Seoha decided to start from the very bottom, without the help of any other programs.
‘It feels like this is going to get incredibly heavy later on, so I should start light.’
He created an empty project folder in VS Code and named it “Synapse.” After opening the built-in terminal and setting up a virtual environment, he installed only the bare minimum tools.
Four files went into the folder.
The school as a physical space, and the agents who were its members.
The engine that would turn the time of this world, and the metrics that would convert every event into numbers and indicators.
Seoha took “time and records” as the two axes that would move the virtual world.
The school building was born as a rectangle, and each student as a single point. But the inside was not as simple as its appearance.
Within them were contained various human personalities and indicators.
Insiders, outsiders, explorers, leaders, impatient types—a multitude of human behavior patterns were planted into each and every point.
The school was designed to function as a collection of resources.
Each resource had capacity, processing speed, preference, usage time, and priority rules.
Because resources could not be distributed fairly, conflict would inevitably arise, and humans would be forced to make choices. And as those choices accumulated, they would form a society.
“Let’s start like this.”
Click.
When he activated the engine, the agents began to move as if alive.
The beginning of the Synapse Engine was astonishingly simple.
* * *
Time flew like an arrow, and the seasons changed twice.
“It’s already snowing.”
Outside the music room window, large snowflakes were falling silently.
The school was busy preparing for final exams.
Seoha had ranked first in every subject on both of the previous exams. But no one was surprised by it anymore. Seoha had become a student treated as an exception not only among the students, but even by the teachers.
During exam period,
Seoha still appeared on the anonymous board as Ori-jwa and solved difficult problems, and in the remaining time, he read every paper he could get his hands on about the Riemann hypothesis.
Updates to the Synapse Engine also continued steadily, and by now it was reproducing the school’s appearance in a fairly plausible way.
The metrics piled up new data every day.
The cafeteria queue had been adjusted to closely resemble reality. During exam period, the seat occupancy rate in the study hall soared.
The students sometimes clashed according to their personality values, but at times they also yielded and cooperated.
Still, it was hard to call this a complete society.
Data was necessary to run a simulation.
But since Seoha could not obtain it, he had to adjust the parameters by inputting statistics from documents or estimates based on his own observations.
Even so, as time passed, the world created by the Synapse Engine was coming to resemble the real school more and more.
His exchange of talents with Gyeoul was also still ongoing.
Seoha’s piano skills had improved noticeably, to the point that someone who knew little about music might mistake him for a preparatory student.
Gyeoul, too, had managed to keep up with advanced mathematics after painstaking effort, so it had been an exchange that greatly helped them both.
“Yeah. Time went by too fast. What do you want to hear today?”
Gyeoul, who had grown noticeably more mature, sat on the piano bench and looked at Seoha.
“Chopin’s Ballade No. 1.”
The piano performance rang out.
She now understood that her music held special meaning for Seoha.
It was because Seoha had often shown an unhealthy state while digging into the Riemann hypothesis.
The Riemann hypothesis was connected not only to number theory, but also to analysis, probability, and physics, so in order to understand it, he had to cross back and forth through countless theories at once.
On top of that, when the distinctive theories unique to each paper’s author were added, the amount of information Seoha absorbed in a single day was vast enough that an entire university research lab would have needed months to handle it.
By now, when it came to the Riemann hypothesis, Seoha had advanced so far that there was no one in the country to compare him to, and he possessed enough depth to hold his own even in discussions with overseas scholars.
Inside Seoha’s mind, the endless waves of the Riemann zeta function continued. The irregular array of prime numbers surged like a vast sea.
‘Ah... again!’
The deeper Seoha dug into the Riemann hypothesis, the more it felt as if he were approaching an abyss.
Had it been a trap to think he could solve it?
The closer he moved in that direction, the thicker the fog became instead. At times, Seoha felt as if he were drifting alone in a sea of formulas.
At such times, Ducky would raise its body and tell him to become one with it. If he did, he would be able to read this vast sea in its entirety and draw closer to the truth.
‘You’re already not so different from me.’
‘Don’t you want to feel the waves of truth directly with your own heart?’
Ducky’s voice was sweet.
But Seoha felt he knew what lay at the end of that temptation.
‘I’d probably become a madman.’
There was no way he could digest that with a sane mind. So even if it was slow, he had no choice but to move forward one step at a time.
The sound of the piano reached him.
Ducky’s theme, played by Gyeoul.
Seeing that Seoha’s condition did not look good, she had continued playing.
Seoha opened his eyes.
“How many minutes was I like this?”
“About forty minutes. It was a little long today.”
Gyeoul looked at Seoha with her fingertips resting on the keys.
Worry and relief were mingled together in her expression.
Seoha tried to smile, but his expression would not form properly.
“That... It’s really hard, right?”
Gyeoul indicated with her eyes the papers in Seoha’s bag.
Seoha shook his head.
“Sorry. I made you worry. It’s not always like this, so it’s all right. When I’m in front of you, I feel at ease, so I end up letting my mind go without realizing it.”
After meeting him for several months, Gyeoul felt as if she now understood Seoha.
A genius the world was watching. But inside, he was a precarious boy who could collapse at any moment. And she knew, too, that Seoha himself was inviting danger by approaching an unsolved problem.
“I don’t know! If it were me, I wouldn’t even look at something like that.”
Gyeoul looked at Seoha with pity, then placed her hands on the keys again.
This time, the melody was even softer. Warm arpeggios like a spring breeze filled the music room.
Seoha closed his eyes and listened to the sound.
‘I need to get a grip. At this rate, I might go mad like Gödel.’
But there had been results.
While reading the papers, there had been an event that could become a small breakthrough.
Gyeoul glanced sideways at Seoha.
As if something good had happened, the corners of his mouth had risen slightly. Gyeoul was happy that her playing helped Seoha, but at the same time, she felt uneasy.
‘Why can’t I just leave him alone?’
To a degree she herself could not understand, Gyeoul was worried about Seoha.
“Thank you.”
Seoha murmured quietly.
Gyeoul did not answer and continued playing.
* * *
“Huh? It’s the same person again?”
Seoha classified the papers he had read in the same way he had done during the four-color theorem.
Then he gathered separately the papers he would need to look over again, and among them, there was a cited researcher who appeared repeatedly.
In the analytic characteristics of the zeta function, in the probability distribution of prime gaps, and even in writings connecting it to quantum chaos theory... The authors were all different, but they were citing the same researcher’s paper.
The common point was that all of them were on the fringes of academia.
‘Who is this person?’
Mikhail Orsen.
It was a name that seemed Slavic.
‘Department of Mathematics, Lesley University.’
“Lesley?”
It was a school he had never heard of.
But the email domain pointed to the United States, and specifically to Massachusetts, where Harvard and MIT were located.
Seoha found every paper by that author on the internet.
His name was in old journals. As though no one except those people had any interest in him, his papers were buried deep in the search results.
“This is unpublished material?”
Papers like this were generally works that had been rejected for publication by editorial boards or criticized and ignored during peer review.
“My God!”
Seoha nearly screamed while reading Orsen’s paper.
Because the direction he himself had been conjecturing regarding the Riemann hypothesis was far too similar to Orsen’s thoughts.
But he could also fully understand why Orsen had been ignored by the academic mainstream.
Crude logic and disorganized thoughts.
He was like a child who, claiming he could see a rainbow, ran toward it with a butterfly net.
Seoha decided to send an email for now.
Tap, tap.
[Dear Professor Orsen.]
—I am a student studying mathematics in Korea.
Recently, while looking into papers related to the Riemann hypothesis, I happened to come across your research.
If possible, would you be willing to have a conversation with me?
—With respect, Yu Seoha.
There were truths that could not be known from papers alone.
Seoha wanted to confirm the conjectures that might exist only inside Orsen’s head.
‘Will he reply?’
He was called a professor, but in truth, he was a person virtually forgotten by academia.
Since a young student from another country had emailed such a person, it would not be unreasonable for him to think it was a prank.
Seoha tried not to expect too much.
He simply wanted to confirm whether the path he had discovered truly existed, and whether there had really been someone who had followed its traces before him.
Two days later, at dawn, in his dorm room.
Beep—
An email notification popped up on his laptop screen.
Seoha felt as if his heart had dropped. With trembling hands, he clicked the mouse.
[RE: Dear Professor Orsen.]
—So I wondered who it was, and it turned out to be the boy in the news who proved the four-color theorem.
I gave up on the Riemann hypothesis long ago. If you saw something in my research, I would advise you to pretend you didn’t.
That path is hell. My writings were crushed time and again at the review stage, my research funding was cut off, and even my colleagues turned their backs on me.
It is not a path for a promising young boy. I trust you have understood.
P.S. If you are truly curious, come to my home. I am in no position to travel far.
—Mikhail Orsen.
‘Come to his home?’
His warning to pretend he had seen nothing was quickly forgotten from Seoha’s mind. The address Mikhail had enclosed was in Boston, near the university where he worked.
But when Seoha actually thought about going, there were more than one or two obstacles.
“Ah!”
Seoha sprang up as if he might leap and rummaged through his box of letters.
From within the pile of envelopes, Seoha pulled out a stack of invitations he had received quite some time ago.
After he had drawn public attention with the four-color theorem, no small number of letters had been sent to Seoha from academia and the media.
There were requests to appear on entertainment quiz shows, invitations to European academic forums, and even requests to attend a mathematics olympiad symposium being held in Japan.
But Seoha had not paid much attention to such things. To him, a problem he had already proved was a thing of the past.
‘There was one from America...’
Seoha searched through the letters.
“Found it!”
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mathematics]
Inside the letter was a message inviting him to the “Young Mathematicians Forum,” along with a notice that they would provide round-trip airfare and accommodations.
Looking at the date, there was still time.
Seoha pulled up a map of the United States on his laptop and checked the address.
“It’s close.”
His heart began to pound.
‘But how do I convince Mom?’
Seoha looked at the envelope in his hand.
The MIT logo stamped in gold leaf shimmered softly in the light.
‘If it’s an invitation from MIT, wouldn’t it be easy to convince both the school and my parents?’
It felt as though he held an invincible card in his hand.