The chill of early morning seemed not yet to have drained away; the air in the corridor was cold.
Click, clack.
The sound of several people’s dress shoes echoed through the hall.
Allen walked at the very front. The hem of his heavy coat brushed against his legs.
Behind him, Lisa, Michael, and the other researchers followed with bated breath.
When they reached the end of the corridor, a nameplate came into view.
[Room 2-148. Lead Investigator – Yoo, Seoha]
Beep—
The door opened when he tapped the card.
Allen stepped carefully inside.
“Hmm?”
From within the darkened laboratory came the faint sound of a piano,
a plaintive tone, as though soothing someone’s heart.
Click.
When the lights came on, the scene inside the room was revealed in full.
“Holy shit!”
“Ah…”
“What the hell is this…”
Everyone looked around, mouths agape.
Enormous equations covered three entire walls of the laboratory, greeting them.
Formulas written densely in white chalk,
complex lines and symbols tangled and interlocked to form a vast algorithm.
“Incredible.”
To Allen’s eyes, it did not look like a language made by human hands, but like circuitry moving and breathing on its own.
Handel’s Passacaglia rang out majestically.
Chalk dust slowly rose into the air, reflecting the fluorescent light. It was like the sight of white snow scattering down from the sky.
Faced with this unreal scene, everyone forgot the reason they had come here.
Whirrr—
A simulation was running on the workstation atop the desk.
A log window was open on the screen.
[Simulation complete.]
[Error : none detected.]
“Over there.”
Someone pointed to one side and whispered.
Seoha was quietly asleep on the sofa in the corner.
As if he had fought a long battle, his entire hands were smeared with white chalk dust.
“Seoha…”
“Shh!”
As Lisa moved closer to wake him, Allen put a finger to his lips and gestured for her to stay still.
It seemed he had been concentrating for a long time, then lain down on the sofa and fallen asleep just like that.
No one opened their mouth, not wanting to wake him.
Lisa’s gaze slowly moved.
From Seoha’s fingertips, to the formulas filling the blackboards, and then back to the monitor screen where the simulation had ended.
His sleeping face looked peaceful.
Rustle.
Allen took off his coat and covered Seoha with it.
“Let’s leave him like this for now.”
Everyone nodded.
Hands covered in white chalk, his face asleep with a satisfied smile, and the perfect equations he had left upon the blackboard.
A strange emotion surged up in one corner of Allen’s chest.
Pride, and at the same time, guilt.
‘We left too much to you.’
Until they had felt the pressure of time and budget, Seoha must have intended to collaborate.
Just like with that paper that had been a group project.
But the situation had not let him.
‘Absurd. So many talented people gathered here, and yet there wasn’t a single person who could exchange thoughts with you on equal footing.’
Allen thought that perhaps Seoha might be an unbearably lonely existence.
* * *
MIT Media Lab E14.
It was dinnertime, but none of the project members could even think of going home.
A great deal had changed overnight.
The formulas written on the blackboards had been scanned with high-resolution cameras and displayed on a large screen.
The researchers sat gathered around the monitors, analyzing the structure of the algorithm Seoha had left behind.
Lisa pointed at the screen with her finger.
“Look here. This is different from the structure we were using before. It seems hierarchical?”
“Hierarchical?”
Michael frowned and zoomed in on the screen.
“This looks like a direct mathematical expression of a neural network… But it’s different from a typical neural net. The rules are different for each layer?”
Lisa nodded.
“That’s right. Each layer operates at a different time and a different scale. One layer runs on the order of seconds, another on microseconds. It’s completely nonlinear.”
“Is that possible?”
Someone muttered.
“Look.”
Lisa tapped at the keyboard and opened part of the formula.
“This isn’t the conventional Fourier transform-based time domain—signal over time. It induces self-synchronization on its own.
Most likely, Seoha judged that the errors we had before were an issue of parallel simultaneous computation caused by hardware limitations, and so he pulled the very concept of time into the operation itself.”
For a moment, silence fell.
They tried to understand the formulas, but the structure did not come into view all at once. The researchers who had been staring at the screen for a long while began to grumble.
“Have I gotten too old? I can’t do this stuff anymore.”
“At this point, shouldn’t we give the algorithm a name? It’s like mathematics from another dimension.”
“MIT didn’t give him a lab for nothing.”
Lisa continued.
“What’s astonishing is that this isn’t unstable at all.
Normally, a structure this complex would collapse at the slightest error, but this one instead accepts those errors in real time and stabilizes itself.”
She pointed to the workstation where the simulation was running.
The graph on the monitor was moving with astonishing smoothness. The data curve that had once fluctuated violently, as if vibrating whenever an incident occurred, was now rising gently without the slightest tremor.
“CPU load, forty-eight percent?”
Michael peered at the screen as if he could not believe it. The load, which had exceeded eighty percent and approached ninety, had fallen by nearly half.
“With the same dataset, it’s performing this well?”
“The clock sync is perfect too. Before, it was delayed by 0.03 seconds every time we ran parallel processing, but now the variance has been reduced by more than a hundredfold.
It seems he considered hardware-induced latency from the design stage.”
The researchers gathered and examined the logs.
‘I thought before that there was no room left for further improvement…’
It was a change astonishing enough to overturn heaven and earth. Everyone was unable to hide their shock at the fact that he had created this in just two days.
Allen, who had been listening quietly, nodded.
“Let’s run the entire validation set with this as the final version.”
“Yes, sir!”
Their voices rang out with vigor.
As the completion of the project came into view, energy returned to the laboratory.
The cursor on the monitor blinked, and then a command was entered.
A moment later, a roar burst from the workstation.
Whirrrrr—
When Lisa pressed Enter, dozens of simulation windows opened at once.
“Twelve thousand test sets loaded. Beginning full-range validation now.”
Allen met the eyes of each person in the lab, one by one.
“For the twenty-four hours that the test is in progress, we are entering emergency mode.
Back up all logs every ten seconds. Report any errors immediately, and all operations except manual shutdown are strictly prohibited.”
This was the final stage. Tension settled over everyone’s faces.
“Yes, sir!”
Michael chuckled.
“So we’re pulling an all-nighter after all.”
It was a familiar situation for researchers.
“This is quite good, all things considered.”
“I’ve done a week before, so what’s one night?”
“Doing it isn’t the problem. What’s painful is when no results come out.”
Everyone nodded as if in agreement.
“But expectations are higher this time. I can’t even imagine how much this city is going to change.”
“Hey! We’re still testing. Don’t jinx it by saying things like that!”
“By the way, who’s going to handle maintenance?”
At the last researcher’s words, everyone shut their mouths.
If they touched it incorrectly and caused an error, a large-scale disaster at the city level could occur.
Would there really be anyone at City Hall capable of handling such a complex algorithm?
“We can just sign a direct contract with the designer. What’s the problem?”
Allen snapped the words out.
“Well, true. Seoha could write a manual or train the staff.”
“We can give him a position as an advisor.”
Allen thought about how the city might compensate Seoha appropriately for his contribution.
And this was the method that came to mind.
As long as the city of Boston used Seoha’s system, he would be able to receive compensation like a pension.
* * *
It was around evening when Seoha woke up.
‘Hmm?’
The situation felt strangely familiar, and Seoha felt a cold sensation crawl up his spine.
‘Please don’t let it be the hospital again…’
He opened his eyes to a slit and looked to the side. It was the laboratory.
‘Whew! Thank goodness.’
This time, Seoha had taken great care to make sure no unfortunate accident occurred.
There were many people here who ground themselves down while doing research, so it had been easy to come up with calorie countermeasures. As long as he ate plenty of chocolate bars and high-calorie drinks and got the proper amount of sleep, what happened before would not happen again.
‘Though I guess I was a bit short on sleep…’
He had been catching naps here and there so he would not collapse, but it seemed the tension had left him after he completed the algorithm.
Rustle.
When he sat up, he saw a familiar face.
“Ellie?”
Eleanor looked up from the book she had been reading.
“You’re awake. A doctor came by. He said you were just asleep. Accumulated fatigue.”
Seoha awkwardly scratched his head.
“I don’t hurt anywhere at all.”
Ellie wore a pained expression.
“To be honest, I knew you were overdoing it. Not just me. Everyone did.”
“What?”
“But we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop you.
The project looked like it was going to collapse because the budget wasn’t coming through, and we desperately needed the algorithm. I’m only an assistant, but didn’t everyone think you were the one and only chance left for this project, Seoha?”
‘It wasn’t that hard, though.’
It seemed he had been misunderstood again. Seoha lowered his head for now.
“I’m sorry for worrying you.”
Ellie shook her head.
“No, this is me reflecting. I saw you working alone at dawn. I wanted to go in and help, like during the team project, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
Right now, I can’t even properly understand the algorithm you made.”
Ellie lowered her head and remained silent for a long while.
She fiddled with the book with her fingertips, then quietly opened her mouth.
“At first, I was so happy to be participating in this project.
But all I did was organize materials and write meeting minutes. Ah! I reserved equipment and set up meeting rooms too.”
Ellie gave a self-deprecating laugh.
“I know. I’m an assistant, so of course that’s what I’m supposed to do. But when I saw everyone relying only on you, I got presumptuously upset.”
“N-no, that’s not…”
Seoha floundered, unable to find words to comfort her.
“So what I wanted to say is that next time, I’ll be a real team member, not the person in charge of the copier. I’ll make some other assistant prepare the coffee.”
As if she had made up her mind, she playfully clenched her fist.
“Then I’ll get going.”
Ellie smiled and waved.
“Okay! Thank you. And Ellie, you said you didn’t do anything, but you were truly a great help to me. If you hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t even have completed the initial algorithm.”
At the unexpected words, Ellie’s eyes widened.
“Hahaha.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Not wanting him to notice, Ellie hurried outside.
After walking for a while, she saw a vending machine.
Her hand trembled as she tried to get coffee.
Thud!
As if blaming herself, Ellie slammed her head against the vending machine.
Thud.
Thud.
Each time the cold metal touched her forehead, her mind became clearer.
The world of mathematics, where black and white, right and wrong were distinct.
And because of that, she could know with cruel clarity.
“Why am I so stupid?”
Even if she had to set aside all her other studies, she had tried to understand Seoha’s algorithm.
But in this world, there were walls that could not be crossed by willpower alone.
Ellie took a notebook from her pocket.
Its edges were already worn and discolored. Every page was filled with formulas she had failed to understand.
Swipe.
Ellie wiped her tears with the back of her hand, then set off in search of a place to study.