I Got an Omnipotent Brain Chapter 106

Translator: Dreamscribe

Rumors always have a way of getting blown out of proportion.

Within just a few days, most of the students had learned of Team Apex's existence.

"Hey, did you hear? Apparently Yu Seo-ha put together a team. They say he's starting so insanely ambitious project. I heard equipnt's been pouring into the lab nonstop."

"Yeah, I heard. Get in there and you'd never have to worry about a postdoc position, right?"

"I heard Dean Thomas is backing the lab big ti?"

Rumors and truth mixed together, snowballing out of control.

'A team created to solve an unsolvable problem.'

'A team of the best from the math and chanical engineering departnts.'

'Just getting on the roster is enough to change the course of a person's entire life.'

These were the kinds of rumors circulating among the students.

"Shouldn't we apply now if we want to get in? You have to join before there are any results to be a real team mber. Once papers drop and patents get filed, it'll already be too late."

Students began to make their moves.

"Theo, got a minute?"

Theo was heading back to the lab with his coffee when soone stepped in front of him.

A neatly pressed shirt, a smile just a touch too eager.

It was Jas, a classmate from his Stanford days.

"Oh, what's up?"

Theo glanced at his watch and nodded.

"About Team Apex, you're on the team, right?"

"Yeah, though we're barely in the starting phase."

So the rumors were true after all.

Jas looked around and lowered his voice.

"Then could you put in a good word for ?

I had a feeling from the mont I first heard about it. You know what I can do, right? I'm pretty confident when it cos to nonlinear PDEs. If you guys need people...."

He let his words trail off suggestively.

Theo listened to the request with an unfazed expression.

"Sure, I don't mind."

"Really?"

Jas's face lit up instantly.

"Man, thanks so much. They say the only people you can count on are your old classmates, right?"

"Don't ntion it."

Sip.

Theo took a sip of his coffee, then pulled a thin stack of printouts from his bag.

A bundle of equations, roughly ten pages of A4 paper. Red pen annotations were scrawled here and there.

"These are excerpts of the key points from the papers Sri and I have been referencing lately.

See the ones marked with an X? Those are cases we discarded. I want you to figure out why they were thrown out, based on your own reasoning, and write it up.

Uh... let's see, three days?"

"Huh?"

Jas blinked.

"Take longer if you need to. I can wait up to a week.

If you find this interesting, co back. If it doesn't make any sense to you, then you don't need to bother."

Theo gave him a pleasant smile.

"No, I don't an that kind of thing. If you could just talk to the team leader for ...."

"Talk to him and what? Get you in to sweep the floors?"

Jas flinched at the chill in Theo's gaze.

"Good seeing you. I gotta go!"

Theo patted him on the shoulder as if to say hang in there.

"Yeah, thanks. I'll give this a read."

But Jas never ca back to find Theo again.

Similar situations repeated themselves several tis.

One student waved around competition awards; another brought a letter of recomndation from a professor.

And Theo's response to all of them was always the sa.

"This paper presents three different models of energy. Is there a function that commonly minimizes all of them? Summarize it in your own words and bring it to ."

"If you read through this paper, around the midpoint there's a spot where the regularity of the PDE solution breaks down. What signs would you look for to catch that?"

Problems on an entirely different level from ordinary assignnts.

The students' faces went rigid.

Naturally, Theo never saw any of them again.

"Theo, still haven't found anyone suitable?"

Seo-ha was eating a donut while reading a paper.

He had agreed to bringing on new team mbers to lighten the load on Sri and Theo. Theo had taken on the task of running the first round of filtering on applicants.

"Unfortunately, no.

It's not that there aren't talented people out there. The problem is that all the good ones are already committed to sothing."

"That's true, but it also seems like nobody's taking the assignnts you give them seriously. At a point in their lives where they have to decide their career path, they're probably reluctant to invest the ti," Sri said, chewing on his donut.

Swish.

Seo-ha rose from his seat and stood before the board.

Then he began laying out the thoughts that had been swirling in his head.

Scratch scratch.

He wrote out equations at a blistering pace.

'Has he already solved it?'

The scattered fragnts of ideas the team had been discussing were converging into one.

Theo noticed that Seo-ha had entered a state of deep focus again. Taking care not to disturb him, Theo quietly slid open a drawer. It was packed full of chocolate bars. There was still a whole box of donuts left, too.

'We need a new team mber.'

Grind.

Theo clenched his jaw.

He thought of Team Apex as sothing like an F1 racing car.

Seo-ha was the engine. A monster engine beyond imagination, with no limit on its output.

But an F1 machine doesn't run on the engine alone. The fra, the aero package, the tires... all of it has to support the engine's performance.

'I want to see Seo-ha running at full speed....'

As it stood, Team Apex couldn't handle the surplus power of its engine.

'The faster the engine gets, the more the parts around it need to level up too.'

They didn't need just anyone filling a seat.

Low-quality parts wouldn't just fail to help the team; they'd only drag it down.

Theo idly clicked open his inbox.

'Even so, it's still too soon for that.'

He had heard from Seo-ha about Su-jeong.

Seo-ha had said that if she grew, she would beco an extraordinarily gifted mathematician.

'Hurry up and get it figured out, will you? Before we die of overwork.'

It was a problem he himself had failed to solve back in his own undergrad days, but with Seo-ha's endorsent, maybe she could pull it off.

Theo chuckled, rembering the look in Su-jeong's eyes as she glared at him, as if to say just watch .

* * *

Late afternoon. A red sunset settled over the MIT campus.

Seo-ha, who had been wrestling with equations, suddenly stopped.

'Stuck again.'

This had been happening a lot lately.

It seed this problem had no intention of yielding to him easily.

Seo-ha set down his pen and took a quiet breath.

A friend back in Korea ca to mind.

'Han Gyeo-ul.'

At so point, new CDs had stopped arriving.

'Did sothing happen?'

They had never made any formal promise, but Gyeo-ul had been sending him a newly recorded CD with each passing season.

However, a few months ago she had sent a text saying she would be busy for a while, and after that, silence.

Seo-ha idly rolled his pen between his fingers, staring into space.

The desk was littered with the remnants of unfinished ideas. On the board, half-written clues toward a common function, tantalizingly close yet just out of reach.

Tangled thoughts failed to take shape and scattered into nothing.

"This is suffocating."

The words slipped out before he realized it.

He needed to steady himself.

Seo-ha changed into workout clothes and started running across campus.

"Huff, huff!"

He ran for thirty minutes as usual, but his head felt no clearer.

Seo-ha circled the track, lap after lap.

The evening wind cut sharply across his cheeks. He had already run more than enough.

But the tightness in his chest still wouldn't let up.

"Hah, hah-"

His breathing grew ragged and the feeling drained from his toes.

Sowhere in the distance, he thought he could see a vast mountain range of energy.

The equations clinging to it seed to notice him, creeping toward him, latching onto his body.

"Dammit!"

Seo-ha stood in the middle of the track and raked his fingers roughly through his hair.

"Don't do this, Ducky! We've been doing so well!"

Thump, thump, thump!

His heartbeat seed even faster now than when he had been running.

Only then did Seo-ha realize he had been calling on Ducky recklessly these past weeks.

Everything in sight grated on his nerves.

The streetlights lined up all the way to the end of the road.

The gap between the third and fourth was awkwardly wider than the rest.

'Who designed this? Why would they space them like that?'

7, 7, 9, 7, 7.3, 7, 8.1.

Numbers arranged themselves automatically in his head.

It wasn't a sequence. Just a aningless string of digits.

Seo-ha bit his lip.

Was it really okay for the world to disregard mathematics this badly?

'Don't look. It's just noise in my head.'

Seo-ha closed his eyes and started running.

Crash!

But he didn't get far before slamming into a bench.

His knee stung.

Seo-ha lay on the ground and closed his eyes, praying that so form of peace would find him.

Riiiiing-

He didn't want to do anything, yet sohow the ringing phone nagged at him.

Without even opening his eyes, he pulled out his phone and answered.

"Hello."

-It's . Han Gyeo-ul.

"...Hey, it's been a while. Are you done with whatever was keeping you busy?"

-Who knows? More importantly, where do you think I am right now?

"Korea, I'd guess?"

-Nope. I'm at the MIT Lewis Music Library right now.

Click.

The call ended with that.

Seo-ha got to his feet. His knee must have been badly scraped; blood was running down.

Hobble.

Hobble.

His unsteady gait grew faster and faster. Before long, he was running.

Evening. Light spilled out between the buildings.

Groups of students were walking toward him, chatting and laughing.

"Seo-ha?"

Soone recognized him and waved.

But nothing reached Seo-ha's ears.

Building 14.

He went down the stairs and sprinted toward his destination at full speed.

Creak.

He pushed through the door and was t with the papery scent unique to libraries.

It was nearly closing ti, so almost no one was around.

Step, step.

Past the corridor, a hall shaped like a circular do opened up before him.

At its center sat a beautiful grand piano.

Its surface was black and glossy, as though it had absorbed every bit of light in the library.

Gyeo-ul was sitting there.

Ding.

Her fingers pressed a key lightly.

Gyeo-ul's tone rang through the hall.

That clear, crystalline sound moved Seo-ha so deeply that he stopped in his tracks without realizing it.

Gyeo-ul straightened her back as if she were facing an audience of tens of thousands, then quietly closed her eyes.

And, as though she had made up her mind, she began to play.

Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1. (syoutube/watch?v=S-Xm7s9eGxU)

Her hands moved with the fluid grace of flowing water.

Ding, da-ding-

A performance that seed to gently wrap around Seo-ha, embracing him.

His heartbeat began to follow the rhythm of her playing.

Thump, thump.

'It's warm.'

It was as if her body heat were being transmitted through the music.

Her playing was smoothing out, one by one, the creases that had been buried deep inside him.

A sound that was hers alone, found nowhere else in the world.

Gently,

ever so quietly,

the delicate arpeggios reached into the depths of Seo-ha's innermost self.

As the performance reached its climax, Seo-ha unconsciously took a step closer.

When the final note spread long through the hall and faded away, Gyeo-ul slowly opened her eyes.

Seo-ha could not contain the emotions welling up inside him.

He took one more step forward and stood before her.

"I think I really need you. Without you, I don't have the confidence to keep going."

Gyeo-ul flinched, a startled look crossing her face.

But she quickly realized that sothing was seriously wrong with Seo-ha.

"You an that literally, don't you? You can't fool anymore, you idiot!"

It had been a full year since the two of them had last t.