Chapter 208
Translator: Dreamscribe
It began to snow.
Woo-hyun glanced up at the sky and led Seo-ha to a nearby cafe. Being so close to the school, the only option was a study cafe with the hushed atmosphere of a library.
The exam ran three hours.
Even those who finished early couldn't leave partway through.
"Coffee?"
"Yes."
Seo-ha nodded.
Back when the boy was little, Woo-hyun used to hand him juice or milk; it struck him just how much time had passed.
"Aren't you worried about your sister?"
"Seo-eun is stronger than I am. Jealousy, expectations, whatever it is, she knows how to turn it into fuel for herself."
Woo-hyun laughed heartily.
"Hahaha! True, that's why she has her quirky side too."
"Even when she has to do something she hates, she'll find some reason why she simply must enjoy it, one way or another."
"It must be thanks to growing up in such a wonderful family."
"Our parents really are remarkable. Thinking about it now, I don't know how they ever decided to go all the way to America for their children. Neither of them could speak a word of English."
"That's part of it, but..."
Anyone who spent time in the private tutoring industry came to understand certain things.
Parents willing to shoulder risk for their bright children were not so rare, if one looked. But that alone didn't produce children who turned out like these siblings.
A gifted mind paired with sound character.
The persistence to endure a tedious process in pursuit of what one wants, and the inner steadiness to stand unmoved by other people's eyes... those weren't things that could be taught.
For a child as emotionally rich as Seo-eun especially, the influence of her environment must have been absolute.
The first thing she saw upon waking was her older brother; the person she had spent the most time with in her life was also Seo-ha. Parents who never demanded achievement and simply showered her with love.
The more he looked, the more ideal an environment it was. Seo-ha's success had felt like a foregone conclusion, but what Seo-eun would someday become was not so easy to picture.
Seo-ha spoke with a gentle smile.
"I was just lucky. I got to meet my teacher early. Even if the me of today were to teach my younger self, I don't think I could do any better than that."
Woo-hyun shook his head with a sheepish look and said,
"No, you would have reached that place one way or another. Regardless of time."
Seo-ha was about to reply that that was absolutely not true when he flinched.
The very question he had been turning over lately.
'Regardless of time.'
"Ju... just a moment."
Seo-ha hurriedly raised a hand, begging his pardon. Woo-hyun looked puzzled, but didn't pay it much mind. It was hardly the first time he'd seen Seo-ha act strangely.
As if a switch had been flipped, the Ducky in his head suddenly opened his eyes.
'I think we've found the path.'
Seo-ha nodded as if in agreement.
Defining logical consistency as energy and measuring it had proven far more arduous than expected. Every attempt to calculate a survival cost had inevitably circled back to time.
Seo-ha admitted that he had been too bound by the engineering premise that it 'must be applicable in reality'.
Ducky twisted his lips and said,
'That stuff only matters to engineers. It's got nothing to do with us.'
It was true.
The title and responsibilities of a research institute director had been constraining his thinking.
It must be implementable.
That premise had been shackling the theory's feet.
'Time itself was Turing's language.'
The remark Woo-hyun had tossed out without a second thought struck off the shackles that had held him back.
Yu-Riemann Geometry dealt with spacetime and dimensions. Seo-ha decided to boldly cut time out of it.
Then how?
Judge by curvature. If he could calculate the critical point of curvature, he could determine the energy required for a path to close itself off.
Fireworks went off in his head.
If he didn't pour it all out this very moment, the insight felt like it would slip away.
Seo-ha hurriedly pulled a notebook and pen from his bag.
Scritch-scratch.
He wrote out equations, heedless of the eyes around him.
Woo-hyun had known for a long time that once Seo-ha slipped into that state, he forgot even who was sitting beside him.
Sip.
Woo-hyun drank a mouthful of coffee without a word. Then he rose from his seat and strode over to the counter.
Tall and slender; as Woo-hyun drew near, the employee found himself staring openly at his face.
'He looks familiar... where have I seen him?'
"Excuse me, would you happen to be the owner?"
"Yes! That's me, I'm the owner."
"Could I rent out this entire place for the day?"
"Sorry?"
"I'll pay you a full week's worth of revenue on the spot. I imagine that should cover it...."
The owner's gaze flicked back and forth between Woo-hyun and Seo-ha, who sat with a cap pulled low. Having apparently done the math, he broke into a bright smile.
"Of course! A week is far too much, three days' worth is plenty!"
"You'll take quite a loss turning customers away, so I couldn't do that. Please feel free to be generous with the figure."
The owner bowed a full ninety degrees as he took the card Woo-hyun held out.
"Thank you. Then I'll go ask the customers inside for their understanding."
The owner hurried out from behind the counter.
Looking around the cafe, a little over ten students sat with laptops or books spread open on the tables. He might be in the private tutoring business, but Woo-hyun was still a teacher of sorts; driving out students in the middle of studying didn't sit well with him.
"The students who are already inside can stay."
"Are you sure? I'm certainly grateful, but still."
"Yes, just politely turn away any new customers. And for those students, I'd like today's service to be on the house. I'll cover the cost."
"There's really no need to go that far...."
"Shh!"
Woo-hyun raised an index finger to his lips.
"There's a reason for it, so please don't ask."
The owner made his way around carefully, explaining the situation to the students.
The once-quiet cafe began to stir. Handed free coffee without any idea why, the students naturally turned their eyes toward the two figures seated in the corner.
Complex tensor equations sprawled across the notebook in a dizzying tangle. In place of the Turing Machine's finite tape, Seo-ha sought to gauge a path's chances of survival through deformations of the Yu-Riemann curvature tensor.
With time gone from the variables, a landscape came into view beyond the world Turing had seen.
At the point where critical curvature was exceeded, a node closed itself off and vanished. Just as a living thing ends its life when its energy runs dry, a computational path, too, collapsed geometrically the moment its efficiency fell.
"Found it. This is the right direction!"
He murmured under his breath as he wrote on. Woo-hyun peered closely at the equations.
'Is that Yu-Riemann Geometry? But something's different....'
The time axis had been cut away.
Riemannian Geometry and Topology didn't deal with time either, but this was something else again. Those couldn't explain the discontinuity of a path breaking off.
'Dynamics, Ricci Flow, Calculus of Variations, Topology, Bifurcation Theory, Computation Theory.'
Countless fields were crossing over within the space of Yu-Riemann Geometry.
This surely wasn't some theory already under research. He had to be pulling in whatever concepts the logic demanded as he went, weaving them into a single framework on the spot.
'A new Computation Theory?'
"What on earth are you...."
Before long, the notebook was nearing its last page.
A gut feeling struck him. The flow must not be allowed to break. Turning his head, he saw students clustered a few meters away, eyes shining as they whispered to one another, having apparently recognized Seo-ha.
A scene from the past suddenly came to mind.
Woo-hyun walked over to them and asked in a gentle voice,
"Say, would any of you be interested in a part-time job?"
At the sudden offer, the students' eyes went round.
Seeing Shin Woo-hyun was astonishing enough, and Yu Seo-ha was here with him too. They had just finished posting 'Yu Seo-ha spotted at a study cafe!' to social media and online communities.
"S... sure!"
One student in the group shot up a hand and shouted.
The students beside him nodded vigorously in agreement. Instead of answering, Woo-hyun pulled a card from his wallet.
"Starting now, I'd like you to cover every wall of this cafe with paper. Not a gap anywhere. Don't worry, I'll pay you handsomely."
"The walls.... with paper?"
"That's right. We're making one giant whiteboard. Sir! That's alright, isn't it? We'll restore everything before we leave."
Woo-hyun asked, looking to the owner listening behind them.
By now, the man had figured out exactly who they were. The owner sensed instinctively that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had come knocking at his establishment.
"O... of course! By all means!"
The boy who had raised his hand first, Lee Ju-han, was a Gifted High School student.
He had only come to cheer on a friend competing in the KMO and stepped in here to knock out some homework while he was at it. And now, right before his eyes, stood the legendary sunbae and Shin Woo-hyun.
"Hey, move it! You, come with me to buy paper and tape."
He had never met any of them before. But he directed them without a moment's hesitation.
Ju-han had grasped at once what Woo-hyun was trying to do.
A shiver-
Goosebumps rose on his skin.
That awe-inspiring scene where Seo-ha sunbae had covered entire walls with equations while proving the Four Color Theorem. Shin Woo-hyun meant to recreate it in this study cafe.
Thump, thump.
His heart pounded as if it might burst.
Every Gifted High School student felt boundless pride in being Yu Seo-ha's direct junior. Their admissions results, too, held an unshakable first place nationwide.
The students who had gone for paper returned in under ten minutes. They seemed to have cleaned out the nearby stationery store. Watching them come panting through the door, arms loaded with bundles of paper, Woo-hyun chuckled.
"That was quick, wasn't it?"
"We can't let sunbae's flow break, can we?"
Ju-han said, gasping for breath. He pulled out his Gifted High School student ID and showed it to Woo-hyun. Woo-hyun looked surprised for a moment, then nodded.
The students began moving in perfect coordination. Whatever Ju-han had told them, they kept their voices down, working as quietly as they possibly could.
Seo-ha noticed none of it.
Information was entering through his eyes, but everything unrelated to the proof was being filtered out automatically by his brain.
His hand moved again.
Scritch-scratch.
The last page of the notebook was filled.
When Woo-hyun held out a marker, Seo-ha took it without missing a beat. Then he strode over and carried his thinking onward across the wall.
"Gasp!"
"For real?"
Seo-ha was writing equations on the very canvas they had laid out.
The students quietly swallowed their breath. The way they cleared the desks and papered over the walls carried the reverence of a sacred rite.
Ju-han pressed each sheet down firmly and pasted it with painstaking care so that no air bubbles would form.
He couldn't understand the equations his sunbae was writing, but this role was more than enough for him.
Soon, every wall of the cafe was covered in paper.
"I didn't expect you to do such a fine job."
Woo-hyun held out an envelope in admiration, but the students waved their hands and refused.
"Huh? Why not?"
"It's fine."
"Really? After all that work, shouldn't you at least take your pay?"
"We're really fine!"
Ju-han stepped forward to speak for them.
He couldn't say why. But something told him he would regret it if he took the money. Woo-hyun regarded them with warm, knowing eyes, then tucked the envelope away.
"Then I've been rude."
The wish not to be remembered as laborers who took wages at the site of history.
He himself was probably not so different from them. Woo-hyun spoke as if to spur them on.
"We may just have contributed to something tremendously important."
Ju-han clenched his fist inside his pocket. Never in his life had he felt as proud of himself as he did today.
Ding.
Ding.
Messages were pouring in from friends who had seen his post. But he didn't take out his phone.
The walls were filling with equations.
Enough to bring to mind, unbidden, that seminar room, now kept under the strictest care.
The snow was falling harder.
But time inside the cafe seemed to flow on its own, sealed off from the world outside.
*****
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