The Meridians(62)

Then Kevin finished. He turned the computer around, and Scott's heart sank. He heard Lynette sob beside him.

It was gibberish. There was nothing remotely approaching English on the screen - nothing even approaching language, for that matter. It was mostly signs and numbers, as though the boy had inadvertently hit the caps lock at the beginning of his response, rendering everything unintelligible.

But no. The boy was fully aware - or as fully aware as ever he was - for a moment later he spun the computer around to face him once more and typed a quick phrase at the end of the long cipher he had already typed.

He spun the computer around again. "It's all wrong," he had typed at the end of the strange phrases.

Lynette was no longer sobbing beside Scott, she was full-on crying. Quietly it was true, but crying nonetheless. "Oh, dammit, dammit, dammit," she was muttering under her breath in between ratcheting sobs that seemed to shake her from the inside.

Scott reached an arm around her, and though he was as sad as she, perhaps, it nevertheless felt right that he should be holding her this way.

Then Kevin spoke. "Witten was white," he said, and pointed at the gibberish on the monitor of his laptop.

Lynette's sobbing redoubled, as though she was sure that with this cryptic repetition all hope was lost, but suddenly Scott was not so sure. He carefully - sadly, almost - disengaged from Lynette's arms and turned back to Kevin.

"Kevin," he said, "I'm going to do something again, okay?"

He reached out and took the computer once again, and looked at the typing. The first line itself actually didn't look like Kevin had typed with the caps lock on. In point of fact, it looked much stranger than that:





σN{f, g} ? N[σN(f), σN(g)] → 0





He looked a few lines down. A new phrase:





σˉh{f, g} ≈ 1/ˉh [σˉh(f), σˉh(g)]





And there was more, much more. And all of it followed by the words, "It's all wrong. It's all wrong."

Scott looked at Kevin. "Whitten was white?" he asked.

Kevin nodded.

Beside him, he felt Lynette suddenly holding her breath.

He looked farther down.





K0(A)ρ/? Z2, ρ (trivial module) = (1, 0)





"Holy shit," he whispered.

Then he looked at Lynette.

"What is it?"

Scott didn't answer. He highlighted the phrases, opened a web browser, and copied them into Google to run a search. The response was instant: a single hit that read "Noncommutative Geometry, Matrix Theory, and Tori Compactification."

"What is that?" asked Lynette, looking over his shoulder.

"Damned if I know," answered Scott, feeling as though he was on the verge of some monumental discovery, feeling the way that he imagined Columbus must have felt when first setting eyes on the New World. "But I'd be willing to bet one thing: when we figure it out, I bet we'll find out that it's all wrong. And," he added, "I bet we'll find out that Witten was white."





***





29.

***

Lynette and Scott stayed up into the small hours of that night, researching and trying to make sense of what new event was transpiring in Kevin's life.

"Got it," she said.

"What?" said Scott, putting away Kevin's laptop. She had been working on her own computer, and Scott had taken over Kevin's when her son went back to bed, both of them searching the 'net for some kind of clue as to what the long strings of mathematical ciphers that Kevin had written could mean.

"He wasn't saying 'Witten was white,'" said Lynette. "He was saying 'Witten was right.'"

"Oh," said Scott, trying to imply by his tone that she had made no further sense at all.

"It's right here," she said. "Edward Witten is a theoretical physicist."

"Naturally," said Scott.

"Don't be mad just because you haven't figured out what's going on yet."

"Mad? Dear heavens, you'd be rescuing us," Scott said with a smile. She liked it when he smiled. It did wonderful things to his face, changing it from something closed and guarded to something entirely new; something open and pleasant.

"Witten is a physicist who works on string theory."

"Oh," said Scott again.

"You mean you didn't know that?" said Lynette with an exaggerated shake of the head and a few tsk-tsks thrown in for good measure. "And you call yourself a teacher?"

"Physical Education. It's not the same as theoretical physics. Though they both have 'phys' in them, so I can see why you'd be fooled."

"String theory argues that all matter is made up of different kinds of strings. The paper you found, the one that Kevin was quoting in his laptop, was a paper about some basic string theory-related stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Beats me," admitted Lynette. "I'm an accountant, not a theoretical physicist, though they both deal with numbers, so I can see why you'd be fooled."

Scott smirked. "Touché," he said.