The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(71)

“Where did you say you found this?” he asked casually.

“I didn’t say.”

“He must have hidden it well.”

“Not as well as you’d think,” she said. “It was, however, password protected. It took nearly a week to crack.”

“Let me guess, he left the password hidden in plain sight?”

A pause. “How did you know?”

“Because he can’t help himself.”

“It was a string of numbers,” she explained, “left encoded in a simple game of checkers.”

He smiled. “Sounds about right.” Turning back to the equation, Philip said, “I would need more time, of course. To fully process this.”

“You can sit here as long as you like; memorize the thing if you want. I won’t be able to give you a copy, you understand.”

“Not until I agree to work for you?”

“You must get tired of my conditions.”

Philip started to read the equation again from the beginning but stopped when the symbols began to wag their tongues again. He closed his eyes. Was he really too dim to process this? Is that what it had come to? “Brain rot,” he could hear his father hissing. But that’s not what was bothering him.

Why had Isaac kept this beautiful math a secret from him?

Philip started to speak, but he knew that if he continued, he would start sobbing. Why not break down right there? Go ahead, curl up in this very expensive chair and cry like a goddamn infant. It seemed like the perfect response to his father’s treachery, to his inability to share his work with his son, his favorite child. Why hadn’t he trusted him? Hadn’t Philip shared everything with his father, told him absolutely everything that was going on in his head? As he asked these questions, his mind conjured up Isaac’s cruel response: “Let’s face it, Philip, it’s been some time since you’ve produced good ideas in your own field. You didn’t need the distraction. You may have been remarkable once, but . . .”

Remarkable. There was that word again.

A squeak of impatience from Nellie’s chair. “Did you say something?”

“I was thinking,” Philip managed dispassionately. “This could be a lot of lovely nothing.”

She pulled her chair close. “Let’s just assume for a second it is something. And if it were something, what might that be?”

“It’s not a traffic equation.”

“No? How can you tell?”

“From the bits I’ve seen of my father’s traffic project, the math is different. It’s difficult to explain.”

“Then what is it?”

“You already know. Or you wouldn’t be swaggering around like you’ve won a prize.”

“Say it, Philip. Say what it is.” The glow from the projection made her eyes almost manic. He had to look away.

“It’s a predictive equation.”

“Don’t be vague. What kind?”

Somehow, Philip had known what kind of equation it was the moment she had switched on the projector. Perhaps for the past week, his subconscious had been working on the problem of his father’s obsessive newspaper collection. Isaac had accumulated those clippings for decades, yet the stockpile never found its way into his mathematics—at least, not publicly. But Philip knew his father enough to see that he wouldn’t have wasted his time on such a collection had it not held the possibility of a greater purpose. An end point. Isaac Severy had been preoccupied with death to the extreme.

“It’s a death oracle, or so you’re hoping,” he said. “You may as well name it something fancy.”

“You’re still being vague.”

A sharp chill ran up his back. All those clippings had been of fatal accidents, but the ones his father had flagged in Sharpie had been particularly suspicious: a woman whose car brakes failed; an abusive father trapped in a discarded refrigerator while his family was away; a man who accidentally shot his fiancée while cleaning his gun. It hadn’t been mundane accidents that had fascinated his father but instead the blurred line between chance and vicious intent, between a genuine accident and a perceived one. This was what Isaac had been attempting to isolate.

“It’s more than just death,” Philip said at last. “The math indicates intent.” He could sense Nellie beaming beside him, willing him to continue. “Homicide prediction in the greater LA area.”

“Can you believe you just said that?” She sounded as if she were about to yank him out of his chair and waltz him around the room. “To think what we could have done with this years ago! Can you imagine how it would have been one fateful morning in September to see a map of Manhattan’s financial district light up? Or that field in Pennsylvania? Or London? Madrid? What about the Paris attacks two days ago?”

“If such an equation were possible.”

“If? Open your eyes.”

“Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s clearly about control.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s my father’s attempt to control the uncontrollable, or at least predict it. As if that could have saved my brother somehow—” He stopped himself, not because he didn’t want to discuss his family history with Nellie but because he wasn’t sure that Isaac’s motivations had anything to do with saving lives. As with most everything in his father’s career, hadn’t he done it for the thrill of discovery? Isn’t that why Philip had chosen theoretical physics? How he wished his father could have shared the math that lay in front of him now—explained to him its wonders and nuances—but Philip had been robbed of that. He fought back against a renewed wave of anger and grief.