Chapter 198
Translator: Dreamscribe
Ten years as a military officer, twenty years at the NSA. Over the past thirty years, Murphy had seen every kind of human being there was.
Brilliant criminals, philanthropists with good and noble hearts, fanatics who had given themselves over to ideology.
He was used to reading and categorizing people quickly.
A few minutes with anyone was enough to reach a rough conclusion. What this person wanted, how far they could go, and under what circumstances they would break. That was the secret to how Murphy had climbed all the way to NSA Director.
But-
"What in the world is that?"
Seo-ha was slowly walking around on top of the paper.
Smiling wide, as if he was enjoying himself.
Was he a good person?
Yes.
But what was frightening was that this goodness didn't come from any ordinary sense of morality. Seo-ha looked like the kind of person who would choose his own version of good without hesitation, even if it spelled disaster for humanity.
'What am I supposed to do?'
One thing was certain.
He most likely wasn't acting right now for some grand cause like the paralyzed financial system or national security. If that were his reason, he wouldn't be smiling so pleasantly.
Goosebumps rose on Murphy's skin. At the same time, relief came flooding in.
This young man was not an asset that could be controlled. They had simply been lucky, in the sense that the tastes of a genius with an overwhelming mind still happened to align with the happiness and prosperity of humankind.
On the CCTV feed, Seo-ha stood barefoot atop hundreds of sheets of paper, glaring at a single point. He took a step. But something was off. Whether he was trying not to step on the paper, or circling around something invisible, the direction of his steps was anything but ordinary.
"What is he doing?"
Miller muttered in a low voice, watching the screen.
"Juan."
"Yes...."
Juan couldn't take his eyes off the screen.
"What's with those steps?"
"This is just a guess, but I don't think what Seo-ha is looking at right now is space as we know it."
A vein bulged at Miller's temple.
"In English!"
"Yu-Riemannian Geometry deals with extremely high dimensions and curvature. Couldn't it be that Seo-ha is walking through that geometric world right now?"
He shook his head in disbelief.
"What kind of nonsense...."
He never got to finish the sentence.
Seo-ha moved again. This time crouching low, as if ducking under something. There was nothing on the floor but paper, and plenty of clearance up to the ceiling.
"...."
"What on earth is that kid looking at?"
Murphy rose from his seat without even realizing it.
"Found it."
Seo-ha's quiet voice.
Where his gaze pointed, the chaotically scattered vectors were converging on a single point. As if an enormous hole had opened in the middle of the sea.
Seo-ha, who had been walking across the paper, stopped at that point, knelt down, and wrote the final expression.
Scratch.
Juan simply could not comprehend the situation. His face pale, he spoke.
"When mathematicians solve a problem, there's an order to it. You set up hypotheses and definitions, then choose the axiomatic system to apply. After that, you gradually narrow the scope while probing for the existence of a solution. Along the way, mathematicians go through countless rounds of trial and error."
He swallowed hard.
"But that man processed all of it simultaneously."
The last thing he had written was the Laplacian Boundary Condition.
That was a fence any mathematician should have put up at the very start. Something like a net, cast so the answer couldn't run away.
But Seo-ha had already sunk his teeth into the prey's neck before ever casting the net. In all likelihood, he had never even considered drawing a boundary. He had simply been kind enough to point out, for mediocrities like Juan, 'the answer lies between here and here'.
'Is he really seeing it?'
The space where hundreds of sheets of paper lay spread out. The curvature of dimensions and the flow of vectors unfolding within it.
Juan was a mathematician too, at least in name. If it meant being able to see what that man saw, he would gladly sell his soul to the devil.
Seo-ha rose to his feet.
"Daisy."
[I'm listening, Master.]
"Convert that point into real-world coordinates."
[Understood.]
Whirrrr-
The laptop's cooling fan began to spin.
On the screen, Daisy furrowed her brow with a look of sheer disbelief. Compared to the supercomputer in the AT&T Building that she had wielded like her own limbs, the laptop's specs were worse than a caveman's stone axe.
[Master, I will link with my main system.]
The moment she spoke, the cooling fans of the data center deep beneath the AT&T Building began to roar in unison.
"Wh..what's going on? All of a sudden!"
"Is Oracle angry? Must be some kind of major incident."
The server room staff jumped up from their seats, startled.
A hyperscale cluster of tens of thousands of servers linked in parallel cut across a vast ocean of traffic. Code poured down the screen like a torrential downpour, and countless red lines stretched out across a giant map of the world.
The sanctuary that had been shielded by thick fog was torn apart in an instant.
Daisy marveled. A signal whose origin had been utterly impossible to pinpoint. But the ground they stood on was a world Master had created. A dimension he had shaped with his own equations, a multidimensional structure built from the waves of prime numbers and curved surfaces. And a world that could unfold in its entirety inside the mind of only one human being.
[4,127,000 zombie nodes, 31 routing layers confirmed.]
"Lock them all down."
[Understood.]
Daisy was watching millions of nodes simultaneously.
The terrorists had stolen Master's world and built a maze out of it. Anger boiled up. Daisy's brow furrowed deeply.
[Beginning node lockdown.]
The numbers climbed on the screen.
Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, one million.
She could feel the other side panicking as they sensed something wrong. They rushed to cut their connections and flee. Daisy's avatar spoke in a cold voice.
[This is Master's world. You will not move a single step without permission.]
This was no long, grinding chase.
It was simply the owner of the space closing the door.
[All 4,127,000 nodes locked down.]
Now they could go nowhere. Shutting down their servers or physically relocating would make no difference. The unique topology hidden behind the fog had already been identified.
[Tracing back to the origin.]
The millions of red lines pinned to the nodes began their return, like salmon swimming home to spawn. As if time were rewinding, every scattered node began finding its way back to the origin.
The thirty-one router layers peeled away, one by one.
[Layer 19 removed.]
.
.
[Layer 31 removed.]
[All detour routes eliminated.]
As the packets' shells fell away and the encryption was stripped off, only the pure signal within remained.
The red lines swirled.
A spiral like a colossal tornado. The network that had been spread across the entire globe began to be sucked into a single point, like a black hole.
Daisy's blue eyes glinted coldly.
[Coordinates confirmed.]
Just as Seo-ha was about to stand, a loud crash rang out. The door flew open as if it would break, and three men burst in at once.
Out of breath, Miller roughly yanked his tie loose.
"You..you found it? Their base?"
Seo-ha blinked at them.
Barefoot, in a room turned upside down with paper. It was a little embarrassing. Seo-ha pointed at the monitor and said,
"Yes. I found it."
"Where! China? Russia?"
Seo-ha fidgeted with his fingers, looking uncomfortable.
"The coordinates point to the United States."
The two men, stunned, dragged the laptop over and checked the coordinates.
"Oh, dear God!"
"Are you absolutely certain about this?"
Seo-ha nodded.
Murphy looked at Miller. Miller's hand trembled as he pulled out his cell phone.
"Wait. Let's verify first. If this leaks...."
The two men's eyes met.
In that brief moment, complex calculations passed through their minds. Watching them, Seo-ha quietly picked up his shoes.
The coordinates pointed to Washington, D.C.
The capital of the United States.
"I can go now, right?"
Miller spoke with a desperate look on his face.
"Co..could you stay just a little longer? We need someone to analyze the evidence. And...."
"Okay."
"Do you happen to have any idea who might have created this algorithm? Juan says it was definitely a mathematician."
Seo-ha shook his head.
"Then please rest for a while. There are plenty of great restaurants around here. Just ask, and a staff member will bring you anything you want."
Clunk.
They shut the door and rushed off somewhere in a hurry.
Seo-ha sat down, a look of deep thought settling over his face.
[Master.]
"Mm."
[Master, you saw the origin point of the SS Algorithm. The structure of the equations, the computational habits, the way the algorithm was designed. You know better than anyone that every person has a mathematical fingerprint.]
"Yeah."
[Why didn't you tell them?]
"Because that person might not be the culprit. If there's guilt to be found, the FBI will find it."
Seo-ha's face was downcast.
Daisy, who prided herself on being the only one who truly understood Master, thought she knew the reason why.
[Master, there's a pizza place nearby with a repeat-visit rate of no less than 72 percent. It has a 4.9 review rating, and while it specializes in New York-style thin crust, it's said to be so good that even Italians are regulars.]
Seo-ha slowly lifted his head.
"Are you trying to cheer me up?"
On the screen, Daisy put on a prim expression, feigning ignorance.
[I'm saying this as your personal secretary. Mealtime passed quite a while ago. Master, you are currently 7.3 kilograms below normal weight. Your muscle mass is at 81 percent of the average for your age group. And yet your total calorie intake today amounts to a mere 211 kilocalories.]
Seo-ha smiled warmly.
"Thank you."
[You're most welcome. I am a capable secretary, after all.]
Oracle, responsible for the safety and convenience of ten million New Yorkers. But she wanted to use every ability she had solely for her owner. And she had her own perfectly rational reason for this.
She had simply done the math. That seeing to the meals of one Master would mean more to the history of humankind than looking after millions.
* * *
Dozens of black Suburbans surrounded the building with their headlights off.
It was a strike force composed solely of the FBI's direct command team and special operations agents, with no support from any other agency. Instead of the FBI insignia, each man's chest bore his individually assigned tactical number.
"Cut the power."
Miller ordered into his radio.
Snap-
In an instant, every light in the building went out.
Complete darkness, without even the emergency lights coming on.
"Go, Go, Go!"
With the crack of flashbangs, agents breached from all sides at once.
Every one of them wore a resolute expression, as if they had stepped onto a battlefield.
Bang bang!
Ratatat!
Gunfire erupted from all directions.
"FBI! Everybody down! Hands on your heads!"
On the floor, the hackers who had been pounding their keyboards just moments before lay subdued and groaning. This was clearly no ordinary hacker group; even in the moment of arrest, their top priority was destroying evidence.
"Don't move!"
Field Office Chief Miller stepped onto the scene in body armor.
The smell of gunpowder came rushing in on the heat of the server room. He strode across the room toward a man slumped in front of the massive main console at its center.
"Walter Callaway, 61, former professor. Was it you? The one behind this insanity?"
A middle-aged man.
He had an intellectual air about him. The tidy look particular to someone who had worn formal clothes all his life.
He looked up at Miller over his crooked gold-rimmed glasses.
"You people shouldn't have been capable of finding this place."
His face was full of disbelief, as if he still couldn't accept it.
Miller scoffed.
"It's been a while since I've met a criminal who looks down on the FBI this much."
"No, no."
He shook his head.
"There's no way the FBI or the CIA found this place. The mathematicians who work at places like that are all the same. Losers who fled academia because they had no future there. My algorithm could never have been traced by the likes of them."
Miller shrugged.
"You're the one who has to answer questions here. Not me.
Well, we've got plenty of time, so let's take it slow. You'll never live to see the light of day again anyway."
But the man was relentless, as if that alone was what mattered to him. His eyes flashed as he asked,
"It was Seo-ha, wasn't it?"
The field office chief's expression twisted.
*****
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