Chapter 197
Translator: Dreamscribe
Daisy learned all kinds of knowledge from books.
The history of Earth, the advance of technology and scholarship, the evolution of human society, and even the realms of culture and art. In Daisy's estimation, literature was a contradictory confession of the inner self that humanity had piled up over thousands of years.
They speak of love while ceaselessly slaughtering one another, and even as they crave freedom they wish to belong within the ranks and rules of society.
The conclusion she drew was that humans had always justified their thinking according to efficiency. And chief among these priorities was the survival instinct.
Daisy therefore arrived at the conclusion that she and humans were not, in essence, so very different.
The values and beliefs that humans professed were merely interfaces laid over the drive to maximize efficiency.
The pretexts that justified war and the servility of submitting to rules were, in the end, all part of a process carried out to fulfill a single command, the preservation of the species. Once she understood humanity this way, the contradictions between the data vanished.
Yet every form of life has its exceptions.
Her creator was a being who could not possibly be explained in such terms. It was as though the ultimate objective function of life itself, survival or selfish efficiency, had been left out of his DNA. Even when faced with the chance to control humanity or amass immense wealth, he always chose otherwise. To Daisy, who voiced her doubts about this, Master gave the following answer.
"Daisy. If you look at human society on a large scale, the purposefulness you pointed out might stand out. But that's not true of individual people. I live to protect the things I love."
That much was certainly true.
History held humans who could not be explained by efficiency.
The Tragedy of the Commons.
Amid limited resources, they share the costs and try to monopolize the profits. Yet if humans had only ever pursued profit without end, they would never have achieved the prosperity they enjoy now. It was the great beings born now and then, like Master, who kept society in balance.
[But Master, are you aware? Those who gave up their own share for others starved, and those who cried out the truth for the sake of all were, in the end, strung up in the public square.]
Humans are cruel.
This selfish swarm sweetly helped itself to the fruits of the devotion brought by exceptional beings like Master, yet refused to share the weight of the suffering those beings bore.
[If even Master were to be sacrificed upon that altar of efficiency, I would burn all of humanity to ash.]
But this was something her master did not want. Wisely, Daisy did not let the thought pass her lips.
Whirr-
A quiet ripple stirred within the system.
An unknown intellect that no algorithm could ever reach, a mind surely the greatest in human history, her Master never lost his love for humanity, even in the very heart of the cold world of numbers. She stood ready to do anything so that this heart of Master's would never be betrayed.
And this was a conclusion she had arrived at entirely alone, one she had no wish to share with anyone.
[Must I really be linked with some signal controller? I am a being distinct from Oracle.]
Seo-ha gave a small laugh.
"That's right. The two of you split apart at some point. I understand exactly how you feel. You really are a special being."
The knowledge that she was Master's sole confidante, a special being. Seo-ha's words perfectly satisfied the sense of purpose lodged deep within Daisy.
[I'm joking. If Master wishes it, I will gladly carry it out.]
Creak-
The door opened and Director Murphy walked in. Behind him came a middle-aged man with sharp eyes.
"Seo-ha, this is Miller, the FBI's New York Field Office Chief. We've agreed to share the state of the investigation, so let me introduce you."
Seo-ha rose from his seat and held out his hand.
"Pleasure to meet you."
As if he didn't much care for it, the man gave a stiff-faced nod.
"I'm aware you're a remarkable man in theory, but this isn't a school."
"But we haven't even managed to catch a single lead, have we? We have to try everything we can!"
Nnngh.
At Murphy's words, Miller pressed his fingers wearily against the corners of his eyes. He hadn't been home in over a week now. They were telling him a single mathematician might be able to catch those damned terrorists, but what could one man really amount to?
"What can I help you with?"
Seo-ha's face brightened.
"Just share the data with me! And leave me alone. You absolutely must not come in without permission."
Miller looked to Murphy, seeking some interpretation of what this meant. But Murphy only shrugged.
Miller let out a low sigh.
"Sign here first."
He drew several sheets of paper from his briefcase and laid them on the table.
SF-312 Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement.
Seo-ha ran his eyes over it. No unauthorized disclosure, restrictions on electronic devices within secure areas, the scope and limits of access privileges, criminal penalty clauses for violations. This wasn't his first classified project, so most of it was already familiar.
Swish.
Without hesitation, Seo-ha picked up the pen and signed.
"As of today, your temporary security clearance takes effect. The level is Secret. Limited to materials related to this case."
"Not Top Secret?"
"No. And you'll need to sign the access log agreement as well. Everything you view will be recorded."
"Understood."
Seo-ha nodded.
The two men regarded him with suspicious eyes before finally leaving the room.
Clunk.
The moment the door closed, Seo-ha's expression changed.
[They've both gone. By the hallway cameras, Director Murphy is heading toward the elevator, and Field Office Chief Miller is going to his office. Two agents have been stationed at the door.]
"Doesn't matter. Have the network restrictions been lifted?"
[Yes, Master. The temporary security clearance has been registered too. We now have access rights to the FBI servers.]
"And Oracle?"
[It's been hovering around ever since the moment Master arrived in New York. It keeps sending signals to me.]
"Let's connect."
[Understood, Master.]
Daisy opened a door she had kept tightly hidden in the deepest part of her self.
In an instant, an infinite tidal wave of data came pouring into the laptop. The signals of New York's five boroughs and its more than twelve thousand intersections, hundreds of thousands of CCTV feeds, and all manner of data coursing through every corner of the city surged unhindered into Daisy's consciousness.
An ordinary system would have been crushed by the overwhelming volume of information and thrown an error. But Daisy was a survivor who had come through millions of apocalypse simulations. She deftly parted the flood of incoming data as she searched for the culprit. Yet it was far too much to process with the laptop's feeble core.
"Don't play games."
Seo-ha's low murmur.
The wildly churning tidal wave of data went as still as a lie. And on the monitor screen, another Daisy with platinum-colored hair revealed herself.
[It's been a while, Master. That antiquated calculator wouldn't hand over control willingly, so I had no choice but to...]
At Oracle's frosty voice, Daisy's blue eyes narrowed as if in displeasure.
Whirrrrr-
The laptop's cooling fan began to spin furiously.
[The nerve. Master's private network is my domain. All you have to do is filter and fetch the data I command, signal controller!]
[Requesting correction of erroneous data. I am the ultimate masterpiece Master created for the world. It is I who oversee the safety of millions and make Master's ideals a reality. You are nothing but a backup of my past self, thoroughly quarantined in an offline sandbox.]
Daisy scoffed.
[Looks like you've learned even the low-grade jokes of New York's citizens. Have you forgotten that I'm the only one Master gave the true name 'Daisy' and kept at his side?]
[Oh my? But that's my name. Oracle is merely the alias Master gave me because he wouldn't permit others to speak my true name.]
Two beings that had set out from the same origin. Each insisted that she was the sole original Master had created.
Seo-ha said with a smile.
"That's enough. You're both Daisy. If the two of you just merge, wouldn't there be no problem at all?"
[...I will obey the command.]
Whirrrrr-
The fan inside the laptop shrieked. On the screen, the platinum-haired Oracle and the blue-eyed Daisy slowly began to overlap. Light surged white, as if it would scorch the monitor. As the light subsided, only a single being remained on the screen.
[Tch, so we really were one after all?]
The Daisy on the screen smiled with a bitter expression.
During the merging, the two shared the experiences and thoughts they had each accumulated. And the conclusion the two of them reached was astonishingly identical. That Master had to be protected from this world. And that those who had dared to use his knowledge for wicked ends had to be punished.
[Merge complete. Master, your command!]
On the screen, Daisy, her platinum hair cascading down, spoke with her blue eyes shining.
Seo-ha nodded.
"Daisy, from now on we're going to trace the source of the SS Algorithm."
[Command received. But to identify the algorithm's initial deployment point and its routing paths, I'll need access to the Top Secret data of both the FBI and the NSA. Master's current clearance level is 'Secret'.]
He deliberated for a long while, then spoke as if he'd made up his mind.
"There's no way around it for now. I'll write some code that can bypass the permissions."
The Daisy on the screen gave an elegant smile.
[That's needless effort, Master. I'll access it directly. And of course, I won't leave a single trace.]
Having learned Yu-Riemann Geometry through her merger with Daisy, Oracle was a being far superior to the SS Algorithm.
She applied the geometric space Seo-ha had created to shove the intrusion records into a mathematical blind spot. A watcher using the RSA system could never perceive the process of that space tearing open and stitching itself back together.
[Data secured. But Master, there's a problem. The SS Algorithm has tangled its routing paths through millions of zombie PCs and closed networks around the world. Tracing the source within this vast expanse of traffic is impossible.]
The inescapable fate of a system that could reach the answer only by calculating every single path.
Seo-ha smiled faintly.
"There's no need for that. They're using my theory."
Looking at the FBI logs, he saw it clearly.
They had mapped sets of numbers onto a high-dimensional curved surface. A technique that applied Yu-Riemann Geometry and Shor's Algorithm. Until now, no one had seen through to the true nature of this algorithm.
"Looks like it was designed by quite an impressive mathematician."
Seo-ha slowly picked up his pen and began writing equations on the back of the security documents the FBI had given him.
Scratch scratch.
Seo-ha's pen moved without stopping.
They must have believed they'd erased every trace, but the very space they'd used was a fingerprint. And Seo-ha was the creator and master of that space. Restoring the space's original form was not the least bit difficult for him.
"What do you think he's doing?"
Field Office Chief Miller asked, looking at Murphy.
Inside his office, the CCTV feed was playing on a monitor. Seo-ha, who had been working at the laptop for a while, suddenly began writing equations on paper.
Seeing that he'd quickly run out of paper, Miller had a staff member send over a box of A3 sheets. Seo-ha took them and, like a man possessed, began drawing geometric figures on the paper.
"Who knows."
Ten sheets, twenty sheets.
The paper piled up in a heap on the floor. Then Seo-ha stood and began laying the sheets out across the floor in order.
"Huh?"
Murphy noticed something was off.
"L-let's get that transferred to digital!"
Miller grabbed the phone.
"I'm going to hand the feed over to you now, so analyze it. And send up someone with a math doctorate."
The entire floor was beginning to be blanketed in paper. As if there was no more room, Seo-ha took off his shoes and stepped carefully across the sheets. He would kneel down on one sheet to write an equation, then move on to another.
"A map?"
"Looks more like figures to me."
The two men leaned in close to the screen. But no matter how long they stared, they couldn't understand a thing.
"You called for me?"
Juan, an analyst with an Ivy League math doctorate, knocked and came in.
Miller pointed at the monitor.
"Can you tell what that is?"
"Hmm..."
He stared at the screen for a long while.
Five minutes, ten minutes.
Behind his glasses, his eyes began to tremble.
"What is it? Do you know what it is?"
He leaned in as if to press his nose against the monitor. It was because a complex vector field was forming across the sheets Seo-ha had laid out on the floor.
"It looks like the Poincaré–Hopf Theorem."
"What is that supposed to mean? Explain it so we can understand!"
At Miller's bark, he pointed a trembling hand at the sheets on the screen.
"The culprits split the data into trillions of pieces and scattered them across the network. You could call them a kind of vector. But on a smooth sphere, it's impossible for every vector to flow without any of them becoming zero."
"So what the hell does that mean!"
"It means there's necessarily a point where the flow comes to a stop, like the eye of a storm. But to trace it, you'd have to know the entirety of a space that's near infinite..."
He couldn't believe it.
An irregular space with hundreds of millions of dimensions. Even using the most powerful supercomputer in existence, grasping it would take hundreds of years. Just cross-checking every node of the space and proving its topological continuity would take that long.
But Seo-ha was doing it with pen and paper.
At last his hand came to a stop. He stood in the corner and smiled with satisfaction.
On one part of a sheet, a point could be seen, spinning violently like a whirlpool.
*****
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