Free Here & There by Joshua V. Scher Page B

teeth.” She smacked Reinier with a dishrag, and she walked back to the bar.
“Ok, now you take my number and raise it to your private number,” Reinier instructed Elle.
“Can I write down the math
?
”
He nodded. She calculated. Nine to the fourth, 6,561.
“It’s a pretty big number.”
“So, and you can write down your work again, as long as you don’t show me, what’s the remainder when you divide that number by eleven
?
”
Ugh, she thought. Eleven goes into 6,561 approximately 596 times. 596 times eleven is 6556. Remainder is . . . “Ok, I got it. I feel like I’m in Montessori all over again, but I got it.”
“Me too. Now I can tell you a secret.”
“Wait, what
?
How
?
” she asked.
“We both now know the same number.”
“We do
?
”
“Yes, through those calculations, we now both have arrived at the same number. We throw away our original numbers. I never know yours, you never know mine, but we now share this number in common. And only we know it. Nobody else at the bar. Not the inebriated primer, not Naelle. Just us. It’s our cipher. We use it to encode our secrets. Actually, we would do iteration upon iteration of this, but this is the basic idea of public-key encryption, cryptography.”
She stared at him. No blushing, no self-consciousness, no attempt at flirting. She smiled. “What’s our number
?
”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s five.” 31
“That’s amazing.” Her eyes widened.
“It’s just math.”
“Don’t be modest, it’s like, wow, it’ll be used everywhere.”
He laughed. “I’m not being modest, and it is used everywhere, ever since it was invented in the 70s.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that makes sense.” She takes a sip of her mojito. “So what’s your thing
?
”
“Quantum cryptography. I exploit entanglement. What we just did is fantastic and useful, except that it’s based on classical physics—”
“Not this again . . .”
He laughed again. “I know, right
?
I do get this tunnel vision, you know, blinders on, and I just go, and it makes me, well, inconsiderate I guess.”
“Might be the eye-patch.” She winked. “I wouldn’t call it inconsiderate. I’d just say you get focused.”
“You are good at PR, Elle.”
Her cheeks warmed up again at the sound of her name on his lips.
He sighed. “How do you say egghead in French
?
”
She cocked her head a moment, thinking. “In Paris, we just would call you ‘intelligent,’” she said in her heavy French accent.
He burst out laughing. She revealed a shy grin.
“You have a way with words.”
    While it is unclear as to how much of this is fact and how much fiction, the two of them obviously made a connection that turned into something bigger. Further support of this is found in subsequent lab footage that clearly shows Reidier sitting at his workstation across the room using a hand mirror with a pink plastic frame and handle. Whatever the exact details may be, something did happen that night that was distinctly different from their initial encounter in his lab.
    Rumors of Eve’s escapades still echoed around the office for some time. Apparently, neither party minded, particularly as both seemed to value discretion. According to former colleague Alfred Muoio, an Italian physicist who had a lab adjacent to Reidier’s, “ . . . Reidier and Eve . . . the two of them as an item was a grand surprise. To everyone. Not in a dismissive way, not that a little man could not cast a long shadow. More, eh, no one ever thought about it. If I recall correctly, at the time I thought she was having a liaison with some German oligarch
duce
overseeing one of ESA’s 32 launches. So it was a total surprise when she and Reidier moved in together. Jaws dropped like dominoes throughout the entire center.” 33
    “You never saw them together?”
    “I saw them at work. Rarely together.”
    “Socially?”
    “Eh, well, Eve was definitely at all the various functions, and I saw her several times at the