Translator: Dreamscribe
The laboratory was cold.
The whole place had to be cleared out completely by the end of today. Workers came in and hauled away the hundreds of journal volumes and academic books that had lined the shelves. Where awards had once hung on the wall, only the lonely marks of nails remained.
He sat by the window, gazing at the Munich sky. The rain had stopped, but the clouds still hung thick overhead.
"Professor, the lawyer is here."
The voice of his assistant came from beyond the door, but Felix did not answer.
Only last week, his office had always been overflowing with people. Corporate representatives offering him research funding, reporters requesting interviews, university presidents wanting to hand him a position.
After the scandal broke, scientist that he was, he had tried to analyze where things had gone wrong.
'When did it begin?'
It was almost funny that he couldn't remember the first time.
Was it that day he erased the fourth decimal place? Or much earlier, back in his graduate days, when he wrote a paper by adapting a colleague's idea?
No, the truth was that he had always been a man far removed from honesty. He swallowed a bitter laugh.
The small hands and mouth that had copied homework and lied to his parents as a child had, in the end, reached all the way up to the Riemann Hypothesis, the so-called Holy Grail of humanity.
"Professor?"
The assistant cracked the door open and called to him again.
Felix slowly turned his head. The eyes of the assistant who had once looked up at him with reverence were now filled with a mixture of contempt and pity.
Bzzt.
[Arthur Pendleton]
Felix looked at the caller on his phone, then waved his hand.
"Tell him to wait a moment."
He hesitated briefly, then took the call.
"Felix. How dare you!"
Arthur's voice was full of fury.
"I'm a victim here! I truly had no idea!"
"I know."
"Why on earth did you drag me into this hell? Today they told me to leave Cambridge. After I devoted thirty whole years to that place!"
His agitated breathing came through the receiver.
"...Professor. Now that things have come this far, let's be honest with each other for once. Did you really trust the data I produced one hundred percent?"
In Arthur's silence, he heard his answer.
A brilliant mathematician as he was, he too would have had his own intuition. Had he truly never considered it? Why Yu Seo-ha, the very man who first established the relationship between quantum chaos and the Riemann zeros, had never attempted to prove it the same way?
"...Was that how it was."
Arthur finally spoke after a long while. The anger had drained from his voice, and a deep weariness had filled its place.
"To be honest, I didn't want to know."
Felix laughed with a bitter expression.
"We were both blind. Even I never expected the proof to become a problem this quickly. I suppose we both saw only what we wanted to see."
Wealth and honor had been right there before his eyes.
They had seemed close enough to touch, and so everything else had felt utterly trivial.
"I hope I never have to see you again as long as I live."
Click.
"Tell him to come in."
The lawyer earnestly explained something, but he heard none of it.
His gaze remained fixed outside the window. Light broke briefly through the clouds, then vanished again. And then the sky was dark once more.
Just as his life as a scholar had been.
"I should get going."
He forced himself to his feet and walked unsteadily.
Many students passed through the hallway.
They whispered among themselves and avoided Felix as though he were a plague patient.
A scene in stark contrast to last week.
"Heh, heh, heh."
He suddenly stopped walking and began to laugh.
"Hahahaha!"
The students recoiled in alarm and stepped backward. But Felix laughed on, unbothered. He laughed so hard his stomach began to ache.
'Ah, it's over.'
Perhaps it had been weeping after all.
He had never imagined that everything he had built over decades would collapse so ridiculously.
When the laughter died down, only silence remained.
Felix wiped the corners of his eyes with his sleeve and walked toward the exit as if nothing had happened.
It was raining again.
'Damn it! I left my umbrella behind.'
But there was no going back.
That place was no longer his laboratory.
* * *
Whitman was wiping down the blackboard in the seminar room.
With each stroke of the eraser, the traces left by their forty-two-day war disappeared one by one. Chalk dust piled up softly on the floor.
Knock, knock!
Leonard came in carrying a bottle of wine.
"Drinking from this early in the day?"
"What's the harm? There are no lectures anyway. They say a glass a day is good for the circulation."
Glug.
After filling each glass about a fifth of the way with wine, the two men raised a toast.
Clink.
"You've worked hard."
"So have you."
The two stood side by side, gazing at the empty blackboard.
The campus was filled with an exhilarated mood.
Ever since the Black Nature had been distributed, MIT had been nothing short of a festival. Undergraduates strode across campus in matching T-shirts printed with the number '512' to pay homage to their seniors, and at the school bookstore, posters printed with the cover of Nature were selling like hotcakes.
"It's noisy out there."
Whitman sipped his wine and looked out the window.
Broadcast vans were parked in front of the main gate. CNN, BBC, NHK. Reporters from around the world had come to cover the story.
"There are a lot of interview requests."
Leonard smiled and held up his phone.
A large photo of Whitman and Dean Leonard filled the screen.
[MIT Writes Unprecedented Chapter in the History of Collective Verification in Science.]
[Guardians of Truth: MIT Stands Against Academic Fraud]
"Guardians of truth, is it..."
"Reporters do love coming up with nicknames. Don't you like it?"
"It's so grandiose I hardly know what to do with myself."
Hearing a murmur outside, he looked out to see Hugo and Laura giving an interview with awkward expressions.
"The reporters keep asking where the Dean is. Say just a word to them."
Whitman shook his head.
"We did accomplish something, that much is certain. But it wasn't the truth that we found. If anything, all we did was strip the crown from a false king. The one who deserves the attention is the person who will wear that crown rightfully."
"So you believe the Riemann Hypothesis will be solved."
"I do. Catching a fraud doesn't make a man a hero. A hero needs a feat worthy of the name."
Snow began to fall outside the window.
The students cheered and rushed out onto the lawn. The two professors slowly drained the rest of their wine and watched the scene in silence.
* * *
The year had turned, and winter, too, was now drawing to a close.
The world was still in an uproar over the aftermath of the scandal, but inside the Apex Lab all was quiet.
Scratch scratch.
Seo-ha's chalk glided across the blackboard.
Behind him, Theo stood with his arms folded, glaring at the equations. A year had passed since they had declared their challenge to the Riemann Hypothesis. Four years since Seo-ha had begun his research privately.
In that time, they had endured hundreds of failures. With each one, Seo-ha's notebook had grown thicker. Ben had organized it all into a database.
A chill.
Su-jeong rubbed her own arm.
Goosebumps rose on her skin.
It wasn't because the room was cold. Lately, a strange atmosphere had been flowing through the lab.
Clatter-bang!
Something fell from Sri's desk.
A plastic cup rolled away with a clattering racket. The hand holding Seo-ha's chalk froze in midair. It looked as though his concentration had been broken, or perhaps as though he were thinking something through.
Theo shot Sri a sharp glare.
'He's completely in the zone.'
It had been a while since he'd seen this.
Since last week, Seo-ha's condition had been odd. He'd always been the type to lose himself in his research and tune out everything around him, but now it was on a whole different level.
While eating, or right in the middle of a conversation, he would often suddenly go blank. Yesterday he'd said he was going to take a shower, and twenty minutes later he was standing in front of the blackboard with his head still covered in suds.
'Shh!'
Theo looked at the team members and raised his index finger to his lips.
There had been signs before this too.
Their freely flowing brainstorming sessions had taken on a clear sense of direction.
Su-jeong had felt it as well. The way Seo-ha asked for supporting lemmas had changed. In the past he would set out only the broad outline and leave the rest to them, but lately he had started laying out specific directions.
The same was true for Sri and Cecilia.
The longer the meetings continued, the more they came to know it instinctively. Seo-ha was no longer chasing Riemann's shadow at random.
"Ah... so that's how it is."
Seo-ha stopped his chalk and let the words out like a sigh.
This way, everything was explained.
One by one, the team members crowded around the blackboard. Seo-ha turned his body to face them.
"We've figured out what we need to find."
An Arithmetic Variety, defined over the integers and therefore impossible to express with classical geometry.
There had been a reason no one had ever found it.
Gulp.
"Looking at the blackboard, I think I get it."
"So this is why everyone failed. Because the integers aren't a space."
"It was a realm that the likes of Felix or Arthur could never have dared to enter."
"How on earth did Riemann ever see this?"
The voices of Theo, Su-jeong, Cecilia, and Sri.
Ben's pupils trembled violently. He felt that he, too, ought to say something, but he simply could not make sense of the equations.
"Uh..."
Cecilia looked at Ben with warm eyes.
"It's all right. There isn't a single one of us who could replace you."
He didn't know why, but every time he heard her words, he felt a lump rise in his throat. Imagining ordering her around like a maidservant made him feel a little better.
Theo took the chalk from Seo-ha.
"Ben, we've been searching for the Operator of the Riemann zeta function this whole time."
"Yes. I know. It's the theory even Hilbert tried and failed to find."
Theo grinned.
"Our situation is different. After Seo-ha revealed the relationship with quantum chaos, he went on to catch the flow of the oscillations too. That over there is what we get when we draw it geometrically."
A flower of geometry sketched on one side of the wall.
Ben gulped.
"This set of oscillation values is the Spectrum. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't find it. It clearly exists, which makes it all the stranger. What Seo-ha is saying is that he's grasped a hint of it."
"Th-then..."
"That's right. Once we reveal the Spectrum, the path to the Operator finally opens up."
Ben's eyes widened.
"Ah! This is insane!"
Ben realized what the team was trying to do.
They intended to reverse-engineer the Spectrum.
They would follow the oscillations of the zeta function to reveal where the Spectrum was hidden, then infer the Operator back out from there. His mind went hazy. It was a notion much like hearing the sound of a violin and resolving to build that exact same instrument.
Wood of precisely the same shape and material, strings of exactly the same tension.
"Don't worry. We can do it."
Seo-ha smiled brightly.
Looking at his expression, even Ben felt a groundless confidence well up inside him.
"Oh, that's right!"
Su-jeong clapped her hands together as if she had just remembered.
"There's an email from the IMU (International Mathematical Union)."
Click.
Su-jeong clicked her mouse, then looked at Seo-ha.
"Congratulations, Seo-ha. You've been selected as a candidate for the Fields Prize!"
[Notice of Final Candidate Selection for the Fields Medal at the 20■■ International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM)]
The ICM, which came around every four years. Come to think of it, it was this year.
There had only ever been a single record of someone in their twenties receiving it, let alone a teenager.
His achievements were more than enough, but given the conservative tendencies of the mathematical world, there had been a chance he would be passed over. Still, at the news that Seo-ha had been selected as a candidate without a hitch, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
*****
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