“So this is the place.”
At the exterior, where glass and stone were strangely intertwined, Rachel shivered for a moment at the grandeur of the MIT mathematics building.
For an intern, experience working in a core department was more valuable than anything else. In that sense, it was fortunate that she had been assigned to the project the city was placing the greatest emphasis on.
“Ugh, it’s cold!”
Why had a chill suddenly run through her?
‘It’s quiet. Should I have just come tomorrow?’
Her official assignment began tomorrow, but Rachel had wanted to take a look at the site in advance, even if it was late in the afternoon.
The building, which she had expected to be bustling, was as silent as if it had been wrapped in stillness.
Creeeak—
When she opened the door and stepped inside, a bleak air washed over her, as if the temperature had dropped several degrees.
‘Hm?’
A rhythmic sound came from deeper down the corridor.
Scratch, scratch.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
An inexplicable fear set her nerves on edge.
Tap.
Tap, tap.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
The sound of chalk tapping against a blackboard.
Why was there such a sound in the hallway?
It was strange.
The sound drew closer, then receded again.
Gulp.
Rachel slowly walked toward the source of the sound.
‘Ah!’
Someone was standing at the end of the corridor.
Red hair, a white lab coat, sagging shoulders.
A slender-looking man was writing something on the wall.
Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch—
His hand moved rapidly, as if he were urgently pouring out the knowledge inside his head.
Growing curious, she stepped a little closer.
Numbers, symbols, equations stretching endlessly onward.
Just as Rachel was about to swallow her breath,
Bang!
The man suddenly slammed his head into the blackboard.
Bang!
Bang, bang!
Once, twice.
Then he slowly turned his head toward her.
Creak, creak, creak—
Rachel felt as if she had heard the sound of a broken spring unwinding.
A pale complexion like a zombie’s, eyes bloodshot red. Just as he was about to reach a hand toward Rachel, someone who had appeared from behind roughly clamped a hand over her mouth.
“Mmph! Mmph!”
She tried desperately to escape, but was helplessly dragged away.
Only after they had moved for quite a while did he let her go. Rachel checked his face and was startled.
“Jake?”
It was Jake, the mayor’s loyal aide and one of the power players at City Hall.
Where had his usual neat appearance gone—the suit pressed so sharply it seemed it could cut skin, the shoes on which not a speck of dust could be found? His face was steeped in exhaustion.
Rachel stared at him blankly, swallowing a scream.
“Hooo.”
Jake caught his breath, warily checked their surroundings, then grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her against the wall.
“Be quiet. Please, be quiet.
That red-haired guy... You were in an incredibly dangerous situation just now.”
“What on earth is going on?”
Just as Jake was about to say something, a shriek rang out as if tearing through the air.
“Kiiiiiyaa!
No! I said no! The algorithm’s tangled again. Why the hell is it converging like this?”
Rachel, startled, hid herself behind Jake.
His scream grew more and more hysterical.
“To optimize this perfectly—that man has to be insane! I can’t do it! I said I can’t!”
From the end of the corridor came the thud of something collapsing.
When Rachel tried to look that way, Jake shook his head.
“They’re trying to knock him out for a bit so he can rest. Around here, when a person breaks, that’s how they fix them.”
There were many things she wanted to ask, but seeing Jake’s haggard face, she couldn’t bring herself to speak.
“Let’s go this way. There’s a place where the City Hall staff rest.”
Step, step.
After turning down the corridor and walking for quite some time, they arrived at an unmarked room.
Rattle.
When they opened the door and went in, familiar faces came into view.
The elites from the Department of Transportation, wearing white coats—the people who had looked after her so much when she had interned there.
But now, they didn’t look much different from Jake.
Someone sitting on the floor muttering to themselves, someone staring blankly into the air in front of the coffee machine, someone slumped over with a simulation running on their laptop—these were not the people from the Department of Transportation Rachel remembered.
“...Oh, Jake. Rachel’s here too.”
The man in front of the coffee machine belatedly noticed them and spoke.
His tone was calm, but his hands were trembling faintly.
“Harry, you don’t look well. Are you sick?”
As Rachel remembered him, he was a top-tier elite with a doctorate from Yale, a man prouder than anyone.
“It’s not my body that’s sick.”
“What? Then what is?”
“Here.”
He tapped his own head with his index finger.
“What happened?”
Unable to hold back any longer, Jake cut in first.
“I saw it earlier. I’d only heard rumors about it, but I never thought I’d see it myself.”
At Harry’s words, the researchers shuddered as if they were having seizures.
“Hiiik—”
“D-don’t tell me you saw it yourself?”
Everything was full of questions.
“What are you talking about? Explain properly!”
When Rachel pressed him, he clutched his head as if in pain.
“It feels a little strange to say this, but I thought I was doing fairly well here.
The algorithm Seoha used in the Boston Project is extremely difficult, you know? But I completely grasped it in just two days. I was confident I could handle my own assignment without any problems.”
“And then?”
“There was something I wanted to ask. I was reading the research notes in the box, and there was a part I couldn’t understand. So I went to find him.”
As if the mere thought terrified him, his knees began to tremble.
“There’s a small lab next to the equipment room by the stairs. It’s not used much, so the lights are usually off, but today, strangely enough, light was leaking out.
And I could hear someone laughing through the crack in the door.”
It was a memory he would never forget for the rest of his life.
Scratch, scratch.
The sound of something being written on a blackboard, the delighted laughter of a boy.
As if possessed, he approached the lab and opened the door.
“Ah...”
Seoha was there.
Scratch, scratch.
His chalk moved.
His hand moved without hesitation, as if his body were trying to catch up to the speed of his thoughts.
After writing equations for a long while, he stared absently at an empty space diagonally across from him.
“You think so too, don’t you?”
The AIs’ trains of thought collided.
There was only one city, but each model was presenting a different future as its ideal.
“Let’s make the models look in the same direction. Not just the data—they need to share the interpretive framework itself.”
‘Who on earth is he talking to?’
Harry’s eyes slowly moved, following Seoha’s gaze.
And then he saw it.
At the end of the direction Seoha was looking, someone—
No, something was sitting there.
An alien presence placed neatly on an empty chair.
Over the face of what was clearly MIT’s mascot, a beaver plush, a yellow duck mask had been fitted.
“Kyaaaaaak!”
Rachel, who had been listening to the story, screamed with all her might.
Jake chuckled.
“Come on, a grown adult trembling because he’s scared of something like that?”
Harry shook his head.
“Of course not.
Even my daughter carries around a teddy bear and talks to it all day. There’s even a guy in a movie whose best friend is a volleyball.”
“Then what exactly was the problem?”
“His eyes.”
“What?”
“I asked him about the contents of the notes. I was curious how he was reflecting data from a future that hadn’t even been observed yet into his predictions.
He explained it in great detail. The problem was that I couldn’t understand it.”
Harry lowered his head.
“It’s the field I’ve devoted my entire life to. Bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate. And after that, I studied it for more than ten years. I must have written more than twenty papers related to it.
In fact, half of those notes were things I already knew.”
Perhaps the memory had returned, because Harry’s eyes grew moist.
“I guess it was obvious that I didn’t understand.
Seoha began explaining again. As if he were teaching addition and subtraction to an elementary schooler. If only I’d understood then—no, if only I’d at least pretended to understand...”
“T-then...”
“No way. Harry is an authority in this field!”
He shook his head violently.
“No, I’m trash.
Seoha clearly said it! ‘Is that really the extent of your intellectual capacity? What are you even doing here with an intelligence like that?’”
The two of them went wide-eyed.
“What? Someone that young said something that harsh? I didn’t take him for that kind of person, but honestly...”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a misunderstanding?”
“...He definitely said it with his eyes. You won’t believe me, but he did.”
With a gloomy expression, he trudged out of the break room.
Once the door closed, silence settled over the break room again.
“Jake, is there anything I need to know in advance? Starting tomorrow, I have to work here too.”
Instead of answering, he let out a deep sigh.
“Most of the researchers dispatched here are probably in the same situation as Harry.
The model is too complex. But we still have to understand it, analyze it, and then create new algorithms from it.”
“Ah... That certainly sounds difficult.”
“I’m telling you, it’s more than that.
Failure, then more failure. The failures just keep piling up.
Even when you think you’ve made it perfectly, Seoha comes over, runs a few tests, and it blows up on the spot.”
Jake pointed to the whiteboard next to the coffee machine.
Graphs, equations, and red X marks and question marks drawn densely across it.
“If it were a paper, you could just call it a failed hypothesis and throw it away.
But here, it’s a different story. This project will be applied directly to New York. If the model slips, the entire city could come to a halt.”
Why was she, nothing more than an intern, being put in a place like this?
Her eyes trembled violently.
“You can’t give up, you can’t run away, and on top of that, the team leader is a monster with absurd abilities. Spend a month or two like that, and people break down.”
A chill.
At the eerie sensation she suddenly felt, Rachel wrapped her arms around herself.
The place she had been assigned to was one that tested researchers’ abilities to the limit.
* * *
Beep, beep, beep—
Tap.
Rachel turned off the alarm on her clock and got out of bed.
‘What on earth is going to happen today?’
The researchers’ unfocused eyes, their faces filled with despair—
Before going to work, anxiety weighed on her heart.
Dragging her reluctant feet, she entered the research building, and someone’s energetic voice rang out.
“Yo! Rachel!”
“Harry?”
“Yeah! Why do you look so surprised?”
He looked at her as if nothing had happened. Rachel felt wronged.
“Because yesterday, you looked like you were about to jump into the Charles River at any moment.”
His eyes went round.
“Ah! That? Hahahahaha!”
Rachel furrowed her pretty brow.
“I looked at it a little more in the evening, and I understood.
It was a stroke of heavenly luck that I remembered Seoha’s explanation. I had been thinking about it completely wrong, you know?
I called and asked him right away, and would you believe it—he told me I was a truly remarkable mathematician. He said there haven’t been many people so far who understood that.
Hahaha!”
Harry opened the door energetically and went into the lab.
He must have been in a very good mood, because his laughter rang loudly through the corridor.
“What on earth is this?”
When she went to the cafeteria, there was a long line in front of the counter.
“Rachel!”
“Jake?”
Unlike yesterday, he looked perfectly neat.
“Hard to adjust to, isn’t it?”
“Please, seriously!”
Jake laughed as if he found it amusing.
“That stress is only for one day. Once morning comes, it starts all over again.”
Taking his coffee, he shrugged.
“The system we’re creating saves people—and beyond that, a city and a country. Everyone is working with that in mind. And our leader, young as he is, is working harder than anyone. We can’t lose either.”
At his serious expression, Rachel quietly swallowed her breath.
“What I’m saying is, it’s work you can’t do without that level of a sense of duty.”
Jake waved his hand and walked away.
When she arrived at her seat, everyone’s expressions were different from yesterday.
“Seoha’s Brain looks like it’ll be finished soon. Let’s hurry too!”
“If we can just handle Manhattan properly now, I think we’ll manage somehow.”
“Where’s the results table from yesterday’s simulation?”
Without a word, Rachel undid the buttons at her wrists and rolled up her sleeves.