Silence flowed through the laboratory.
“First of all…”
Seoha carefully opened his mouth. The researchers pricked up their ears.
“You’ve all worked very hard.”
Words that were neither quite praise nor consolation. Hyeongju’s eyebrows twitched.
Seoha closed the materials and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. His eyes seemed to be gazing somewhere far away. Theo quietly unfolded his arms, then looked at Seoha and said,
“Just say it.”
Seoha’s gaze wavered.
“But still…”
“It’s fine. No matter how much feedback we gave, it wasn’t something that could be fixed. We need to be honest if the lab is going to set the right direction.”
He hesitated.
Because after looking over the proposal, he was certain. The system they had created was not that of mathematicians. Perhaps cryptographers and engineers shared the same way of thinking in that mathematics itself was not their objective. If the result was good, the process did not matter.
‘It’s not as if that’s wrong.’
A cipher fulfills its purpose as long as it is not broken.
It had passed through many hands. Attack and defense, a structure designed thoroughly for those purposes. The choices had valid reasons behind them, and each judgment had a plausible logic to it.
But the resulting product, built up from all of that, was a patchwork rag with cement slapped over every visible crack. Physiologically, Seoha simply could not accept it.
“This cipher isn’t as robust as it appears.”
And so he spoke in a language they could understand.
The researchers’ eyes widened at the unexpected response. LWE was a system whose efficiency and security had already been verified.
Someone raised a hand and spoke.
“Not robust… What do you mean by that?”
“The security of LWE is based on the difficulty of the Shortest Vector Problem. It shouldn’t be something that can be broken easily.”
“Exactly. Why would this be unsafe?”
A murmur spread through the laboratory.
But Seoha’s words were not a lie. He could see it. A route capable of neutralizing this cipher.
“It’ll be faster if I show you directly. You must have a sample implementation of the cipher, right?”
“W-we do!”
Hyeongju hurried over and opened the terminal on a workstation in one corner of the lab. A welcome message the researchers had made while staying up all night.
Slide.
Seoha rose from his seat and stood in front of the workstation. He studied the screen for a moment, then nodded.
“Could I get a board, please?”
Ben had already dragged over a large board. Seoha uncapped a marker and began writing equations.
Needless to say, this cipher was not yet complete. If they patched it properly, even Seoha would not be able to bring it down easily.
‘That’s why I have to do it now.’
He had not wanted to use such a rough method, but seeing the researchers’ absolute confidence in their work, it seemed there was no other way.
Scribble.
The equations that began in one corner of the board gradually expanded their territory. The first person to realize what was unusual was Theo, who had spent the longest time with Seoha.
“Huh?”
He looked startled, then stared at Seoha with appalled eyes.
‘He must really not like that cipher.’
“Theo, is that…”
Sujeong edged closer and whispered to him.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Then Sri, Cecilia, and Ben, one by one, also grasped Seoha’s intent.
Seoha was not decrypting the cipher. He was reverse-tracing the very generation principle of the noise used in the encryption process.
“Ah, I see!”
Come to think of it, Seoha was a mathematician who had studied chaos more deeply than anyone else.
Perfect randomness was ten thousand times harder to implement than perfect order. In other words, the countless layers of noise they had painted over the truth to hide it had left behind just as many mathematical fingerprints.
“The paradox of overengineering.”
Cecilia murmured softly.
It referred to the phenomenon in which constraints added to strengthen security paradoxically narrowed the space where the correct answer could exist.
Having filled the board with equations, Seoha nodded as if satisfied.
“Sri! Please make a filter with this.”
“Understood. I’ll code it right away.”
Sri opened his laptop and began converting the equations Seoha had written into an algorithm. Green characters poured down the screen like a torrential rain.
Tap-tatatatak—
“Theo and Sujeong noona, please extract just five hundred sample ciphertexts. Ones with different structures.”
“Which section?”
“Different key generation stages. The fingerprint changes every time the noise seed changes, so we need cross-validation.”
Theo was already moving. Sujeong followed behind him and said,
“Then we can do 125 each from parameter sets A through D.”
“Okay.”
“Cecilia, please help with the topological geometric mapping. We need to correct the projection angle so the framework hidden beneath the noise doesn’t look distorted.”
“That’s my specialty. Leave it to me.”
With an elegant gesture, Cecilia began visualizing the nonlinear functions written on the board as a geometric model.
“Ben, please distribute the server resources across thirty-two nodes. If we pass everything through the filter at once, it might overload. You know computational precision is important for peeling away noise, right?”
Ben shrugged and adjusted his headset.
“I’ve already finished the distribution. Just say the word.”
It was something they had always done.
Team Apex displayed its greatest ability when assisting Seoha. Each of them clearly knew their role and moved according to the conductor’s intent. Hyeongju stared blankly at the board, only belatedly realizing that goosebumps had risen on his arms.
‘What in the world is happening?’
He could not tell exactly, but the atmosphere made it feel as if something—something utterly shocking—was about to happen.
Time passed.
Ten minutes.
Twenty minutes.
Joseph, who had been standing in the corner with his arms crossed, sidled over and spoke.
“What do you think, Luca?”
They were researchers from the NSA. In other words, spies and liaisons planted by the agency.
“These Koreans are pretty good too. It doesn’t reach Kyber, but it’s a fairly solid cipher. If I had to guess, they must have been studying it in advance.”
Luca, a curly-haired Latino man, adjusted his glasses as he spoke.
“It looks like they’re trying to break the cipher right now.”
“I figured Seoha wouldn’t like this. You saw the report too.”
Joseph nodded.
According to the report, Seoha had a tendency to obsess fanatically over mathematical order. To him, an LWE-style cipher must have been like torture. But disliking something and breaking it were two separate matters.
“So you think he’ll fail?”
“Of course. Probabilistically, it makes no sense. The advantage of LWE is that there’s almost no room for luck to intervene. With RSA, if you’re unlucky, a prime factor might occasionally get hit.”
“Doesn’t it look like they’re trying to remove the noise?”
Luca indicated the screen with his chin.
“It sounds plausible, but it’s impossible. That’s basically the same as saying they’re going to find the seed of the random number generator. If that were possible, LWE itself wouldn’t hold.”
Joseph stopped talking and looked at the workstation screen. Endlessly flowing code and calculation logs.
“There’s no way they don’t know that, so why…”
Team Apex were not fools.
Over the past four weeks, Joseph had felt to the bone just how outstanding those geniuses were. They were monsters who caught up in mere days to topics he had studied for years, then overlaid their own interpretations on top. And now they were moving according to Seoha’s gestures. With faces that showed not a shred of doubt.
Seoha stared at the data pouring down the screen like a downpour.
A flood of numbers layered with artificial noise, impossible for human eyes to read for patterns. But to Seoha, who had glimpsed the true chaos of the universe within the zeros of the Riemann zeta function and the distribution of primes, it looked entirely different.
‘Kekeke. How amusing that they made this and called it chaos.’
Seoha brought a finger to his temple and quieted Ducky. But his thought was correct. Artificially injected noise could never become complete chaos.
Chaos created by nature has no purpose. It merely exists as it is. That very purposelessness is the essence of randomness.
‘But this is different.’
Someone designed this with a purpose. If there is intent, preferences arise, and if so, there will naturally be regions one wants to avoid. Sections where computation grows complex, boundaries where collisions are likely to occur, cases processed as exceptions during verification.
They were traces an ordinary person could never see, but Seoha was an exceedingly exceptional being. After quite some time, he opened his mouth.
“Everyone, did you know? True chaos is extremely beautiful.”
Seoha still vividly remembered the chaos he had seen in the quantum chaos experiment.
While the researchers tilted their heads, all preparations were completed.
“The filter is done.”
“Projection correction complete.”
Seoha slowly raised his head.
“There is bias in this cipher’s noise.”
One researcher sprang up indignantly.
“Bias? We used an algorithm to make the random numbers as unpredictable as possible—”
Tap.
Seoha approached the workstation and applied the filter Sri had made to the cipher. The noise waveforms that had been scattered chaotically across the screen transformed into a three-dimensional geometric structure.
“Huh?”
“T-that’s…!”
It was just as Seoha had said.
The waveforms of the random numbers, which should have spread out in a perfect sphere, were minutely distorted around a particular axis.
“If we analyze this bias and trace it backward, the range in which the answer can exist narrows exponentially.”
Tap.
Each time he added a filter, the number of possibilities that had been close to infinite was cut away in huge chunks.
The enormous search space that had exceeded ten to the hundredth power was reduced to less than half in an instant.
Tap.
Half again, and then the random numbers narrowed down by tens of thousands, by thousands.
The overwhelming insight that had drawn out the spectrum hidden within the chaos of primes thoroughly stripped bare the true face of the fake chaos made by humans.
Luca and Joseph’s eyes widened as if they would pop out.
“Impossible! He’s finding and filtering out such minute bias in the random numbers?”
“He interpreted noise as distortion in geometric space.”
The elite Korean and American researchers watched the wondrous dismantling show without even breathing properly.
‘Ah! How refreshing!’
Seoha felt good.
A giant castle of trash was collapsing piece by piece. It felt crisp and clean, like wiping a long-dusty window clear.
And at last, the true skeleton of the cipher they had tried so hard to conceal revealed its shabby form in the very center of the screen.
Less than two hours had passed.
“H-how can this be…”
A groan-like sigh escaped Hyeongju’s mouth.
They had discussed it with scholars through sleepless nights. According to their calculations, this was a cryptographic system they had believed would withstand even attacks from quantum computers, yet it had been crushed hollowly by a single human being. What he felt went beyond awe and became fear.
‘Of course.’
Theo looked around.
The researchers were staring back and forth between the monitor and Seoha’s face, mouths hanging open as if their jaws had dropped.
Engineering patchwork, forcibly stitched together in pursuit of results alone, could never survive before Seoha’s mathematics, which pierced through structure itself.
‘It’s like an execution.’
Seoha had swung the blade called mathematics and cut the convictions they had believed in cleanly in two.
“An LWE stripped of impurities is, in the end, nothing more than a very simple system of linear equations.”
Tap.
The final equation was entered from Seoha’s fingertips.
Then the maze of intricately tangled polynomials straightened out in an instant, and the encrypted answer was displayed.
[Welcome to Apex Lab, KOREA]
In a silence where not even breathing could be heard, Seoha smiled brightly and said,
“Thank you! I’m truly delighted to meet all of you as well.”
“…”
“…”
He put on an affectedly sorrowful expression.
“I’m terribly sorry it turned out this way. It seems we have no choice but to make a new one. May I start over from the beginning, in the way I want?”
‘Demon!’
The researchers wore heartbroken expressions.
The members of Team Apex sincerely sympathized with them.