Elixir Read Free Page A

the phone? I had to leave my aunt for the night to come—”
    “Because someone could be listening in on a phone dammit.” Standing, he pulls a plane ticket from a drawer and extends it to Sean. His expression is grave. “We’re going to DC. A car’s outside ready to take us to LAX Airport. The National Security Agency is expecting you.”

Shreds of Doubt
    A thirtyish woman rocks a screaming infant on a grounded aircraft, Sean and the professor one row behind. Sean stares out the window at three men in orange vests loading luggage on another plane, sky still dense with rain. He sticks his hand in a bag of spicy Doritos, pops a couple in his mouth, and chews, the crunch muffled by the wailing child.
    “You need to shred every copy of the paper and erase the file from your computer,” the professor says in a hushed yet frantic voice from the middle chair. He glances to his right, making sure the guy in the aisle seat isn’t listening. He’s not, bobbing to music in his headphones. “I destroyed the one you sent me after I emailed it to the NSA.”
    Sean regrets the lie the professor made him tell his aunt about why they were going to DC, a math conference at Georgetown they “couldn’t miss.” The guilt of it has been weighing on him. “I still don’t get why the freaking NSA cares so much. Don’t you think this is a little extreme? A cross-country trip? I can’t even tell my own relative where we’re going?”
    “The existence of your algorithm and the involvement of the NSA must be kept a secret. Family included. If not, there’s a chance word can get out that it’s a reality and people will hunt you down for it. Bad people. What you’ve created has catastrophic potential. If someone without the purest of intentions got access to it the world as we know it could change.”
    “Because of a math formula?” He bites into a Dorito.
    “It’s more than a math formula.”
    “If you knew it was gonna be such a big deal why didn’t you give me a heads-up before we even started the independent study?”
    The professor peeks over his shoulder to see if anyone is eavesdropping, an oblivious overweight couple playing Angry Birds on iPads. He says to his student, “We never discussed you doing something as...significant as this. I thought you’d analyze the historical approaches to the Traveling Salesman and maybe make some marginal gains in its runtime. I didn’t expect you were going to exponentially alter the fabric of it.” He taps his fingers on his knees for a while, eyes jumping around. “You do realize how encryption works, don’t you?”
    “Sort of. I was gonna take the class last semester, but it was full.” He tosses two more chips in his mouth.
    “Well...you should’ve registered earlier,” he says with a trace of frustration. “All sensitive information, whether it’s confidential government documents or credit card numbers, gets scrambled when it crosses the internet so people can’t steal it. Hackers and what not. Hard-to-solve math like the kind in the Traveling Salesman Problem is used by the good guys to do the scrambling.” A pause. “Do you see the issue?”
    “So if you had my paper you could hack anything that was encrypted by the problem?”
    “Not only the Salesman. But any one even similar to it.”
    He bangs his hands together a few times, knocking the Doritos dust off. “How much encoded info is in that...group?”
    “Pretty much all of it.”
    Sean leans back, the gravity of the situation sinking in. He’s quiet for about half a minute, the crying baby the only noise between them. “Sorry.”
    The professor lets out a nervous laugh. “Oh Sean, oh Sean.” The screens mounted to the rear of the headrests glow and a welcome message plays from American Airlines. A perky stewardess recites a safety announcement over the PA system. Passengers flip up their tray tables and power down their phones.
    Sean stuffs his chips in the pouch in front of him. He lost his