Chapter 211
Translator: Dreamscribe
Ding-dong-ding-
The bell signaling the end of the exam rang.
Seo-eun set down the pencil she had been drawing with and stretched. The student beside her was clutching his answer sheet, fixing something.
"You there! Put the pencil down!"
The proctor shouted sharply.
"Shouldn't that be an automatic zero?"
"Seriously. Like anybody else finished early because they had time to spare."
A few of them made their displeasure obvious, but Seo-eun didn't even glance their way.
In the world of mathematics, competing with other people hardly mattered.
How fast a solution came, or even whether the answer was correct, were all secondary concerns.
Why a single line of an equation flowed the way it did, and what kind of world that definition brought into being, were the only things that held any value for Seo-eun.
Oppa had never once praised her for getting an answer right. But whenever she grasped the true nature of a problem, he wore the most delighted expression. Seo-eun loved seeing that face of his.
"Well done, everyone. Collect your belongings and leave quietly."
The proctor's gaze rested on Seo-eun for a moment.
A teacher at Seo-ha's old school, he was a devout believer in Genetic Determinism. And Seo-eun, with her perfect score on the first round, had only strengthened his conviction.
'She really does enjoy solving problems.'
That part of her resembled her oppa. So did the way she paid no mind whatsoever to the eyes around her.
Seo-ha had been so brilliant that teaching him lost some of its flavor, but from what he had observed, she wasn't quite at that level. She hesitated where she got stuck, and the instant she understood, she tore up her equations without a moment's pause.
'This should be interesting.'
Young as she was, she was better than any of the gifted students gathered here from across the country.
A faint smile spread across his lips.
"It's really coming down."
Seo-eun stepped out of the building and looked up at the sky.
She opened her phone and found a text from her oppa.
-I'm at a study café nearby. I'll send you the map, so come straight over when you're done!
Seo-eun tilted her head, then started walking toward the school gate. The café was only five minutes from the exam site.
She arrived in three. But then-
"Huh?"
The front of the café was swarming with people.
Students in Gifted High School uniforms, university students in department jackets, and two cameras stamped with broadcast station logos.
Someone who looked like a reporter turned to the person next to him and asked.
"They still won't let us in?"
"No, apparently there's no room inside. They won't move even when we ask them to."
It was below freezing and snowing, and not a single person was leaving.
'Don't tell me something happened to oppa?'
Urgency took hold of her.
She rose onto her toes to see inside, but the wall of bodies was too much for her.
"Excuse me. Just a second!"
She tried to wedge her way through, but it was hopeless. While Seo-eun hopped up and down, fighting for a look, the closed glass door swung open.
Warm air leaked out through the gap. The crowd stirred and turned as one.
A tall, striking man with orange hair.
Theo stood out even among all those people.
"Theo!"
His eyes swept over the crowd and landed on Seo-eun right away.
Nearly everyone here had some connection to mathematics, one way or another. They recognized Theo's face. A few of them stepped aside without being asked.
"Is oppa all right?"
Seo-eun asked in an urgent voice.
"Let's get inside first."
Seo-eun trotted along after Theo as he led the way.
* * *
It wasn't long after he started writing that Seo-ha began to regret it.
This was not, after all, a theorem he could finish in a matter of hours. The further the equations progressed, the more lemmas and preconditions came trailing out behind them.
Uncountable Cardinal Theory, Measure Theory, Homological Algebra, the functor structures of Category Theory, the invariants of homeomorphisms, and on top of all that, the work of redefining Computational Complexity Theory in terms of Yu-Riemann Geometry.
Touch one and ten more shook loose. There was no telling how many days a proper proof would take.
Seo-ha couldn't keep the anxiety off his face.
'Seo-eun will be here soon.'
Ducky seemed to be thinking the same thing, and the two of them quickly reached an agreement.
'All right! Let's leap over it!'
There were two ways for a mathematician to write.
An explanation that considers the reader, or a proof meant for himself alone. Since he wasn't going to show it to anyone anyway, choosing the latter shouldn't cause any real trouble.
'What is this?'
Chan-sung, the youngest professor in KAIST's mathematics department, felt his head spin.
It had been difficult, but he had definitely been keeping up. Then all at once the equations went into overdrive. Passages that would normally require an entire paper were being omitted wholesale.
More than a dozen times over.
He must have seen the result first and written the flow out backward from it. But no matter how hard Chan-sung tried, he couldn't see it.
He wasn't the only one, apparently; a murmur spread through the room around him.
"Please step aside for a moment."
Theo's voice.
Seo-eun was worried that something might have happened to her oppa.
Rattle.
The door opened, and at last the scene inside came into view. She stopped dead where she stood.
"...Huh?"
The sharp smell of markers.
Walls covered in white paper, and equations filling every inch of them.
It took her breath away. Numbers and symbols packed densely all the way up near the ceiling.
It was as though the wall itself were alive. Equations branching off in every direction ran unbroken, each of them reaching somewhere, like rivers running toward the sea.
The café was full of people, but Seo-ha didn't seem to have noticed; he was focused on nothing but the equations.
Theo spoke in a low voice, as if issuing a warning.
"Don't be startled. Seo-ha right now might be a little different from the oppa you know. It's like a switch he flips to concentrate when he's working on a hard problem...."
She wasn't listening.
Seo-eun beamed as she looked at Seo-ha.
The expressionless face, the disheveled hair, the marker stains on the ends of his rolled-up sleeves.
'What? I worried over nothing.'
Hyper-focus Mode.
Her oppa was as gentle as could be most of the time, but Seo-eun, who had been at his side since the day she was born, knew that he had another face he showed on occasion.
'He pretends it's nothing because he's embarrassed.'
A giggle slipped out of her.
In those moments her oppa said very little and wore a slightly uncomfortable look.
Seo-eun sat quietly in a chair and waited for him to finish it all.
Scritch-scritch.
The logic grew extraordinarily complex.
A Turing Machine was, at its core, ruled by time. The act of advancing the tape one cell at a time and shifting states. In other words, the order of computation was the premise that took precedence over everything else.
But in the world Seo-ha had built, the universe did not process problems sequentially. A world in which the entire structure of a problem existed as a single topological figure. There, the answer changed endlessly and came to rest in the most natural state of equilibrium.
'Simultaneity of Uncountable Space.'
It was a new concept that surpassed the limits of existing computation theory.
Seo-ha thought of Turing.
A lonely boy who had lost a friend in childhood and wept over it. With no real connection to anyone else, he could not have known how to fill that loss.
Seo-ha spoke gently to that solitary genius.
'How is it? Did you meet your friend there?'
He understood Turing with his whole heart.
What Turing had wanted to build was not a friend, but a world in which he would never have had to lose one. It was mourning in its most desperate form, carried on for the whole of his life.
But through the help of many people, Seo-ha had come to understand something.
'Alan, a relationship is a singular thing. It's precious because it can be lost. I hope that there, you and your friend are happy.'
「Q.E.D.」
The marker set down its final point.
Seo-ha lifted his hand away and shivered faintly. Seo-eun couldn't understand a word of what was written on the wall, but she could feel the release radiating from the sight of his back.
"Oppa!"
This was another side of him that Seo-eun truly loved. No matter how serious his face, he always smiled brightly the moment she called him.
Seo-ha turned around.
The nerves that had been drawn taut went slack, and warmth seeped back into his face. Seo-ha broke into a radiant smile. Seo-eun shrugged at Theo as if to say, See?
"How did the exam go?"
"Great!"
"Then let's head home."
"Okay. Mom said she'd make a whole spread of good food."
Seo-ha picked up his coat.
The mathematicians gathered in the café were nearly out of their minds with frustration. They wanted someone, anyone, to explain, and the one person who could clearly had no intention of doing so.
Sensing the mood, MathHolic bravely stepped up to Seo-ha and asked.
"Um.... Director Yu! What does the theorem you wrote on the wall actually mean?"
Every eye in the room turned to one spot.
Seo-ha looked at a loss. It had been an entirely private proof, but it seemed far too late to wave the question off now.
He sighed, then answered.
"It means Turing's Computational Complexity Theory never managed to contain the whole universe."
Murmur, murmur-
Unable to bear his own impatience, Chan-sung shoved his way in between the two of them.
"Director! This proof isn't like you at all. It isn't a theorem in complete form. Here, and here too! Why are the leaps in logic so severe?"
Seo-ha scratched his head, looking a little sheepish.
"It was almost time for my sister to get here. I just wanted to check the answer quickly."
All of this, just to go meet his sister?
The room fell quiet. Gasps and groans broke out here and there.
Chan-sung's and Jun-il's mouths hung open.
Seo-ha put on his coat and picked up Seo-eun's bag for her. He was making to leave the café with the APEX team members.
"Wait, please!"
Chan-sung called out to him urgently.
"Don't tell me you're just going to leave like this? At least this one part, please explain...."
Seo-ha shook his head.
"Someday I'll write it out properly and publish it as a paper."
"Someday.... you say?"
His words never reached their target.
The glass door swung shut, and Seo-ha's figure vanished into the snow.
Chan-sung looked up at the wall with a hollow expression.
In the café Seo-ha had left behind, someone's eyes flashed as he spoke.
"Let's photograph it."
Click!
Click!
Everyone pulled out their phones at once. Shutter sounds came down like rain. One of them gave the corner of one of the poster sheets a discreet nudge with his hand.
"This is just taped up, isn't it? If I peel it off gently...."
"Oh? Me too, me too!"
"Could I take one sheet as a keepsake as well?"
"Any way you look at it, these two sheets are a set. Wouldn't it be better for one person to take them both?"
"What on earth are you saying? Obviously a university should have them!"
With Seo-ha and his team gone without claiming ownership of anything, the café turned into pandemonium in an instant.
Chan-sung clutched his head with both hands.
"Everyone! Please stop!"
"You be the quiet one. And forget about hauling them off to a university!"
There was no telling how much these papers would be worth if someone held onto them. Even people with no real interest in mathematics joined in, and the commotion swelled.
Watching it all, Woo-hyun frowned.
"Enough!"
At that lion's roar of a shout, the café went silent in an instant.
His relationship with Seo-ha was common knowledge.
People assumed Woo-hyun meant to take all of it for himself. But what came out of his mouth was something else entirely.
"Just leave them where they are. If you need them for research, come here and look at them."
"Y-you really mean that's all right?"
A windfall no one had dared hope for.
The café owner's eyes went round.
"Yes, that would be best. You provided the space, after all."
Everything Seo-ha wrote would become history before long.
Woo-hyun had never intended to take them down in the first place. Leaving them intact, exactly as they were, would be better for everyone.
He handed the owner his business card.
"If the upkeep becomes difficult, contact me anytime. I'll help with the preservation work."
Envious eyes turned on him from all sides.
The owner accepted the card with both hands.
"Thank you. Thank you so much."
He looked up at the wall.
It had been more than ten years since he opened the café. The income was meager, and the small sense of purpose he got from watching students study had been his only real pleasure.
He kept his head bowed toward Woo-hyun for a long time.
His café would become a local landmark now. Enough, at the very least, that he would never have to worry about making a living again.
* * *
Three days later.
Arriving at the café for the day, the owner rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was seeing things.
A line had formed in front of the shop.
People dragging suitcases, as though they had come straight from the airport.
"Can I come in?"
He flinched at the sudden burst of English.
They exchanged casual greetings with one another, as if they were already acquainted. Different skin colors, different languages. Yet every last one of them was looking at the same place.
*****
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