Root of Unity Read Online Free

but addressed Professor Halliday instead. “Sonya, she’s right. Go get some coffee; try to stay calm. We’ll figure this out.”
    “Things don’t always work out, Arthur. You should know that better than anyone.”
    Arthur didn’t reply, though his movements hitched for a second before he became the supportive friend once more, nudging Halliday gently to her feet. “Give me your keys, okay, hon? We’ll call in a bit.”
    She obeyed, and Arthur guided us out of her office and locked the door.
    “You going to be okay?” Arthur asked.
    She hesitated. “My biggest fear is—I don’t know if I can recreate it. My greatest achievement, and I don’t even know…what if it’s gone?”
    Arthur took her by the shoulders. “Ain’t gonna make you no promises I can’t keep. But Russell here is the best there is, and I ain’t too shabby myself. Take this one day at a time, okay? We’ll call.”
    She nodded.
    “Come on. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” I prodded Arthur.
    He squeezed Halliday’s shoulders one last time. As we headed off at a trot, he glanced back several times to where she stood thin and bereft in the hallway.
    Well, this sucked for Arthur. Of course, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to take his head off the moment we were out of sight.

Chapter 3
    In the end, I was very well-behaved. I waited until we were in the car. Arthur was pulling out of the visitor’s parking lot and had the gall to say to me grimly, “So, I get this is a big deal. Can you give me the layman’s rundown?”
    “You first,” I said. Penguins could have gotten frostbite from me.
    He hesitated. “Me first what?”
    “Fuck you,” I said, though I couldn’t force as much vitriol into it as I wanted. “The client will pay my rates?”
    “You’ll be paid—”
    “She didn’t want me there. She didn’t even want you there.”
    “She came around, though, right? I knew she’d let us help if—”
    “You lied to me.”
    “Okay, yeah, but I didn’t know if—”
    “If what?” I bit out. “If I’d come along if you weren’t paying me to?”
    “You got to understand—she’s too important to me. I didn’t mean—I needed you; I ain’t thought—”
    “You thought if you said, ‘hey, Cas, help me out,’ that—what, I’d say no?” Voicing the words stung. I bit my lip.
    “Well, to be fair, money’s what you always—and you can’t be too hard on me, Russell, if this ain’t no official job for you, can you take it anyway?”
    It was a fair concern. After all, Arthur knew what happened when I wasn’t working—he was one of the few. That didn’t mean I wanted to concede. “You could have asked me. For the record, I’ll be fine.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said, though I didn’t hear much repentance in his tone. “It was too important; can you understand? Please? But I’m sorry. I am.”
    “So who is she?”
    He took a long breath. “Sonya and I—we grew up together. Childhood friends.”
    “And then?”
    “And then what? Life happened. We grew apart. Ain’t mean I don’t still care about her.” He kept his eyes glued to the road in front of him, like someone who wasn’t telling me anything close to the whole story. “So, uh. This math stuff. Help an old guy out—why is the world ending?”
    “This isn’t over,” I grumped, but I let him change the subject. For now. I slumped in the passenger seat, sticking my boots up on the dash. “Do you know anything about encryption?”
    “Not a thing.”
    “Okay. Well, a whole hell of a lot of our current crypto depends on the idea that factoring large integers is a really hard problem. In simple terms, we encrypt information by multiplying large prime numbers together, and the fact that no one can un- multiply them easily is what keeps everything secure. And ‘everything’ means everything—from your credit cards to the Department of Defense.”
    Arthur let out a low whistle.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “So Sonya cracked the crypto?”
    “Sort