around into the QA lab itself. It was dingy in there, as usual, and half the cubicles were empty of human life. Nobody here but us computers; workstations humming away, sucking juice and meditating on who-knew-what questions. (Actually, Idid know: they were mostly running test harnesses, repetitively pounding simulated input data into the programs we’d so carefully built, in the hope of making them fall over or start singing “God Save the King.”) The efficiency of code was frequently a bone of contention between our departments, but the war between software engineering and quality assurance is a long-drawn-out affair: each side needs the other to justify its survival.
I was looking for Amin. Amin with the doctorate in discrete number theory, now slumming it in this company of engineers: my other canary in a number-crunching coal mine. I found him: feet propped up on the lidless hulk of a big Compaq server, mousing away like mad at a big monitor. I squinted; it looked vaguely familiar…“Quake? Or Golgotha?” I asked.
“Golgotha. We’ve got Marketing bottled up on the second floor.”
“How’s the network looking?”
He shrugged, then punched the hold button. “No crashes, no dropped packets-this cut looks pretty solid. We’ve been playing for three days now. What can I do for you?”
I shoved the printout under his nose. “This seem feasible to you?”
“Hold on a mo.” He hit the pause key them scanned it rapidly. Did a double-take. “You’re not shitting?”
“Came out about two hours ago.”
“Jesus Homeboy Christ riding into town at the head of a convoy of Hell’s Angels with a police escort…” he shook his head. Amin always swears by Jesus, a weird side-effect of a westernized Islamic upbringing: take somebody else’s prophet’s name in vain. “If it’s true, I can think of at least three different ways we can make money at it, and at least two more to end up in prison. You don’t use PGP , do you?”
“Why bother?” I asked, my heart pounding. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“If this is true-” he tapped the papers “-then every encryption algorithm except the one time pad has just fallen over. Take a while to be sure, but…that crunch you heard in the distance was the sound of every secure commerce server on the internet succumbing to a brute-force attack. The script kiddies will be creaming themselves. Jesus Christ.” He rubbed his mustache thoughtfully.
“Does it make sense to you?” I persisted.
“Come back in five minutes and I’ll tell you.”
“Okay.”
I wandered over to the coffee station, thinking very hard. People hung around and generally behaved as if it was just another day; maybe it was. But then again, if that paper was true, quite a lot of stones had just been turned over and if you were one of the pale guys who lived underneath it was time to scurry for cover. And it had looked good to me: by the prickling in my palms and the gibbering cackle in the back of my skull, something very deep had recognized it. Amin’s confirmation would be just the icing on the cake confirmation that it was a workable proof.
Cryptography-the science of encoding messages-relies on certain findings in mathematics: that certain operations are inherently more difficult than others. For example, finding the common prime factors of a long number which is a product of those primes is far harder than taking two primes and multiplying them together.
Some processes are not simply made difficult, but impossible because of this asymmetry; it’s not feasible to come up with a deterministic answer to certain puzzles in finite time. Take the traveling salesman problem, for example. A salesman has to visit a whole slew of cities which are connected to their neighbors by a road network. Is there a way for the salesman to figure out a best-possible route that visits each city without wasting time by returning to a previously visited site, for all possible networks of cities? The conventional answer is no-and this has big implications for a huge set of computing applications. Network topology, expert systems-the traditional tool of the AI community-financial systems, and…
Me and my people.
Back in the QA lab, Amin was looking decidedly thoughtful.
“What do you know?” I asked.
He shook the photocopy at me. “Looks good,” he said. “I don’t understand it all, but it’s at least credible.”
“How does it work?”
He shrugged. “It’s a topological transform. You know how most NP - incomplete problems, like the traveling salesman problem, are basically equivalent? And they’re all graph-traversal issues. How to figure out the correct order to carry out a sequence of operations, or how to visit each node in a graph in the correct order. Anyway, this paper’s about a method of reducing such problems to a much simpler form. He’s using a new theorem in graph theory that I sort of heard about last year but didn’t pay much attention to, so I’m not totally clear on all the details. But if this is for real…”
“Pretty heavy?”
He grinned. “You’re going to have to re-write the route discovery code. Never mind, it’ll run a bit faster…”
I rose out of cubicle hell in a daze, blinking in the cloud-filtered daylight. Eight years lay in ruins behind me, tattered and bleeding bodies scattered in the wreckage. I walked to the landscaped car park: on the other side of the world, urban renewal police with M16’s beat the crap out of dissident organizers, finally necklacing them in the damp, humid night. War raged on three fronts, spaced out around a burning planet. Even so, this was by no means the worst of all possible worlds. It had problems, sure, but nothing serious-until now. Now it had just acquired a sucking chest wound; none of those wars were more than a stubbed toe in comparison to the nightmare future that lay ahead.
Insert key in lock, open door. Drive away, secrets open to the wind, everything blown to hell and gone.
I’d have to call Eve. We’d have to evacuate everybody.
I had a bank account, a savings account, and two credit cards. In the next fifteen minutes I did a grand tour of the available ATM s and drained every asset I could get my hands on into a fat wodge of banknotes. Fungible and anonymous cash. It didn’t come to a huge amount-the usual exigencies of urban living had seen to that-but it only had to last me a few days.
By the time I headed home to my flat, I felt slightly sheepish. Nothing there seemed to have changed: I turned on the TV but CNN and the BBC weren’t running any coverage of the end of the world. With deep unease I sat in the living room in front of my ancient PC : turned it on and pulled up my net link.
More mail…a second bulletin fromcomp.risks, full of earnest comments about the paper. One caught my eye, at the bottom: a message from one of No Such Agency’s tame stoolpigeon academics, pointing out that the theorem hadn’t yet been publicly disclosed and might turn out to be deficient. (Subtext: trust the Government. The Government is your friend.) It wouldn’t be the first time such a major discovery had been announced and subsequently withdrawn. But then again, they couldn’t actually produce a refutation, so the letter was basically valueless disinformation. I prodded at the web site again, and this time didn’t even get the ACCESS FORBIDDEN message. The paper had disappeared from the internet, and only the print-out in my pocket told me that I hadn’t imagined it.
It takes a while for the magnitude of a catastrophe to sink in. The mathematician who had posted the original finding would be listed in his university’s directory, wouldn’t he? I pointed my web browser at their administrative pages, then picked up my phone. Dialled a couple of very obscure numbers, waited while the line quality dropped considerably and the charges began racking up at an enormous-but untraceably anonymized-rate, and dialed the university switchboard.
“Hello, John Durant’s office. Who is that?”
“Hi, I’ve read the paper about his new theorem,” I said, too fast. “Is John Durant available?”
“Who are you?” asked the voice at the other end of the phone. Female voice, twangy mid-western accent.
“A researcher. Can I talk to Dr. Durant, please? “I’m afraid he won’t be in today,” said the voice on the phone. “He’s on vacation at present. Stress due to overwork.”
“I see,” I said.
“Who did you say you were?” she repeated.
I put the phone down.
From: [email protected] (none of your business) To: cypherpunks Subject:John Durant’s whereabouts Date:…
You might be interested to learn that Dr. John Durant, whose theorem caused such a fuss here earlier, is not at
