Chapter 111
Translator: Dreamscribe
Ring ring ring ring...
"MIT Department of Mathematics."
Jake cleared his throat and spoke in the most courteous voice he could manage.
"Good day. My name is Jake Waltz, aide to the Mayor of New York City. Would it be possible to obtain contact information for a student named Yu Seo-ha?"
A brief silence.
A cold tension could be felt through the phone line.
"What exactly is the reason for this contact request?"
'Hm?'
That was not the reaction he had expected.
Jake decided to emphasize that he was a powerful and important person.
"It's regarding a New York City transportation project. Our mayor is looking for the architect behind the smart traffic system currently operating in Boston.
He's an extremely busy man, but he said he'd like to make special time for a meeting.
Miss, this is a really big opportunity."
"I'm sorry, but we cannot provide Seo-ha's personal information to outside organizations. It's a directive from the dean. If you have business with him, please submit a formal request through official channels."
The staff member's voice carried a weary, bureaucratic exhaustion. Sensing this, Jake could not contain the irritation surging up inside him.
"Excuse me! Did you not hear me say New York City Hall? The mayor of the largest city in America is asking!"
Sigh.
The sound of the staff member exhaling came through the receiver.
"You're the one who needs to listen. How many organizations and companies do you think are looking for Seo-ha right now? Yesterday it was the Federal Transit Safety Administration, and today two tech companies sent official requests.
So follow the proper procedure!"
Click.
The call was cut off before he could even respond.
It was the first time he had been treated this way since becoming an aide.
"Security's unbelievable."
He had assumed an undergraduate would be relatively easy to get to. He was dead wrong.
If he couldn't even bring in one student, there was no telling what the mayor would say to him. Jake let out a sigh and booked a flight to Boston.
* * *
Mornings at MIT were always bustling.
Undergrads gliding by on skateboards, grad students sprinting with books in hand, TAs walking around carrying two cups of coffee each.
Sri walked quietly through the crowd. His destination was Building 10, Barker Library.
The massive domed library, its lights never went out, not for a single hour of the day.
Sri set his books down in his usual seat on the right side of the dome area.
Theo was slumped over at the seat across from him, apparently having pulled an all-nighter.
Tap tap.
A gentle knock on the table made Theo flinch. He stretched as if he had slept well, then signaled to Sri to step outside.
Clunk.
The familiar canned coffee, now a routine. Theo took a drink and his face melted into an expression of relief.
"Did you pull another all-nighter here?"
"We've got a review at the lab today, remember? You don't look like you got much sleep either."
Sri smiled and shrugged.
"Theo, I've been having so much fun with math lately. I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but I feel like even the time I spend sleeping is a waste."
At Sri's words, Theo nodded and rolled his neck and shoulders.
His neck, stiff from sleeping hunched over all night, was still aching.
"Oh, I know exactly what you mean. Like fireworks going off inside your head, right? Enjoy it while it lasts. Once you get past that stage, it's nothing but endless misery."
"What?"
"Seo-ha seems to have an incredibly precise read on other people's mathematical abilities."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"He knows exactly where we'll get stuck on a problem, how far we've understood something, what type of thinking we do. It's like he's peering directly into our heads."
Theo tapped his own temple with a finger.
"Right now, you're probably feeling yourself grow every single day. Like your brain has gotten massively sharper."
"Exactly! I thought I'd finally had some late breakthrough on my own... Are you saying that's not what happened?"
Sri had been experiencing a kind of omnipotence lately.
These days, when he looked at a function, the shape of the problem would appear in his mind like a higher-dimensional figure, even before he started calculating.
"Yeah, that's not it. We're with Seo-ha all day long, right? When you watch Seo-ha work with numbers right next to you, you can't help but follow his perspective. I think he's guiding us that way on purpose.
Oh, and of course, this only works because you're an exceptional mathematician to begin with."
"So that's what was happening. I'm still glad, though. I've definitely grown, no question about that. But what did you mean about it getting miserable?"
Theo looked Sri straight in the eye.
"Haven't you noticed during our meetings lately? Seo-ha waits for us until we catch up. I find that unbearably humiliating."
Thunk.
Theo finished the last of his coffee and tossed the can into the trash.
"I want to be useful to Seo-ha. Not just be on the receiving end of his consideration all the time."
He headed back to his seat.
Sri stood there in a daze, watching Theo's retreating back.
"It was all guided?"
Everything he had thought he'd figured out on his own?
Sri shook his head and followed Theo inside. He opened the paper they were reviewing and began reading with fierce intensity.
Seo-ha had intended to give them room to breathe, but from where they stood, it only drove them to push themselves harder.
* * *
Jake had already been wandering the campus for well over an hour.
At first, he had been confident.
He believed that the title of aide to the Mayor of New York would earn him a warm welcome anywhere.
But reality...
"New York City Hall? If you have business with Seo-ha, come back with a written proposal."
Slurp.
The dean sipped his tea while eyeing Jake with thinly veiled disdain.
'At this rate, the mayor is going to have my head.'
Jake's mind went blank.
Asking around among the students, he tracked down the club Seo-ha was said to belong to.
"Who the hell are you? Are you from Skyline? We already said we're not selling! You people are relentless!"
"You again? How many times has it been just this week?"
Spectra Works had also been dealing with a constant stream of companies trying to buy the Synapse Engine.
They were already fed up with visitors to the point of hostility.
Jake received the door slammed in his face without even understanding why.
"This isn't how it was supposed to go..."
He roughly loosened his tie.
Not many people walked around the MIT campus in a suit. Students glanced at him as they passed.
Jake sat down on a bench and caught his breath.
"I guess the ambush approach isn't going to work."
What he had thought would be easy was not going according to plan at all.
There was no doubt that Yu Seo-ha was already being treated as a strategic asset by MIT.
Just as he pulled out his phone to dial the mayor's direct line, a voice came from behind him.
"I hear you've been looking for me?"
Jake spun around in surprise.
A young, East Asian boy. The same face he had seen in the photograph.
He let out a sigh of relief.
"Yes, that's right. I came all the way from New York because I have a proposal for you."
He pulled out the documents he had prepared and showed them to Seo-ha.
The materials prepared by the New York Department of Transportation were practically the size of a book. Seo-ha's face lit up with interest as he sat down on the bench beside Jake.
Swish.
'Is he actually reading this?'
The pages were turning far too fast.
Seo-ha's expression shifted moment by moment as he read. From interest to dismay, and finally to something close to stunned silence.
"I can't believe this. It's not the 1980s..."
Of New York's roughly 13,000 traffic lights, more than half were still operating on primitive, fixed-timer systems.
On top of that, the city's grid layout meant that signal interference was a constant, structural problem.
The north-south blocks were long, and the east-west ones relatively short. Because of this, clearing signals in one direction always meant sacrificing the other.
"You'd be getting asymmetric patterns constantly. Why are there so few sensors? And the small number of automated signals are still based on '90s-era systems..."
Jake's face turned red under Seo-ha's relentless criticism.
Snap.
Seo-ha closed the documents, having reached the last page.
"Tell the mayor this.
Boston has been gradually overhauling its system for a full ten years. But New York hasn't changed since the '90s. As a result, the entirety of Manhattan has turned into one giant congestion zone."
Jake's face hardened, unaware of the full extent of the situation.
"Is it really that serious?"
Seo-ha nodded.
"No sensors, no real-time optimization, and you've got pedestrians, cyclists, taxis, and delivery motorcycles all mixed together with fixed-signal timing.
This is less a technology problem and more a problem of will.
Come back when you're prepared to spend at least ten times what Boston spent. With an official proposal, of course."
Seo-ha stood up and walked away.
There was an air of authority about him that did not match his age.
Jake did not even think to stop him. He simply watched in a daze.
Trudge, trudge.
'New York, huh...'
New York was seven times the size of Boston, with over thirteen times the population. Trying to solve the traffic signals of this massive, complex city with a single algorithm would be nothing short of arrogance.
'A hierarchical, distributed AI structure would be the best approach.'
Divide Manhattan into roughly thirty zones, each with its own small AI hub.
Then build a central brain to serve as the conductor.
That would require over 10,000 sensors and a complete overhaul of the signal infrastructure.
The equipment and personnel needed would be far greater than what existed now. Seo-ha had learned through his experience in Boston just how difficult a task like this was.
'Still, I really don't want to build another signal optimization model...'
He was not aware of it himself, but Seo-ha had absolutely no tolerance for tedious problems.
"Oh! Theo and Sri could handle it."
If it was those two, they could take the model he had already built and tune it for New York.
Feeling lighter, Seo-ha hummed a tune as he headed to the lab.
Beep beep.
An empty lab. No one had arrived yet.
Slide.
Seo-ha pulled something out of a drawer.
"Hey there, Ducky."
In his hand was a bright yellow duck mask.
It was the exact same shape he had seen in his dream a few days ago. After waking from that dream, Seo-ha had felt an urge to keep talking to Ducky.
Swish.
He held up the 3D-printed mask against the wall.
'Hmm.'
He crossed his arms as if something about it didn't feel right, then walked over to the corner of the lab and grabbed a Tim the Beaver plushie.
"Let's use this instead."
He put the mask on the plushie, and it fit perfectly.
A bright yellow duck bill, round black eyes, and the beaver's two front teeth poking out from below.
"Cute. It suits you."
"Don't be ridiculous!"
He could almost hear Ducky's voice protesting.
"Hahaha! I'm serious!"
Seo-ha felt a certain sympathy with Ducky's dream.
He thought it over.
'Now that we understand each other's thoughts, maybe we can work together more easily from here on.'
"If you have complaints, just say so anytime. Don't go being spiteful for no reason."
Seo-ha rolled up his sleeves and organized the chalkboard.
The vast trove of materials that Theo and Sri had been compiling all this time. Studying them, Seo-ha had been able to glimpse the landscape beyond the mountain range.
'What would it look like if I went there myself?'
"Ducky, let's give this a shot together!"
He began writing equations on the chalkboard.
Countless conditions branching out from multiple directions. Until now, he had been unable to find a function that satisfied all of them.
Scratch scratch.
Curvature, torsion, boundaries, stability, area, deformation.
A function that converges all of these conditions.
The chalkboard began to fill, one board at a time.
What started on the front board had already migrated to the side, covering more than half the lab in equations.
"These weren't separate, isolated conditions. They were just moving along with the flow of energy."
Ducky's mask was watching Seo-ha.
As if it alone had the right to witness the place Seo-ha had now reached.
The expressions written on the chalkboard pushed and pulled against one another, converging toward a single point. And at last, they began to lock together into one vast structure, turning like gears.
The flow of curvature affected torsion. Torsion created the gradient of the energy surface, and energy dictated the direction of everything else.
Through the fog, the ridgeline of a great mountain range slowly began to reveal itself.
In the hallway outside the lab,
Theo and Sri leaned against the wall, watching Seo-ha.
"This is your first time seeing it, right?"
Sri nodded, his eyes hazy.
"This is what Seo-ha looks like when he's at peak focus. Whenever something clicks into place in his head, he always pours it out like this."
It was a subject they had been researching together for a long time, yet Sri could not understand even half of the equations Seo-ha was writing.
Sri watched Seo-ha's back and swallowed hard.
"God whispered it to me."
"Hm?"
"That's what Ramanujan used to say whenever he explained his theorems. Don't you think we're looking at something similar right now?"
If the mathematical goddess Namagiri truly existed, would she look like this?
Sri gazed at Seo-ha with eyes full of awe.
*****
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