Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

King was wrong in one respect. Parker had been glad to have him in the room, because it had given him someone to talk to. Sasha didn’t seem the least bit interested in conversation. After King left, Parker watched her reading and tried in vain to come up with a way to break the awkward silence. He was surprised when she spoke up.

“You figured this out?”

He shook his head quickly. “No, you did all the work. I just plugged in the variables from what al-Tusi wrote.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything.” Something like a smile twitched across her face, and she nodded toward the door through which King had just passed. “Do you think he understood any of it?”

“Jack’s a smart guy. But truthfully? It’s a lot to swallow. The source of life? It seems a little farfetched.”

“You’re right.” She looked at the screen thoughtfully. She was silent for a long time. “I want to go there,” she said finally. “To the Prime. I want to see it for myself; to know if it’s true.”

Parker stifled an urge to laugh. She was serious. “I think Jack has a different set of priorities.”

She crossed her arms, looking almost petulant. “Your team was supposed to be helping me, remember?”

“Sasha, we solved it. Isn’t that enough?” He already knew the answer. The quest to understand the Voynich manuscript had come to define her life, and now, with the ultimate goal in sight, he was telling her to back off. He sighed. “You said that all life is mathematically connected to the Prime. What did you mean by that?”

“Why do you ask?”

“If I’m going to sell Jack on the idea of finding the Prime, I’m going to need a more persuasive reason than just to satisfy your curiosity.”

It must have been the right thing to say, because when she looked at him, there wasn’t a trace of irritation in her expression. “Life is a mathematical process. Each of us is the product of countless permutations that began with the Prime event.

“Think about your own life as a mathematical expression. You are the product of DNA from your two parents. And they are each the product of two. We are each the result of millions of such computations, and our DNA contains all those factors.”

He nodded to indicate that he understood, but he still didn’t see what she was driving at.

“But at some point, the process flips. The branches of the family tree start coming together and the number of factors reduces down to primes.”

“Adam and Eve.”

She inclined her head. “Figuratively speaking. Somewhere in history, all humans share a common ancestor, or, put another way, a prime factor. Of course, the prime factor for humans is just one point on a much larger continuum, but that too can be mathematically reduced to a prime factor—the Prime factor.”

“Okay, I get that. Everything starts with something, chicken and egg. But that’s not what you meant by a connection, is it?”

She pursed her lips. “Life is more than just the mathematical distribution of genetic material. There’s something else involved that we still don’t understand; some component or catalyst that got the whole thing started. It’s in every living thing; it’s what separates living cells from organic matter and a living human from a dead corpse. And the really remarkable thing is that this life-force—whatever you want to call it—is the same now as it was at the beginning.”

“You mean it’s the same kind of energy, right?”

She shook her head. “The same energy, undiluted and indivisible.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s like using one candle to light another. The original candle might die out, but as long as you keep lighting candles, it’s the same original flame you started with. It goes on forever.” She turned her head. “Are you familiar with quantum entanglement?”

“Two particles interact, then separate but remain connected, no matter how far apart they are.”

“Everything in the universe is entangled because all the matter in the universe originated with a single event, the Big Bang. But living things are quantum entangled in a very specific way, linked to the Prime event. Every living thing on Earth is connected, through time and space by quantum entanglement, to the Prime. It’s like we’re all plugged into it by an invisible extension cord. Do you see now why finding and protecting the Prime source is so important?”

Parker certainly did. “I’ll take this to Jack. I’ll make him understand.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“If he doesn’t, then I guess we’ll have to go with Plan B.”





FORTY-SIX


Langley, Virginia



The phone on Domenick Boucher’s desk started ringing as soon as he stepped into his office, almost as if the caller somehow knew that he had arrived to start his workday.