Root of Unity Read Online Free Page A

of,” I said. “The ticket is, we’ve always thought factorization was a hard problem, but we’ve never actually known it was hard. Nobody’d ever proven it was.”
    Arthur frowned. “Why’s everyone use it, then? Seems kind of unwise.”
    “Not that unwise. A lot of really smart people had been working on the problem of integer factorization for a very long time, and nobody’d come up with a fast way of doing it. Key word being ‘fast’—we can do it; it just takes years, far too long to be useful in code-breaking. So building an encryption algorithm based on the fact that nobody’d ever discovered a way to do this quickly, well, it was actually pretty genius.”
    “Except Sonya found a way,” said Arthur.
    “Yeah.” I still couldn’t believe it. As grave as the situation was, part of me was ravenous just to read her proof. “Yeah, she thinks she did.”
    “And you say everything runs on this math.”
    “Yeah. Checker might know better than I would where all it’s being used, but I’m pretty sure it’s across the board. Every financial transaction people send electronically. Our whole economy, national security, all of it.”
    “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” whispered Arthur. “So if whoever got her proof decides they’re bored just making themselves rich…”
    “Modern apocalypse,” I said. “It’s possible. I think we’ve got a little breathing room, though. Professor Halliday said she was in the midst of going back through decades of notes and rewriting the proof for publication—it’ll take them time to organize and absorb all her work. And they’ll probably need someone in the field to help them with it. Plus they’ll have to write whatever actual computer code they want to use—I’ll have to talk to Checker and see if he can estimate how long that’ll take—”
    “Wait,” said Arthur. “Did you just say they’d need a mathematician even if they have her notes?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Probably more than one.”
    “ Shit,” said Arthur, yanking the wheel to slue the car toward the next exit, “Sonya—she ain’t safe—”
    A car slammed into us from behind.
    Metal shrieked and the seatbelt wrenched me across the chest. The car spun more than 180 degrees and slid into a skid across four lanes of freeway, traffic screeching by us the wrong way around—
    I reached for the wheel and yanked it over, Newtonian mechanics erupting in my brain like a fountain. “Accelerate!” I bellowed in Arthur’s ear; he immediately let go with his hands and slammed his foot down on the pedal.
    “Switch with me!” I shouted, diving for my seatbelt release with my other hand and cursing Arthur’s insistence that I wear it. Horns deafened the air in a cacophony around us, and a screeching crash blasted through the noise as if it were right next to my ear—two cars avoiding us had smashed into each other and one had flipped over the median. I swung the wheel the other way with a solid wallop of inertia, sending us barreling between a semi and a minivan as I brought us out of the skid. The minivan’s driver jerked away, and it turned directly into the path of a bright blue sports car. I could have screamed—not that you could have heard it over the deafening explosion of metal and kinetic energy. “I wasn’t going to hit you!” I yelled in pure frustration.
    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