Damian hated his name.
The reason was nothing special. It was because everyone he met for the first time had something to say about it.
“Ah! That Damian?”
“That’s the name of the protagonist in the novel, right?”
No, you idiots.
The protagonist of Demian is Sinclair.
He did not know why his parents had given him such a name.
Was it because of the intellectual, philosophical image the name carried? Or perhaps they had simply liked the sound of it. But he had resolved that if he ever married and had children, he would never name them after a specific person. Because names had power. Damian knew that better than anyone.
No one had recommended it to him, but he read Hesse’s novel, and he became fascinated by the characters within it.
‘The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world.’
It was a sentence he had underlined while reading the novel as a child. And it became the sole conviction Damian held as a cryptographer.
“Damian! The perfect timing has come for Kyber to make its debut. We’re going to become the saviors of the world!”
Victor, the chief researcher, shouted, unable to hide his excitement. The other team members in the lab were also talking noisily among themselves, their faces flushed.
“Looks like NIST wants to move things along quickly?”
“I heard the White House gave orders to hurry.”
“Normally, it would have taken years. In a situation like this, we might be able to seize the standard in an instant.”
Even before a calamity threatening the world, joy gleamed in their eyes.
It was understandable. The shield they had honed for years had become the one lifeline that could save a collapsing world.
The chance to become heroes, that overwhelming exhilaration, was heating the air of the laboratory.
‘Salvation, huh.’
Damian quietly toyed with his coffee cup as he watched them.
In his eyes, what was happening in the world now was inevitable. Throughout human history, ciphers had always been broken without exception. Enigma, RSA, SIKE—all of it was merely the process of a bird breaking its egg and being born.
‘Can Kyber become a bird?’
Damian did not voice the question aloud.
He was the one who had created Kyber. He had been involved in every corner of its design, shaping it with his own hands. But no matter how he thought about it, he could not picture the image of a bird breaking free from the egg and taking flight in Kyber. If so, perhaps it would not be so bad for it to become an egg that would never break, protecting the world forever.
* * *
Theo looked out the window the entire time he was in the taxi.
The sunset stretched long between the low buildings. It was a color and scenery difficult to see in America.
The meeting with the NIST official had lasted longer than expected.
The man had spoken nonstop for three hours, and half of it had been about Kyber.
“Kyber has already had a considerable portion of its stability verified. Utopia is theoretically interesting, but it has no field application cases yet.”
He had spoken indirectly, but in the end, it meant that they already had Kyber in mind as the standard, so Utopia should simply stand there as a token participant.
Theo gave a faint snort of laughter.
“What a joke.”
But he did not bother saying anything more.
The taxi stopped in front of the research institute.
Theo got out of the car and turned up the collar of his coat.
Pshooong.
The security door rose, and he stepped inside.
The corridor was quiet.
“Mm? That’s strange.”
Since the crunch had begun, the institute had always been noisy. It should have been normal to hear groups of people gathered in discussion, keyboards being pounded, or someone screaming at any given moment.
Clack.
Feeling uneasy, he hurriedly pulled the handle of the main lab door.
The lights were half off. Only the monitors scattered throughout the room cast a bluish glow, illuminating the interior. And using that light as their lamp, the researchers were gathered in clusters in front of the board.
Theo asked as he took off his coat.
“What is everyone doing? Have you all been put under mass hypnosis?”
“Shh!”
Jihye raised her index finger and brought it to her lips. Then she pointed with her hand toward the sofa in the corner.
Theo slowly turned his head.
“Huh?”
Soft, even breaths.
Seoha was lying on the sofa, fast asleep.
He had looked as though he had been overexerting himself lately, so Theo had been thinking of stopping him at least once, but it seemed the researchers had acted first. Theo gave a bitter smile as he looked at Seoha’s face.
‘That wasn’t your fault.’
In the past, he could not understand.
Where did his endless love for humanity and altruism come from? But as the time he spent with Seoha grew longer, he naturally came to understand the reason.
The love of family, and the terribly heavy sense of responsibility that only the one with the greatest intellect could possess.
Seoha knew how enormous a ripple a single stone he threw could create in the world. One could tell just by looking at how strictly he controlled Oracle’s scope of activity, and how he had blocked the authority to change it behind layer upon layer of safeguards.
“Oh? Theo, you’re back?”
Sri and Ben trudged over with hollow eyes.
Sri’s hair was so disheveled it looked as though a bird had built a nest in it. Even on Ben’s normally neat face, a dark stubble had grown.
“What have you two been doing?”
Sri shook his head wearily.
“There’s still a lot to update. We were building a physical-layer defense line to stop side-channel attacks.”
“I was looking at the part Joseph proposed. There was a method that tracked the waves of electromagnetic radiation during computation. To block that, I tried changing the execution order. I must have run the simulation thousands of times.”
With a tired expression, Ben walked to the pantry and brewed coffee.
Sujeong and Cecilia were in much the same state.
Seoha had given them the theory, but applying it to reality was an entirely different matter. No matter how flawless it was mathematically, the moment it ran inside an actual computer, problems kept erupting nonstop.
‘Still, it’s worthwhile work.’
In order not to damage the perfect design Seoha had drawn, the geniuses of Apex were willingly rolling around for days and nights, fighting a desperate battle.
“Has there been any progress on your side?”
At Theo’s question, Jihye, who had been standing in front of the board, slowly turned her head.
Srrrk.
When she stepped aside, the traces that had been hidden behind her came into Theo’s view. Several large whiteboards filled the wall. Equations written in black, red, and blue marker were tangled together in dizzying complexity. The entire board was stained from how many times it had been written on and erased.
“Hahaha. Progress, you say.”
Jihye looked up at the board with bloodshot eyes and gave a hollow laugh.
“We talked big to the director and told him we’d finish everything, so he should get some rest.”
Theo silently read the densely packed formulas on the board. Jihye felt as if she wanted to crawl into a mouse hole.
“Everyone who was confident gathered and checked the equations, but we just couldn’t find the answer.”
The more perfect a theory was, the harder it was to touch.
Ordinary prodigies could not possibly fill the gaps in the logic that had extended intuitively from within Seoha’s brain. For Theo, it was something he could easily have predicted.
“Huh?”
He looked down at the theorem written below. Jihye took off her glasses and spoke in a tired voice.
“We’ve specified the section where the problem occurs. So it’ll be easier for the director to look at when he wakes up. It’s pathetic that this much is our limit, isn’t it?”
Theo walked up to the board.
The original equations were written in black marker, the problem sections in red, and the variables in blue. A cryptography specialist had organized the problem in the language of Yu-Riemann geometry.
“This is remarkable. I’m seeing you in a new light.”
To narrow down the point where the problem occurred with such precision, one first had to understand the entire structure. And using a language they were seeing for the first time in their lives, at that.
Seeing the unmistakable traces of effort, Theo smiled with satisfaction.
‘The Korean researchers are quite impressive too.’
Was it because they shared the same nationality?
They held special feelings toward Seoha. If the American researchers felt awe toward Seoha, the Koreans had added something more on top of that.
It was as if they were looking at a successful youngest sibling.
That strange pride that came from the fact that someone from the same country had climbed to such heights. It was probably that emotion that had kept them in front of the board until now. Theo could feel it.
Seoha slept for six hours straight.
With the corners of his mouth slightly raised, as if he were having a happy dream.
Rustle.
Seoha shifted, then opened his eyes.
‘Where am I?’
He looked around for a moment. It seemed he was trying to figure out why he was here.
“Oh? You’re awake?”
Hyeongju noticed first.
After that, the researchers came rushing over. Jihye stared intently at Seoha’s face as if trying to check his condition.
“It’s only been six hours. Are you okay?”
Seoha blinked, then replied calmly.
“Yes, I’m fine. Noona.”
The laboratory fell silent.
Jihye’s face flared red. It did not even take two seconds for the redness to reach her ears. She hurriedly turned her head toward the board.
“Th-then that’s a relief.”
““Hahaha!””
The researchers’ cheerful laughter rang out.
Hyeongju covered his mouth with a pfft and turned his head away. Seoha rose from the sofa and put on his gown.
Step, step.
He slowly walked toward the board.
His hair was tousled, and his gown was full of wrinkles. But the fatigue was clearly gone from his face. The eyes that had looked heavy before he fell asleep now appeared clear and sharp.
“Here.”
Theo handed him a marker.
Seoha took it and scanned the equations with his eyes. Then he looked at the researchers and smiled.
“You all worked hard. This is very well organized.”
Jihye felt the strength drain from her shoulders.
Scratch, scratch.
Seoha’s hand moved.
Barely thirty seconds.
“Holy shit!”
Hyeongju swore without realizing it. The condition they had failed to solve no matter how hard they tried had been整理ed in just four lines.
“Wait, Director. How did you do that there?”
A startled researcher grabbed Seoha and asked.
“The problem was that the geodesic was breaking at the curvature transition section. Because you were trying to forcibly straighten the curvature tensor caused by the prime wave function, the computation was being overloaded. Instead, if you distort the space itself to match the curvature…”
Seoha’s hand moved without stopping.
Jihye covered her mouth with her hand. She felt as though a scream might escape.
‘Is something like that possible with human ability?’
From his hand, the transition point of the curvature was projected into a higher dimension. He had borrowed the concept of a fiber bundle from topology and applied it to the algorithm. Then the geodesic they had thought was severed connected smoothly in the higher space.
‘Why are they reacting so much to that?’
Sujeong smiled with a pleased expression.
The true face Seoha showed when facing a century-class problem was not merely this. But even the sight unfolding before their eyes at that moment was more than enough to shock the researchers.
He moved on to the second red section.
The problems that had seemed infinitely complex passed through his hands and, as if by magic, were solved in the simplest and most elegant forms.
And then the next problem.
Scratch, scratch.
Seoha was in a good mood.
Perhaps because he had slept deeply, the nerves that had been so highly excited had calmed down. In the past, Seoha had done everything alone, but in truth, he liked the sensation of matching his breathing with others.
He could tell by looking at the board. The traces of many people clinging to it and carefully organizing the equations. From the divided colors, he could feel the researchers’ meticulous consideration. So that when he woke up, he could take over with ease.
‘Kind people.’
And so, he wanted to repay them.
Now, the final problem.
At some point, the researchers had begun following behind Seoha. When he stood in front of the board, people naturally gathered around him. As if they wanted to understand everything without missing a single thing.
Excited, Seoha wrote out a long equation more kindly than usual. And like that, two weeks passed.
* * *
One week before the NIST standardization competition.
All the researchers gathered and stared at the screen with tense expressions.
“We’ll run the final test.”
Tap.
Sri pressed Enter.
Stage 1, function verification. Stage 2, efficiency test. Now all that remained was Stage 3, security verification. It was the stage where every attack scenario the researchers had devised over the past few months would be applied simultaneously.
[Beginning security verification]
[Loading attack scenarios - 247]
“There were this many?”
Joseph muttered as he looked at the screen.
A considerable number of them had been designed by him personally. The supercomputer activated, and the progress bar began to move.
[Scenario 1/247 - Blocked]
[Scenario 2/247 - Blocked]
The number rose rapidly.
“Please.”
Jihye clasped her hands over her chest as if praying.
The hundredth was an attack she had devised. It was a scenario that assumed coincidences to an almost excessive degree.
[Scenario 100/247 - Blocked]
“Yes!”
She clenched her fist and cheered.
.
.
[Scenario 247/247 - Blocked]
The screen paused for a moment.
And then—
[Security verification complete]
[Vulnerabilities: 0]
[Utopia v1.0 - Final verification passed]
The laboratory fell silent.
One second.
Two seconds.
“Waaaaaaaaah!”
It was the moment when the hardships of the past several months were finally rewarded.
The researchers shouted in triumph and raised both hands high. Luca patted Joseph on the shoulder. His head was bowed, and his shoulders were shaking as he cried.
A beautiful cipher was a bewitching creature with a demonic charm.
Before they knew it, it had captured all of their hearts.
Two days later, the research team departed for America to attend the NIST standardization competition.