Translator: Dreamscribe
Just how difficult can a Sudoku puzzle get?
The number of possible configurations for a 9 X 9 Sudoku puzzle reaches roughly 5.4 billion. Considering that the space within the grid is finite but human cognitive capacity has its limits, the perceived difficulty can effectively approach infinity.
Seo-ha sat in his chair, watching his team members.
'Who'll be the fastest?'
What was needed to solve this puzzle wasn't some skill like exceptional mental arithmetic. That also meant such one-dimensional talents alone wouldn't be enough to cross the threshold of this lab.
'Chained logical structure.'
Theo smiled as he worked on the puzzle.
One conclusion gave birth to the next, and that in turn became a new constraint, compressing the entire structure inward. A circular framework of forming hypotheses, collapsing them, and extracting fresh logic from the wreckage.
It was the kind of problem Seo-ha would love. He himself possessed innate talent surpassing anyone else's, yet he had little regard for those who relied solely on that talent.
'Here.'
Paradoxically, he focused on the spot with the fewest hints. Few hints meant the constraints on which numbers could fit there were all the more powerful.
Theo began severing the invisible chains of logic one by one, analyzing the topological balance of the eighty-one-square grid.
'No way!'
Ben's pupils trembled as if struck by an earthquake.
A 9 X 9 grid, just eighty-one cells.
But each time a single number was placed, the branches of possibility multiplied exponentially.
'Crazy. There's only one solution.'
Seo-ha had casually fabricated an extreme-difficulty logic puzzle on the spot. Ordinary Sudoku puzzles relied on elimination, crossing out wrong answers one at a time. But the problem Seo-ha had set had eighty-one numbers organically intertwined into a single colossal equation.
'I have to see the whole thing at once.'
Ben grasped it intuitively. This was a test asking whether the human brain could be used like a parallel processor. Then what about Seo-ha, who had created the puzzle?
In the brief moment it took him to write down those numbers, just how many possibilities had he considered simultaneously?
'I can do this. I'm a genius.'
Crunch.
Ben clenched his molars.
His brain cells were screaming. Thousands of numbers danced inside his head. But once he picked a direction, a faint path finally seemed to appear.
Scratch.
'Huh?'
The sound of a pencil shattered his concentration.
Already?
Was someone bluffing?
Scratch scratch.
Ben stole a glance to the side. It was Theo. He was filling in the blanks at a terrifying pace.
'How?'
Ben's breathing grew ragged. As panic set in, the threads he'd glimpsed tangled up. He'd have to verify everything from the beginning again. But did he have the time for that?
Scratch.
This time it came from the other side.
Cecilia, who had been munching on a doughnut, moved her pen with elegant precision. And a moment later, even Su-jeong and Sri.
Not once in his life had Ben ever felt slow.
'Am I really the only one who hasn't even started?'
Ben couldn't believe what was happening. When he looked at the board again, the numbers seemed warped. It was as if a monster with seventeen eyes were sneering at him.
"Done!"
Tap!
Theo set his pencil down on the desk. Ben doubted his own ears.
[12 minutes 43 seconds]
Shortly after, Cecilia rolled her stiff neck and spoke in a languid voice.
"Me too."
[14 minutes 21 seconds]
"Ugh. Third place."
Su-jeong scrunched up her face, clearly displeased.
[15 minutes 10 seconds]
"Ah, dead last! This is exactly why I didn't want to do it!"
Sri clutched his head before filling in the final number.
[16 minutes 12 seconds]
Ben's eyes wandered, unfocused.
He hadn't filled in a single cell. His brain felt fried by overload, and he couldn't form a single thought.
"Doctor?"
Theo called out to Ben, who sat there in a daze. Ben jerked his head up, startled.
Five pairs of eyes locked onto him at once. A helplessness he had never felt once in his entire life. Ben felt an unbearable wave of shame.
"I... I..."
What was he supposed to say.
He wanted to make some excuse, but the empty answer sheet in front of him strangled the words in his throat.
'Have I just been a frog in a well all this time?'
The thought flashed through Ben's mind that perhaps his genius had only ever been valid within an extremely shallow range.
While he had been splashing his feet at the edge of a stream, these people had been swimming through the deepest depths of the ocean. Once a negative thought took hold, all his past glories suddenly felt pitiful.
"Doctor Simmons?"
Seo-ha was calling him.
He pried open his reluctant lips and managed to answer.
"...Ben."
"Sorry?"
"Just call me Ben. Drop the 'Doctor.'"
He was embarrassed.
He thought back to his master's days, to those seniors who flaunted their degrees over their actual ability. He used to deliberately tangle equations into knots and lounge back to enjoy watching them flounder.
'I get it. A degree is the only thing you guys have to brag about over me.'
Now that the very yardstick he'd used to mock others was being applied to himself, his face burned.
He was so ashamed he wanted to evaporate and disappear right there on the spot.
"You couldn't fill in a single number, Ben."
"...No. I don't think I belong here."
Ben hung his head with a forlorn expression.
"No, not at all."
Seo-ha shook his head with a light laugh.
Ben couldn't find the slightest trace of mockery or contempt on his face.
"The reason you couldn't write down an answer is precisely because you're exceptionally brilliant."
He looked up at Seo-ha, puzzled. The tone was too plain, too matter-of-fact, to be mere consolation.
"You probably foresaw the many possibilities unfolding across the eighty-one-cell grid. Including the way they collide, contradict each other, and collapse.
You must have known, Ben, that this puzzle had only one solution. Failing to find it doesn't make you a person without talent."
"B-but I'm the only one who didn't solve it."
"That's because we know Seo-ha well."
Su-jeong chimed in with a prim expression.
"Ah, that's true too. I figured there had to be some high-dimensional trap. Seo-ha really hates random brute-force substitution that depends on luck. I have to admit we had an advantage from the start."
"R-right! There's no need to be so down. If I were in your shoes, Ben, I'd have felt the same."
"Hmm, I think I would've done well from the beginning, though?"
Cecilia said this as she popped the rest of her doughnut into her mouth in one go.
Tact wasn't something one could expect from her. Theo shook his head and stepped in to smooth things over.
"Still, a deal's a deal! You can make up for it next quarter, right?"
Heave-ho!
Theo pulled an enormous box out from under the desk.
When they opened it up, the contents were a sight to behold. Crumpled receipts from local cafes, invoices from cutting-edge companies in Europe and Korea, even a makeshift receipt scrawled in crooked handwriting that read 'tteokbokki and gimbap.' Some were stained with tea and coffee, the writing blurred beyond legibility.
Rummage rummage.
"What's all this?"
Official documents from the federal government and the National Science Foundation, security clearance renewal forms, manuals of unknown origin, various bills and overdue notices, and even visa-related paperwork that some unhinged researcher must have tossed in there, all stuffed into this one box.
"I-I'll be counting on you."
Seo-ha peered into the box, his face turning white as he took a step back.
At the same time, Su-jeong and Cecilia averted their gazes guiltily. Theo broke into a wide grin and clapped Ben on the shoulder.
"Whew!"
Ben took a deep breath.
This was actually a blessing.
There was no better opportunity to grasp the lab's situation. Following the flow of money and paperwork would reveal where this lab was headed. Ben took the box with a solemn expression.
"Alright. Let's give it a shot!"
He undid the buttons on his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. Then, settled into the seat he'd been shown, he began to dig through the box in earnest.
But that resolve didn't last long.
The instant his eyes landed on a NASA proposal smeared with tteokbokki sauce, his last thread of composure snapped.
* * *
Before Ben joined, Team APEX Lab had been an absolute mess.
Considering the average level of intellect among the people in this place, it was nothing short of lamentable.
Bzzz-
But now that chaos was being put in order.
The scanner hummed at regular intervals. Like a skilled surgeon excising a tumor with a sharp scalpel, magic was unfolding in his hands.
The first thing addressed was financial opacity.
Countless items were being sorted under the 'Benefits & Welfare' folder. Each receipt that passed through the scanner found its proper place within the system he had built from scratch.
"Wow!"
Seo-ha let out a gasp of admiration.
The lab's expenditures were now laid out in neat pie charts and line graphs, perfectly clear at a glance.
He had analyzed proposals from major institutions and consolidated them all in one place. The tangled mess of federal security renewal documents and visa-related tasks had been integrated into a scheduler he'd created, displaying their progress as bars.
"Hm?"
The scheduler blinked with a red glow.
Only then did Sri realize his visa was on the verge of expiring.
"Ben! There's no marker!"
Su-jeong, who had been organizing equations on the board, said with a pouty face.
Without even raising his head, Ben answered.
"Third drawer on the right of the supply room, next to the blue file. Looking at the history, you've been ordering them once every two months. And only after you'd run completely out, at that. I calculated the threshold based on consumption rate and set up an auto-order macro."
Click.
Theo clicked open the shared folder.
"Oh my God!"
All the equations he'd been photographing over time had been tidied up.
LaTeX code, theorem numbering. Everything fit neatly inside a paper-formatted layout, leaving practically nothing to touch up.
Theo couldn't hide his emotion.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
Having wrapped up the miscellaneous tasks, Ben examined the research log with a satisfied expression.
He had loudly declared he wouldn't attend the meetings, but the theories being discussed in this place were on another level entirely. Each and every one was a hypothesis worthy of being the topic of a major paper.
The people here were dismantling the Riemann Hypothesis down to nearly the molecular level.
"What is it?"
Ben asked, frowning.
For several minutes now, Cecilia had been hovering around him. The look in her eyes was like one watching an admirable, loyal retainer. It put him in a strangely sour mood.
"Mhm, mhm!"
Cecilia kept nodding to herself, then gave a thumbs-up and drifted away.
Ben caught a snippet of what she was murmuring.
"...So there really was a reason we kept a porter in the party."
He shook his head slowly from side to side.
The more one tried to understand them, the more one lost.
Extraordinarily brilliant, yet somehow lacking in some respect. Ben decided to simply accept this fact.
* * *
The cafeteria on the first floor of the research institute.
Ben sat down in a corner with a cup of coffee in hand. He had been working without a moment to spare, and the week had flown by like an arrow. After processing thousands of pages of paperwork, this was a sweet, hard-earned rest.
"Refreshing."
Seo-ha possessed a superhuman intellect.
But in some respects, he was also an extraordinarily scatterbrained man. Knowing that he could fill in the parts where Seo-ha fell short gave Ben a sense of pride.
The miscellaneous work wasn't bad either. In the sense that it transformed chaos into perfect order, this feeling perhaps resembled the thrill of cracking a difficult mathematical problem.
'Don't tell me this work actually suits me?'
It was a sensation different from solving complex equations, something far more primal yet exhilarating.
He shook his head violently to chase the thought away.
"Should I explain it again? You're not mentally challenged, so why can't you understand this?"
"Seriously! I miss one class and it's a nightmare."
A conversation he couldn't ignore drifted over from the next table.
Whoosh.
Ben stood up from his seat and walked over to them. Then, in a serious voice, he said,
"Listen carefully, students. Even if someone's intelligence is a little lower or they're slow in a certain field, that doesn't make them worthless.
So please don't use ugly words like 'low IQ' or 'mentally challenged.'"
The students, who had been half-joking, nodded with bewildered expressions.
"I'm glad you understand."
He gave a smile of utter satisfaction.
*****
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