Chapter 193
Translator: Dreamscribe
Damian hated his own name.
The reason was nothing special. Every single person he met for the first time had something to say about it.
"Ah! That Damian?"
"That's the name of the main character in the novel, right?"
No, it isn't, you idiots.
The protagonist of 'Demian' is Sinclair.
He had no idea why his parents had given him such a name.
Was it because of the intellectual, philosophical image the name carried? Or maybe they had simply liked the sound of it. Either way, he had resolved that if he ever married and had a child, he would never name it after some specific figure. Names have power. Damian knew that better than anyone.
Nobody had recommended it to him, but he read Hesse's novel anyway, and he was captivated by the characters in it.
'The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world.'
That was the sentence he had underlined as a child while reading the novel. And it had become the one and only conviction Damian held as a cryptographer.
"Damian! This is the perfect moment for Kyber to make its debut. We're going to be the saviors of the world!"
Victor, the chief researcher, shouted, unable to contain his excitement. The other team members in the lab were talking loudly among themselves, faces flushed.
"Sounds like NIST wants to move fast on this?"
"I heard the order to hurry came down from the White House."
"Normally this would have taken years. In a situation like this, we could have the standard locked up in no time."
Even in the face of a disaster threatening the world, there was a glint of joy in their eyes.
It was understandable. The shield they had spent years honing had become the only lifeline that could save a collapsing world.
A chance to be heroes. That swelling exhilaration was heating up the air in the lab.
'Salvation, huh.'
Damian quietly turned his coffee cup in his hands and watched them.
The way he saw it, what was happening in the world right now was inevitable. In human history, ciphers had always been broken, without a single exception. Enigma, RSA, SIKE. All of it was nothing more than the process of a bird cracking its egg to be born.
'Can Kyber become that bird?'
Damian did not voice the question aloud.
He was the one who had made Kyber. He had been involved in every corner of its design, shaping it with his own hands. And yet, no matter how he turned it over in his mind, Kyber never conjured the image of a bird cracking its egg and taking flight. If that was the case, then perhaps it wasn't so bad to become an egg that never broke at all, one that protected the world.
* * *
Theo stared out the window the entire taxi ride.
The sunset stretched long between the low buildings. It was a color and a scene rarely seen in America.
The meeting with the NIST official had run longer than expected.
The man had talked nonstop for three hours, and half of what he said had been about Kyber.
"Kyber's stability has already been substantially verified. Utopia is theoretically interesting, but there are still no cases of it being applied in the field."
He had dressed it up, but what he meant was that they already had Kyber in mind for the standard, so Utopia could stand there and make up the numbers.
Theo let out a short laugh.
"Yeah, right."
But he didn't bother saying anything more.
The taxi pulled up in front of the research institute.
Theo turned up his coat collar as he got out of the car.
Fwoosh.
The security door slid up and he stepped inside.
The hallway was quiet.
"Hm? That's strange."
Ever since crunch had started, the institute had been perpetually noisy. There should have been the sound of people clustered in threes and fours arguing, keyboards being pounded, someone screaming, all of it constant.
Clunk.
Uneasy, he yanked the handle of the main lab open.
The lights were half off. Only the monitors scattered around the room lit the interior with a bluish glow. And using that glow as their lamp, the researchers were huddled together in front of the boards.
Theo took off his coat and asked.
"What are you all doing? Did somebody hypnotize the lot of you?"
"Shh!"
Ji-hye raised an index finger to her lips. Then she pointed a hand toward the sofa in the corner.
Theo slowly turned his head.
"Huh?"
Soft, even breathing.
It was Seo-ha, lying on the sofa, fast asleep.
He had been looking overworked lately, and Theo had been planning to put the brakes on him at some point, but it seemed the researchers had gotten to it first. Theo looked at Seo-ha's face and smiled wryly.
'That isn't your fault.'
In the past, he hadn't been able to understand it.
Where on earth did that endless love for humanity, that selflessness, come from? But as the time he spent with Seo-ha grew longer, he came to understand the reason naturally.
The love of his family, and the crushingly heavy sense of responsibility that only a person with the finest intellect could carry.
Seo-ha knew exactly how enormous a ripple a single stone he threw would send through the world. That much was obvious just from the way he strictly controlled the scope of Oracle's activity and locked the authority to change it behind two and three layers.
"Oh? Theo, you're back?"
Sri and Ben came trudging over with hollow eyes.
Sri's hair was a tangled mess, like a bird had nested in it. Even Ben, normally so tidy, had dark stubble growing on his face.
"What have you two been up to?"
Sri shook his head.
"There's still so much to update. We were putting up a physical-layer defensive line to block Side-Channel Attacks."
"I was looking at the part Joseph proposed. Turns out there's a method that traces the waveform of electromagnetic emissions during computation. I've been changing the execution order to block it. I've probably run the simulation a few thousand times."
Ben walked wearily to the pantry and brewed himself some coffee.
Su-jeong and Cecilia were in the same state.
Seo-ha had handed them the theory, but applying it to reality was an entirely different problem. No matter how flawless it was mathematically, the moment it started running inside an actual computer, problems came pouring out endlessly.
'Still, it's worthwhile work.'
To keep from marring the perfect design Seo-ha had drawn up, the geniuses of APEX were willingly rolling through days and nights of brutal struggle.
"Has your side made any progress?"
At Theo's question, Ji-hye, standing in front of the board, slowly turned her head.
Whoosh.
As she stepped aside, the traces that had been hidden behind her came into Theo's view. Several massive whiteboards filling the entire wall. Equations written in black, red, and blue marker were tangled together in a chaotic sprawl. The boards were smeared all over from how many times things had been written and erased.
"Hahaha. Progress, you say."
Ji-hye looked up at the board with bloodshot eyes and let out an empty laugh.
"I talked big to the Director, told him we'd handle everything so he should get some rest."
Theo read the equations packed across the board without a word. Ji-hye felt like crawling into a hole.
"Everyone who said they were confident got together and went over the equations, and we couldn't find the answer no matter what we tried."
The more perfect a theory was, the harder it was to lay a hand on it.
The gaps in logic that had shot out intuitively from inside Seo-ha's head simply could not be filled by ordinary prodigies. For Theo, it was an easy thing to have predicted.
"Oh?"
He looked down at the propositions written at the bottom. Ji-hye took off her glasses and spoke in an exhausted voice.
"We pinpointed the sections where the problems occur. So it'd be easier for the Director to look at when he wakes up. Pretty pathetic that this is all we could manage, isn't it?"
Theo walked out in front of the board.
What was written in black marker was the original equation, red marked the problem sections, and the blue pen had been used for the variables. Cryptography specialists had organized the problem in the language of Yu-Riemann Geometry.
"Impressive. I've reassessed my opinion of you all."
To narrow down the points where the problems occurred this precisely, they would have had to understand the entire structure first. And using a language they were seeing for the first time in their lives, at that.
Seeing such clear evidence of the effort put in, Theo smiled with satisfaction.
'The Korean researchers are quite something too.'
Was it because they shared a nationality?
These people held a special feeling toward Seo-ha. If the American researchers felt awe for him, the Koreans were adding something on top of that.
It was something like watching a little brother who had made it big.
That strange sort of pride that comes from the fact that someone from the same country had climbed all the way up there. That feeling was probably what had kept them pinned in front of the board until now. Theo could sense it.
Seo-ha slept for six straight hours.
The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, as though he were having a happy dream.
Rustle.
Seo-ha shifted, then opened his eyes.
'Where am I?'
He looked around for a moment. He seemed to be working out why he was there.
"Oh? You're up?"
Hyung-joo noticed first.
The researchers came swarming in behind him. Ji-hye stared intently at Seo-ha's face, as if checking his condition.
"It's only been six hours. Are you okay?"
Seo-ha blinked, then answered nonchalantly.
"Yes, I'm fine. Noona."
The lab sank into silence.
Ji-hye's face flushed all at once. It took less than two seconds for the red to reach her ears. She hastily turned her head toward the board.
"Th... then that's a relief."
""Hahaha!""
The researchers burst into cheerful laughter.
Hyung-joo covered his mouth with a snort and turned away. Seo-ha got up from the sofa and put on his lab coat.
Step, step.
He walked slowly toward the board.
His hair was disheveled and his coat was covered in wrinkles. But his face was clearly free of fatigue. The eyes that had been so heavy before he slept now looked clear and sharp.
"Here."
Theo handed him a marker.
Seo-ha took it and ran his eyes over the equations. Then he looked at the researchers and grinned.
"Good work, everyone. This is organized really well."
Ji-hye felt the tension drain out of her shoulders.
Scratch scratch.
Seo-ha's hand moved.
Thirty seconds. That was all.
"Holy crap!"
Hyung-joo blurted out a vulgar word before he could stop himself. The condition that hadn't budged no matter how hard they tried had been resolved in just four lines.
"Hold on, Director. How did you get from there to..."
A stunned researcher grabbed Seo-ha and asked.
"The problem was that the Geodesic breaks at the Curvature transition section, right? You're trying to force the Curvature tensor induced by the wave function of the primes to flatten out, and that's what overloads the computation. Instead, if you distort the space itself to match the Curvature..."
Seo-ha's hand moved without pause.
Ji-hye clapped a hand over her mouth. A scream felt like it was about to leak out.
'Is something like that even possible with human ability?'
Under his hand, the Curvature's transition point was projected into a higher dimension. He had borrowed the Fiber Bundle concept from Topology and applied it to the algorithm. And with that, the Geodesic they had thought was severed connected smoothly in the higher space.
'That's hardly anything for him.'
Su-jeong smiled with a look of quiet pleasure.
Seo-ha's true nature, the one he showed when facing a problem of the century, was nowhere near this modest. But even what was unfolding in front of their eyes right now was more than enough to leave the researchers stunned.
He moved to the second red section.
Problems that had looked infinitely complicated came apart, as though it were a lie, into the simplest and most elegant forms the moment they passed through his hands.
And then the next problem.
Scratch scratch.
Seo-ha was in a good mood.
Maybe it was because he had slept deeply, but his badly frayed nerves had settled. Seo-ha had done everything alone in the past, but the truth was that he liked the sensation of matching his rhythm with other people.
He could tell just by looking at the board. The traces of many people leaning in together, meticulously organizing the equations. The careful consideration of the researchers came through in the divided colors. All so that he could pick it up smoothly when he woke.
'Kind people.'
Which made him want to repay them.
Now for the last problem.
At some point, the researchers had started trailing along behind Seo-ha. When he stood in front of a board, people gathered around him naturally. As if they didn't want to miss a single thing, as if they wanted to understand all of it.
Seo-ha, delighted, wrote out the long equations more considerately than usual. And so two weeks passed.
* * *
One week before the NIST Standardization Competition.
The researchers were all gathered, staring tensely at the screen.
"Running the final test."
Tap.
Sri pressed enter.
Stage one, functional verification. Stage two, the efficiency test. All that remained was stage three, security verification. The stage where every attack scenario the researchers had devised over the past several months would be applied all at once.
[Security verification starting]
[Loading attack scenarios - 247]
"Were there that many?"
Joseph muttered as he watched the screen.
A considerable number of them were ones he had designed himself. The supercomputer spun up and the progress bar began to move.
[Scenario 1/247 - Blocked]
[Scenario 2/247 - Blocked]
The numbers climbed quickly.
"Please."
Ji-hye brought her hands together at her chest as if in prayer.
Number 100 was the attack she had devised. A scenario that assumed coincidences to an almost excessive degree.
[Scenario 100/247 - Blocked]
"Yes!"
She clenched her fist and cheered.
.
.
[Scenario 247/247 - Blocked]
The screen paused for a moment.
And then-
[Security verification complete]
[Vulnerabilities : 0]
[Utopia v1.0 - Final verification passed]
The lab sank into silence.
One second.
Two seconds.
"Whoaaaaa!"
The moment when months of hardship were finally repaid.
The researchers shouted in celebration and threw both hands into the air. Luca patted Joseph on the shoulder. His head was bowed, his shoulders were shaking, and he was crying.
A beautiful cipher was a bewitching thing, a creature with a spell on it.
Because before anyone knew it, it had captured every one of their hearts.
Two days later, the research team departed for America to attend the NIST Standardization Competition.
*****
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