The sun had already begun to set.
Seoha finished up the assignment he'd been working on and closed his laptop.
One of the things he liked most about this school was that no one cared where you studied.
Whether in the hallways, on the lawn, or even in the gymnasium bleachers, everyone naturally pulled out books or laptops.
Seoha had also found his own space recently.
Between Buildings 2 and 4,
beneath an old stone staircase that few people used.
During the day, tree shadows provided shade, and when the sun set, the glow of the sunset reflected off the windows, quietly tinting the spot.
*-I'll pick up my sister and head to the clubhouse.*
After leaving a short message for Root, Seoha put his phone in his pocket and headed to the bike storage.
The afternoon sunlight stretched out long against the glass wall.
Seoha found the familiar old gray frame among the parked bicycles.
"Gyaaah!"
Stretching both arms overhead, he mounted the saddle.
As he exited the dormitory path, a school bus crawling along in the distance came into view.
Seoha pedaled faster.
"Got it."
He rode alongside the bus and waved toward the window.
Seoeun's eyes widened in surprise before breaking into a bright smile and waving back.
"Oppa!"
The foreign pronunciation seemed amusing, as laughter from the children inside the bus could be heard.
Arriving at the bus stop and waiting briefly, the bus carrying Seoeun pulled in. The vehicle slowed to a stop, and soon—hiss—the door opened.
As Seoeun came down the bus steps, voices calling out from behind followed her.
"Bye, Sunny!"
"Bye, bye!"
Children stuck their hands out the window and waved repeatedly.
Seoha couldn't help but admire his sister's appearance like that.
He hadn't even properly greeted his classmates in the same department yet…
"Oppa!"
Seoeun came pattering up to him.
In her arms, she held the beaver doll he'd given her a few days before.
"See you!"
"See you tomorrow!"
Perhaps thanks to Seoeun's cheerful personality?
She naturally exchanged greetings with the children who had gotten off with her.
"I got a hundred on the spelling test today! I got all the math problems right too! And during gym class, I jumped rope twenty times."
Seoeun listed off everything she'd learned at school today one by one without missing a thing.
He'd worried at first that she'd struggle with English, but Seoeun's mind, trained from an early age, was adapting to the new environment with astonishing speed.
"You said it was hard, but you've already made friends?"
"Yeah! Everyone's nice. A lot of kids ask me to teach them Korean."
At lunchtime, the girls would surround Seoeun and pour out words they'd learned from songs or dramas, like 'annyeong' and 'saranghae'.
Seoeun was beginning to grow tired of it.
*'Oh! Truly the land of K-pop.'*
These days, Korean songs could often be heard even at MIT. The great cultural influence of their homeland was certainly an advantage when living in a foreign country.
Seoeun hugged the beaver doll close.
"Everyone knows his name too. The kids say hi to him every break time, you know?"
Seoha had recoded the beaver and embedded a few entertaining features.
If you said "Hi, Beaver!", the doll would greet you back. If you praised it with "Good job!", it would wag its tail. Among other things…
From the day he'd given her the doll, Beaver had become Seoeun's best friend.
Seoeun was blending into American society faster than expected.
*'At this rate, she might forget Korea altogether.'*
Seoha shook his head.
It would be fine.
He just had to make sure he didn't forget.
"Get on the back!"
Seoha placed a cute duck helmet on Seoeun's head.
Once his sister climbed onto the back seat, Seoha pressed down on the pedals.
"Kyaha!"
The autumn wind brushed across their faces.
Fallen leaves on the ground rustled, tickling their ears.
The road was a gentle downhill slope.
Even without pedaling hard, the wheels rolled smoothly forward.
Seoeun spread her arms wide and shouted loudly.
"The weather is so nice!"
Seoha smiled and pedaled a bit faster.
The maple trees lining the slope were beginning to change colors.
Sunlight squeezed through between them, intermittently grazing their faces.
"Hold on tight, or you'll fall!"
"I won't fall!"
Seoeun let out a cheerful laugh, reaching her hands into the air.
The wind blowing from the river lifted her hair. It was the unique early autumn atmosphere of this city—a mixture of sunlight, trees, and the scent of the distant sea.
* * *
The co-working space at the Martin Trust Center,
the building where Spectra Works had been assigned workspace.
When he opened the door, Root waved his hand.
"You're finally here. We've been waiting a while."
Entropy already had two PCs running simultaneously.
"Your sister likes the beaver?"
She asked without taking her eyes off the monitor.
"Yes, I recoded it a bit and gave it to her, and now she goes to school with it every day."
"All that hard work making it was worth it, then."
When Seoha turned on his laptop, the server connection automatically displayed the 'Spectra Works' logo screen.
Root pushed a few documents across the desk.
"The school's legal team has finished their review. Your parents' signatures have also been notarized.
The contract is effective starting now. The TLO (Technology Licensing Office) also said there are no issues."
Seoha nodded briefly.
The process had been complicated because he was a minor, but since it was common at MIT, everything had been wrapped up smoothly.
"Then let's get started."
Clack, clack.
Seoha began typing code into his laptop.
"First, I'll change the core. The node count... hmm, at least eighteen thousand.
If we combine classrooms, labs, libraries, dorms, cafeterias, gyms, and hallway sections, it's best to divide the spatial cells into forty thousand units."
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap—
"Grids waste too many resources along MIT's winding routes.
For the corridors between buildings, use polygon mesh; for nodes, place weighted edges centered around entry portals and target events…"
Entropy took her hands off the keyboard and brought her face close to Seoha's laptop screen.
"Hold on! Mesh reduction first? Wouldn't it be better to attach the agents first?"
"We're paving a clean path for the agents to move on first. It'll be easier if you think of it as plumbing that channels our intentions."
Whooo—
Cipher whistled admiringly from the side.
"And here I thought you were only good at math, but your programming is insane too."
Whiiiiir—
Seoha's laptop was already beginning to scream.
Root looked at it and signaled to Cipher with his eyes.
"Hey, this won't do. Let's build our mathematician a computer first."
"Huh?"
While Seoha was bewildered, Cipher made space for assembly on the table.
When they opened the storage room, component boxes were stacked like a mountain.
Memory, motherboards, coolers, case fans, power supplies; even thermal pads were lying around in individual sheets.
"High-spec so it doesn't stutter."
The most expensive parts in the storage room began coming together.
"Use the graphics card we received as a prize last time."
"There's no suitable CPU, though…"
"You're right. I think we used them all up when building the servers."
Root scratched his head and sprang up from his seat.
"Didn't we hear a rumor that the robotics team next door got some samples in?"
"Would they give us that?"
"We're borrowing it. Just trust me!"
Five minutes later, Root returned holding a CPU with a proud face.
"It's an ES (Engineering Sample). We can pay them back with something better next time."
Like the experts they were, the assembly was done in an instant.
Splendid components went into the case one by one, and even the final cable management was completed perfectly.
"What OS are you going to use?"
"Ubuntu, please."
The kernel, drivers, and programs were all set up.
"Try it out!"
Seoha sat in front of the computer.
It was the first high-performance desktop he'd ever owned.
Seoha immediately ran a program.
He moved over the Synapse Engine he'd created and loaded the MIT dataset.
The loading bar filled up completely, and tens of thousands of nodes and connection lines appeared on the screen.
"Wow…"
An exclamation slipped out before he knew it.
"Nice, right?"
Root smiled with his arms crossed.
"This is on par with your average research lab server. You'll be able to run computations and rendering simultaneously."
Seoha's hands moved busily.
"I'll try reflecting events in real time."
The moment he entered the code, a reaction appeared immediately.
Inside the virtual MIT, a 'rain' icon appeared, and several students opened umbrellas or went indoors. In the midst of that, when someone slipped, a nearby student rushed over to help them up.
"Wow, this is freaking amazing."
"Behavioral variables are all linked too."
The three couldn't help but admire the intricate algorithm.
Seoha's hands danced across the keyboard.
"There were some features I couldn't use because I was worried about the load, but I'll apply them all now."
Seoha accessed GitHub and copied the conscience index code he'd used when making 'Quack-Quack'.
"Huh? Wait!"
Cipher looked at Seoha's GitHub account, and his eyes went wide.
"You're Deoki?"
A nod.
Seoha had been visiting GitHub in his spare time to accumulate programming knowledge.
"That Deoki?"
"For real?"
Entropy and Root also approached Seoha in surprise.
"The server admin at our school had a meltdown because of the open-source automation patch Deoki made before."
Seoha laughed awkwardly and waved his hands.
"It just ended up that way while I was helping people with wrong code. I couldn't just pass by when I saw questions on the board."
"Is that what you call helping? You fixed the mess the server admin made in three lines of code."
Seoha flushed.
"That was just a coincidence. I saw that the recursive function was tangled up…"
"On the forums, there were even rumors that Deoki was an AI."
"Appeared like a comet and fixed code left and right, right?"
"I got help from him too."
Seoha smiled sheepishly and turned his gaze back to the screen.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
His fingers moved as if playing a piano, and new lines streamed across the screen one after another.
The complex algorithm that Spectra Works had made was being neatly organized.
Watching Seoha fix bugs in real time as he went, the three clicked their tongues in amazement.
"I feel inadequate."
"Let's not do that to ourselves. A great mathematician is bound to be an outstanding programmer."
"I just hope he doesn't touch system engineering. We'd be out of a job."
During short breaks, Seoha refreshed himself on MIT's internal developer forum.
Next to his ID 'Deoki', there was now a blue verification mark indicating an insider.
*[Deoki was here too]*
*-Is he really human? There are no bugs wherever he's been.*
*└So it was our school, lololol*
*└A programmer of that caliber couldn't belong to another school, haha.*
*└Can't we bring him to our club?*
*└We'd have to find out who he is first. Deoki doesn't reply to DMs unless it's a coding question.*
*└Right. I heard Silicon Valley programmers sent him DMs trying to befriend him and all got rejected.*
Gulp.
The sound of swallowing saliva was strangely loud.
Root asked Seoha with a serious face.
"Do you need more equity, by any chance?"
Seoha was startled.
"No! It's already too much as it is. Don't worry, I'll do my part and work hard to earn what I've received."
"If we've done anything to upset you, please tell us. You shouldn't keep it bottled up inside, okay?"
"Yes!"
Seoha was happy that he could be of help to these fun and kind people.