Chapter 201
Translator: Dreamscribe
[FBI Arrests Largest Cyber-Terror Ring in History. Full Scope of Attempt to Paralyze Financial Networks Revealed]
[Who Tracked Them Down? Anonymous Civilian Collaborator Made Decisive Contribution to the Investigation]
[The Man Once Called the Reincarnation of Euler, Why Did He Join Hands with the Devil?]
Major news outlets around the world were all pouring out urgent breaking coverage at once.
From the digital billboards of Times Square to the monitors on the Wall Street trading floor. Even the citizens walking down the street were all watching the news on their smartphones.
The world was in a frenzy reporting on the triumph the FBI had achieved.
"With this, we have completely severed the root of the most lethal cyber-terrorism in human history."
Field Office Chief Miller continued his announcement in front of dozens of microphones, his face flushed.
Amid the flurry of camera flashes, he struggled to suppress the emotions welling up inside him. The very media that had lambasted him as incompetent only a few days earlier had changed their tune in an instant.
Miller let out a small sigh of relief.
If possible, he would have liked to bring Seo-ha along and explain the tense course this operation had taken. But the man who had contributed the most to the arrests had said this.
"I don't want to be on TV for anything other than mathematics. My family would definitely be shocked."
They had only been able to uncover part of the terror plot's masterminds.
The faction that had planned the largest short-selling scheme in history. When they traced the money, astonishingly, hedge funds turned up.
Every one of them protested that they were no traitors.
"The RSA encryption system is going to be finished soon anyway. We were just trying to pull that timeline forward. You could call it a kind of shock therapy, I suppose."
"We thought the government was involved in this plan too. It was a senator who introduced us, after all."
People who served money alone as their absolute good.
The moral hazard of hedge funds was nothing new, but this incident had crossed the line by a wide margin. Naturally, they would all be detained, and their companies dissolved.
But the true mastermind could not be fully identified.
The man they had all pointed to as the ringleader had vanished before investigators could lay a hand on him, as though he had never existed in the first place.
He had left no trace of any kind. The politician who had brokered the connection with the hedge funds had died in an accident, and the funds had come from a cold wallet whose owner could not be pinned down.
The work of a professional. It was certain that an intelligence agency, or someone who had come out of one, was involved, but there was no evidence. They had put the composite sketch Walter had drawn up on Interpol's wanted list, but there was a high probability that even that was fake.
China and Russia.
When they analyzed the seized materials, it turned out that their ultimate goal had been to undermine confidence in the dollar. The other attacks had merely been decoys to divert attention.
So naturally they could not help but suspect the nations most dissatisfied with dollar hegemony. But one could hardly start a war without clear evidence.
Even so, the agency would not stop its pursuit.
* * *
It was a clear, bright season. Mi-young sat on the wooden veranda and drew in a deep breath.
The scent of soil drifting from afar, the smell of pumpkins and peppers ripening. It was the smell of her hometown, one she was breathing in again after so many years.
Life in America had become familiar somewhere along the way, and the daily walks along the banks of the Charles River still remained a fond memory, but the air there had always felt cold to Mi-young.
No matter how settled her life became, a foreign land would never become home. Mi-young felt that truth deep in her bones.
"Seo-eun, what are you doing?"
In the garden plot, her daughter was bent at the waist, absorbed in something.
Looking closer, she was humming a tune as if delighted, picking pumpkin leaves. A smile bloomed at the corner of Mi-young's mouth.
"I'm getting the side dishes ready to eat!"
Seo-eun grinned sheepishly, dirt smudged on her face.
Mi-young guessed she must have been thrilled after getting a call from her oppa. At Seo-ha's word that he'd be back in a few days, her daughter's face had been bright all morning. Then, unable to hold it in, she must have finally gone out to the garden.
"Mom! This should be enough for when oppa comes, right?"
Seo-eun came over, proudly shaking a basket full of pumpkin leaves.
Seo-ha's palate had an unusual streak to it, and ever since he was little he had loved soft, tender pumpkin leaves topped with spicy gangdoenjang.
Mi-young gently stroked Seo-eun's hair.
'It would be nice if she were this honest all the time....'
Her daughter had reached the age where she was slipping into adolescence before anyone noticed.
These days Seo-eun no longer ran out past the front gate to throw herself into her oppa's arms whenever he came. On the contrary, if Seo-ha so much as stepped into her room, she was quick to recoil in disgust and chase him out.
"Oppa! Knock!"
At Seo-eun's stern warning not to enter her room without permission, Seo-ha flinched.
"Pfft."
Watching it, Mi-young had to stifle her laughter from behind.
That wounded look on her son's face.
She sat on the veranda with her daughter and peeled the skin from the pumpkin leaves.
It was quite a tedious job, and when doing it alone she had to steel herself, but done like this, the two of them sitting face to face, it became a pleasant little pastime.
"La-la-la."
Seo-eun's humming showed no sign of stopping. Mi-young reached out and brushed the dust off her daughter's cheek.
Suddenly an old memory came to mind.
Back when Seo-eun had barely gotten used to walking, the two of them used to romp about together, the little girl eagerly trampling through the garden on her small legs.
Mi-young had thought such peaceful days would go on forever....
The people looking for Seo-ha had grown more numerous.
When the Minister of Science and Technology had come in person to ask whether there was anything troubling them, she too had been thoroughly flustered. Her husband, a former civil servant, had stood stiff and rigid almost like a soldier, at attention, as he shook the man's hand.
Perhaps because it wasn't peeling as easily as she expected, Seo-eun scrunched up her pretty forehead.
"Aargh! This is such a pain. Mom, why is Korean food like this? Americans all just throw stuff together and eat, you know!"
Even as she grumbled with her mouth, she was carefully peeling the skin from the pumpkin leaves one by one.
The sight of it was so lovely that the corners of Mi-young's lips lifted.
"Hwaa! That was hard. Mom, I peeled them all!"
Neatly trimmed pumpkin leaves were piled up in a tidy heap in the basket.
"Good job. Now go wash your hands and let's do homework. When did seonsaengnim say he was coming?"
"Next week? He keeps telling me to try entering a competition, but I'm thinking it over. You have to do those training camps and stuff later, right. And you have to go all the way abroad just to compete."
For a little while now, Seo-eun had been receiving Woo-hyun's tutoring.
Mi-young was dumbfounded at the way her daughter carried on as if she'd already been picked to represent Korea. Having grown up watching her oppa, she must have come to take such things for granted.
Creeeak.
From across the yard came the sound of her husband opening the gate and coming in.
The first draft was complete, but there was still much to revise. President Park had also advised that publishing after Seo-eun produced results in Korea would stir up a bigger response.
The sunlight was warm.
A gentle breeze grazed through her hair.
Mi-young closed her eyes and savored the late-summer weather. And so as not to forget this happy time, she carefully engraved it deep within her heart.
* * *
Seo-ha, in America for the first time in a while, had many things he needed to do. He met Gyeo-ul, they exchanged news of how they'd each been doing, and he listened to her play in the practice room.
"Here."
Gyeo-ul handed him two CDs she had newly recorded.
Her refined appearance suited the scenery of New York well. But the eyes with which she looked at Seo-ha, at least, had not changed at all.
Worry, sorrow, and the trust they had built together over a long time. Seo-ha accepted them with an apologetic expression.
"It hasn't gotten worse, has it? Are you maybe...."
Gyeo-ul bit down hard on her lower lip.
She wanted to say, how about going to see a doctor? If he were nearby, she was confident she could do something for him one way or another. But when he was far away like this, she sometimes had nightmares. Dreams in which Seo-ha turned into an entirely different person.
"Don't worry. It's getting better, actually."
'Liar.'
Gyeo-ul knew it better than anyone. Whenever Seo-ha sank into a certain state, his pupils dilated and his focus drifted far away.
A strange High.
His genius might be a blessing for humanity, but as an individual it seemed to take as its fuel a dangerous flame that gnawed away at his very life, and that frightened her.
"You said your next recital is in Korea, right? I'll definitely come that time. My urgent business is over, so I've got a little breathing room now."
Seo-ha gave an innocent smile.
Not long ago she had placed fourth at the Queen Elisabeth Competition, one of the world's four great piano concours. The age limit for international concours was generally thirty. She had decided to take on the challenge before it grew too late. She had resolved to enter every one of the four great concours.
"I'll only do it this once. I want to go to Korea too, it's been a while."
She had pestered her mentor to hold one last recital before preparing for the Chopin Competition. Of course, missing Korea was just an excuse. Meeting Seo-ha was the real purpose.
'I just hope he stays healthy until then....'
He pretended otherwise, but Seo-ha was stubborn.
Gyeo-ul let out a small sigh, then unwound the cashmere muffler she had draped around herself and wrapped it around Seo-ha's neck. New York turned cold ahead of Korea, after all.
As if bashful, Seo-ha's face reddened.
Was it because they had always been apart, except for that one year back in Gifted High School? Every time they met, the tenderness grew. Gyeo-ul pressed down hard on the urge to hold on to him and let him go.
* * *
"Ladies and gentlemen, our aircraft will be landing shortly at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. The current weather in Austin is clear, with a temperature of 28 degrees Celsius."
Seo-ha stretched.
Four and a half hours by plane.
He couldn't believe that traveling between cities within a single country required flying for such a long time.
"To the University of Texas, please."
Seo-ha said to the driver as he got into the taxi.
The P=NP Problem was first posed in 1971 by the Canadian computer scientist Stephen Cook. And in '73, Leonid Levin, then a mathematician in the Soviet Union, arrived at the same conclusion after his own independent research.
They revealed that certain complex problems (NP) were connected to one another, so that if just one of them could be solved efficiently (P), all the rest could be solved with ease as well.
Recognizing the contributions of the two scholars, academia decided to call this the Cook-Levin Theorem.
"If it can be solved, that is."
Seo-ha muttered, looking out the window.
After the Cook-Levin Theorem emerged, the mathematical world split in two and waged fierce debate.
That was only to be expected, since although a seemingly wondrous connecting link had been discovered, there was no evidence whatsoever as to whether the key hanging at the end of it actually existed.
Yet many scholars still remained who held onto their faith in it.
Of course, it was understandable. The discovery that tens of thousands of problems that seemed to have nothing to do with one another were in fact bound together by a single connecting link.
Their fields were all different too.
Physics, biology, mathematics....
And yet, peel back one layer and it was all the same logical formula?
If this didn't set his heart racing, then he was surely no mathematician.
"So is this a joke God tossed out for fun? It's far too intricate to be mere coincidence."
The scholar who had said this was at the University of Texas.
Not long ago, Seo-ha had thrown a few questions his way by email. The man had grown greatly excited that a message had come from Seo-ha himself, and had invited him to the university in person.
The University of Texas ranked within the national top ten. But in the fields of analysis, applied mathematics, and topology, it was powerful enough to count among the top five in the world.
"Ugh.... so hot!"
He had heard that Texas was hot, but he hadn't known it would be like this. The moment he stepped out of the car, the searing heat rising off the asphalt greeted him with a hello.
Drenched in sweat, Seo-ha walked along, checking the map the man had sent him.
"Is it here?"
Wiping the sweat beading on his forehead with his sleeve, he set foot inside the mathematics department building. Once the air conditioning hit him, he finally felt he might live. The spot marked on the map was Large Lecture Hall 302.
'He's a famous professor, so I guess his lecture hall is big too.'
The man was a giant of the mathematical world, a Wolf Prize laureate.
Creeeak.
Without much thought, Seo-ha opened the lecture hall door and walked in.
Silence.
"It's Yu Seo-ha!"
"My goodness. He really came!"
Seo-ha's body creaked as though it had broken down.
That was because hundreds of students, packing the tiered lecture hall to the brim, were all looking at him with bright, sparkling eyes.
And a moment later,
Whoaaaaaaa!
Thunderous applause and cheers washed over him.
*****
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