"How do you raise a house full of psychopaths, Dr. Choi?" she asked, looking back through the glass at the small boy.
"Very carefully, Dr. Min. Very carefully."
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Vivaldi filled Choi Wonwoo's ears as he stared down at his phone screen and the self-evaluation form he was tasked with filling out by the end of the day. This new bizarre corporate hoop-jumping was ridiculous to him. They weren't a law firm, they were an ivy league university. Asking a tenured professor to describe themselves in three words or less was absurd. Most couldn't describe what day of the week it was without an APA formatted dissertation and review board approval.
Three words to describe him? Which him did they want? The brilliant quirky weirdo or the deviant homicidal psychopath? Both were true enough, though one was most definitely more palatable than the other. Yet neither of them could go on a self-evaluation.
He sighed, gazing out over the quad. The sky overhead was as ominous as his mood. Dark gray storm clouds hung low, just waiting to unleash on the students who refused to yield their space until the last possible moment. It was uncharacteristically chilly for this time of year. He took a sip of his coffee, keeping himself tucked up against the building as he watched the rain move closer. It was slated to rain all day according to the forecast, but Wonwoo put as much stock in forecasts as he did horoscopes.
Bianca Li, an assistant professor of astrophysics, tucked herself in beside him, tugging her sweater across her body and wrapping her arms around herself. Her black hair whipped across her face, and her black framed glasses sat perilously close to the end of her nose. She was easily older than Wonwoo by at least ten years but could still pass for a grad student.
He pulled his earbuds from his ears. "How would you describe me in three words?" Before she could answer, he took a finger and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
"Weirdo without boundaries?" she asked, batting his hand away.
"Weirdo was the first thought that came to mind for me as well. I don't think that would fly with the board."
Bianca shrugged. "You've got tenure. What are they going to do about it?" She snapped her fingers. "I got it. Absent-minded professor."
Wonwoo rolled his eyes. "I'm not absent-minded. I have...selective hearing."
"Children have selective hearing. You live in your own world," she pointed out.
Wonwoo waved her statement off. "You're exaggerating."
"You almost walked into the fountain...twice."
She wasn't wrong. The thing was, Wonwoo was absent-minded by choice. When a person is burdened with an affliction that causes them to remember—verbatim—every word ever spoken to them, their brains become a chaotic mess, a tangle of conversations from yesterday and decades ago. A single word could trigger a cascade of memories that could trap him in his thoughts for days.
So, Wonwoo remained selectively absent-minded. His observations were a thing he'd trained himself to turn on and off at will rather than lose his mind absorbing pieces of conversation with every step he took. By shutting out the things he considered static, he was able to focus on the things that mattered, like spintronics or light scattering and optical wave mixing techniques, semiconductor quantum dots, and, sometimes, even laser physics.
