Factoring Humanity

“Sure. As far back as nineteen seventy-seven, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman — the three MIT scientists who worked out the technique — encoded a message using the 129-digit product of two primes. They offered a hundred-dollar prize to anyone who could decode it.”

“And did anyone?”

“Years later, yeah. Nineteen ninety-four, I think.”

“What’d it say?”

“ ‘The magic words are squeamish ossifrage.’ ”

“What the devil is ‘ossifrage’?”

“It’s a bird of prey, I think. It took six hundred volunteers using computers worldwide each working on part of the problem over an eight-month period, to crack the code — more than a hundred quadrillion instructions.”

“So why haven’t they done that with Josh’s message?”

“He used 512 digits — and each additional digit is an additional order of magnitude, of course. They’ve been working on it, using conventional means, ever since but haven’t cracked it yet.”

“Oh. But why did this consortium come to you?” She was a hard-T person, too.

“Because they think I’m getting close to a breakthrough in quantum computing. I’m not ready yet — we’ve got only one prototype system, and even if we do get the bugs out of it, it’ll work only with numbers exactly three-hundred digits long. But in a few months, with luck, I will have a system that could decode messages of any length almost instantaneously.”

“Ah.”

“This woman who came to see me, I think she wants to patent whatever technology is gleaned from the message.”

“That’s outrageous,” said Heather. “Even if such a message exists — and I really doubt that — it belongs to everyone.” She paused. “And besides…”

“What?”

“Well,” said Heather, frowning, “if it exists, then Josh did kill himself after he saw what it had to say. Maybe — maybe you don’t want to know what it says.”

“You mean maybe his suicide might actually have been related to the message?”

“Maybe. Like I said, as far as I knew, he wasn’t gay or bi.”

“But what kind of message would lead a man to kill himself, but first hide it from the rest of humanity?” asked Kyle.

Heather was quiet for a moment, then: “‘Heaven exists, it’s absolute paradise, and everyone gets in.’”

“Why keep that a secret?”

“So that the human race would go on. If everyone knew that was true, we’d all commit suicide to get there sooner, and Homo sapiens would become extinct overnight.”

Kyle thought about this. “Then why leave an encrypted version of the message at all? Why not just destroy the message altogether?”

“Maybe it’s like the Pope,” said Heather. Kyle’s face telegraphed his lack of comprehension. “They say there’s a prophecy under lock and key at the Vatican; it’s been there for centuries. Every once in a while, a Pope looks at it — and reacts with horror, locking it up again. At least, that’s the story.”

Kyle frowned. “Well, this consortium wants me to go work for them; they’re offering a lot of money.”

“How much?” asked Heather.

She could see hesitation on his face. Even before he spoke, she knew what he must have been thinking: If we don’t reconcile at some point, is it wise for me to disclose the magnitude of a new source of income? “It, ah, was quite a substantial sum,” said Kyle.

“I see,” said Heather.

“They’ve already got a line on another researcher who also is close to making a breakthrough.” He paused. “Saperstein.”

“You hate that guy.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should do it.”

“Why?”

“Well, suppose Saperstein or someone else does it instead. That doesn’t mean the Huneker message, if it really exists, ever goes public — the government doubtless has a copy of the message, but they’ve kept it under wraps for over twenty years now.”

“Perhaps. But I’m sure the consortium will make me sign an NDA.”

“Ah,” said Heather, imitating her husband. “The coveted NDA.”

He smiled. “An NDA is a nondisclosure agreement. They’d likely make me sign a contract with very stiff penalties, promising not to divulge the message’s content, or even its existence.”

“Hmm. What do you want to do?”

Kyle spread his arms. “There was an old Monty Python skit about a joke so funny you’d literally die laughing if you heard it; it was used as an Allied weapon in World War Two. It had to be translated from English to German by teams, each person translating only one word at a time. One guy accidentally saw two words and ended up in intensive care.” He paused. “I don’t know. If somebody handed you a joke and said it was that funny, wouldn’t you have to look and see for yourself?” He paused. “Even if Huneker did kill himself after he read it, I want to know what the alien message said.”

“It might be indecipherable, you know — just like the Centauri messages. Even if you can figure out the prime factors, it doesn’t mean the message would make sense. I mean, despite what I said a moment ago, I guess it is plausible that Josh killed himself for personal reasons, and the message had nothing to do with it.”