I Got an Omnipotent Brain

Translator: Dreamscribe

He knew it was a dream.

But Seo-ha made no effort to wake himself.

A house built of stone and earth; he remembered seeing one in a book when he was young. It was the Agraharam style of southern India. The warmth of the space wrapped itself around his body. Seo-ha liked the atmosphere of this shabby little house.

And there was one person, standing with his back turned.

Clink.

The man wore a white shirt that looked far too large for his slight frame. Dark skin, curly hair swept back neatly from his forehead.

He came closer, holding a teacup.

"Will you have some?"

"Yes."

What mathematician would refuse tea poured by Ramanujan? Seo-ha nodded without hesitation.

When he took the cup, he found warm milk tea inside.

Sip.

A rich flavor, sweet and faintly bitter.

Was this how Earl Grey had tasted back when he was alive?

"...."

For a while, the two of them drank their tea without speaking.

Seo-ha wondered why he had come to be dreaming this.

'What was I doing before this?'

He thought it over carefully, but nothing came back to him, as though a thick fog had rolled in. Still, a dream was the surfacing of the subconscious; there must have been something he had always wanted to ask Ramanujan. Since the chance had finally come, Seo-ha decided to ask it.

"Ramanujan, did the goddess Namagiri really give you the formulas?"

"Hmm. That was a question I got often, back in the day."

Ramanujan set his teacup down as if unbothered and went on.

"There was no lie in anything I said. I truly did hear a voice."

Seo-ha shook his head.

That much he had already guessed. It wasn't what he was curious about. He lowered his voice to a whisper, as if confessing a secret.

"No. I'm asking whether the owner of that voice really came from outside you."

If the goddess had truly taught him, he would never have been able to understand the formulas. The equations he wrote down had already been inside Ramanujan.

The hand holding the teacup went still. He stared at Seo-ha for a moment, then nodded as though he understood.

"No one has ever asked me that.... I had forgotten for a moment. You're a similar kind of human to me, aren't you."

"Most people reacted in one of two ways, didn't they? They believed, or they laughed."

"That's right."

Ramanujan laughed, his face bright with amusement. Then, in an instant, his expression turned serious.

"I couldn't stop thinking.

While I ate, while I walked down the street, even while I slept, I saw equations. At Cambridge it got worse. Once I started hearing voices, I couldn't bear it. That was when my body fell apart."

Just as he had suspected.

"That must have been frightening."

"Enormously. Every day I wondered whether I had gone mad. I had to find a solution."

"And that was the goddess Namagiri."

He stopped speaking and was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke in a calm voice, like a confession.

"At some point I could no longer handle the flow. I couldn't tell which voice was truly my own. It was only right at the edge of madness that I finally found a way out."

"You separated it."

"Yes. I decided to treat it as another being, not myself. The goddess speaks and I write it down. If she was the one giving me the equations, then there was nothing wrong with me at all."

His voice dropped lower.

"Once I saw it that way, the voice no longer frightened me. I wasn't mad, I was simply a man who had been chosen. Even so-"

Ramanujan spoke in a gloomy voice.

"Even the goddess could not protect me entirely."

"What happened?"

He gripped his head with both hands, as though in pain.

"I wrote to my wife every day, but no reply ever came. My mother must have hidden the letters, saying they would interfere with my studies. Ah! My love, Janaki! She was the only thing holding my life up."

"That must have been hard."

It was painful just to listen.

Turing had been the same. Why was an ordinary life never granted to brilliant mathematicians?

"It was near the end of my time at Cambridge, I think? The voice came all day long. So much of it that I couldn't possibly write it down. My mind must have been wearing away."

"And your body was sick too."

Ramanujan had died of tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-two. But he shook his head as though he disagreed.

"The mind went first. The tuberculosis was only what came after. That was when I understood. The goddess was no merciful mother, but a vast wave I could never withstand. All those countless equations I kept writing right up until my death, they were flames burning with my own life as their fuel."

Seo-ha, who had been listening in silence, answered him.

"...But they were truly beautiful flames."

"Yes. And I knew. I knew it wasn't a way that could last. It was a power too great for a human body to carry. Sir Isaac Newton must have realized as much long before me. That's why he escaped into alchemy, into theology."

Severe persecutory delusions, paranoia, insomnia, and nervous exhaustion.

Based on the letters he wrote and the records left by those around him, modern doctors believe Newton likely suffered from severe bipolar disorder.

He looked quietly at Seo-ha and asked.

"So what do you mean to do now?"

Seo-ha looked down into his teacup.

How long could this amicable companionship with Ducky last? No, the relationship he had set up at the very beginning was already creaking, that much was certain.

He had created Ducky in his sixth year of elementary school.

"Thank you, seonsaengnim. Thanks to you, I think I'll manage somehow."

"Not at all. I only hope you never end up walking the same road I did."

Seo-ha bowed deeply, with the utmost respect.

Creak-

When he opened the door, a rush of hot wind struck his face.

The Indian countryside spread out before him. Sunlight, brutally vivid, poured down over a road where red dust drifted.

"Wow! It's this vivid?"

At the edge of the village, scrawny cows walked along swishing their tails. The chirping of unfamiliar birds somewhere in the distance, the lively shouts of people, the streets thick with the smell of spices; all of it made everything feel that much more real.

"Quack, quack quack!"

At the noisy cries, Seo-ha turned around.

A flock of ducks marched past in single file with waddling steps. The lead duck at the front had an enormous lump on its head.

"Hahaha!"

A laugh escaped him.

"Ducky."

"Quack!"

Seo-ha stopped in front of it and crouched down.

"Were you feeling anxious, by any chance?"

"...."

On the road toward Step 8, Seo-ha had felt fear.

The terror he had experienced for the first time inside a heat that felt like it was burning his brain away. There was no way Ducky hadn't known about it. He had been afraid that Seo-ha would run.

"Relax. I'm not going to run. And no, I won't deny that you exist, either. But how about you stop showing up before I call you?"

Shhhk.

Ducky shifted into a human shape.

"Then what do you intend to do? You know it as well as I do. That thing is a monster you can't even compare to the problems you've solved so far. If you can't see its essence through my eyes, you probably won't be able to solve it. So you'd be better off handing the reins to me...."

Seo-ha's face darkened with anger.

"Ducky!"

He felt the need to redefine his relationship with Ducky.

Clinically, Ducky's current condition was a quasi-autonomous ego state. Using him as a cognitive tool, the way he had been doing until now, had reached its limit.

Over many years, the voice of compulsion had developed into a being with a consistent personality and will of its own. And now it had gone so far as to demand a swap of egos.

"Am I wrong?"

Seo-ha shook his head.

"You're wrong. Very wrong. Your existence would certainly help in solving the problem, but intuition isn't the only road to an answer. I intend to work through that problem piece by piece, with the blade of cold logic in my hand."

Ducky narrowed his eyes behind the mask.

"So you're saying you don't need me anymore?"

"I already told you. I won't deny that you exist. You're my mathematical self, and I need your power too. But right now there's a serious problem between us."

"There is no problem! I exist inside you in a definite form, and that's the only thing that matters!"

Seo-ha let out a sigh.

"When I first met you, I was too young. Our agreement was written in the language of a child's game. We're both adults now, so let's make a proper contract."

Ducky was demanding autonomy because the structure of his constraints had changed. A slapdash agreement was far too flimsy to contain a Ducky who was growing into a highly developed ego.

In exchange for acknowledging his existence and drawing up a new contract, Seo-ha decided to redefine the balance of power between them.

"Hmph! I can already tell you'll just rattle off a list of things I'm not allowed to do."

Seo-ha's face went cold in an instant.

"Ducky. Listen carefully. If you don't accept this, I'll bury you in that pit right now. And once I go back to reality, I'll never come looking for you again."

"Do you really think you could?"

"This isn't a question of possibility. If I hand you the reins, I'll lose everything that matters to me. I'd sooner go mad like Gödel. If it gets bad enough, I'll escape into another field the way Newton did. Putting my experience to use and becoming a psychologist wouldn't be so bad."

Ducky stared straight into Seo-ha's eyes, as though searching for his true intent.

Seo-ha didn't look away. This was no bluff. Ducky knew better than anyone that once he made up his mind, he never bent.

"...Let's hear your conditions."

The two of them talked for a long time, working out the terms of the contract.

Do not appear without being called, the reins would not be handed over under any circumstances, do not attempt to make contact with other people, and so on. Ducky demanded a set amount of free time, along with rights equal to Seo-ha's whenever they tackled a problem like the Millennium Prize Problems or Step 8 of Seo-ha's hypothesis, and Seo-ha accepted.

"So I can't talk to Seo-eun either."

The duck mask, with loneliness in its eyes. Seo-ha understood how he felt.

"No, let's make that an exception. You're that child's oppa too."

Seo-ha held out his hand for a handshake.

Ducky looked down at it. What it held was respect and coexistence. But it also carried an unspoken pressure to keep the promise, without fail.

Swish.

Ducky slowly reached out his arm and took Seo-ha's hand.

The moment their hands met, Seo-ha felt something inside him shift. Like a string pulled taut finding the right tension for the very first time.

'So this is balance.'

The contract was complete.

Red dust swirled around the two of them, then scattered. Seo-ha let go and looked up at the sky. The blazing Indian sun and the blue sky.

And then, in an instant, the scene before his eyes changed.

"Hm?"

What he saw was a familiar ceiling. He was inside his own room.

"Was that a dream?"

He shook his head.

The heavy taste of milk tea still lingered in his mouth.

The doll wasn't on the desk.

Looking around the room, he spotted Ducky flung down in a corner.

"Ah!"

He remembered.

He had been so furious at that ridiculous proposal that he had hurled the doll away.

He picked it up and set it back on the desk.

It was the moment he lifted his hand away.

Whoosh-

A sensation bore down on his head, suffocating.

Seo-ha braced a hand against the desk and tried to hold himself up. But he lost his balance almost at once and collapsed to the floor.

Crash!

For over a decade, Seo-ha's brain had poured immense energy into suppressing Ducky. His prefrontal lobe had been pressing down on the compulsion circuit without rest.

That structure of suppression had been reorganized in a single night. His brain fell into a temporary state of overload as it searched for a new balance.

"Seo-ha!"

"Oppa!"

He heard his startled family come running.

"I can't have them worrying...."

The energy spent on suppression was being released.

For the first time, the resources of the prefrontal lobe could be turned toward thought. But for the moment, he couldn't control his body at all.

That was why he ended up being carried to the hospital.

*****

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