Then he invited me out to Cumberland the next weekend, to see what he was working on. It would keep him from being a laughingstock. If not, he’d rather that no one knew he’d gone down this path. If he was right, he’d be in the textbooks, he wrote. He didn’t mean to be paranoid, he wrote, but this was a make-or-break project for him. When I replied, I told Mike the cloak-and-dagger stuff was getting to be a bit much.

Mike was ecstatic in his reply, though he scolded me for including a screen shot of the graph: he told me to copy everything onto the thumb drive and overnight it back to him. Then I called in sick to work and went to bed. I looked at the thing until sunrise, when I finally tore myself away and sent Mike an e-mail telling him the good news. It was beautiful, and I couldn’t look away. Each successive iteration wasn’t quite identical to its parent - there was similarity, not repetition. It divided into three smaller spirals, within which the pattern repeated. The arcs spiraled around, making nearly a full circle before little curls began peeling off from the main arc. The graph spread over my computer screen like frost blooming across a window. Mike hadn’t told me what to expect, other than I would know it when I saw it. It took 39 caffeine- and pizza-fueled hours at the computer, tracking down bugs in bizarre edge cases the equation triggered, and plugging improbable memory leaks up and down the code stack, but just after midnight Monday morning, I got it. The software was open source, so I could at least take a crack at trying to figure out what was wrong. It was a little bit odd, but that was Mike. Mike had insisted on express mailing it to me, rather than letting me download it, and it came with a note telling me that I wasn’t to discuss it with anyone. I wanted to help him out the bragging rights were just a bonus.īy Saturday afternoon, I had a thumb drive with a copy of the software on it. So when he e-mailed me about how his graphing software kept choking on an equation he was researching, and asking if I could debug it for him, I had to say yes. Its math department was eclectic and small, but prestigious, and he fit right in. Mike had ended up in Maryland too, pursuing his doctorate at Allegany University, in the state’s mountainous panhandle. I’d graduated and found my niche working as a contractor for a three-letter-acronym agency in DC’s Maryland suburbs, doing things you couldn’t legally do anywhere else. Being the more practical of the pair, I’d studied computer engineering, while Mike had gone straight for theoretical mathematics. And the odds were, if one of us couldn’t do it, the other one could. We were always racing to be the first to solve some new mind bender, or find the flaw in some hot new encryption algorithm. Our jockeying for the highest grade quickly developed into a fast, if competitive, friendship. I met Mike in a freshman computer science class in college. In the beginning, all I was trying to do was help a friend. The police said we were both nuts, but I know they’re wrong.

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