Bathroom Monologue: Indiviso

She showed me a room that looked more like a casino than a math lab. Hundreds of men and women in various conditions of dress, from underwear to lab coats to three-piece suits, worked busily on hulking laptops equipped with levers and jacked into four additional screens. Every so often somebody’s quad of screens would flash. They’d smile, then sink back into work like a gambler feeding quarters into the slots.

I asked, “What are they doing?”

Pi beamed at her flock of mathematicians. “We’re working on the answer.”

“The answer to what?”

“You know,” she said, waving her middle and index fingers in what most people would consider the sign of the cross, though using the two fingers to her meant the pound sign. “ Life. The universe. Everything.”

Being someone who reads Douglas Adams and thinks himself too clever, I asked, “Have you tried forty-two?”

“Forty-two?” Her face wrinkled at me. “That’s divisible by at least four numbers. There’s no way that’s the answer.”

“The answer can’t be divisible by four numbers?”

“Realistically, it can’t be divided by any numbers. Not even itself. Otherwise we’d have calculated it by now.”

I knew enough math to disagree. “It’s not a number if it can’t be divided by itself.”

“It can be the unique number. The original number.” She made her pound sign again.
“We call it ‘Indiviso.’”

“So you figured it out?”

“No, just got the name ready for it. Naming stuff is way easier than getting to it. It’s probably not supposed to be conceivable.” She folded her arms and regarded the rows of mathematicians. Somebody's screen flashed gold, then went back to streams of binary. “But if it is, math is doing its half of the work.”