Brooks checked the pages. Ruiz asked the operator to put the two lines side by side. Several panelists took notes, and one connected remotely asked a follow-up about whether the restriction was strong enough for the transition lemma. Elijah answered slowly, tracing the condition back to the definition of permitted seam identifications. The exchange did not end in applause; it ended with the scholars writing down a more precise version of the claim, which was exactly what serious review was supposed to produce.
Whitfield looked displeased. "Clarity is not merely a matter of phrasing," he said. "It may conceal a genuine limitation. And there remains the question of whether this manuscript was independently produced."
He turned toward Elijah. "Did you write every part of it yourself? Did a teacher provide the central argument? Did someone help you invent the notation?"
The room grew uncomfortable. Elijah felt as though all his notebooks had been taken from him and placed under a light that revealed something shameful. "I wrote it," he said.
"Dr. Okonkwo showed me books and told me where I was making mistakes. But I made the diagrams and the edge chart. I can show the old versions if you want." He reached instinctively toward Maybe and Not Yet, waiting beside the podium.
Park intervened. "Questions of authorship can be addressed through the usual submission review. We will not turn this defense into an interrogation of a child without specific evidence of misconduct." A ripple of relieved applause began, then quickly stopped when she raised her hand. Elijah thanked her, but the question had already found its target. He wondered whether every correct answer would simply make Whitfield more certain that somebody older must have supplied it.
The session had begun as a discussion of definitions and constructive methods. Now Elijah could feel the attention sliding away from his pages and settling on him as a person. He was aware of the cameras, the rows of adults waiting to see what happened next, and his own voice sounding younger every time he answered. The effort of holding back tears was becoming harder than following the mathematics.
Whitfield proposed a fresh problem to test whether Elijah understood unfamiliar applications rather than simply repeating a rehearsed explanation. Park hesitated, then permitted a short question with the explicit condition that it be evaluated as a discussion, not a separate examination. Whitfield drew a Mobius strip on the screen, a twisted band whose surface joins in a surprising way. "How many colors would you need here," he asked, "if neighboring regions must receive different colors?"
Elijah stared at the picture. He had seen a Mobius strip in a library video, and he knew you could walk around its surface and return to where you began on what seemed at first to be the opposite side. But the drawing showed no partition into regions, no list of adjacencies, and no precise description of which colorings were permitted. He did not know whether Whitfield wanted an answer from topology or graph theory. His first instinct was to guess a number and hope.
Then he remembered how Okonkwo had stopped him the day he confused lines with colors. "Can I ask a question first?" he said. Whitfield lifted his eyebrows. "Go ahead."