mathematical proof, we have to trace its roots backwards through the field of computational complexity from Gödel and Turing to Cook and Levin.

He scanned poorly organized historicotheoretical underpinnings of the proof and began reading again two-thirds of the way through the article.

All of this brings us, at last, to Nicholas Rush: the Oxford-educated mathematical wunderkind whose first brush with fame came with his groundbreaking proof that a Hadamard matrix exists for every positive multiple of four. This achievement earned him the distinction of becoming the youngest-ever recipient of the Fields Medal. Following his graduate studies at Oxford, many assumed he would follow the familiar trajectory of countless brilliant mathematicians—peaking in his twenties with early successes. Yet Rush defied expectations, repeatedly reinventing himself within the field of computational complexity, much to the admiring frustration of his colleagues. His latest and most transformative accomplishment came this January, when he presented an abbreviated version of his P=NP proof at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM).

“The title of his talk was unannounced,” recalls Dr. Marcus Smith of Princeton University. “The guy gets up there, clicks on his PowerPoint, cool as you please, and there it is on the title slide: ‘A Demonstration of the Relational Equivalence of P-Class and NP-Class Decision Problems.’ Let me tell you, I’ve never been in a room like that. Rush was already an academic rockstar, taken incredibly seriously, but for him to stand up at a major conference and lead with a title like that—it’s the kind of moment that either ends careers or mints legends.”

The reception to his talk was electric, setting off a chain reaction of excitement and scrutiny. The subsequent paper was rigorously reviewed and independently verified by the mathematical community and also assessed by a federally appointed panel of mathematicians, cryptographers, and information security experts. This panel was tasked with evaluating the practical implications of Rush’s proof for global infrastructure and information security. In the wake of these revelations, governments, academics, and the public were left grappling with the monumental implications of his work, and with a growing curiosity about the enigmatic man behind the proof.

Nicholas Rush was born in Glasgow, Scotland. Little is known about his early life. He has rarely spoken of it, either publicly or privately. “You get the impression, if you know the man well enough, that he had a tough time of it. But he wouldn’t ever tell you as much,” comments David Starr, a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. Whether due to a difficult past or a characteristic academic disdain for the media, Dr. Rush remains an elusive figure. He consistently declines interviews that stray from his research, eschewing public attention. This reticence, coupled with the groundbreaking nature of his work and rumors of his recruitment by the U.S. Air Force to Cheyenne Mountain, has fueled an explosive proliferation of speculation about his life and motives in the public consciousness.

“Oh fantastic,” he muttered.

“If you understand the implications of the proof,” says Evan Casterbridge, former physicist and host of NPR’s Monday Math, “then you know it represents a profound threat to privacy and information security. Its existence guarantees the encryption systems we rely on to protect our data aren’t just theoretically vulnerable. They’ll be decrypted, likely within a window of less than five years. And when you add the fact that Dr. Rush is reportedly considering a consulting role with the Air Force—on a project so classified it doesn’t have a publicly available name—you can see why people are uneasy.”

Whatever lies ahead for America’s most preeminent cryptographer, the ramifications of his proof are already reshaping the world.

He sat back, absently tracing the edges of the device at his temple. He surveyed the mostly empty library, tracing the movements of an employee restocking the shelves, an elderly man reading the paper at a nearby table, a petulant pre-teen accompanied by an overgrown child in an inane red T-shirt who was obviously his tutor.

No one seemed to be watching him. All to the good.

So.

He was a well-quoted mathematician who’d turned information security on its head. Shortly thereafter, he’d gone to consult for the Air Force for reasons unknown. This morning, he’d woken alone, beside a river, with no memory and a pair of identical devices attached to his head.

This was no accident. Someone had done this to him. It was a virtual certainty.

The question was who and, more importantly, why.

Two things troubled him, in that they didn’t fit into the narrative he was beginning to construct about himself and what had happened to him.

One—whoever was responsible for his current condition had left him his wallet. Why bother to strip him of his memory, but leave his ID on his person?

Two—the devices he was wearing seemed to be preventing a catastrophic perceptual problem; he also found that puzzling.

Despite these two areas of uncertainty, he was in no way inclined to ring up the United States Air Force and ask what the bloody hell had happened.

Not yet.

Not when they topped the list of potential perpetrators of this cognitive cut-up.

If the Air Force didn’t know his current location, he wasn’t inclined to advertise it.

He had the wherewithal to last a few days while he sorted himself.

In all likelihood, he could make a reasonable go of it. He wasn’t certain how well undisputed mathematical brilliance translated into the ability to survive, undetected, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but—

It was time to find out.

Nicholas Rush looked back at the computer, readjusted his glasses, and continued reading.