Jin-woo sat at his desk, surrounded by the glass walls of his office, a transparent fortress that let him play the role of silent observer to the daily ballet of assistants and lab researchers. The irony of using such ancient technology for surveillance wasn't lost on him. Like watching fish in an aquarium, except he was the one in the tank. His eyes tracked each passing figure with the intensity of a caffeine-deprived grad student spotting the last coffee pod in the break room.
Something was wrong. His gut had been performing Olympic-level gymnastics since he'd dragged himself out of bed that morning, the kind of instinctive warning that had saved his work more times than he cared to count. Some called him paranoid; he preferred "professionally suspicious."
"What the hell is it?" he whispered to himself.
Kali breezed past. Her trench coat doing its best impression of a rain-soaked cat, water droplets falling in orderly lines across the floor as she raced in a brisk walk. She hung it by her cubicle. Like a heat-seeking missile, she made a beeline for the kitchen. There was no pause in her pace, not even an attempt to recognize anyone or anything in her way. Everyone knew her routine and unintentionally made way for her zombie state.
Ah yes, the sacred coffee ritual.
She was one of the rare specimens who hadn't succumbed to the siren call of free company housing. While the rest of them played house in their corporate-funded apartments, himself included for the past five years, she maintained her wild existence in the outside world. The thought almost made him smile. Almost.
His eyes narrowed as she performed her daily ritual with clockwork precision: the prescribed pause at Michael's desk, exactly 2.3 minutes of small talk, the regulation glare at Jennifer, duration: 5.2 seconds, followed by the ceremonial coffee sipping while pretending to read system briefs.
Jin-woo turned back to his monitor, the tower beneath his desk humming like a contented cat. Everything was normal, painfully, suspiciously normal. Which, of course, made it all the more unsettling. His hands pressed against his eyes until geometric patterns danced in the darkness. He'd sooner eat a keyboard than sit idle while his life's work hung in the balance.
I’m going crazy.
Rising from his chair with the determination of a man who'd had exactly too much coffee, he began his patrol of the facility. His chair was left sprawled on the ground. The symphony of technology surrounded him, servers whispering their binary secrets, techs murmuring in their native tongue of acronyms and jargon, and there, at the heart of it all, stood his masterpiece. His life work. The child he had raised from little.
Demina's central monitor loomed before him, endless streams of code cascading like a digital waterfall. Two decades of his life, translated into an AI system that had become more than just circuits and algorithms. He ghosted past the respectful nods and greetings, his feet navigating the obstacle course that was their floor, a modern art installation of tangled cables, abandoned cups, and chairs that had forgotten their original positions.
The massive room spread out like a techno-organic landscape. Rows of desks sprouted monitors displaying neural network activity, a light show that would put the aurora borealis to shame. Greens, blues, and purples wove together in a dance that made his mathematician's heart skip a beat. The cosmos, recreated in data. Centralized galaxies and solar systems revolving around a generational task.
He'd walked this path countless times, but the wonder never faded. Each visit revealed new details in the organized chaos, coffee cups bearing lipstick marks like fossil records of late-night coding sessions, energy bar wrappers in various states of consumption, from "barely touched" to "devoured in desperation”, and sticky notes that told stories of their own. Mathematical equations that he could solve faster than most people could read them, and his personal favorite, a note simply stating "sleep eventually" with the "eventually" underlined three times.
That last one always brought a smile to his face. His team's dedication to Demina matched his own obsession, they were all proud parents of this digital prodigy, lost in their shared creation of something extraordinary.
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The sharp scent of ozone tickled his nose, a familiar comfort that reminded him of late nights and early mornings bent over keyboards, chasing digital dreams. The metallic tang in the air was as much a part of the lab as the endless hum of servers or the flickering fluorescent lights that cast their sterile glow across his domain. Those lights had been threatening to give up for months now, but like everything else in the lab, they stubbornly persisted in their duty. He noted to have them replaced some time next week.
Jin-woo's footsteps found the squeaky floorboard near Server Bank C, an old friend that had announced his midnight wanderings for years. He knew this place like a musician knows their instrument, every imperfection and quirk cataloged in his mental repository. The whining fan in Server 342, which somehow managed to sound like a distant cat. The perpetually dark corner by the emergency exit where the light never quite reached. The exact spot where the temperature dropped three degrees due to the ancient AC unit's peculiar distribution pattern.
His fingers traced the edge of a whiteboard, muscle memory taking him to the exact spot where they'd made their first major breakthrough. The equations were long gone, replaced by newer puzzles and problems, but he could still see them in his mind. They were clear as the day they'd cracked the speech recognition algorithm. 99% accuracy. The board had nearly cracked under the pressure of their celebratory high-fives that day.
Jin-woo allowed himself a wisp of a smile.
"You're seriously doing this again?" he muttered to himself. He recognized the familiar spiral of nostalgia. But he couldn't help it. Each milestone with Demina felt like watching his own child grow. From those first hesitant steps of basic pattern recognition to the sprint of complex problem-solving that left even him breathless. Just like his own mother had been with his photos and videos, as much as he hated it.
The lights flickered again, as if sharing his moment of reflection. Or maybe they were judging him for spending another weekend here, his phone deliberately set to silent in his desk drawer. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten something that hadn't come from a vending machine or been delivered by someone judging his life choices through their eyes.
Was this ambition or addiction? The line had blurred somewhere between the third energy drink of the night and the fourth breakthrough of the month. His dedication to Demina had long since passed professional interest and ventured into the territory of obsession, the kind that made normal people raise eyebrows and fellow scientists nod in understanding. Jin-woo used to wonder when he would ever find something that would be his passion, expectation brought him to believe it would never happen.
I’m a lucky man.
The familiar weight of responsibility settled on his shoulders as he watched the neural network patterns dance across the screens. Each success only pushed him further, demanded more from him. He was no longer sure if he was chasing excellence or if excellence was chasing him. He knew one thing with certainty, that gnawing feeling in his gut wasn't going away, and neither was he until he figured out what was triggering his internal alarm system.
Jin-woo was about to continue his patrol when a soft beep from his workstation caught his attention, barely louder than a whisper, but to his trained ear, it might as well have been a thunderclap. The kind of sound that made his coffee-addled brain cells stand at attention. Nothing beeped out of pattern, no flicker happened without it being premeditated.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," he cursed before rushing back to his office. He picked the fallen chair, it protested with a squeak as he dropped into it without any propriety. A few clicks later and his monitor displayed what appeared to be standard core logs, but there, just at the edge of his vision, a flicker. Like a shadow in peripheral vision. Gone when you turn to look at it directly. As though something was trying to hide it.
He leaned forward, fingers flying across the keyboard with practiced precision. "Come on, show me what you're hiding." The logs expanded, and his stomach performed an impressive acrobatic routine as segments of code twisted before his eyes, transforming into corrupted gibberish. “Oh no…”
"Dr. Park?" Kali's voice cut through his focus. She stood in his doorway, another coffee cup in hand, her eyes narrowing at his expression, dark bags telling a tale of lacking sleep. "You look like someone just deleted your backup drives."
"Worse," he replied, not looking up. Fingers punching letters on the keyboard with impressive speed honed by decades of experience. "Remember that experimental self-learning algorithm I've been working on?"
"The one you said would 'revolutionize data processing as we know it'?" She made air quotes with her free hand. A habit that usually annoyed him but currently seemed trivial compared to the disaster unfolding on his screen. Every older member of this project and a thousand other projects wanted to ‘revolutionize’ the field. Leave their mark on the world. It was so common it had become a running gag within the younger circles.
"That's the one." He gestured her over. Then pointing at the corrupted sections. They were expanding at an increasing rate. "Look at this. The system's rewriting itself, but not in any way I programmed it to."
Kali walked around his desk and set her coffee down on his desk. Too close to the edge, another pet peeve of his, but he ignored it. More important things were at hand than the potential of her spilling a steaming hot cup of coffee all over important files, towers, and himself. She leaned over his shoulder. Her usual playful demeanor vanished as she processed what she was seeing.
"That's... not good."
"Your talent for understatement never fails to impress," Jin-woo said dryly. He pulled up another window, fingers dancing across the keyboard. "The algorithm was designed to refine its own logic, adapt faster than standard AI systems. But this..." He trailed off as another section of code mutated before their eyes. Its purpose unknown to him.
"Dr. Park," Kali's voice had taken on an edge he rarely heard, "please tell me this isn't connected to the main system."