Translator: Dreamscribe
Knock knock!
"My lady, it's time to wake up!"
At the voice coming from outside the door, Cecilia forced her eyes open.
A clear, bright morning, quite unlike the gloomy weather of Oxford. She pulled the silk blanket up over her head and mumbled.
"Just a little longer."
"I know you were up late researching last night, but you have a full schedule today."
Cecilia kicked her legs under the blanket in a small show of rebellion.
But there was no mercy in Emma's actions.
Whoosh.
She strode over and drew back the curtains.
Sharp sunlight came pouring into the bedroom. As if blinded, Cecilia let out a shriek and burrowed deeper under the blanket.
"Conquering the morning is what makes a great head of the household. Now, up you get."
As if this had been repeated countless times, Emma stripped the blanket away with a practiced motion. Cecilia's slender form was laid bare.
Emma took both her hands and pulled, raising her upper body as though handling a precious doll. Cecilia flopped about like a boneless mollusk and buried her face in Emma's shoulder.
"You'll feel better once you soak in the tub."
She nodded with half-closed eyes and let Emma lead her toward the bathroom.
Only after sinking into the warm, rose-scented bath did Cecilia barely recover her dignity as a countess. After Emma's meticulous hands finished grooming her, she stepped into the dining room.
"Good morning, my lady."
Morris greeted her, courteously pulling out her chair.
On the table sat eggs Benedict with smoked salmon and freshly baked chocolate brioche. Cecilia elegantly took up her fork and knife and began to eat.
"Morris, Boston mornings are far too violent. In Oxford, the light was never this strong even with the curtains drawn."
"How fortunate. It will only make my lady's beauty and intellect shine all the brighter."
Trickle.
Morris poured Darjeeling into her teacup and then took out his notebook.
"This morning, an urgent letter arrived from the Prime Minister's Office. It's a request for the Ashley family to play a central role in the newly launching 'Pan-European Science Belt'. In effect, it appears to be pressure to take part in the struggle for supremacy between Europe and America."
Cecilia bit off a piece of brioche and let out a dry laugh.
"They've all lost their minds over the dream that the Riemann Hypothesis will be solved. To think even the British government is being played by that disgraceful fraud of Felix's. What they want is the symbolic value our family holds. The moment I join, that proof gains far greater authority."
"Proposals of marriage have arrived from both the Duke of Somerset's house and the Marquess of Hastings's house. With my lady's stay in Boston dragging on, the elders of the family seem to be growing concerned."
She set down her knife and accepted the envelopes with a cold gaze.
A wealthy young countess, and on top of that one carrying the symbolic weight of being a direct descendant of Ada Lovelace, she would be a golden goose no figure in European politics or business could afford to let slip away.
"How tiresome. They still haven't given up?"
The proposals they had extended were a far cry from romance. Blatant business prospectuses aimed at merging the family's assets and intellectual legacy.
It was part of the reason she had crossed all the way to Boston, fleeing England as if escaping. She had no wish to live within that suffocating atmosphere.
"It seems they're truly taken with you, my lady."
"What a joke. If they're that serious, tell them to hand over their own houses on a silver platter. Then I might consider it. Do you know the best thing about coming to America? I don't have to run into those faces on the street."
Cecilia downed the rest of her tea in one go and rose from her seat.
"I'm going to school."
The Rolls-Royce glided smoothly out of the estate.
She gazed out the window, lost in thought.
She couldn't stand stupid men. The Ashley family had produced geniuses for generations.
'Is it in the blood?'
Unless someone possessed a breathtakingly beautiful intellect, she simply couldn't feel any attraction to them.
In that sense, Apex Lab had been the perfect refuge. Being a facility of international renown, it not only let her slip free of their snares but also let her make wonderful friends.
Seo-ha especially.
He didn't spare so much as a glance for her title or her vast fortune. The only thing he coveted was her own brilliant intellect.
Whenever she was solving equations alongside him, she felt alive not as a countess but as a single mathematician. Only after coming to Boston had she discovered for the first time what a thrilling temptation intellectual resonance could be.
"Hahaha!"
She clutched her stomach and laughed as if she found it utterly hilarious. Morris glanced at her quizzically in the rearview mirror.
If the British government meant to use her as a political tool, she intended to answer them gladly, in the most Ashley-like manner possible.
With the most perfect and beautiful proof, one that couldn't even be compared to those tattered rags.
What expressions would they wear then? Just imagining it was exhilarating.
"Oh?"
A familiar silhouette appeared in the distance.
Cutting through the biting autumn wind, Seo-ha was running. She had seen him riding his bicycle a few times, but today, perhaps because the weather had turned cold, he was jogging along briskly with his hood pulled up.
"Morris, stop the car."
"My lady, this is not a stopping zone."
"I don't care, stop. Now!"
At Cecilia's firm command, the car smoothly slowed and came to a halt beside Seo-ha.
Whirr-
The rear window rolled down. Cold air rushed into the car, but she paid it no mind and spoke with an elegant gesture.
"Why, Seo-ha? Fancy seeing you in a place like this?"
Breathless from running, Seo-ha stopped walking and steadied his breathing.
"Cecilia? You're out earlier than usual today."
"The Boston sunlight was so lovely that my eyes opened all on their own at dawn. But where's your bicycle?"
"The chain's in bad shape. I was jogging in for the exercise."
"In this weather? If you catch a cold like that, it'll be a disaster. Hurry, get in!"
When Cecilia patted the seat beside her invitingly, Seo-ha climbed into the car with a look that said he had no choice.
The soft leather seat and the warmth wrapped around Seo-ha's body.
Whirrrrr-
The car began to move again.
"The road's a bit congested. I'll take a different route today."
Morris asked for her understanding in a courteous tone.
'This counts as congested?'
Seo-ha tilted his head, but the car had already turned and entered the coastal road.
"Wow... what a view."
The sight of the morning sun shattering across the water and sparkling like jewels was beautiful.
Morris eased off the speed a little.
Cecilia sat with her chin haughtily propped on her hand, gazing out the window, but she couldn't quite hide the small smile playing at the corner of her lips.
* * *
Mornings on the MIT campus were always bustling.
But once one passed Killian Court and drew near the building where Apex Lab was located, anyone's footsteps would grow cautious.
"Hey! Look at that! That's them, right?"
One student jabbed his friend in the side.
A teal Rolls-Royce, gleaming without a speck of dust, slid to a stop on the campus road. When Morris opened the door with crisp, precise movements, out stepped a woman of an elegant bearing one might only see in films.
"This is insane. It's a real countess. They say her family's one of the most prominent in England."
And one man climbing out alongside her in an awkward posture. The eyes of the watching students mingled envy with jealousy.
As if the surrounding stares meant nothing to her, Cecilia reached out and straightened Seo-ha's twisted hood.
"That's Yu Seo-ha, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
He answered with a dazed expression.
The object of admiration for math students across America, no, across the whole world. A sigh-laced gasp escaped from among the students.
"Let's study hard. My goal, for starters, is to get one paper into Science."
"Forget it. I hear it's hard enough just to land a single interview. Get in there and your life would change, wouldn't it?"
Ben, on his way to work, glanced at them as he passed.
'It's not as glorious a workplace as you all think.'
Today was the day of the regular meeting.
People gathered one by one, and before long the meeting began.
By now the team had drawn considerably close to the Riemann Hypothesis. He didn't quite understand it, but in Cecilia's way of putting it, it was now time for the Four Heavenly Kings to show up.
"The Zeta Function is faster to understand not as an equation but as a line the universe has folded in order to arrange the prime numbers."
At Seo-ha's explanation, Su-jeong nodded.
"I've been thinking about it the whole time, and I think it'd be good to try extending the Selberg Trace Formula into Noncommutative Geometry. Because the quantum irreversibility that arises when a particle moves on the surface of the manifold we drew might just be synchronized with the primes."
Ben caught his breath without realizing it.
He had secretly believed that, in quantum physics theory at least, he would be peerless in this lab. And among them, Su-jeong was a classical number theorist, so he had been sure he could easily overtake her once things moved into applications.
'She studied this in the meantime?'
She clearly hadn't known quantum theory well. Neither had the other team members.
But with how much they studied, each person's progress was plain to see within the span of just a few months. For him, even keeping up with the content of the meeting was never an easy task.
"Analytic continuity is going to matter, then. The Zeta Function is a dynamic flow with infinite driving force."
Theo transformed the Hardy-Littlewood Approximate Functional Equation to fit the geometric framework and filled the blackboard.
Seo-ha drew the blueprints and the team members laid the bricks. And Theo was like an inspector testing whether the building could bear the load.
'So then... wh-what about me?'
Once the direction was clearly set, the proof began to take shape.
Seo-ha and Cecilia were discussing the geometric model. Sri would gather it all up, render it into equations, and then build a simulation model.
'It's not such an easy workplace.'
If one's ability couldn't keep up, it was hell itself. Who could ever understand this kind of suffering?
Ben quietly opened his own notebook. And then he tore out, with a loud rip, the 'Apex Lab Intelligence Ranking Chart' he had written on his very first day at the lab.
"Hm?"
He looked up to find everyone watching him.
"This is all thanks to Ben. Ever since Ben came, I think the lab's efficiency has doubled."
At Seo-ha's words, everyone nodded fervently.
"You saved us, really. We can finally do research that actually feels like research."
"The lab environment's gotten more pleasant too."
"Right. Thanks to the database Ben organized, the time we spend hunting for references has been cut in half."
Ben wore a bewildered expression.
The students outside who envied him could never possibly know. This place was absurd. A group where the world's greatest geniuses gathered to challenge a problem no one in history had ever overcome.
The one they trusted, relied on, and willingly entrusted their backs to.
'Is that me?'
"Ahem!"
The corners of Ben's mouth turned up.
He placed his hands back on the keyboard. He was hard at work writing a macro when he suddenly felt an unpleasant gaze.
Looking to the side, he found Cecilia watching him as if studying him. She rummaged through a drawer and pulled something out.
"Eat this. And if anything ever upsets you, tell me anytime."
A snack she had brought from the estate, a luxurious chocolate adorned with gold leaf. She smiled as if satisfied, then waved her hand and drifted away.
And then came a low voice.
"I have to be careful. The Porter class has... as its passive, so I have to build up affinity by treating him well... and if possible, get a grip on his weaknesses in advance..."
She was still a person he couldn't understand, but the moment he put the chocolate she'd given him into his mouth, his eyes flew open. The supreme sweetness melting on the tip of his tongue and the cacao flavor spreading faintly. It was a taste on a different level entirely from the mass-produced stuff he'd been buying at the supermarket until now.
The team members, having finished the meeting, were each gathering up what they needed to research.
While tidying his desk, Seo-ha picked up the trash bin beside him.
Ben, mid-bite into his chocolate, sprang up from his seat. He trudged over and snatched the bin out of Seo-ha's hands.
"I'll handle this."
Even disposing of the trash was no simple matter in this place.
"N-no. It's fine. It's the stuff I threw away!"
When Seo-ha reached out to take it back, Ben firmly shook his head.
'You all just look ahead and keep running. I'll clear away all the bothersome things.'
This wasn't giving up.
If he could come to pull his own weight in this place, then, at that point.
*****
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