Translator: Dreamscribe
The applause that had filled the stage gradually faded.
But the audience couldn't bring themselves to leave their seats. Only after the ushers carefully guided them out did people finally start moving with reluctant expressions.
"That's the first Pathétique I've ever heard like that. It felt like I'd gone back to my younger days."
"Hahaha! That tickling sensation in my chest, it really was a masterpiece."
The people who had spilled out into the plaza in front of the fountain replayed the stage they'd just witnessed with flushed faces. With a daisy glittering vividly on the traffic display board, the New York night was steeped in the musical afterglow they had left behind.
The next day, news of the concert was carried through the New York Philharmonic's official channels and the daily papers.
The performance video clip they uploaded sparked huge buzz the moment it went up. The reaction to Seo-ha and Gyeo-ul's duet piece in particular was tremendous.
[Official] New York Philharmonic - 'The Theme of Duckie' (World Premiere)
2.1 million views.
└I was there in person. In 20 years of listening to classical music, I've never had a moment that gave me chills like that. The entire audience at Geffen Hall held their breath. It felt like listening to the confession of some lonely mathematician. Through the music, I learned that even a genius's life isn't easy. I was deeply comforted by it.
└The Retrograde Inversion in the second movement was truly stunning. The way it perfectly inverted and sublimated the despair of the first movement was moving in itself.
└After the concert ended, people were debating in the plaza outside. Curious, I joined in and they were all complete strangers ㅋㅋㅋ No one was ready to just go home.
└It was a night that proved modern classical music can surpass the works of past masters.
[Official] New York Philharmonic - 'Beethoven Virus', Duet (Han Gyeo-ul & Yu Seo-ha)
4.08 million views.
└So this was actually improvised?
└I'm a piano major in college and I'm just gonna die ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Matching ensemble like that doesn't even make sense?
└Pure talent, that's all it is.
└Ah, this is so good. I've been replaying it for hours now. It's like a scene from a movie. And their expressions are just perfect.
└I'm the taxi driver who drove that guy yesterday. He was pale as a ghost because he was running late for the show, and to think he was the architect of Oracle. I'll remember it as the greatest honor of my life.
└Watching young geniuses play happily on the piano made me smile without even realizing it.
└You can hear the audience gasping when he stands up and crosses arms with Gyeo-ul in the middle ㅋㅋㅋ
└Those two have been goofing around like that since their Gifted High School days. They probably think nobody knew, but everyone just turned a blind eye.
After spending one night at the hotel provided by the New York Phil, Seo-ha left for Boston the next day. Seo-ha rested his head against the bus window, watching the scenery slip past.
The piece Gyeo-ul had played streamed through his earphones. A raw live clip with the applause and cheers of thousands recorded as they were. Seo-ha read the comments and quietly closed his eyes.
'I never thought it would actually reach anyone.'
It wasn't a piece composed for someone to listen to. It was the despair he could never tell anyone, a wretched confession of a self that had crumbled day after day before unsolved problems.
The harsh loneliness and suffocation he had pressed into the page with the tip of his pencil in that cramped dorm room, those heavy, viscous lumps of feeling, had been scattered across the heart of New York through Gyeo-ul's hands.
'Why?'
People had been enthralled by the piece. They said they had hurt and been comforted alongside it. Seo-ha realized that all of them were living their lives carrying their own loneliness and pain.
"Hoo...."
He let out a long breath.
Strangely, the knot that had been blocking his chest felt washed away, leaving his heart much lighter. The mental fatigue accumulated over months had been burned clean and gone in just a few minutes of performance the day before.
The compulsion to produce answers, the responsibility of wanting to live up to expectations. Once he poured all of these into the furnace called music, new equations began to flow through his cleanly emptied mind.
'You feel it too, don't you?'
Familiar scenery appeared outside the window. It was time to face the monster again.
But unlike before, no solemn resolve stirred within him. Just a pleasant excitement tickled his heart. Seo-ha opened his bag and pulled out a notebook.
"It won't come easy, will it? How many notebooks do I have to fill before you'll show me your answer?"
Gazing at the Charles River flowing proudly outside the window, he whispered softly, as if in anticipation.
* * *
A small pub tucked away in an alley of Sinlim-dong.
Cling.
Ji-hoon glanced around, then broke into a bright smile and walked over to the corner.
"Guys, Ji-ye noona! It's been forever."
The IMO comrades had gathered after a long while.
Ji-ye, who now carried herself with a noticeably more grown-up air, beckoned the handsome Ji-hoon over with a wave. Chang-seok was still clinging to his old nerd style. Do-kyung looked exhausted, perhaps from the strain of his studies.
"Oh, Sung Ji-hoon! You're old enough to be wearing a Department Jacket now?"
"I'm a sophomore, you know?"
When Chang-seok ruffled his messy hair and acknowledged him, Ji-hoon waved his hand bashfully and took a seat.
"You must be popular, right? A face like yours is genuinely rare at Seoul National."
"What, are you crushing on him? Quit being so thirsty. Have you still not gotten your act together?"
At Do-kyung's reproach, Ji-ye raised her fist.
"Quiet. I'm Seo Ji-ye, the goddess of the chemistry department! If I felt like it, I could line up the guys who like me for a hundred meters."
"Then go pick one of them already! Why are you still single?"
"They're all losers! I miss the days when I had Seo-ha and Ji-hoon to feast my eyes on."
Chang-seok wearily took off his glasses and wiped them.
"Knock it off. The kid's right here, it's embarrassing."
"Ahem!"
"By the way, you're not majoring in math either?"
At Do-kyung's question, Ji-hoon gave a wry smile.
"How could I, after seeing someone like Seo-ha?"
The three nodded in unison, as if on cue.
"Right, right! Su-jeong's the real die-hard!"
"It was a good thing I went to the IMO back then. I'm glad I learned early that I'm an utterly ordinary person."
"She's overshadowed by Seo-ha, but Su-jeong is no joke either. There are things you can't possibly understand without going through it firsthand."
Ji-ye studied chemistry, while Do-kyung, Chang-seok, and Ji-hoon were all studying engineering.
"Did you guys see the compression theory APEX Lab put out recently? Our department's in a panic over it right now."
Do-kyung picked up Ji-hoon's words.
"Of course I saw it. How does Seo-ha keep making us study, even from over there? My professor's assigned me Minimum Energy Theory this semester. If I have to study ST Compression on top of that, my head's going to split open."
At the undergraduate level, they only covered the bare outline, but even that was enough to drive students half-insane.
"That paper's insane, isn't it? I heard it came out of the process of designing Oracle. It's basically already empirically validated, so the professors must be having a hard time with it."
Chang-seok nodded.
For him, as a computer engineering major, Seo-ha's theory went beyond awe to the point of fear.
"I'm in chemistry so I don't have to deal with that stuff!"
"...."
"...."
The three glared at Ji-ye, then sighed.
"Honestly, doesn't it make you proud? The kids who used to eat tteokbokki with us at night are turning the global academic world upside down. Whenever I tell people I know Seo-ha personally, they all turn green with envy."
The friends were walking the path of pure mathematics that they had given up.
Watching Seo-ha and Su-jeong, Chang-seok felt a complicated tangle of emotions. A subtle sense of deprivation that came alongside the pride. But these days, he was sincerely cheering them on.
"There's a downside to it too."
Do-kyung furrowed his brow and tossed out the comment.
The unexpected remark drew everyone's gaze.
"What is?"
"Knowing Seo-ha personally?"
He shook his head as if fed up.
"Yeah. Someone keeps pestering me by email. He asked about Seo-ha, so I answered him sincerely, and now it's just getting out of hand."
"Who is it?"
"Benjamin Simmons. You know, the guy who was on TV a few years back. Said to be the youngest person ever to earn a Ph.D."
The other three's eyes widened.
""Ah!""
If the East had Yu Seo-ha, then the West had Benjamin Simmons. There used to be people who said as much.
He had entered formal schooling at the age of four. Graduated high school at eight, earned a bachelor's in mathematics at eleven, and from there blazed through to a master's in just a year.
And at the mere age of fifteen, he received a Ph.D. in quantum physics from Giessen University in Germany.
It was the first such case since university curricula had been formalized in the 20th century. After that, there had been no particular news of him, or so they had thought....
Slide.
Do-kyung pulled out his phone and tapped on his inbox.
When he scrolled down, emails with English subject lines packed the screen.
[Subject : About Seoha Yu]
[Subject : Request for introduction]
.
.
"Whoa! Isn't this practically stalking?"
Ji-hoon let out a dry laugh.
"The contents are even worse. He kept asking more and more personal stuff, and when he asked me to introduce him to Seo-ha, that's when I blocked him."
"Seo-ha really is a star. Big enough that someone that famous comes latching on."
Ji-ye rubbed her arms as if shivering with goosebumps.
The thought suddenly came to her of Shin Woo-hyun's video clip with five million views, the one where he'd said genius isn't determined by age.
'That's right. Even if Seo-ha were thirty or forty now, he'd still be a monster.'
A brief curiosity stirred in her about what kind of person this Benjamin must be, but she soon shook her head to chase the thought away.
She had way too much overdue coursework to be lost in idle thoughts.
* * *
A quiet cafe near MIT, in Cambridge.
Tap tap tap tap.
Theo silently tapped the keyboard of his laptop, then pressed his fingers to his temples and let out a long sigh.
"They've really been pushing it."
Team APEX was, by any measure, at the very forefront of the global mathematics community, but a peek inside revealed an operation that was nothing short of staggering.
Proposals poured in from every direction. Vast amounts of practical data to process, a budget so large it was hard to believe it had been allocated to a single lab, and the legal and administrative procedures necessary to keep the lab running.
Faced with the mountain of paperwork, Seo-ha, Su-jeong, and Cecilia all averted their eyes at the same time, as if by prior agreement.
"M..my butler does all this for me, so I have no idea about any of it!"
"I can't even manage my allowance, my mom yells at me about it every day."
"...."
In a rare moment, Seo-ha just sat there with his mouth hanging open, wearing a blank, vacant expression.
Sri was busy with maintenance of the servers and workstations. In the end, all the cleanup fell to him as the only adult.
"What if I were to embezzle the funds?"
Not being able to leave the loose system as it was had been his undoing. By the time he came to his senses, everyone was leaning on him like a mother. He could have bet his entire fortune that Seo-ha didn't even know the leading digit of the lab's operating budget balance.
"Excuse me!"
Theo looked up.
Early twenties?
The face was youthful, but the air the man carried was anything but light. The blue eyes hidden beneath the blond hair seemed to speak of his intellect.
Only then did Theo remember that he had scheduled an interview here.
Rustle.
He rummaged through his papers and pulled out the printed resume.
"Benjamin Simmons, welcome."
Reading the name straight off the document made Ben's expression sour.
Theo's eyes scanned over his credentials.
Master's in mathematics, Ph.D. in physics, and LOGIA ranking number four.
It wouldn't be a bad thing to have one mathematician well-versed in physics on the team. That had been his thinking when he'd set up the interview.
"I didn't expect to be summoned out to a cafe. I'm fairly certain Seo-ha said anyone in the LOGIA top four had access to the lab."
Theo's eye twitched.
Ever since Cecilia had joined, LOGIA had been a vacant house. Even ranking fourth there wasn't really an achievement worth bragging about.
"And Seo-ha didn't even come out himself. Are you aware that I hold the title of youngest ever Ph.D.?"
Theo couldn't hold back and chuckled.
"Ah! I'd forgotten for a second. Brats are usually like this, after all."
If Seo-ha had been dreadfully unlucky, would he have grown up looking like this?
From the moment he was born, Benjamin had never had peers his own age. He'd always been treated as a freak and met with rude stares.
To Ben, Seo-ha was the first 'kindred' human being he had ever come to know. But what he'd seen at this meeting he had come to with such expectations was the figure of an adult counting a stack of receipts and sighing. The words didn't come out kindly.
"What exactly do you mean by that, mister?"
'Mister?'
Theo could read Benjamin's mind.
In academia, Ph.D. holders were generally addressed faithfully as 'Dr.' or 'Professor.' To them, anyone without a doctorate was classified as a Mister. This was, of course, a roundabout way of saying that even a master's degree holder was nothing more than a layperson in academic terms.
"Seo-ha is a busy man, doctor. You want to join our lab, don't you? Then you'll have to interview with me."
He'd already been stressed out from all the chores piling up.
Theo bared his teeth and smiled brightly.
*****
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