I Got an Omnipotent Brain Chapter 118

Translator: Dreamscribe

On the plane back to New York.

The sky outside the window was pitch black. But John's mind had never been clearer.

The dawn roads of the Bronx, the bus stops of Queens, the George Washington Bridge with its endless lines of cars.

The commute from the city center to the outskirts had always been like this.

The price paid at the end of those lines was ti. The thing he never wanted to lose, yet had always been robbed of.

John reflected on the day's events.

"Do you really think he can pull it off?"

The question lacked a clear subject or object, but Jake understood it perfectly.

"There's sothing I noticed during my ti stationed at MIT. There's a practice that's taken for granted in that world, though it's hard for people like us to grasp.

When Seo-ha makes a judgnt, that's the end of it. Nobody asks, 'Is it possible?' The conversation imdiately shifts to, 'How do we do it?' I never once saw anyone challenge his conclusions."

"Why do you think that is?"

"It must be trust built through repeated results. The fact that he's never once been wrong silences everyone else."

"Hmm...."

John gazed out the window in silence.

He had thrown himself into this boldly enough, but there was no shortage of concerns weighing on him.

"Once this starts, there's no turning back.

It's practically political suicide. If it fails, my career is over that very day, and even if it succeeds, the rest of my political life won't exactly be smooth sailing. Billions of dollars in public funds, citizens' data, and the enormous social costs that will co along the way."

"Are you thinking of pulling out?"

"I won't pretend the thought hasn't crossed my mind. But you know, Jake."

"Yes."

John turned his head and looked Jake straight in the eyes.

"As mayor, I can't help but feel that leaving this city the way it is would be too cruel a decision. This city runs on a structure that sacrifices low-inco residents to maintain its glamour.

Soone has to break this vicious cycle. Of course, I can't fix everything. But I believe we owe the citizens at least a small space to breathe.

And...."

A warm smile settled on John's lips.

"Didn't you say it yourself? That Seo-ha can make it happen.

If it's clearly going to work, all that's left is the resolve to act. If I shy away from sothing like this, what could I ever hope to accomplish as a politician?"

Jake thought for a mont, then pulled out his laptop and opened it.

"We'll need to craft our strategy carefully."

"Obviously. The key is money. If we try to rely on the DOT's ager budget, this project won't even get off the ground."

"Then where do you plan to pull the money from?"

John grinned, teeth flashing white.

"There's a perfect source, isn't there? A departnt that eats up twenty percent of the budget every year."

Jake's jaw dropped.

"Y-you don't an...!"

The bottomless money pit. The place where no matter how much money was poured in, it never seed to show, yet spending was unavoidable.

"We need to refra this.

From now on, this isn't a transportation policy. It's 'Ti Welfare'."

"Can that convince the city council?"

John shook his head.

"The council isn't the audience we need to convince.

Do you know how much ti New Yorkers spend commuting each day? It's long past the point of re inconvenience.

If giving that ti back to the citizens isn't welfare, then what is?"

Jake's mind started racing.

"I think it could work. We can build a strong enough argunt to win any debate."

The two continued talking for a long while after that.

Concrete figures, anticipated attacks, and the counter-argunts to et them were thodically laid out.

"This should do. Get so rest."

The cabin lights dimd, and the passengers drifted off to sleep one by one.

John dread of his childhood for the first ti in a very long while.

His mother, who had passed away without ever seeing a doctor because she had no health insurance, was waving at him, her face bright with joy at seeing her son.

When he woke, John quietly wiped his damp eyes with the back of his hand.

"Mom, that's sothing I still can't do. But I'll try, one thing at a ti, starting with what I can."

* * *

New York had always been a city accustod to change.

The place where trends shifted faster than anywhere else in the world. News broke in real ti and new stories poured in constantly, but most of them evaporated before the day was over.

This ti, however, was different.

During the morning rush, the sa headline kept appearing on subway screens and bus stop displays.

[New York City Officially Announces 'Ti Welfare' Initiative]

John's face appeared in full on the massive screens of Tis Square.

He was holding a press conference in front of City Hall.

"Since I introduced the concept of Ti Welfare, opinions have poured in from all sides.

I know. This was not a familiar term for you. When we think of welfare, we usually think of money or programs."

John looked around at the reporters and the crowd.

"I've heard it on various broadcasts: that it's unrealistic, that I'm just dressing up a traffic issue as welfare, and even that I might have gone senile."

Hahaha!

Everyone burst out laughing at a joke from John, who was usually so serious.

"What I'm offering you is not money, nor a free al. Today, I want to talk about sothing far more valuable and precious than either of those things."

John paused briefly.

"Everyone, did you read your children a bedti story last night?

How long has it been since your family sat down together for dinner? What about leisure, like exercise or gas? Have you gotten enough rest to recover from the exhaustion of work? You want to change jobs, but do you have the ti to learn a language or a new skill?"

Citizens who had been hurrying through Tis Square began to stop, one by one, and look up at the screens.

John stared directly into the cara and spoke.

"We pay for all of these things with a single currency. The one thing everyone possesses in equal asure: ti."

"But today's New York consus this most equal of resources in the most unequal of ways. So sit helplessly in traffic, watching their ti get chipped away, while others ride above it all, enjoying efficiency.

The 'Ti Welfare' I'm advocating is a declaration that we will return the precious resource that has been stolen from your lives!"

His speech was less a rehearsed piece of rhetoric than a cry that had been pressed down and held in for twenty years.

Throughout Tis Square, people could be seen nodding their heads.

Office workers in their suits on the way ho, young people who had been staring at their phones, even the street sweepers. John was a politician who understood the struggles of ordinary people better than anyone.

'I want to spend more ti with my kids....'

'When was the last ti I actually talked to my family?'

'It's been years since I've seen my friends.'

Everyone listening to his speech was thinking the sa thing.

Clap, clap, clap!

Applause spread through the murmur of the crowd.

And at last, it swelled into a thunderous chant calling John's na.

* * *

Several weeks passed.

Project Oracle, as City Hall had begun calling it, had still not officially launched.

However, John's creative campaign was winning explosive support from New Yorkers, and it was widely predicted that council approval would co before long.

Seo-ha was attending school as usual.

He went to classes in the morning and, as always, t Theo and Sri for lunch.

"Still no luck with recruitnt?"

Seo-ha asked, looking up at the two of them while eating his pasta.

"It's in progress. We've actually gotten way more applications than expected."

"Really?"

Seo-ha's face had been showing up in the news almost daily lately.

[Mayor John's Big Gamble: The Young Mind Behind It All]

[Silicon Valley Takes Notice: Could Project Oracle Expand to the Private Sector?]

"But I wouldn't get my hopes up. Sri's been giving the screening tests lately, and sohow his reputation is even worse than mine was."

"Cough, cough!"

Sri, who had been eating lamb curry, hastily grabbed his water glass.

"I'm being unfairly accused here!

I just had casual conversations about topics we commonly work with, that's all!"

Theo shook his head with a smirk.

"I'm telling you, he's pickier than I am. But I get it. We need people who can contribute right away.

What happens if we hire soone average? It could take them years just to catch up on everything the team has already laid out. And of course, once Oracle goes fully operational, it'll only get harder."

"Haah."

Sri let out a sigh.

"I've been looking on LOGIA too lately, but there's barely anyone who stands out."

"Oh? You're a LOGIA user too, Sri?"

Seo-ha looked at him with genuine surprise.

"After the update, the ssenger and community features got a lot stronger, so it's great for networking with other mathematicians. Before, it was just simple chats, but now people leave comnts on problems and those turn into whole discussion threads.

I've heard that lately, people are even setting up private threads to exchange proof sketches and ideas."

Theo nodded.

"Yeah. It's basically half social dia at this point.

A massive forum for mathematicians? Though ninety percent of it is show-off kids."

"What's your ranking, Sri?"

Seo-ha asked the sensitive question as casually as anything.

Sri hesitated for a mont, then answered in a small voice.

"...Fifth."

LOGIA was currently under Seo-ha's unchallenged reign.

Even if he never logged in again for the rest of his life, his first-place spot was guaranteed. So had even started saying he should be inducted into a hall of fa and removed from the rankings entirely.

Below him, Theo held the second-place position for an extended period with a score close to one thousand points.

"Hahaha!"

Theo let out a hearty laugh.

"For soone who's not even a math major, that's not bad at all. And I know both the guys in third and fourth."

Seo-ha tilted his head.

"What kind of people are they?"

"One's a Caltech master's student, forr IMO first place from a few years back. The other is a guy in Elijah Cronen's lab at Princeton."

Sri stuck out his lower lip in a pout.

"Co on, they're both monster-level geniuses!"

"Don't worry about it. Neither of them would ever join our team anyway."

Between all the work he had been juggling, Seo-ha had completely forgotten LOGIA even existed.

"Oh! The inactivity penalty expires today."

Theo hurriedly pulled his laptop out of his bag.

Tap-tap-tap.

"Huh?"

His hands froze over the keyboard. Then he leaned his face closer to the screen.

"You're not fifth, Sri."

Sri flinched and lurched forward.

"What?"

"Did I move up?"

Theo said nothing, simply turning the laptop screen toward the other two.

[1st : Yu Seo-ha / SSS / MIT / KR / 3243.9]

[2nd : Theodore Langford / S / MIT / US / 999.7]

[3rd : Julian Lambert / S / Caltech / FR / 997.1]

[4th : Lim Su-jeong / S / MIT / KR / 996.9]

[5th : Daniel Brown / S / Princeton / US / 996.5]

[6th : Srinivasa Krishnan / S / MIT / IN / 995.8]

.

"Aaagh! I got bumped down!"

The contrast between the two faces was striking. Sri clutched his head in despair, while Theo wore the expression of soone who had just spotted sothing interesting.

And Seo-ha's eyes were fixed not on the rankings or the scores, but on Su-jeong's affiliation.