The rules made Elijah feel slightly safer. They also made the occasion more serious. Researchers had traveled overnight from universities in the United States and abroad, and several had rearranged classes to attend remotely. One woman from Berkeley held a thick sheaf of notes with Elijah's diagrams printed in color. He could not understand why someone who knew so much would spend hours looking at something he had drawn with a pencil from the school supply cabinet.
At eight-forty-five, he stepped into a corridor to use the bathroom and found Whitfield near a window. The professor was alone, fastening his cuff, and for a moment Elijah considered turning around. Whitfield saw him first. "Elijah," he said, in a voice much softer than the one he had used on stage. "I hope you're prepared for a considerably more difficult discussion today."
"I practiced," Elijah replied.
"Preparation isn't always enough. These people will ask about assumptions you may never have encountered. There is still time to withdraw and spare yourself a public failure." Whitfield looked at the boy's borrowed blazer, then back at his face. "A promising student can survive being wrong in private. Becoming a cautionary tale on the internet is another matter."
Elijah felt his throat tighten. He had rehearsed answers to mathematical objections, not to someone suggesting that the world would laugh at him forever if he made an error. "Dr. Park said I could present," he answered, clinging to the only certainty available. Whitfield sighed. "Of course you can. The question is whether you should."
After Whitfield walked away, Elijah remained beside the window until a staff member asked whether he needed directions. He said no, returned to the waiting room, and texted Okonkwo: I AM SCARED. She was sitting only two rooms away, but writing the sentence felt easier than saying it.
Her reply came quickly: I KNOW. TRUST THE WORK. ASK FOR HELP WHEN YOU NEED IT. YOU ARE ALLOWED TO BE TEN.
At nine, the auditorium doors closed. Park introduced the session and thanked the reviewers, emphasizing that an extraordinary claim would receive extraordinary scrutiny without requiring extraordinary cruelty. Elijah approached the podium with the pages of his formal notes arranged in a neat stack. His hands trembled enough to make the top sheet flutter, but the microphone stayed steady when he adjusted it. He looked toward Danielle in the front row; she put one hand over her heart and nodded.
He began with definitions. The repeating network had to be planar, its fundamental patch finite, and its boundary identifications consistent with a specific admissibility condition. The four-coloring he sought was not just any coloring of a potentially infinite map but one produced by a finite local prescription compatible with the network's specified periods. He showed three examples that satisfied the hypotheses and two that did not, explaining why an argument that ignored that distinction would prove too much.