Drrrrrrr—
—MIT Department of Mathematics.
Jake cleared his throat, then spoke in as polite a voice as he could manage.
“Hello. My name is Jake Waltz, assistant to the New York City mayor. May I have the contact information for student Yu Seoha?”
A brief silence.
A cold atmosphere seemed to seep through the phone line.
“What is the exact reason for your request?”
“Hm?”
It wasn’t the reaction he had expected.
Jake decided to emphasize that he was a powerful and important person.
“It concerns a New York City traffic project. Our mayor is looking for the designer of the smart traffic system currently being operated in Boston.
He is an extremely busy man, but he said he would like to make time especially to meet him.
Miss, this is a truly big opportunity.”
—I’m sorry, but we cannot provide Seoha’s personal information to an outside organization. That is a directive from the dean. If you have business with him, please submit an official written request through the proper channels.
There was a bureaucratic weariness in the staff member’s voice. Sensing it, Jake couldn’t hold back the irritation rising inside him.
“Listen! Did you not hear me say New York City Hall? The mayor of the largest city in America is looking for him!”
Haa.
He heard the staff member sigh on the other end of the receiver.
—You listen carefully. How many organizations and companies do you think are looking for Seoha right now? Yesterday, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration came by, and today two tech companies sent official letters.
So follow procedure!
Click.
The call was cut off before he could even answer.
It was the first time he had been treated like this since becoming an assistant.
“Their guard is incredible.”
He had thought Seoha would be relatively easy to handle since he was an undergraduate, but that had been a miscalculation.
If he couldn’t even bring in one student, there was no telling what he would hear from the mayor. Jake sighed and booked a flight to Boston.
* * *
Mornings at MIT were always busy.
Undergraduates riding skateboards, graduate students running with books in their arms, teaching assistants walking with two cups of coffee in hand.
Sri walked quietly among them. His destination was Building 10, Barker Library.
A massive domed library, its lights never went out, twenty-four hours a day.
Sri set his books down at his usual seat on the right side of the dome area.
Perhaps he had stayed up all night, but Theo was slumped over in the seat across from him.
Tap, tap.
When Sri lightly tapped him, Theo’s shoulders flinched. Theo stretched as though he had slept well, then signaled Sri to go outside.
Clunk.
The canned coffee had become familiar by now. Theo drank it, then wore an expression as if he had come back to life.
“You stayed up here again?”
“We have a review at the lab today. Looks like you didn’t get much sleep either.”
Sri smiled and shrugged.
“Theo, math is so much fun for me these days. I know it sounds a little funny, but even sleeping feels like a waste of time.”
At Sri’s words, Theo nodded, then rolled his neck and shoulders.
The nape of his neck, stiff from staying up all night, was still sore.
“Ah! I know that feeling well. It’s like fireworks are exploding in your head, right? Enjoy it as much as you can now. Once that stage passes, you’ll become endlessly depressed.”
“What?”
“Seoha seems to grasp other people’s mathematical abilities with terrifying accuracy.”
“Huh? Then?”
“Yeah. He knows what problems we’ll get stuck on, how far we understand, and what type of thinking we do, as if he’s looking inside our heads.”
Theo tapped his own temple with his finger.
“Right now, you probably feel yourself growing every day. Like your head has gotten incredibly sharp.”
“That’s right! I thought my mind had finally opened up late in life… Are you saying that’s not it?”
Sri had recently been feeling a kind of omnipotence.
These days, when he looked at a function, the shape of the problem would appear to him like a higher-dimensional figure before he even calculated anything.
“Yeah, it’s not. We’re with Seoha all day long. When we watch how Seoha handles numbers beside us, we can’t help but follow that perspective. It even feels like Seoha is guiding us that way.
Ah! Of course, this is only possible because you’re an exceptionally talented mathematician.”
“So that was it. Still, I’m happy. It’s undeniable that I’ve grown. But what do you mean by becoming depressed?”
Theo looked straight at Sri.
“Haven’t you felt it during meetings lately? Seoha is waiting for us until we understand. I find that unbearably humiliating.”
Clack.
Theo finished the coffee remaining in the can, then tossed it into the trash.
“I want to be of help to Seoha. I don’t want a relationship where I’m just being accommodated one-sidedly.”
He returned to his seat.
Sri stood blankly, staring at Theo’s back.
“It was guided?”
Everything he had thought he had realized on his own?
Sri shook his head and followed Theo. Then he opened the paper they were going to review and began reading fiercely.
Seoha had meant to give them some breathing room, but for those on the receiving end, it had only become a reason to whip themselves even harder.
* * *
Jake had already been wandering the campus for over an hour.
At first, he had been confident.
He believed that the title of assistant to the New York mayor would earn him a warm welcome anywhere.
But reality was…
“New York City Hall? If you have business with Seoha, bring a proposal.”
Slurp.
The dean sipped his tea and glanced at him with an irritatingly smug look.
‘If I go back like this, the mayor won’t leave me alive.’
Jake’s mind went blank.
After asking student after student, he found the club Seoha belonged to.
“What the hell, you! Are you from Skyline? I told you we’re not selling. You’re damn persistent!”
“You’re here again? How many times has it been just this week?”
At Spectra Works as well, companies trying to buy the Synapse Engine had been visiting without end.
They, too, were at the point where the very sight of a visitor made them shudder.
Jake had to be turned away at the door without even knowing why.
“This isn’t right…”
He roughly loosened his tie.
There weren’t many people walking around the MIT campus in suits. Students glanced at him as they passed.
Jake sat on a bench and took a moment to catch his breath.
“I suppose hijacking him is out of the question.”
The matter he had thought would be easy was not going according to plan.
There was no doubt that Yu Seoha was already being treated as one of MIT’s strategic assets.
Just as he took out his cell phone and was about to dial the mayor’s direct number, a voice came from behind him.
“I heard you were looking for me?”
Startled, Jake turned around.
A young-looking Asian boy. He looked exactly like the photo.
Jake let out a sigh of relief.
“Yes, that’s right. I came all the way from New York because I have a proposal for you.”
He took out the documents he had prepared and showed them to Seoha.
The materials prepared by the New York Department of Transportation were nearly the length of a book. Seoha looked intrigued and sat down beside him on the bench.
Rustle.
‘Is he even reading it properly?’
The pages turned far too quickly.
Seoha’s expression changed moment by moment as he read the documents. From interest, to lamentation, and finally to a silence close to shock.
“I can’t believe this. It’s not the eighties anymore…”
Of the roughly 13,000 traffic lights in New York, more than half were operating on primitive fixed-timer systems.
On top of that, because of the city’s grid structure, signal interference was constantly occurring.
The north-south blocks were long, while the east-west blocks were comparatively short. For that reason, if traffic was allowed to flow in one direction, the other side inevitably had to be sacrificed.
“Asymmetric patterns must be occurring constantly. Why are there so few sensors? Even the few automated signals are based on systems from the nineties…”
At Seoha’s continuing harsh criticism, Jake’s face turned red.
Thud.
After reading to the last page, Seoha closed the documents.
“Please tell the mayor this.
Boston has been gradually overhauling its system for as long as ten years. But New York hasn’t changed since the nineties. As a result, all of Manhattan has become one enormous congestion zone.”
Jake’s expression hardened. He hadn’t known the details.
“Is it that serious?”
Seoha nodded.
“No sensors, no real-time optimization, and fixed signals in a state where pedestrians, bicycles, taxis, and delivery motorcycles are all mixed together.
This is more a matter of will than technology.
If you are prepared to spend more than ten times the budget used in Boston, then come find me again. With an official proposal, of course.”
Seoha stood and left.
There was an intimidation about him that did not match his age.
Jake couldn’t even think to stop him and simply watched blankly.
Step, step.
‘New York, huh…’
New York was seven times the size of Boston, with more than thirteen times the population. Trying to solve the traffic signals of such a large and complicated city with a single algorithm was arrogance.
‘A hierarchical distributed AI structure would be best.’
A structure that divided Manhattan into roughly thirty zones, with a small AI hub assigned to each area.
Then they would create a brain to serve as the conductor.
This would require more than ten thousand sensors and a full-scale overhaul of the traffic signals.
The necessary equipment and manpower would increase far beyond the current level. Seoha had learned through his experience in Boston just how difficult that would be.
‘Still, I don’t want to make another signal optimization model…’
He was not aware of it himself, but Seoha had a personality that could not tolerate boring problems in the slightest.
“Ah! Theo and Sri can do it.”
With those two, they would be able to tune the model he had previously created for New York.
His heart feeling lighter, Seoha hummed as he headed for the lab.
Beep—
The empty lab. It was still too early for anyone else to have arrived.
Rattle.
Seoha took something out of a drawer.
“Hello, Ducky.”
What he held in his hand was a bright yellow duck mask.
It was exactly the form he had seen in his dream a few days ago. After waking from that dream, Seoha had felt an urge to keep talking to Ducky.
Slide.
He hung the mask he had made with a 3D printer on the wall.
‘Hmm.’
As if dissatisfied with something, he crossed his arms, then brought over one of the Tim the Beaver dolls from the corner of the lab.
“Let’s go with this.”
When he put the mask on it, the size was perfect.
A bright yellow duck bill, round black eyes, and beneath them, the beaver’s two front teeth poking out.
“Cute. It suits you.”
—Don’t be ridiculous!
He could almost hear Ducky’s voice bursting out in complaint.
“Hahaha! I mean it!”
Seoha sympathized with Ducky’s dream.
He thought about it.
‘Now that we understand each other’s thoughts, won’t we be able to cooperate more easily from now on?’
“If you have any complaints, say them anytime. Don’t just act spiteful for no reason.”
Seoha rolled up his sleeves and organized the blackboard.
The vast amount of material Theo and Sri had organized for him. While studying it, Seoha had been able to guess at the scenery beyond the mountain range.
‘What would it look like if I went there myself?’
“Ducky, let’s try this together!”
He began writing equations on the blackboard.
Countless conditions extended from many directions. Until now, he had not been able to find a function that satisfied them all.
Scratch, scratch.
Curvature, torsion, boundaries, stability, area, deformation.
A function that converged all of those conditions.
The blackboards began to fill one by one.
The proof that had begun at the front soon moved to the side, filling more than half the lab with equations.
“These weren’t separate conditions. They had merely moved along the flow of energy.”
Ducky’s mask was looking at Seoha.
As if he alone had the right to see the place Seoha had now reached.
The formulas written on the blackboard pushed and pulled at one another, heading toward a single point. And finally, they began to mesh and turn as one enormous structure.
The flow of curvature influenced torsion. Torsion created the slope of the energy surface, and energy dictated the direction of all of them.
Within the fog, the ridge of a vast mountain range slowly began to reveal itself.
In the hallway outside the lab,
Theo and Sri stood leaning against the wall, watching Seoha.
“It’s your first time seeing this, isn’t it?”
Sri nodded, his eyes hazy.
“This is what Seoha looks like when his concentration reaches its peak. Once something is organized in his head, he always unfolds it like this.”
It was a subject they had been researching together for a long time, but he could not understand even half of the equations Seoha was writing.
Sri swallowed as he looked at Seoha’s back.
“God whispered to me.”
“Hm?”
“That is something Ramanujan often said when explaining his theorems. Aren’t we seeing something similar right now?”
If the goddess of mathematics, Namagiri, truly existed, would she look like this?
Sri gazed at Seoha with eyes full of awe.