Elixir (3 page)

They approach two large block-shaped buildings, no signs or writing on either. The cab stops in the eighteen-thousand-spot NSA parking lot, the professor sliding his wallet from his pocket. As he pays, Sean gets out, fixating on the black reflective windows, staring back at himself on the surface.

The professor steps on the curb, wraps his trench coat snug around his chest, and nods at the main facility. They wander toward it, Sean eyeing the faces of NSA employees as they walk by, emotionless expressions, whispered conversations.

They enter the lobby. Sean peeks through the one-way glass at the sea of cars outside. “We’re meeting by the memorial,” his teacher says, veering toward a hall. “This way.”

In a short while they’re at the end of a corridor. Hands in his pockets, Sean inspects an eight-foot-tall triangular memorial dedicated to fallen American codebreakers, “They Served in Silence” engraved above one hundred seventy-one names.

A fit woman in a dark business suit approaches, click of her high heels echoing. “Welcome gentlemen,” she says with her palms up. “I’ll show you to Mr. Goya’s office.”

In a bit she’s escorting them across an upper floor lined with wide black-rimmed monitors, interactive graphs and charts on each. They thread through a couple dozen bustling workers, stopping at a door labeled “P. Goya – Technical Director.” She cracks it and says, “He should be just a few minutes. You can wait on the couch until he’s back.”

“Thank you,” the professor says as they slip inside the corner office. Sean soaks in the personal touches, on the wall an encased Philadelphia Eagles jersey, on the desk a picture of a man posing with the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar software company, next to it another of him with his wife, son, and daughter in front of Disney World’s Cinderella Castle.

The professor settles on the edge of the U-shaped leather couch, fingers tapping his knees. Arms folded, Sean leans by the football jersey. The muted morning sun oozes through the Venetian blinds in faint strips, streaking across his body and the jersey’s glass case next to his head. His teacher starts humming a song he can’t make out. “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees? The room is silent other than the off-key tune.

In some time the man from the photos strides in smiling. He has energetic green eyes, much more colorful in person than in the photos. “I appreciate your patience,” he says, shaking the professor’s hand. “Nice seeing you again.” He grips the kid’s. “Patrick Goya.”

“Sean.”

Patrick gets comfortable in his ergonomic chair and says to the professor, “I can’t thank you enough for contacting me. What you did was the absolute right choice.” Then turns to Sean. “You’ve definitely complicated my life here, that’s for sure.” He has a sip of coffee from a blue cup with the NSA seal on it. “That being said. I’ve been at the agency for seven years and worked in the private sector at a handful of major tech companies for fifteen years before that. In no position have I ever seen a discovery made as inventive as yours. It took me a while to even understand what you did. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever been exposed to. In any kind of math.”

“I didn’t think it was gonna cause so much trouble. I probably would’ve done another problem if I did.”

He laughs. “Come on. That’s the King Kong of problems. Trouble aside, you must be thrilled you were able to...wrangle it. The sense of accomplishment with something of that magnitude has to be incredible.” Sean shrugs. “I’m sorry we have to keep this classified. You deserve the notoriety.”

“Notoriety is the last thing I want.”

Patrick looks confused. “It was an achievement up there in the field with...the invention of the personal computer. You don’t want the public to know you did it?”

“Man. I’m glad you guys want to keep it a secret.”

He rocks back and forth for a few moments. “Why’d you try to solve it then?”

“I wanted to see if I wouldn’t be able to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone at school said it was the hardest one out there. I thought maybe I’d...hit a wall trying to figure it out.”

“You don’t hear that a lot at the NSA.” Patrick chuckles, so does the professor. “Why would you hope for...failure?”

“It would be a change I guess.”

“From what?”

“It feels weird.” He rubs the back of his neck. “How easy stuff like that is for me, compared to...things other people say about it.”

Patrick absorbs this. “Ah. It must be lonely at the top. I get it. Not a bad thing though. Being at the top.” He has some more coffee. “How much did you win on the game show again? A mill and a half?”

“One point seven,” he says with reluctance. He’s always been embarrassed to admit he became a millionaire from answering trivia questions, aware of how hard the average American has to work for a paycheck, like his aunt, a dental assistant for twenty years before they got rich.

“You could’ve won a hundred million. Me and my wife used to watch you. Why’d you step down?”

“It was time.”

“You’re crazy. If I were you I would’ve milked that as long as I could’ve.” He studies Sean from head to toe, Pirates cap, wrinkled shirt, neon sneakers. “I can’t say you’re not interesting Malone.”

“He certainly is,” the professor says with a slow nod. “With an IQ of two hundred and fifty, he definitely has the ability to surprise.”

Patrick stands and saunters to a chrome-edged table in the corner, refilling his mug under a Krups machine. “You’re a Pennsylvania boy I hear?”

“Yeah,” Sean says. “Shipville. I saw your Eagles jersey on the wall. You too?”

“Lay a finger on it and there’ll be hell to pay. I know you guys in Shipville are all Steelers fans.” The boy smirks. True, he does like the Steelers. “Don’t let the suit fool you. I’m a North Philly kid at heart.” He pours a dash of milk in his drink and stirs it with a thin red straw. “How’re you liking California?”

“It’s cool.”

“You’re a little young for the dorms, right? Did your parents move west with you?”

Over the last ten years Sean’s gotten good at showing no outward signs of pain when the word “parents” is mentioned but hasn’t made much progress with the inward reaction, the bottom of his stomach dropping. “My aunt. My parents passed away.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“It was a while ago.”

His gaze tilted down, Patrick waits for the awkward moment to dissolve, then says, “We’ll meet with the rest of them in a bit. You guys want a bite before? I can have my secretary put in an order for us.”

“Pizza would be good,” Sean says, excitement in his voice for the first time all day. “Maybe with peppers? Spicy ones. Not the yellow banana kind.”

“Professor?”

“I’ve never said no to pizza. But please, only the hot stuff on half. I’d have indigestion for a month if I came close to a habanero.”

“Done,” Patrick says, glancing at his gold watch on one hand, lifting his phone with the other. “We’ll need to eat quick. The people we’re meeting with aren’t exactly the type who tolerate bad punctuality.”

A short while later Sean is twisting back and forth in a swivel chair in an underground conference room, brown-oak paneling, dim track lighting, agency logo mounted on the far wall. He has a bad cramp in his left leg, the result of a six-hour plane ride and lack of sleep. The professor sits next to him at the shiny table, Patrick at one head, four government men among them. In the center is a stack of confidentiality documents all seven just signed.

“He’s on his way down,” Patrick says as if warning everyone.

In a couple minutes the door opens, a brawny man in his sixties entering, some others tensing in his presence. Sean recognizes him from press conferences on TV, the United States Secretary of Defense.

He grasps the non-disclosure contracts, then advances with slow strides to the empty head seat and descends his six-foot-four frame into it. He thumbs through the sheets of paper, grunting in approval as he counts each signature. Once done with all seven, he looks up and says in his baritone Southern accent, “None of you have any business telling anyone outside this circle the formula exists. Wives. Kids. Priests. Anyone. If you do, I’ll personally see to it that my friends in the Justice Department throw every punishment outlined in this agreement down on you to the letter. Are we clear?”

“Yes sir,” Patrick says in the sort of tone employees use with their bosses. “All seven of us are fully aware of the stipulations.”

The Secretary glances at him for a second, then sweeps his gaze across the other four federal officials. “The fact that something like this is out in the world changes how each of your organizations has to go about its business. Forever. But your staff will carry on without a whisper of it. From the janitor all the way up to your second-in-command. If you have reason to believe this algorithm leaked, you’re to discuss it strictly with the four other reps sitting here. Assess the problem with them, then trickle the orders down to your staff. If your subordinates ask questions, you tell them it’s classified. If they keep asking...you send them to me. And most importantly, if you have a suspicion anyone else in here is responsible for a potential leak, you tell me before you find the time to take your next breath. Is that understood?” They all nod. He pivots his stare to Sean, cracks the knuckles on his right hand, and asks, “Do you know who I am?”

Sean’s brain retrieves all the information it’s ever read about him, birth date, pounds of tobacco his wealthy family’s South Carolina farm produces every year, rank when he fought in Vietnam, position he played on the Cornell football team, name of the Middle Eastern dictator the defense contractor Peltex Industries was accused of selling weapons to when he was the CEO ten years ago. All he says, “You’re the Secretary of Defense. Paul Pine.”

“That’s correct.” He lingers on the boy’s neon sneaker, jutting out from the side of the table. “Now, you interrupted the lives of the leaders of the most important bureaus in this country. I hope you’re aware of that. They can never operate in the same capacity again with this...variable in the mix.”

Head down, Sean says in a low voice, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was gonna be this...big of a thing.”

“It’s bigger than a big thing. All right. And for what? The thrill you could do it? Knowing you have the power to hack something?”

“Sir, to clarify,” Patrick says. “Sean’s intentions were innocent, never about hacking. This began as an academic exercise at the Southern California Technology Institute he was doing alongside his instructor Steven Merzberg, who’s with us too.” The professor gives a clumsy wave. “There was never any goal to hack into one of our data centers, or any other. As soon as Dr. Merzberg found out, he escalated it to me immediately.”

“That’s a hell of an assignment you handed out professor,” Pine says.

A few seconds pass. “That’s all it was ever intended to be,” the professor says, a thin layer of sweat on his bald head. “An assignment. I planned for him to analyze the nature of the Traveling Salesman Problem, and possibly make some slight efficiency gains in the time it takes computers to process it. Even a minor improvement would’ve been considered a momentous feat.” A pause. “But I never thought he was going to come up with a formula to turn it on its head, and decrease the runtime by an order of magnitude. In my field, doing what he did is essentially considered impossible. This...outcome of his never crossed my mind when we began the independent study.” He glances at Sean. “In hindsight though...I probably shouldn’t have made that assumption about the boy. He’s not a...typical student.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well.” He folds his hands in front of him. “I’ve been around academic professionals my entire adult life. Brilliant men and women. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge. Everywhere. I’ve seen the reaches of the human IQ spectrum. The small group at the far-right corner of the bell curve. To be honest, I’m considered one of those people myself.” His face contorts into a ponderous expression. “But Sean, see, he’s different. Statistically speaking, at any given time, there is someone who isn’t in any group. By definition you can call that individual the smartest person on Earth. Based on my knowledge of the minds out there in the most distinguished realms of academia, my own mental abilities included, and comparing that to what I’ve observed of the boy since he’s been at the school, I would say there’s a good chance he would be just that. The smartest person on Earth. In terms of raw intellectual firepower, he surpasses anything I’ve ever come across.” He pauses. “By a landslide.”

Hearing this speech, a few people at the table glimpse Sean, a flash of wonder in their eyes they’re trying to conceal out of professionalism. The Smartest Person on Earth. He hates that title, been called it three times before. Once over a decade ago by a child cognition specialist who gave him an IQ test. Once backstage at
Jeopardy!
by a physicist from Poland he rendered scoreless. Once by their mailman in Pasadena, a big fan.

Not only does the label itself draw the sort of attention he doesn’t like, such as the stares he’s getting right now, but it has implications that bother him at a deeper level. Without a mind on the planet superior to his, there’s no line of defense between him and those hard, almost otherworldly, questions that have baffled humanity for ages. Why did nature create any of us in the first place? When it did, how come it made us so different from each other? Now that it has six billion versions of us on this giant floating rock in infinite space, what are we all supposed to do?

As gifted as he is he can’t answer any of these. The universe scares him. Knowing he’s our best hope to make sense of it scares him even more. The Smartest Person on Earth. He didn’t ask for that title. He asked for it just as much as someone asks for bad vision or an inability to digest certain foods or crooked teeth. He was born with it.

Pine reclines, his large build flattening the leather cushion. “I realize he’s not normal,” he says to the professor. “I remember him from
Jeopardy!
a few years ago.” He shifts to Sean. “How old are you now?”

The cramp in Sean’s leg tightens. Rubbing it, he says, “Fourteen.” He doesn’t like the way the Secretary is looking at him. He detects an animalistic hostility in his eyes, veiled beneath a shallow disguise of civility from years of boarding school and the Ivy League, summers at country clubs, hobnobbing at political fundraisers, and all the things that come along with the others.