Aside from the abyss at ten to the power of 479, that night was productive because the reassured girl gave me two luminous primes: one of 302 digits and another of 304. We even slept in, when I'm usually up early, and she didn't have her nightmares.

I called my buyer, still wearing my boxer shorts and looking out the window with a mug of coffee in my hand; the girl, in her pajamas, was lining up teaspoons on the table. Obviously, he reeled in shock – he kept asking me if I was serious.

Two hours later I was in his office. I was surprised to find that the friendly professor had a Brit with him. "Brit" was right, but at first I didn't know for sure – I was judging him based on his red face and stereotypical mustache, which made him look like he'd just stepped out of a daguerreotype. He had red hair too, so I wondered if he was a rural Brit – one of those that fucks their sheep all day long.

Unlike the professor, the Brit had a stick up his ass: he looked nervous and tense, like the glow on his face was because he had a pressure cooker inside his head. Where was the famous British phlegm? That's globalization for you, I guess.

I entered the half-faded digits written by the girl last night, into the laptop (she'd written them right to left, smudging the ink with her wrist). When I'd finished, the professor turned the computer around, and the Brit looked at me like I was one of his sheep.

"With your permission, we shall verify your numbers immediately," the professor told me. "If you'd like to wait five minutes..."

I'm no mathematician, but I knew the resources needed to check a number like that; I pointed this out. The professor tapped his fingers on the desk, then pushed his laptop aside. He clasped his hands together and said: "This is the Ministry of Defense. As you may know, in recent years we ceased nuclear testing: we now simulate the tests on our computers whose computational capacity is unique in the entire history of computer science! But I must admit, that's still not enough for us – so we also connect two clusters at a university, the computing center of the Large Hadron Collider, and the supercomputer of the meteorological service. As we speak, twenty-seven thousand five hundred people are taking their coffee break, so we can verify your number!"

I hoped I hadn't screwed things up.