New York City Hall, the mayor’s office.
After receiving the report, John’s eyes widened, and he counted the digits again.
Smack.
“Jake. Work must be easy for you these days, huh? There’s a typo in the documents. How could you add an extra zero to something as sensitive as the budget?”
Jake respectfully placed the documents John had thrown back in front of him.
“I’m sorry, but it isn’t a typo.”
John furrowed his brow.
“Then you’re telling me you seriously brought this to me?”
A low voice.
But it was the tone he used when he was truly angry.
“...”
“Do you know how much New York City’s annual budget is?”
“I do.”
“Then I suppose there’s no need for me to explain how absurd the amount written in this report is. Unless my aide has gone insane, he wouldn’t tell me to pour ten percent of the annual budget into this.
For reference, the Department of Transportation’s entire budget is 1.2 percent.”
“That’s the total budget until the project is completed, and for now, if we have about half of it, we can begin—”
“Enough!”
He raised his hand as if he did not want to hear any more, cutting Jake off.
“I clearly said ten times the Boston project. Not a hundred times! This is a figure I couldn’t execute even if I were the president!”
“Please take a look at the last page.”
Jake had written the figure ten billion dollars on the first page of the report.
Because if they could not get past this point, the rest of the contents would be nothing but empty words anyway.
Rustle.
John flipped through the report with indifferent eyes.
“...What is this?”
Names densely written across the final page.
At first, it looked like a simple list of signatures. But the more he read, the stiffer his expression became.
Blue ballpoint pen, pencil, marker.
Cursive, block letters, handwriting so bad even an elementary schooler would not use it, and even penmanship so rigid it looked as if it had been typed out on a typewriter.
“Hahahaha!”
John could not hold back and burst into loud laughter.
Jake looked at him in confusion.
“Ah... Sorry. It reminded me of the Declaration of Independence I studied back in college. There, too, fifty-six patriots left their signatures on the last page.
They steeled their resolve by leaving hope and fear, determination and responsibility, in a single line of writing.”
He sat down and slowly read through the signatures.
Theodore Lanford — Mayor, you are a lucky man. Seize the opportunity.
Harriet Cole — This is not delusion. John, let us go to the future together.
Jonas Patel — This is not the best answer, but the only answer.
Freya Alvarez — I sign with full awareness of the risks.
Miguel Howard — I will share responsibility with everyone here.
Susan Lee — The only way to save this damned city.
.
.
The final line.
As the page was nearing its end, John’s eyes stopped in one place.
Yu Seoha — It’s all right if you choose not to do it. This is not my dream, after all. It’s just that, as a mathematician, I could not ignore the existence of a better answer.
“Dream.”
John rubbed his face dry, then gulped down the water sitting on his desk.
“I’ll read the report.”
What exactly was the boy’s plan, for every researcher to be speaking with one voice?
In the twenty years he had lived as a politician, he had received countless proposals.
Half of them had been the delusions of idealists who disregarded reality, and the other half were products of selfishness that had cleverly disguised personal gain as the public good.
‘Not his dream? The existence of a better answer?’
Slide.
When he turned the page, the overview appeared.
The purpose of the project, the core concept of the system, the method of operation... The report Jake had poured his heart into was written in language that even an ordinary person could understand without difficulty.
Rustle.
John was soon drawn into the future of New York that Seoha was envisioning.
But once he passed the middle section, his expression gradually hardened. By the time he reached the end, John’s hand holding the report was trembling.
“Jake.”
“Yes, Mayor.”
As if he had expected it, Jake immediately approached.
“I need to meet Seoha. This is not the kind of matter that can be judged by looking at documents.”
“I’ll prepare it at once.”
* * *
The researchers dispatched to MIT went on a short vacation.
After all, until the mayor gave his approval, no work could be advanced.
The people who had laughed and cried in the research building for months headed to their respective homes with broad smiles, like soldiers returning from deployment to a battlefield.
Seoha was sitting at a small table in the corner of the cafeteria, looking out the window.
The new CD Gyeoul had sent him was playing through the earphones in his ears.
‘Her skills have improved even more.’
Debussy’s Reverie.
Why had she chosen this piece?
The dreamy tone, suited to the late afternoon weather, gave rest to Seoha’s exhausted mind.
As the music was nearing its end, a group dressed in black suits, utterly out of place for the location, poured out of a car.
Whirr—
When the door opened, the attendants entered first and surveyed the interior.
And a moment later, a man revealed himself.
Rough skin, bloodshot eyes.
John looked ten years older than usual.
Jake approached Seoha first.
“Seoha, the mayor is here.”
Seoha slowly lifted his head.
He took out his earphones, rose from his seat, and extended his hand to John.
“You’ve come again.”
John smiled faintly and took his hand.
“I had no choice but to come.”
Thud.
John placed the report he had read yesterday on the table.
It seemed he had read it meticulously, as notes and tabs were attached throughout.
“I’ll ask you directly. Is this plan truly feasible?”
It was an utterly absurd story.
In the report, he had mentioned the existence of an AI that always made the optimal decision, as if it knew the future. What was needed to create it was an enormous amount of budget and data.
Among that data was sensitive information directly tied to the safety of citizens.
“It’s possible.”
“Before coming here, I sought advice from scholars I trust.”
John opened the report, covered in annotations.
“They said such a thing cannot exist in this world. They said the very premise of calculating every variable in New York is impossible.”
Seoha nodded.
“They are right.”
“Then...”
“But if another world exists, created from all of New York’s information, then we can test the future there, make our choice, and return.
A digital twin.
That is the brain of New York traffic that I intend to create.”
Another world synchronized with the real New York. It could be called a replica that reproduced the physical elements composing the city as a mathematical structure.
Its essence lay not in prediction, but in convergence.
If millions of scenarios could be run simultaneously, then among them, a solution that guaranteed the lowest cost and the least congestion would inevitably exist.
“Oracle...”
“Pardon?”
“I hear the researchers call your system that.”
Seoha looked troubled.
“I think that’s an exaggeration.
AI is nothing more than a mass of algorithms. The answers the system produces are not prophecies, but the result of finding the point that converges most stably among countless possibilities.”
“Is there no room for abuse?”
What if someone tried to create a future advantageous to a particular group?
He was a politician.
He knew better than anyone that power and information were the easiest things in the world to abuse.
“There is no need to worry about that. I won’t allow it.”
Seoha answered without even a second of hesitation.
Some humans did not pursue the common good.
That was the first lesson Seoha had learned after coming into contact with people.
John stared quietly at Seoha’s face. Since meeting him, the boy had already looked at his watch three times. As if he wished an unwelcome guest would hurry up and go home.
‘So it’s true.’
He had no intention of forcing this project through.
Nor would he have any desire to curry favor with him, a man of power.
“I kept thinking about it on the plane here.
Ten billion dollars. An absurdly huge amount of money. By common sense, it shouldn’t be possible.
The moment I approve this, I’ll have to fight the council constantly for the rest of my term. And yet, why was I unable to ignore it? Why am I here?”
Seoha thought he knew the answer, but John seemed to want to say it himself, so he let him continue.
“New York has become a city of aristocrats.
The top one percent own more than half of all real estate in New York. The immense wealth that remains in this city never leaves their domain.”
As if his throat had gone dry, he paused for breath and drank some water.
“And what about the traffic problem?
The media talks as if congestion pricing will solve every problem in New York, but in the end, it’s a measure to let the rich live more comfortably. Do you think they care if there’s a fifteen- or twenty-dollar admission fee attached to the center of Manhattan?
The real problem is the ordinary people who commute into New York every day.
Low-wage workers coming in from the Bronx, Queens, or New Jersey cannot commute without cars. To them, congestion pricing is practically no different from a fine.”
As anger rose within him, John’s voice gradually became more emotional.
“Do you know what the media says as a solution to this?
Use public transportation, they say. Oh! My God! We must all be idiots. To think we were agonizing over such an easy problem!”
Bang!
He slammed his fist down on the table.
“Every area with convenient transportation belongs to the rich. Ordinary people have already been pushed out to the outskirts, beyond the reach of the public transportation network.
There are no subway stations nearby, and buses come every thirty minutes. Even so, people are driven farther outward in search of cheaper housing because they can’t afford murderous rent.
This city is becoming a slum from the outside in. Of course, the inside will remain clean even in the future. As long as their money doesn’t dry up, that is.”
At some point, John’s voice had become an anguished confession.
In the past, he had not been someone who belonged to the inner circle as he did now.
An old residential district near the docks. On darkened streets, shouting and fighting rang out every night. Schools lost teachers every year to budget cuts, and public facilities were in such poor shape that nothing remained intact.
Growing up in a poor neighborhood was not a matter of choice. It was simply something like a fate decided in advance from the moment of birth.
John, who had been a brilliant student, became a politician to change the miserable reality of the poor. Twenty years had worn him down, but the word “dream” that Seoha had written had brought him all the way here.
“Do you know what ordinary people ultimately lose as a result?”
John looked at Seoha with cold eyes.
“Time.”
He nodded.
“Time is the most valuable commodity human beings have.
And yet, in this city, the time of the poor is consumed at far too cheap a price. Are you telling me you can truly change that?
If so, I can fight not just the council, but all of America. Even if, in the end, I fail to be reelected.”
At some point, Seoha had stopped looking at his watch.
John, whom he had thought was an ordinary politician, carried a noble ideal in his heart. And Seoha had the ability to make his dream a reality.
“You came to the right place, Mayor. Mathematics can accomplish anything.”
A bright smile spread across Seoha’s face.
He could help a good person and make many more people happy.
Rustle.
John turned the pages of the report and opened to the very last sheet.
Scratch.
Then, in neat handwriting, he left his signature.
‘John Carson.’