Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (15 page)

“Everyone else
does
care.
You
care, you just don’t know it yet.”

“Keep talking.”

Kevin hesitated. The stream of students was beginning to taper off now; it was almost time to head inside. He knew he only had a few minutes before he had to start teaching.

Three minutes to explain maybe the most important concept in next generation computing
, he thought.
Sure, no problem.

“NP means Non-Polynomial time,” Kevin said, speaking quickly now. “But never mind that. It’s just a way of describing a type of problem that computers
can’t
solve.”

“And why not?”

Kevin shrugged. “Some puzzles just have too many possible outcomes. No matter how fast the computer, it would take millions of years to work out one of these things by brute force. Speed doesn’t matter. You have to be
smart
.”

Danny shook his head. “Example, please.”

“Let’s say you’re a Fed-Ex truck driver in Manhattan, and you’ve got ten deliveries to make today. You want to go as quickly as you can, and drive the shortest distance possible.”

“Good so far.”

“Well, that’s no big task for you – just get out a map and eyeball the thing, and you can probably work out the quickest route. Maybe not the absolute
best
route, but something pretty close.”

Danny nodded. “Yup, I could handle that.”

“Okay, but you’re actually doing something incredibly sophisticated. From a computer’s point of view, you’re a drop-dead genius. Because with ten destinations, there are 10-factorial possible routes.”

“Which means?”

Kevin smiled. “There are over 3.5 million different possible routes to deliver those packages. And even a fast computer will have to work for a bit to go through all those possibilities.”

Danny’s mouth dropped open. “3.5 million. Son of a – ”

“Exactly,” Kevin said. “And remember that having just 10 drop-offs would be unrealistically low. A real Fed-Ex guy probably has to deal with something like 30 or 40 deliveries on a busy day.”

Danny was still nodding. “That sounds right. And how many possible routes are there for a 40-delivery day?”

“It’s a number we don’t even have a name for. It’s an 8 with 47 zeros after it.”

Danny threw his hands up. “I’m an English teacher,” he protested. “I don’t work with numbers like that.”

“Neither do I. Put it this way: if the Fed Ex guy has to make 60 deliveries, then the number of possible routes is roughly the same as the number of atoms we think are in the universe.”

Danny let out a little laugh. “All right,” he said. “That seems like a lot.”

“I agree. And the larger point is that NP problems are all like this one. The complexity goes up too fast for any computer to handle it with raw speed. Only a human can solve – or even
try
to solve – problems of this kind. Computers have power, but they don’t have any real intelligence. They can’t see the big picture.”

Danny was silent for a minute.
“So the kid’s dad, Billaud. He might be close to solving the Fed Ex problem?”

“Not the Fed Ex one in particular, but it doesn’t matter. All the NP problems are related. If you can solve one, you can solve them all.”

“How’s he going to do it?”

Kevin shrugged. “No idea. I don’t know how close he is. But even the possibility is huge. Because if you get a computer to solve an NP problem, all bets are off. Past NP, there’s theoretically no limit to what a computer could do. And then we hit the singularity, which would be absolutely incredible.”

Danny put his head down. He was getting tired. “Are you going to explain that last bit?”

Kevin frowned. “No way. I can’t squeeze the singularity into a two-minute lesson. I need to get to class.”

Danny nodded. “Fair enough. Talk to you later.”

They let in a few last straggling students, and then they let the door close behind them. They headed up the stairs.

Out on the street, the men in the blue painting jumpsuits climbed back into their van. They seemed to have left most of their painting supplies somewhere.

In the other van, perhaps.

Blood Began To Spill

Kevin was back in the classroom, and the teaching was easy. Laughably easy. He had gone through the whole Algebra book in the middle of the night, after all; he knew where he was headed. And his recall of fundamental mathematics had certainly not been affected by whatever had happened to him over the last three months. If anything, he seemed to remember those concepts even more clearly; he felt as if he could recall entire pages from the book, pages and examples and details he had only glanced at the night before. During his second class, one of the boys asked a question about isolating a variable. Without pausing in the middle of what he was writing on the board, Kevin simply told the boy to look at example 5 at the bottom of page 22.

The boy did. And in another moment, he silently nodded his understanding.

A different student raised his hand. “How’d you know he’d ask that?”

Kevin stopped writing. “What?” He hesitated. Turned to face the class. “Oh, that’s… I’ve been teaching this subject for a long time
.
”

“Okay.”

He turned back to the board and kept writing. The students kept working. Kevin wondered, in a detached, background part of his mind, when the moment would come that he would simply pass out. That moment
had
to be coming. He had not slept a single minute in the past twenty-four hours.

But
there was n
o drowsiness, no lack of attention span. Nothing except a dull ache in his legs from that sprint around the park loop a few hours ago. Which had nothing to do with a lack of sleep.

How am I getting away with this?

Then again, maybe he
wasn’t
getting away with it. Because Danny had clearly noticed something when he first saw him this morning
,
s
omething in the way Kevin looked, circles under his eyes or a sag at the corners of his mouth. So maybe there was some sort of drug in his system, some kind of amphetamine or steroid or who knew what else, something that was masking his fatigue, hiding it somehow,
and
all the while eating him up,
consuming
him from the inside. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

If that’s the answer, I’ll go down hard when this stuff wears off
.

I
f it was a drug, then there was clearly still plenty of it left. He got through his two morning classes without feeling a thing. He didn’t need to sit down; his eyelids didn’t even feel heavy. He felt as if he could teach the whole course from scratch, no notes required. Not once had he even glanced at his lesson plans.

And already
it was time for lunch.

In the cafeteria,
Kevin filled his plate with as much food as he could carry, beans and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and salad and bread and a little plate of yellow custard. He felt as
if
he hadn’t eaten in days. He saw Jean, the biology teacher, waving to him to join them at one of the faculty tables, and he was about to go sit down when he heard a rising commotion coming from the far end of the cafeteria. He and all the other teachers looked.

It was easy to see why the students were in an uproar: Connor Feeney was hard at work.

Connor had put another much younger, much smaller student in a headlock, and he was dragging the student down one of the aisles as if presenting him for a public shaming in a town meeting. Which was precisely the point. Even from across the room, Kevin could recognize Connor’s victim: it was Elias Worth, the closely-shorn fourth grader who had briefly broken down crying in the computer lab the day before.

“You okay?” Connor was shouting, holding Elias’s head with one hand while delivering repeated jabs and blows with the other. “You all right?” A quick knock on top of Elias’s head with his knuckles. “Is it time to cry?” A slap on Elias’s face. Now another. As if Elias had fainted, and Connor were a doctor trying to revive him. “Every day’s a good day for some crying, right Worth?” A jab in Elias’s ribs. “It’s okay, Worth, let it out.”

Several teachers, Kevin included, got up from their lunch and began moving quickly to intervene. Not
too
quickly, because rescuing Elias
would
probably doom him to longer and more severe beatings after school. He needed help, but the hard truth (one that no teacher would have been willing to admit) was that Elias also probably needed time to endure, time to suffer through Connor’s abuse so that he could emerge, bruised but alive, as “a kid who had been beaten up by Feeney.” Because there were
lots
of kids who met that description. They were a group of their own. Not a proud group, but still a group. With a sort of quiet, hard-nosed honor.

And yet as the teachers approached, several of them noticed that there was something else going on. The other students were gathered now in a tight circle around the two boys, and that crowd was starting to make noise. It was an excited, root-him-on-noise.

Because Elias was doing more than enduring.

In fact, the smaller boy was putting up a very respectable struggle, especially considering his size. Which was the reason the other students were getting so excited. Abuse at the hands of Connor Feeney usually inspired only silence, or perhaps small winces of sympathetic pain. If you were in the vicinity of a Feeney beating, you simply put your head down and moved on, lest you were noticed as someone who might be deserving of a beating yourself. But Elias Worth was making things interesting. He was a quiet, small-for-his-age boy with few friends, and until yesterday he had been known only as that kid with the high forehead. He showed up after each vacation with tragically short hair, making him look as if he were about to enlist in the marines. And then at the end of the day yesterday, he had become “that kid who cried in the computer lab.”

But now he was becoming something else entirely: “that kid who’s way,
way
tougher than he looks.” Because suddenly, somehow, he was giving Connor Feeney a hell of a time. Elias was certainly not crying now, and never mind his reputation from yesterday. Now he was redeeming himself. Now he was beginning to thrash about so violently that Connor was struggling to maintain his headlock.

“Hey, cut it out,” Connor said, the surprise clear in his voice. “Easy, Worth. Cut – ”

Elias redoubled his efforts. He could sense the shift, could sense the opportunity for an upset, and he was not going to let up now. The crowd of students felt it too, and they began chanting Elias’s name.