Rumors are always bound to be exaggerated.
Within a few days, most of the students had learned of Team Apex’s existence.
“Hey, did you hear? Yu Seoha put together a team. They say he’s starting some insanely huge project. Apparently equipment’s pouring into the lab nonstop.”
“I heard. If you get in there, you won’t have to worry about finding a postdoc position, will you?”
“I heard it’s a lab Dean Thomas is really backing.”
Rumor and truth mixed together, swelling like a snowball.
“A team created to solve an unsolved problem.”
“A team made up of the elite from the math and mechanical engineering departments.”
“Just getting your name on the team changes your entire life tier.”
Rumors like that circulated among the students.
“Shouldn’t we apply now if we want to get in? You have to join before there are any results to be a real team member. Once the papers blow up and the patents get registered, it’ll already be too late.”
The students began to move.
“Theo, got a minute?”
Theo was heading back to the lab with a coffee when someone blocked his path.
A neat shirt, a slightly overdone smile.
It was James, a classmate he had studied with back at Stanford.
“Yeah, what is it?”
Theo checked his watch, then nodded.
“It’s about Team Apex. You’re a member there, right?”
“Yeah. We’re only just getting started, though.”
So the rumor was true after all.
James glanced around and lowered his voice.
“Then could you put in a word for me?
I had a feeling the moment I first heard about it. You know what I can do, right? I’m pretty confident when it comes to nonlinear PDEs. If you happen to need people…”
He let the end of his sentence trail off.
Even after hearing his request, Theo’s expression remained calm.
“Yeah? Sure.”
“Really?”
James’s face instantly lit up.
“Man, thanks. Seriously. I knew classmates were the only ones you could count on.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Sip.
Theo took a mouthful of coffee, then pulled a thin bundle of printouts from his bag.
About ten pages of formulas on A4 paper. Red-pen annotations were scattered here and there.
“This is a selection of only the key parts from the papers Sri and I have been referencing lately.
See the ones marked with Xs? Those are the cases we discarded. Write down, from your perspective, why you think they were thrown out.
Uh… Three days should be enough, right?”
“Huh?”
James blinked.
“It’s fine if it takes longer. I’ll wait up to about a week.
If you think this is interesting, come find me again. If you have no idea what it’s talking about, then you don’t have to bother coming back.”
Theo gave him a bright smile.
“No, not this kind of thing. If you just put in a good word with the team leader…”
“Then what? You’ll come clean the lab?”
James flinched at the chill in Theo’s eyes.
“Good seeing you. I’m off!”
Theo patted him on the shoulder as if telling him to hang in there.
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll give this a read.”
But he never came to see Theo again.
Similar incidents repeated several times.
One student thrust his competition awards at him, and another even brought a recommendation letter from a professor.
And Theo’s response to them was always the same.
“This paper presents three different models of energy. Do you think there’s a function that minimizes all of them in common? Summarize it in your own words and bring it back to me.”
“If you read through this paper, around the middle there’s a point where the regularity of the PDE solution breaks down. If it were you, what signs would you catch to realize that?”
Problems on a completely different level from ordinary assignments.
The students’ faces stiffened.
Naturally, Theo never saw them again.
“Theo, have you still not found anyone suitable?”
Seoha was eating a doughnut as he read a paper.
In order to lessen the burden on Sri and Theo, Seoha had agreed to add more team members as well. Theo had decided to do the initial filtering of applicants.
“Unfortunately, no.
It’s not that there aren’t talented people. The problem is that anyone useful is probably already doing something.”
“That’s true, but it also seems like no one is taking the assignments Theo gives them seriously. At the point where they have to decide their career path, they’re probably reluctant to invest the time.”
Sri said as she chewed on a doughnut.
Srrrk.
Seoha rose from his seat and stood in front of the board.
Then he began to unpack the thoughts in his head.
Scratch, scratch.
He wrote formulas at an incredible speed.
‘Has he solved it already?’
The fragments of ideas the team had been discussing all this time were coming together into one.
Theo realized that Seoha had once again entered a state of intense focus. Taking care not to disturb him, he quietly opened a drawer. It was packed full of chocolate bars. There was still a box of doughnuts left too.
‘We need a new team member.’
Grit.
Theo clenched his teeth.
He thought Team Apex was similar to an F1 racing car.
Seoha was the engine. A monstrous engine beyond imagination, with no limit to its output.
But an F1 machine did not run on its engine alone. The frame, the aero package, the tires—everything had to support the engine’s performance.
‘I want to see Seoha running at full speed…’
The current Team Apex was unable to handle the overflowing power of its engine.
‘The faster the engine gets, the higher the level of the parts needs to rise with it.’
They did not need just anyone.
Low-quality parts would not help the team; they would only be a minus.
For no particular reason, Theo clicked on his inbox.
‘Still, no matter how you look at it, it’s probably too soon.’
He had heard about Sujeong from Seoha.
He had said that if she grew, she would become an unimaginably outstanding mathematician.
‘Hurry up and solve it, then come here. Before we die from overwork.’
It was a problem he himself had been unable to solve as an undergraduate, but with Seoha vouching for her, she might be able to do it.
Remembering the way Sujeong had glared at him as if to say they would see about that, Theo laughed.
* * *
Late afternoon. A red sunset settled over the MIT campus.
Seoha, who had been wrestling with formulas, suddenly stopped his hand.
‘I’m stuck again.’
This had been happening often lately.
It seemed this difficult problem had no intention of opening an easy path for him.
Seoha put down his pen and quietly drew in a breath.
Suddenly, he thought of a friend in Korea.
‘Han Gyeoul.’
At some point, new CDs had stopped arriving.
‘Did something happen?’
They had never promised each other anything, but Gyeoul had sent him a newly recorded CD each season.
But after a text a few months ago saying she would be busy for a while, all contact had ceased.
Seoha rolled his pen for a moment and stared into empty space.
His desk was full of the remains of ideas not yet organized. On the board were half-written clues to common functions, seeming just within reach yet never graspable.
The complexly tangled thoughts failed to take shape and scattered into the air.
“This is frustrating.”
The words slipped out without him realizing.
He needed stability.
Seoha changed into workout clothes and began running across campus.
“Huff, huff!”
He ran for thirty minutes as usual, but his mind did not feel clear in the slightest.
Seoha circled the athletic track again and again.
The evening wind brushed sharply past his cheeks. He had already run more than enough.
But the tightness in his chest still had not eased.
“Haa, haa—”
His breathing grew rough, and the sensation in his toes dulled.
In the distance, it felt as if he could see a vast mountain range of energy.
The formulas attached to it looked at Seoha and began crawling toward him, wriggling as they clung to his body.
“Damn it!”
Seoha stood in the middle of the track and roughly swept back his hair.
“Don’t do this, Ducky! We’ve been doing fine all this time!”
Thump, thump, thump!
His heartbeat seemed faster than when he had been running.
Only then did Seoha realize that he had been calling Ducky out recklessly of late.
Everything he saw grated on his nerves.
The streetlights lined up all the way to the end of the road.
The interval between the third and fourth was ambiguously wider.
‘Who designed this? Why did they build it like that?’
7, 7, 9, 7, 7.3, 7, 8.1.
The numbers arranged themselves automatically in his head.
It was not a sequence. Just a list of numbers with no meaning whatsoever.
Seoha bit his lip.
Was it really all right for the world to disregard mathematics this much?
‘Don’t look. It’s just noise in my head.’
Seoha closed his eyes and began to run.
Crash—
But he did not get far before colliding with a bench.
His knee stung.
Seoha lay on the ground and closed his eyes. He prayed that rest would come to him.
Tiririring—
He did not want to do anything, yet for some reason the ringing of the phone bothered him.
Without even opening his eyes, he took out his phone and answered.
“Hello.”
—It’s me. Han Gyeoul.
“…Yeah. It’s been a while. Is the thing keeping you busy settled now?”
—Who knows? More importantly, where do you think I am right now?
“Aren’t you in Korea?”
—No. I’m at MIT’s Lewis Music Library right now.
Click.
With those words, the call ended.
Seoha got to his feet. His knee must have been badly scraped, because blood was flowing from it.
Limp.
Limp.
Seoha’s staggering steps gradually grew faster. Then, before he knew it, he was running.
It was evening, and light spilled out from between the buildings.
Students approached in little groups, chatting cheerfully.
“Seoha?”
Someone recognized him and waved.
But Seoha heard nothing.
Building 14.
After going down the stairs, he sprinted at full speed toward his destination.
Creak.
When he opened the door and went in, the library’s distinctive smell of paper met him.
Perhaps because it was close to closing time, there were hardly any people in sight.
Step, step.
After passing through the corridor, he came to a hall shaped like a round dome.
At its center stood a magnificent grand piano.
Its black, smooth surface seemed to have absorbed all the light in the library.
Gyeoul was sitting there.
Ding—
Her finger lightly pressed a key.
Gyeoul’s tone rang through the hall.
Moved by that clear, transparent sound, Seoha stopped walking without realizing it.
Like a pianist facing tens of thousands of audience members, Gyeoul straightened her back, then quietly closed her eyes.
And as if she had made up her mind, she began to play.
Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1.
Her hands moved gracefully, like flowing water.
Ding, di-ding—
The performance seemed to wrap Seoha in a gentle embrace.
Seoha’s heartbeat began to follow Gyeoul’s rhythm.
Thump, thump.
‘It’s warm.’
It was as if her body heat was being conveyed through the music.
Her playing was straightening, one by one, the bends and knots that had been suppressed inside Seoha.
A sound that belonged only to Gyeoul, found nowhere else.
Softly,
so very quietly,
the delicate arpeggios continued, stroking the deepest parts within Seoha.
As the performance reached its peak, Seoha unconsciously took a step closer.
When the final note spread long through the hall and vanished, Gyeoul slowly opened her eyes.
Seoha could not control the emotions welling up in him.
He took another step forward and stood before Gyeoul.
“I think I really need you. Without you, I don’t have the confidence to keep living properly from now on.”
Gyeoul looked startled.
But she soon realized that Seoha’s condition was far from ordinary.
“You mean that literally, don’t you? I’m not falling for it anymore, you idiot!”
It had been one year since the two of them had met.