Chapter 66
“Whew, I'm stuffed. Your cooking really is the best, sister-in-law.”
After eating a ton of the food Mom served her, Aunt Jina patted her bloated belly.
Mom smiled and handed her the shopping bag she'd prepared in advance.
“Oh, right. Jina, this is a souvenir from your trip to France.”
“Oh yeah-!”
Arin and I sat side by side on the sofa, listening to their conversation.
Arin said quietly to me.
“Sis, this'll work out, right?”
“If Aunt Jina's helping us, it'll work out. We've already paid the lawyer's consultation fee.”
“Huh? When did we pay the consultation fee?”
“Our cheeks.”
I poked my own cheek with my index finger, poke-poke-.
Then Arin fiddled with her own cheek and said,
“…That's an expensive consultation fee.”
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After dinner.
We entered full preparation mode for Operation 'Keeping Yu Ayeon Out of Elementary School.'
“All right, if we're going to get Ayeon recognized as a gifted-education special case in one shot, the more solid and objective evidence we have, the better. Otherwise she'll have to take some annoying test or other. First, pull out everything you've got at home!”
Rustle-rustle-.
Our family started searching every nook and cranny of the house.
We opened drawers and looked inside.
Searched the study too.
Unpacked the suitcase again.
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I came back carrying the souvenirs I'd brought from France.
“This is the Millennium plaque I got at the award ceremony, and the certificate proving the Clay Mathematics Institute awarded me one million dollars!”
I held up the Millennium plaque.
My name was engraved into the metal base.
And underneath it was a ridiculously cool inscription.
[An unsolved problem since 1859
In recognition of the achievement of solving the Riemann Hypothesis
and in deep tribute to your outstanding contributions to mathematics and human knowledge,
the Millennium Prize is awarded to Yu Ayeon
Clay Mathematics Institute
2026]
Heh.
It's got style for days!
The certificate came with it too.
The official document certifying that the Clay Mathematics Institute awarded Yu Ayeon one million dollars.
Aunt Jina took the plaque and certificate and looked them over.
“Oh, nice, nice.”
Next, Mom brought over a journal from the study.
“What's this thin book?”
“Ah, right! This is my paper that appeared in an overseas math journal! It just so happened to be a journal our family subscribes to, and my paper got published in last month's issue!”
It's a bona fide top-tier math journal, too!
I opened it and showed it to Aunt Jina.
Our names were in the table of contents, mine and Mom's.
[Ayeon Yu, Seolae Han - On the Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis]
Aunt Jina looked at the paper and said,
“Ooh, so this is that famous thing called the Riemann hypothesis, right?”
“Yesss-! More precisely, it's the Riemann theorem now!”
“Okay, let's take this too.”
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Then Dad rummaged around the back of a drawer for a while and pulled out a sheet of paper.
“Oh, here it is.”
It was an old test result sheet.
The results of the Wechsler IQ test I took at 26 months old.
A perfect 160 in all five categories.
[Full IQ score: 160]
Aunt Jina took the paper and studied it for a long while.
“Wow, you got this when Ayeon was 26 months old?”
“Yep.”
“For reference, Arin took one too, and she got 145!”
“Really? Arin's amazing too.”
Aunt Jina laid the paper out beside the other materials.
The Millennium plaque and the one-million-dollar certificate.
The paper published in a top-tier journal.
The IQ 160 test result sheet from when she was 26 months old.
“Now that we've gathered everything, there sure are a ton of proofs showing our Ayeon is a supergenius, huh?”
Aunt Jina said while organizing the materials,
“Hehe. Of course! I'm the smartest person on Earth!”
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Aunt Jina turned on the laptop and asked Mom,
“Sister-in-law, can I look through your inbox?”
“Why?”
“You said academic contacts come by email, right? I want to check if there's anything useful in here too.”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Mom handed over the laptop.
When we opened Mom's inbox, there was a mountain of unread emails.
Like snow piled up in winter.
Oh right, was it 'heaped up' rather than 'softly piled'?
“Wow... that's a lot...”
“Right? There are so many interview requests and lecture requests that lately I haven't even been reading them properly.”
It's true that because so many unwanted emails have been coming in, I've been reading my mail a lot less lately.
I do worry that I might end up missing something important, but...
I couldn't help feeling exhausted by the reporters' relentless requests for interviews.
Someday I really should open a separate Yu Ayeon-only email account.
But Aunt Jina must have been a veteran at this kind of thing.
She quickly skimmed through the countless emails, muttering, “Let's see if there's anything useful-”
“Oh? Sister-in-law, did you see this?”
“Jina, did something important come in?”
Mom came over.
Aunt Jina pointed at the screen.
Princeton, Harvard, Oxford, and so on...
They were emails sent to me by prestigious universities.
[We would like to invite Ms. Yu Ayeon to join our university as a research professor. We will provide a position with no teaching obligations so you can focus freely on research, and we will do our utmost to accommodate your desired salary terms.]
I checked the emails from the other universities too.
[Our university can skip all the administrative procedures and degree verification required for a formal faculty appointment and proceed with special recruitment. We sincerely hope you will come to our university...]
Emails with similar tones kept coming one after another.
And mixed in among them were emails from Korean universities as well.
Seoul National University, KAIST, and POSTECH.
In STEM terms, they were universities that could still hold their heads up in Korea.
But the contents of those emails felt a little different from the ones I'd read earlier.
Overseas universities were brimming with confidence, like, 'Come to our university and we'll give you this and that and anything you want!'
By contrast, the domestic universities' emails...
[Um... if there's any chance you could come to our university, would that be okay? Compared to all those other famous universities with massive support, we have a lot of shortcomings, but we'd still be happy if we could be together... sniffle-sniffle]
Something like that.
Of course, I don't mean they actually wrote and sent it exactly like that.
At least, that's how it felt to me.
Sure enough, maybe because pure academia has such a weak foothold in Korea, even the requests to offer me a math professorship felt somewhat timid.
If it had been an engineering school, they probably would've still managed to puff their shoulders out and speak a bit more confidently.
But Korea is kind of a barren land for pure academia.
I felt that way when I was a math professor in my previous life too.
The administrative procedures were a pain in the neck on their own, and there was constant pressure to keep producing results if I wanted funding.
I just couldn't research in peace.
It got so bad that in my previous life, I even took advantage of the break after the students finished their semester and holed up in my lab for three months, trying to smash the Riemann Hypothesis to bits.
Anyway.
I felt good knowing I'd gotten a ton of love calls from famous universities all over the world.
“Heh-heh-heh-.”
“Wow, our Ayeon is getting love calls from famous universities and being super popular, huh?”
“Hmph. I'm kind of amazing, right!”
I shrugged my shoulders and thumped my chest, thump-thump-.
Aunt Jina snickered and poked my cheeks, poke-poke-.
“If we play this right, we can use this as bargaining material too.”
“Huh, how?”
I asked.
Aunt Jina raised her index finger and explained.
“As a rule, people in public office want their term to go by without any big incidents or trouble, nice and smooth, right? So they find making special exceptions and things like that bothersome and don't really like it.”
Aunt Jina tapped the laptop screen with her index finger, tap-tap.
“But if we show them this, they'll get nervous, right? Especially now, with overseas brain drain at a sensitive peak, they won't drag their feet—they'll handle it right away.”
In other words.
Aunt Jina's strategy was this:
If some big shot refuses to recognize me as a special case?
Or if they go, “Hahaha, please wait just a moment-” and drag things out slowly for three or four weeks?
Then we throw in screenshots of the emails from foreign universities.
— If you keep this up, I... might... go overseas?
— So behave yourselves.
If they did that, the bigwigs at the education office would have no choice but to go, “Gasp, we'd better behave ourselves, sniffle-sniffle-” and stamp the seal down with a thunk.
“Of course, if they had any common sense, those earlier pieces of evidence alone would be enough to recognize Ayeon as a special case right away... But it never hurts to have more bargaining material, does it? Right, Ayeon?”
“That's right-!”
As expected of Aunt Jina.
That level of meticulous preparation!
That's lawyer-grade professionalism.
Swish-swish-.
Aunt Jina put a hand on my head and rubbed it roughly.
“With just this much, there's no way we can fail.”
Aunt Jina said as she organized the documents,
“Good. Now let's make an appointment, sister-in-law.”
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The next day.
Mom, Arin, Aunt Jina, and I visited the district Office of Education together.
To smash the restriction that said I had to go to elementary school!