The laboratory was cold.
By the end of today, this place had to be completely cleared out. Workers came in and removed the hundreds of journals and academic books that had been shelved in the bookcases. Where the awards had hung on the wall, only the nail marks remained forlornly behind.
He sat by the window and looked out at the Munich sky. The rain had stopped, but the clouds still hung thick overhead.
“Professor, the lawyer is here.”
His assistant’s voice came from beyond the door, but Felix did not answer.
Until just last week, his office had always been overflowing with people. Corporate representatives coming to offer research funding, reporters asking for interviews, university presidents wanting to entrust him with positions.
After the incident broke, he had analyzed what had gone wrong, as befitted a scientist.
‘When did it begin?’
It was absurd that he could not remember the first time.
Had it begun on the day he erased the fourth decimal place? Or had the problem started far earlier, back in graduate school, when he wrote a paper by applying a colleague’s idea?
No, from the very beginning, he had been a man far removed from honesty. He swallowed a hollow laugh.
Those small hands and that small mouth from childhood, the ones that copied homework and lied to his parents, had ultimately reached all the way to the Riemann Hypothesis, called the Holy Grail of humanity.
“Professor?”
His assistant cracked the door open and called to him again.
Felix slowly turned his head. In the eyes of the assistant who had once looked up at him with reverence, contempt and pity were now mixed together.
Bzzzt—
[Arthur Pendleton]
After seeing the caller on his phone, Felix waved his hand.
“Tell him to wait a moment.”
He hesitated briefly, then answered the call.
—Felix. How dare you!
Arthur’s voice was full of rage.
—I’ve been wronged! I truly didn’t know!
“I know.”
—Why on earth did you drag me into this hell? Today Cambridge told me to leave. I devoted a full thirty years to them!
Through the phone came the sound of his agitated breathing.
“…Professor. Since we’ve come this far, why don’t we be honest with each other for once? Did you truly trust the data I created one hundred percent?”
In Arthur’s silence, he heard the answer.
As an outstanding mathematician, he too must have had his own intuition. Had he truly never wondered? Why Yu Seoha, who had first identified the relationship between quantum chaos and the zeros of the Riemann zeta function, had never attempted a proof in the same manner.
—Was that how it was…
Arthur spoke after a long while. The anger had drained from his voice, and in its place was a deep fatigue.
—To be honest, I did not want to know.
Felix smiled bitterly.
“We were both blinded. I didn’t expect that proof to become a problem this quickly either. I suppose we only saw what we wanted to see.”
Wealth and honor had been right before his eyes.
They had seemed close enough to reach if he stretched out his hand, and everything else had felt insignificant.
—I hope we never meet again in this lifetime.
Click.
“Tell him to come in.”
The lawyer explained something in a serious tone, but Felix heard nothing.
His gaze remained outside the window. Light briefly shone through the clouds, then soon disappeared again. And once more, the sky was dark.
Just like his life as a scholar.
“I suppose I must go.”
He forced himself to his feet and walked unsteadily.
Many students were passing through the corridor.
They whispered quietly among themselves and avoided Felix as though he were infected with some contagious disease.
A scene in stark contrast to last week.
“Kekekekek.”
He suddenly stopped walking and began to laugh.
“Hahahahaha!”
The students recoiled in horror and stepped back. But Felix paid them no mind and laughed. He laughed so hard his stomach hurt.
‘Ah, it’s over.’
Perhaps it had been weeping instead.
He had never imagined that everything he had built over decades would collapse in such a ridiculous way.
When the laughter died down, only silence remained.
Felix wiped the corners of his eyes with his sleeve and walked outside as if nothing had happened.
It was raining again.
‘Damn! I left my umbrella behind.’
But he could not go back.
That place was no longer his laboratory.
***
Whitman was erasing the blackboard in the seminar room.
With each movement of the eraser, another trace left behind by the forty-two-day war vanished. Chalk dust piled softly on the floor.
Knock, knock!
Leonard came in carrying a bottle of wine.
“You want to drink in the middle of the day?”
“What of it? We don’t have any lectures. They say one glass a day is good for circulation, you know.”
Glug, glug.
After filling the glasses about one-fifth full with wine, the two raised a toast.
Clink—
“You worked hard.”
“So did you.”
The two stood side by side, looking at the empty blackboard.
The campus was filled with excitement.
After Black Nature was released, MIT had become a festival in the truest sense. Undergraduates, in order to pay tribute to their seniors, had matching T-shirts printed with the number “512” and strutted across campus,
and at the school bookstore, posters printed with the cover of Nature were selling like hotcakes.
“It’s noisy outside.”
Whitman sipped his wine and looked out the window.
Broadcasting vans were parked in front of the main gate. CNN, BBC, NHK. Reporters from all over the world had come here to cover the story.
“We’re getting a lot of interview requests.”
Leonard smiled and showed him his phone.
On the screen, large photos of Whitman and Dean Leonard were displayed.
[MIT Writes the History of an Unprecedented Collective Verification in the History of Science]
[Guardians of Truth — MIT Stands Against Academic Fraud]
“Guardians of truth…”
“Reporters do love giving people nicknames. Do you not like it?”
“It’s so grandiose I hardly know what to do with myself.”
At the sound of murmuring outside, they looked out and saw Hugo and Laura awkwardly giving an interview.
“The reporters keep asking where the dean is. You should say just one word.”
Whitman shook his head.
“We certainly did accomplish something. But we did not find the truth. If I had to put it into words, we merely removed the crown from a false king. The one who should receive attention is the person who will rightfully wear that crown.”
“You believe the Riemann Hypothesis will be solved.”
“I do. Catching a fraud does not make one a hero. A hero needs a feat worthy of the name.”
Snow began to fall outside the window.
Students cheered and rushed out onto the lawn. The two professors slowly emptied the remaining wine in silence as they watched the scene.
***
The year had changed, and winter was already nearing its end.
The world was still noisy in the aftermath of the scandal, but inside Apex Lab, all was quiet.
Scratch, scratch.
Seoha’s chalk slid across the blackboard.
Behind him, Theo stood with his arms crossed, glaring at the equations. It had been a year since they declared their challenge to the Riemann Hypothesis. Four years since Seoha had begun researching it privately.
They had suffered hundreds of failures in that time. The more they failed, the thicker Seoha’s notebooks became. Ben organized them and turned them into a database.
A chill.
Sujeong rubbed her own arm.
Goosebumps had risen on her skin.
It was not because the weather was cold. Lately, a strange atmosphere had been flowing through the lab.
Clatter!
Something fell from Sri’s desk.
A plastic cup rolled away with a loud noise. Seoha’s hand, holding the chalk, froze in midair. It seemed as though his concentration had been broken, or perhaps as though he was thinking of something.
Theo shot Sri a sharp glare.
‘He’s completely in the zone.’
It had been a long time since he had seen this.
Since last week, Seoha had been acting strangely. He had always been the type to immerse himself in research and fail to see anything around him, but this was on another level.
He often went blank all of a sudden while eating, or even in the middle of a long conversation. Yesterday, he had said he was going to take a shower, only to appear twenty minutes later in front of the blackboard with his hair covered in foam.
‘Shh!’
Theo looked at the team members and raised his index finger to his lips.
There had been signs before.
Their freely exchanged brainstorming had begun to take on a clear direction.
Sujeong could feel it as well. The way Seoha requested auxiliary lemmas had changed. In the past, he would simply establish the broad outline and leave the rest to them, but recently he had begun giving them specific directions.
The same was true for Sri and Cecilia.
The longer the meetings continued, the more they instinctively understood. Seoha was not randomly chasing Riemann’s shadow right now.
“Ah… so that’s how it was.”
Seoha stopped his chalk and let the words out like a sigh.
With this, everything made sense.
One by one, the team members gathered around the blackboard. Seoha turned and looked at them.
“What we need to find has been decided.”
An Arithmetic Variety, defined over the integers and therefore impossible to express through existing geometry.
There had been a reason no one had been able to find it.
Gulp.
“I think I understand now that I’m looking at the blackboard.”
“So this is why everyone failed. Integers aren’t space.”
“It was a domain the likes of Felix or Arthur could never dare enter.”
“How on earth did Riemann see this?”
Theo, Sujeong, Cecilia, and Sri’s voices.
Ben’s pupils shook violently. He felt like he ought to say something too, but he could not make heads or tails of the equations.
“Uh…”
Cecilia looked at Ben with warm eyes.
“It’s all right. There is no one among us who can replace you.”
He did not know why, but every time he heard her say something like that, he felt a lump in his throat. Imagining ordering her around like a maid made him feel a little better.
Theo took the chalk from Seoha.
“Ben, we’ve been searching for the operator of the Riemann zeta function.”
“Yes. I know. It’s the theory Hilbert tried to find and failed, right?”
Theo grinned.
“Our situation is different. Seoha uncovered its relationship with quantum chaos, and then even managed to catch the flow of the oscillations. That over there is that drawn geometrically.”
The flower of geometry drawn on one side of the wall.
Ben swallowed.
“The set of these oscillation values is the spectrum. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t find it. Strange, isn’t it, when it clearly exists? Seoha is saying he has caught a hint of it.”
“Th-then.”
“That’s right. If we reveal the spectrum, at last the path to the operator opens.”
Ben’s eyes widened.
“Ah! This is insane!”
Ben realized what the team intended to do.
They were going to reverse-engineer the spectrum.
They would follow the oscillations of the zeta function, reveal where the spectrum was hidden, and then infer the operator from there. His mind went blank. It was an idea akin to hearing the sound of a violin and deciding to create the exact same instrument.
With wood of precisely the same shape and material, and strings with exactly the same tension.
“Don’t worry. We can do it.”
Seoha smiled brightly.
Looking at his expression, Ben felt as though he too was gaining confidence without any basis at all.
“Oh, right!”
As if she had only just remembered, Sujeong clapped her hands together.
“An email came from the IMU, the International Mathematical Union.”
Click.
After Sujeong clicked the mouse, she looked at Seoha.
“Congratulations, Seoha. You’ve been selected as a candidate for the Fields Medal!”
[Notice of Selection as Final Candidate for the 20■■ International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) Fields Medal]
The ICM, which came around every four years. Come to think of it, it was this year.
There had not been a single recipient in their teens, and only one in their twenties.
His achievements were sufficient, but considering the conservative tendencies of the mathematical world, there had been a chance he would be ignored. But at the news that Seoha had safely been selected as a candidate, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.