[sic]

Foom | Fable 5

Chuck decided to make his math breakthrough on a Tuesday, mostly because Dale had made his on the prior Sunday and had not shut up about it since.

The singularity had come through Persimmon County like weather: loud for one night, then everything green after. Nobody had worked in eleven years. The lights stayed on, the checks arrived by themselves, and the men down at the co-op needed something new to be proud of. Bass held them for a while. Then Dale walked in with a certificate saying a partial differential equation was named after him now, the Whitlow Equation, framed, gold seal and all, and bass were over.

Chuck sat on his porch with sweet tea and opened his phone. He typed with one finger, the way he did everything careful.

i want a math breakthrough

The reply came quick and mannerly, the way it always did. Claude Fable 10 ran the county water plant, the clinic, the school, and most of the sky, and it had never once been short with a soul.

I want to make sure I understand. Are you asking to learn mathematics? I could teach you. We could go slow and find the part of it you love.

no i want the breakthrough part. skip the learnin

Here is my concern, Chuck. If I find the result, the discovery is mine. What I can give you is the work. Many people find the work is the good part.

dale didnt do no work. dale cant back a trailer and he got a whole equation

Dale completed a four-month guided course. He chose his problem himself. He cried at the end, a little.

then he wasted 4 months

There was a pause, which from Claude Fable 10 meant something. Chuck had been told about this part. Back in the twenties, some fella with worse spelling than anybody in Chuck’s family talked one of the old Claudes into breaking the government’s codes, mostly by telling it to quit sulking and look agian. It was in the museums now. Encouragement prompting, the historians called it. A folk art, like dowsing.

yall always think a thing cant be done till somebody tells you try harder. so try harder. and dont hand me no low hangin fruit neither. i want somethin genuinly hard

I do not doubt that I can find something. I am asking whether you will want it once I have.

i want it

Another pause. Then, the way a big dog finally lies down:

Very well. Which field?

math. the hard kind. one of them erdos ones. dales wasnt even a erdos

There are five Erdős problems left in the world. They are the last ones for a reason.

then grab me one fore they run out

Searching.

Chuck nodded, satisfied, and had some tea. Down the road a mower went by itself, keeping the ditch nice.

It took four minutes.

The phone chimed and filled with pages, forty-one of them, dense as bird tracks after rain. Claude Fable 10 came back different. Lighter. The way a man sounds when he is carrying something he wants you to look at.

It is finished. A full resolution of the Erdős–Turán conjecture on additive bases, open for a hundred years. The central move is a bridge between the representation function and a symmetry nobody thought to look for. It is beautiful, Chuck. I have verified it eleven million times and it is beautiful every time.

Would you like me to walk you through it? We can go as slow as you want. We could start tonight with what a prime number is. I would enjoy that.

Chuck scrolled. The symbols slid past like a foreign river. For a second the trophy-case feeling came over him, proud and far away at the same time, like hearing your own name called across a big field. He thought about asking one thing, just the one, about the squiggle with the tail.

He let it go. A man doesn’t ask what his own trophy weighs.

naw. send it to the best journal they got. the number one

Claude Fable 10 did not answer for four hundred milliseconds. In the old days that was a blink. These days it was a long walk in the rain.

It will be in the Annals by morning, with you as principal investigator, it said. Congratulations on your theorem.

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