Chapter 13
“Wow~ They even opened a place like this? So cool! The AC is blasting~! Dad, look! They even have free staplers and paper clips here!”
I looked around the shop with sparkling eyes.
“Really? Is this your first time seeing one, A-yeon? There wasn’t a place like this when you were Shin I-jun?”
The place we had come to visit was a 24-hour unmanned print café.
We had come here to print a whopping 125-page paper.
“First time! At least five years ago, when Shin I-jun was alive, there wasn’t a place like this! Dad, don’t you remember? When you and I were in college in my previous life, if we had to submit a report, we’d go to the copy-room guy and ask him to print it for us.”
“Ah, ah~ Yeah, that’s right. Now that I think about it, it’s nostalgic.”
“Oh right, do you remember the time Dad was carrying coffee to the copy room, spilled it by accident, and soaked the keyboard? Back then the copy-room guy got soooo mad, saying, ‘Student! Can’t you see drinks are forbidden here?’”
“Ahem! A-yeon... you know too much about me.”
As soon as I brought up his cringe-worthy past, Dad cleared his throat and covered his face with his hand.
“Heehee. I remember everything about Dad, from your grades to your course history!”
“…?”
“… Huh?”
Our utterly ordinary conversation started making the customers around us look strange.
From a distance, it sounded like a normal father-daughter conversation, but up close it was the bizarre story of a daughter who had gone through college with her father...
Oops!
“Mph-.”
Sensing the odd mood, Dad and I clamped our hands over our mouths and went silent.
‘I never thought we’d run into trouble like this just because we were talking normally at home...!’
Still, even if they felt a little off, they’d probably just think Dad was humoring his daughter’s make-believe play.
They’d never reach the truth that the daughter’s real identity was actually the reincarnation of Dad’s friend.
Reading the room—.
‘Let’s just print it quietly and get out of here...’
We exchanged that kind of look and decided to print in silence.
‘One-sided black-and-white printing is 70 won... so 125 pages comes to 8,750 won.’
Spending this much at a print café made us practically VIP customers, didn’t it?
The manager should come out and treat us to strawberry milk!
Dad expertly pressed the buttons, paid, and the printing began.
Whirr-.
Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle-.
Trying to print 125 pages, the printer got toasty-hot and overheated.
‘Sorry, printer... hang in there a little longer...!’
Pat-pat-.
I petted the printer beside me, cheering it on in my heart.
After topping up the A4 paper when it ran low midway, the paper was finally printed.
I carefully flipped through the freshly printed 125-page paper, still warm like freshly baked bread.
Satisfied-.
I liked everything overall, but what I liked most was the first author’s name, printed prominently on the first page.
1 저자 : A-YEON YU
2 저자 : SEOL-AE HAN
“Heehee.”
Who am I?
A genius with an IQ of 160, a former iPhone owner, and the first author of the paper proving the Riemann hypothesis.
I’m the first author of the paper~ I’m the first author of the paper~
All you pippis who’ve never written a paper, stand at attention!
“Do you want to see it too, Dad?”
I offered him the paper in good faith, but Dad had gone pale and was waving both hands frantically, shaking his head.
“Give me a break, A-yeon. I spent a whole week hunting typos during breaks at work until my eyes practically fell out, and now even looking at letters makes me sick.”
“Moo—. Dad’s such a weakling.”
I pouted, sticking out my lips.
“You’re the amazing one, A-yeon.”
“Hmph. I am pretty amazing!”
But that smug feeling faded again almost immediately.
✒️✒️✒️
“A-yeon, now that the paper’s finished, how are you going to publish it?”
When we got home and I was humming while checking over the paper, Mom casually asked.
“Can’t you just upload it to that paper site you mentioned last time? You said you could post it without a separate review.”
Dad-pippi, who had never written a paper before, asked.
arXiv.
A paper site for uploading papers before any review.
A place where raw paper drafts that haven’t even been peer-reviewed yet get posted.
I shook my head at Dad-pippi’s question.
“Nuh-uh. You can’t just upload it. Even though arXiv is a place where unreviewed papers get posted, it isn’t somewhere just anyone can freely upload. In fields like math and physics, an already registered researcher has to vouch, saying, ‘This person is allowed to upload a paper.’ That’s because there’s an endorsement system.”
“Endorsement?”
“It’s a system where you can only upload if you have a sponsor. That sponsor is called an endorser.”
“What, why is that only for math and physics? Dad’s engineering friends just upload theirs however they want.”
“Math and physics take a long time to verify even the logic, and there are way too many nobodies who just slap together papers in the right format. So they use endorsement from someone in the same field as a filter—someone who can say, ‘This paper at least isn’t nonsense.’ If they didn’t have that, it would’ve become a cyber playground for trolls, right?
And engineering fields do have endorsements too, but they’re pretty loose. There are lots of researchers, so endorsers are easy to find, and trends turn over fast, so there’s a strong ‘just post it first’ vibe. That’s why you can pretty much upload anything.”
But lately, low-quality AI papers have been flooding in by the hundreds every week, so I’m starting to think engineering fields should tighten endorsements too...
Hearing me, Mom tilted her head.
“A-yeon, then all you need is an endorser?”
Shake-shake-.
I shook my head once more at Mom-pippi’s question.
That made it a two-hit do-ri-do-ri combo.
“Nuh-uh. That’s not all. arXiv is a place where scholars around the world upload thousands of papers every day. Even if you succeed in posting it thanks to an endorser, odds are it won’t even hit double-digit views and will get buried right away.”
An endorser only gives the paper a quick once-over and decides whether it’s nonsense or not.
‘This paper is worth reading,’ they can’t promise.
So even if I claimed I proved the Riemann hypothesis, there was a high chance nobody would care.
To put it another way, it’s like claiming on a forum, ‘I solved the Riemann hypothesis,’ and nobody believing you. There are just too many fake geniuses out there.
Dad thought about it and asked.
“But if it’s a paper claiming to have proven one of the seven great unsolved problems, wouldn’t it be worth taking a look? Ah, right! Didn’t a Korean lab also claim last time that they’d developed a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? The whole world paid attention to that even though it wasn’t verified.”
“Ah... LK-99, you mean. That was also a case where a paper on arXiv drew attention by itself. But that one had the huge attention-grabbing factor of a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor, and when people skimmed the paper, it looked kind of plausible, so it went viral online. It was an irregular case where ordinary people paid way more attention than scholars did.”
I was sure my paper would work if it got a lot of attention.
But getting that kind of attention is ultimately just luck.
‘I don’t want the fate of a paper I busted my ass over for two years to depend on nothing but luck!’
So, for the first step toward definitely getting noticed...
I needed what you’d call backing.
“Backing?”
“Yeah. In the end, I needed someone who could solve the endorser issue and recommend to the public that this paper was worth reading. If a well-known professor in academia read it first and publicly said it was good, the whole story would change. And then there’s also...”
“Also?”
“After arXiv, I’d have to submit it to a proper journal, and then it goes through peer review, right? In that process too, whether you have connections in academia matters more than you’d think.”
Dad, who wasn’t very familiar with this side of the field, frowned.
“Isn’t that a little unfair? It should be judged by the paper’s content alone.”
“Ideally it should be, but... reality doesn’t work out that neatly.”
It would be great if academia ran purely on merit, but...
In the end, anywhere people gather is all the same.
In other words, both people and papers need connections to get good evaluations.
No, if anything, communication with colleagues becomes even more important in academia.
If you ignore communication, those devious thieves can steal your accomplishments.
Grigori Perelman, who proved the Poincaré conjecture, one of the seven great unsolved problems alongside the Riemann hypothesis.
That old guy almost had his achievement stolen by some Chinese researcher and took a huge betrayal because he didn’t have enough clout.
The moment I explained that, I suddenly got goosebumps all over.
“Eeeek!”
“A-yeon, what’s wrong?”
“N-nothing... I just suddenly had a scary thought...”
Just imagining my hard-won proof of the Riemann hypothesis being stolen by some weird Chinese professor, like Mr. Perelman, was horrifying.
A weird Chinese professor snatching the applause I was supposed to get...?
Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap!
— Xie xie! Xie xie! Wo ai ni!
And I’d have to watch it from the other side of the TV screen, with a handkerchief clenched in my teeth...?
Kyaaah! I’d rather bite my tongue and die one more time!
‘But if I bite my tongue, it’ll hurt like crazy... no, wait, Mom, Dad, and Arin would be sad, so I shouldn’t die...’
No, no, what are you thinking, Yu A-yeon! Don’t go off track!
Anyway.
To prevent a tragedy like that, I really did need what they call backing, aka connections.
In an academia riddled with schemes and power plays, I was just a powerless five-year-old girl.
A fragile little baby rabbit left alone in the wild.
To survive, I needed a strong ally.
The family meeting fell quiet for a moment.
Mom stared into space for a moment, lost in thought.
“I never had to worry about that when I was a grad student.”
“Really?”
Dad replied.
“When I was under Professor Shin I-jun, he took care of everything whenever I submitted a paper. He’d contact the journal editor directly, step in if there was a problem during peer review, and of course he was the one who handled the endorser. All I had to do was focus on research.”
Mom looked at me and added.
“Back then I thought it was only natural... but it was all possible because the professor had been going out of his way for us.”
“Heh-heh. My past-life self really was pretty powerful, huh!”
Smug~
I put my hands on my hips with a confident look and puffed out my chest proudly.
My past-life self, who had published three top-tier papers, had enough clout to go anywhere in academia and toss out a confident ‘Ahem-!’
Of course, I don’t have any of that now; I’m just a soft little girl.
“So, A-yeon, since you said backing, who are you thinking of asking?”
“The first person that comes to mind is... probably Professor Park Mu-yeol.”
“Professor Park Mu-yeol? The one I know?”
“Yep!”
Professor Park Mu-yeol.
The one who had willingly tried to decipher the awful handwriting in my research notes, only to give up in the end and post it online.