The Last Rational Man Read online

minute, recovering. I gulped the rest of the coffee, now cold, and left. At the time, I didn't pay much attention to the police loitering near the café's door. I wish that I had.

  I came back to the interrogator. He was waiting for me to answer.

  "A code. A number. She gave you the key to a code."

  "I know nothing about a code."

  He looked at me for a moment, shrugged, and went on.

  "I'll explain. You are aware that there is a group of rebels that is trying to destroy civilization as we know it."

  "Sure, the Blue-and-Greens. They want to go back to some fairy-land dream of primitive ecology. Benign nuts."

  "Nuts, yes. Benign, no. They plan on achieving their goal by destroying everything that is based on advanced technology."

  "There is no way that they could accomplish that."

  "They can come awfully close to success. They have gotten access to a major database. I have been told that the information could be used to paralyze society."

  "How?"

  "I don't know. I wasn't told, and it is one of these things that it is best not to know. But let me explain. The database security is not that difficult to break, except for one important fact. The data is encrypted. There are certain parts that can be accessed if you have the right code. The database as a whole, though, is open only to those who have a special code, based on an extremely large prime number. We are talking about a number in the range of a hundred digits.

  "The rebels somehow managed to get hold of the code. Six of them split the number among themselves. Each memorized a part of the code. We tried to catch them before they could record the numbers, or pass then on to others. Five of them slipped by us. Their secret is probably known by hundreds now. We caught the sixth. We thought that we caught her in time, before she passed on the number.

  "One of the men was a bit too enthusiastic during the interrogation. It may be for the best. If the number died with her, then we are safe. There is only one problem. We know that she met with you on her last day. We are pretty sure that you are the only one she met. So we need to know. To really know, no matter how uncomfortable you feel about it, no matter how illegal this all seems.

  "Did she give you the code? A number."

  Only then did I realize. Her phone number. It had seemed like the wrong number of digits to me. Whatever this was, I didn't want to be part of it. I wanted out as fast as possible.

  "She gave me a number. I thought that it was her phone number. Listen – I will tell you the number, or write it down. You can have it. I don't want to be part of this"

  This finally threw him. I could see panic in his eyes. He held up his hand.

  "No. Don't. And I am sorry, you are part of this, no matter how innocent you may be. Don't tell me the number. It would only make it worse. Another unauthorized person would know the key. We only have one choice, really. We have to make absolutely sure that you don't ever let that number out."

  My guts froze.

  "You wouldn't!"

  "No, we wouldn't shoot you. You are innocent, after all."

  My imagination was starting to go wild. They wouldn't shoot me. Maybe they had some other awful death in mind for me. They had no legal case against me. They were going to arrange an "accident". I would drown. I would be found hanging from a rafter, an apparent suicide. They would threaten my family, to make sure that I remained silent. Maybe some brain surgery. How much would they need to cut out to make me forget? How much of me would be left once they did that?

  For some reason, I didn't think of the worse possibility of all.

  "I am afraid that it is going to be difficult for you. Some options were eliminated on moral grounds. Others were just not practical, or reliable enough. In fact, the option that was chosen in the end does not seem quite reliable. I personally do not think it is terribly moral either. It was not my decision, though I am the one who had to question you and now has to inform you of your fate."

  By now my mind had frozen. They had come up with something so terrible that even my overworked mind couldn't have thought of. I waited.

  "I am the last person that you will speak with. Ever. You will be kept in a prison. A beautiful prison, a large prison, but a prison nonetheless. It will be a form of solitary confinement. We cannot take the slightest risk that the number will get out. Information will be able to come into your comfortable prison, but no information will be allowed out. You can have books, newspapers. You can even have an internet connection. But it will be one way- you will only be able to download, never upload. Not a single email. Nothing from this moment on.

  "The rebels have many supporters. If the number leaves your cell, we fear that they will quickly get hold of it. The results will be disastrous.

  "You will wonder how long this will be for. The database is extremely large. To re-encode it with a new key is essentially impossible. We also don't see any point at which the database will cease to be of use to the rebels. In short – you will remain here for the rest of your life."

  "There isn't anything at all that could happen? Some event that could free me?"

  "I suppose that if the rebels somehow got hold of the code, then your presence here would be of little use. On the other hand, if the rebels got hold of the code, it would be hardly worth leaving the cell. Life as we know it would know longer exist.

  "It is of no matter. You will not be able to contact the outside world. Knowing what the cost of the key leaking out would be, I doubt that you will even try."

  He got up, and walked to the door.

  "Goodbye. And thank you."

  The last human I ever would see walked out of the room. I sat stunned for a few moments. I finally got up, and tried the door. It was open. It only took a few minutes for me to understand that they had left me an entire house as a prison. A house without windows.

  I needed to get a message out. No, not the number. Just a message to my friends, or to my parents, who would be going crazy with anxiety. I wondered what story they had been told to explain my disappearance. If I could tell them what was going on, maybe they could take some legal action and get me out of there.

  I started exploring, examining the prison.

  The kitchen was well equipped. Later I would learn how food was delivered through a chute. There was a sort of airlock. The inner door would only open to let the food in when the outer door was closed.

  I spent the next three weeks going through the house as thoroughly as I could. There must be some way of contacting the outside world. It was impossible to accept that they had thought of everything. Yet it seemed that they had. There was no way to get any information out of that house.

  I tried everything. My garbage went directly into an incinerator. I thought of flushing notes with the secret number down the toilet, but I had little doubt that they had the equivalent of a garbage disposal on the sewage outlet.

  For a while I though that the internet connection would be their weak point. You remember the internet. After all, it wasn't that long ago.

  Sure, I was set up with only incoming data. But you always had to ask for information. You couldn't download a movie or a book without sending some packet of data out. All I needed to do was to have some kind of pattern to my surfing, and maybe, maybe somebody would pick up on the coded message. A little wild surfing turned up the truth. They had a special server set up for me with some basic information and entertainment preloaded. Some of it, such as the news, was updated regularly by the server. I could never get anything unusual over that connection, though.

  Printed books were available. New ones kept being delivered with the food. But I couldn't ask for anything specific. I could only read whatever they chose to dump down that chute.

  One day I just stopped. I had thought of every possible way of getting a message out, and come up with nothing, nothing at all. It looked like I would be spending the rest of my life there – close to 250 years! How would I manage to survive?

  At that point I had no interest i
n contacting the rebels. I just wanted to get word out, in hopes that somehow I could get out of there. I had no interest in giving the enemy the key to that database.

  I hoped that I could forget that number, that cursed set of digits. If I did, then I would feel better about actually getting out of the prison. I would no longer pose a risk to civilization. Did you ever try to deliberately forget something? If you can answer me: 'Yes, but I don't remember what,' then I will believe you. It is essentially impossible. Once you decide to forget something, it is burned even deeper into your memory.

  The best way to deliberately forget something it to try to remember it. But you have to convince yourself that you really do want to remember it. I couldn't deceive myself enough to do that.

  I spent months memorizing other sets of numbers, in hopes of drowning the code in a sea of other numbers. It didn't work.

  There was no point in it in any case. I had no way of getting a message out, and even if I did, there was nothing that anybody out there could do to help me. Only the code could free me. I was determined that even if I found some way to get a message out, I wouldn't send out the code. If saving civilization meant I had to give up on my freedom, then so be it.

  But I was lonely. The loneliest human that ever lived. I went over the events, trying to think what I could have done to avoid the mess that I was in. This is always a futile exercise, unless you expect to be in a similar situation in the future, and can learn a