Translator: Dreamscribe
"Hey! That person who just went in, isn't that last year's New Horizon Prize winner?"
"There are seniors who got the Schrödinger Scholarship and the Marie Curie Fellowship in there too. This is insane. Did they really issue some kind of Total Mobilization order?"
The department's famous big names wandered the hallway with deathly looks on their faces.
"They're not letting us in?"
"They said volunteers are fine, though? Brewing coffee and taking out the trash, we can at least manage that much."
Watching the seniors' hollow eyes, the overflowing pizza boxes, and the boards crammed with savage equations, the undergraduates licked their lips.
This was probably a massive event that would never come around again in their lifetimes.
The classmate beside him nodded. He too had been a prodigy in his own right, hailed as a child genius before entering MIT, but in this enormous affair there was nothing he could do.
"I snuck in yesterday and took a look at the board. It seemed to be dealing with L-functions, but I gave up partway through reading it."
"Hah. Yeah. It stings a little to feel left out, but really, what could we even do?"
Even so, among the undergraduates the yearning to take part in this war spread like wildfire. They volunteered to clear away trash and ferried coffee and donuts without pause.
Hugo, the math department postdoc who had won the New Horizon Prize, looked around and said,
"Listen up, math department. If we lose to the physics kids, starting tomorrow you'll be doing that work too. The Riemann Hypothesis is our home turf, you know."
Laura, the Marie Curie Fellowship scholar listening beside him, snorted with laughter.
"Interesting. Then shall we have the math department wait on us a little? Come on, physics! Let's pick up the pace."
At Laura's provocation, Hugo's brow twitched.
"Hmph! And this from people who can't even filter out a single bit of noise and keep throwing operator errors."
"What was that? You're the ones using statistical models whose ergodicity hasn't even been properly verified. Do you even properly understand the process of substituting the Riemann zeta zeros with a physical spectrum?"
"Are you stupid? That theory was made by Seo-ha, from our department."
"In our department's quantum lab, you mean. Physics contributed plenty to that paper!"
At the two of them trading savage jokes, the master's and doctoral students flinched. The undergraduates carefully collected the pizza crusts and paper cups that had fallen at their feet.
Whitman and Leonard had split Felix and Arthur's paper into twenty modules and distributed them to each lab. And the most suspect portions were handed to Hugo and Laura, the aces of their respective departments. On the large screen set up at the center of the conference room, the collaboration tool ran in real time.
"Ugh, this is no joke. How long do we have to keep doing this?"
"I got dragged out in the middle of writing my own paper."
"Watch your mouths, you lot! The dean is smiling right over there. I can see it. That benevolent smile that says, 'Skip out and you can kiss your degree goodbye'."
At Hugo's warning, everyone glanced around uneasily and returned to their seats.
'Strange.'
One week, two weeks. Time passed.
It had been a project they were initially forced into against their will, but the further the verification progressed, the more a sense of wrongness crept into the equations.
For days now, Hugo had been glaring at the modular transformation formula written on the blackboard. Algebraically, there clearly seemed to be no flaw whatsoever. Every term was closed, and the variables too were perfectly controlled.
"It's too perfect, isn't it? Unsettlingly so."
Laura, too, tore at her hair as she watched the results of her own simulation match Felix's predicted values like two peas in a pod.
"Hugo, if there's an error here, it doesn't seem like it'd be a data problem."
"But it's certain there is a problem. If it's not the data, there's only one possible answer. Probably the coordinate system...."
"Fun, isn't it. You felt it too? The deeper I dig, the more it reeks. Doesn't this seem like something huge?"
Laura stuck out her tongue and licked her lips.
In her mind rose an image of passing judgment on the heretics who had built a tower of lies. The repercussions would be enormous, not just in academia but in society at large. Imagining her own name engraved at the forefront of it sent a thrill through her. The heretics would be executed. And the one preparing the guillotine to take their heads, that would be none other than herself!
Hugo and Laura's eyes gleamed with greed.
"Let's report it first."
"Of course."
The two deans' gazes sank cold as they read the report the pair submitted.
"A Topological Mirage, hm...."
"This is a tricky part to verify. Even cross-checking hundreds of thousands at once, it won't be easy to pin down."
In mathematics too, there exist expressions that satisfy every algebraic condition yet cannot actually exist.
"There's a strong chance it's a structure that's perfect locally but doesn't hold globally."
"Hm.... A Penrose Triangle."
A figure devised by Roger Penrose, the British mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate in physics.
Examine each line one by one and there's no problem, but take the whole and it has a geometrically impossible structure. As though their opinions had aligned, the two looked at each other and nodded with grim expressions.
Whitman looked at Hugo and Laura and asked,
"Do you two know what the most terrifying verification in modern mathematics and physics is?"
"Sorry?"
"Uh.... um. Isn't verification terrifying to begin with?"
He wore a satisfied expression.
"It's exhaustive census and cross-validation."
The two of them went pale.
"D-don't tell me!"
"You're joking, right?"
"Once you know where to dig, the rest is simple. From here on we dismantle the paper's coordinate system down to the atomic level. We re-verify every single equation, transformation, and assumption independently. Whether there were any missing conditions or implicit premises, whether the choice of coordinate system was justified."
Laura cautiously raised her hand.
"Dean, wouldn't doing that take at least several months?"
Right now every researcher had set aside their own work to come and help. But this state of affairs couldn't be maintained forever.
It was common sense that a wartime Total Mobilization should be brought to a swift end.
"Don't underestimate MIT."
Whitman's eyes flashed sharply.
"Several months? That's only if a handful of people fight it out in lonely isolation. But aren't a great many talents gathered here right now? From this point on, I'm switching to a war of annihilation."
It was a large-scale mission with few precedents in the history of MIT, no, perhaps in the history of universities themselves.
Hundreds of distinguished master's, doctoral students, and postdocs were thrown in to verify a single page of the paper.
"Asymptotic Behavior, the Analytic Continuation in the neighborhood of singularities. We dig relentlessly into everything Felix waved off as self-evident."
"Laura, you examine the correspondence relations of the quantum energy levels."
It wasn't just manpower; all of MIT's computational resources were mobilized along with them.
Every workstation that could be deployed, and on top of that the supercomputer, The Core, every bit of computing power charged toward a single target. Watching this, the undergraduates were all left dumbfounded.
Gulp.
'Something incredible seems about to happen.'
'Could it be that I'm standing at a historic moment?'
The postdocs ran roughly up and down the hallways.
Even when night fell, the building's lights did not go out. With the deans not heading home, no one could go home either.
'You dare browbeat us with data? Felix, Arthur. If you truly solved the Riemann Hypothesis, then you'll have to withstand this much verification.'
"Dean, Section 14 has passed. Its algebraic accuracy is perfect as well."
"The numerical analysis results match the paper's predictions to twelve decimal places."
Each time a report came in, a sigh of disappointment escaped the researchers.
Whitman clenched his teeth. Had it not been for Seo-ha and Elijah's assurances, he might have given up around here. But once the answer was known, all that was left was to press forward with grit.
"Keep going. Don't leave a single gap, comb through it all."
There was no waver in his voice.
It was exactly the forty-second day since the Total Mobilization had been declared.
The night had grown deep, but the buildings of the two departments still gave off light like a lighthouse in the darkness.
That was when it happened.
"Huh?"
In the corner, Hugo, who had gone seventy-two hours without sleep glaring at a sheet, shot up from his seat.
Crash.
The chair toppled over with a clatter, but no one paid it any mind.
"I-I found it."
Hugo's voice trembled.
In that instant the conference room fell dead silent. Whitman and Leonard approached him as if drawn by a magnet.
"Where is it?"
With a trembling hand, Hugo pointed at the equation on the screen.
It was the part dealing with the irreversibility of the operator, one of the paper's most fundamental premises.
"Look at the mapping process going from the T-plane to the S-plane here. Felix assumed this transformation behaves the same way at every level. Algebraically there's no problem at all, but...."
Hugo looked at Laura.
Quick on the uptake, she pounded the keyboard like mad and expanded the scale of the simulation down to the Planck level.
"Very subtly... it's twisted."
The geometric structure that appeared on the screen rippled like a jellyfish and then slowly began to contort.
Laura clamped a hand over her mouth, feeling as if she might scream.
"Arthur and Felix hid a non-Euclidean gap in a very cunning way. Below a certain threshold, the topology of the equation tears apart. It's a tiny error, but even this is enough to collapse the theoretical consistency they claim."
Silence fell.
"...."
"...."
A single point of error.
In that moment Laura felt as if she could understand Felix.
What if MIT hadn't thrown in all its human and material resources and charged at this? In all likelihood it would have been accepted as established theory. And it wouldn't have been broken for decades.
Whitman wore a sorrowful expression.
The moment he was convinced he had proven the Riemann Hypothesis, he had discovered an extremely small impurity. Cover up just this one thing, and it was all but certain he would leave his name in human history.
Felix could not overcome this fleeting temptation. And the moment he compromised, the scholar in him died.
"Hugo, Laura!"
At Whitman's call, the two of them stiffened their shoulders.
"What happens if we extend this error globally?"
Laura swiftly entered the figures and pressed the Enter key.
Clack-clack-clack!
In that instant the splendid graph floating on the screen shattered as though a glass were breaking. All that remained was a pile of random data with no order to it whatsoever.
"It's over."
Leonard murmured in a low voice.
It was the moment the forty-two days of a hellish march came to an end. Some wiped away tears, and some cheered in the thrill of victory.
"Yes!"
"We did it! We actually did it!"
"Hah, damn it. What a relief, seriously."
Hugo smiled with hollow eyes and said,
"We won, Dean."
Eyes closed, Whitman shook his head.
"No, the truth won."
Outside the window, dawn began to break.
Hugo and Laura shambled out into the hallway like zombies. Forget a shower, they hadn't even changed clothes in days and felt grimy. But their faces glistened with elation, like those of holy knights who had brought judgment down upon wicked heathens.
"Laura, that effect of the graph shattering earlier was killer. Ugh, the sheer satisfaction was just...."
"Don't talk to me. Half my brain cells feel like they've died. The second I get back I'm collapsing into bed and sleeping for a solid thirty hours."
Mid-conversation, Hugo tilted his head and looked toward the corner.
Someone was fidgeting restlessly. They started to come this way, then backed off again, then tore at their hair and changed direction once more.
The two of them smiled and walked over to him.
"Seo-ha! What are you doing here?"
His shoulders flinched, and he slowly turned his body to face the two of them.
"I was wondering if there might be anything I could help with."
Seo-ha's eyes wavered, unable to find their footing.
He found it hard to face the researchers' wretched state. They had abandoned even their own research to come here. It seemed the official order had come down because of what he'd said to the dean, and that left him uneasy.
"Seo-ha, do you happen to remember me?"
"Yes. You used to be in the quantum lab."
Laura's face lit up brightly.
"I'm grateful to you. Thanks to you, I got a wonderful opportunity. And we don't need to worry. We finally found the counterexample."
Seo-ha's eyes sparkled.
"Really?"
"Yeah. But you know what...."
"Yes."
Laura shuddered as if revolted.
"If you ever feel like you owe us even the tiniest bit, then pay it back by solving the Riemann Hypothesis. That thing was a truly preposterous monster. We only dug into a fragment of it for a moment, and...."
She swallowed hard.
"...it was terrifying. What we saw was a failed proof. At the same time, it was the wreckage of possibility, torn to the most miserable shreds. The Riemann Hypothesis is a demon. I just couldn't bring myself to believe humanity could ever solve it."
Hugo added a word of agreement.
"Ahh, I think I know that feeling too. The demon of Riemann gobbled Felix and Arthur right up. It was refreshing, but also a little painful."
Seo-ha's eyes went round, and then his expression changed and he smiled brightly.
"Don't worry about that. I'll be sure to strike it down."
His smile looked excessively pure. The conviction dwelling within it was eerie instead, and a chill ran down the spines of the two of them.
*****
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