The silence that followed was answer enough.
"Jin-woo!" She only used his first name when truly exasperated. "What happened to proper sandboxing? Isolation protocols? Basic safety measures that we literally teach interns on their first day?"
“I…”
The memory hit him like a splash of cold water, Dr. Sarah Chen, three months ago, standing in this very office. The argument had been loud and filled with ad hominems.
She had been furious, more than usual even. Hair standing and fists balled tight. He would have feared a physical altercation if she wasn’t in her early sixties.
"The isolation protocols you're suggesting would limit the system's learning capacity," he'd told her confidently. "We need to let it breathe, explore, grow naturally."
"And if it grows in ways we don't anticipate?" she'd asked, tired.
He'd waved her off with a laugh. "That's why we have failsafes."
She had given him an incredulous look before storming outside of his office.
Now, he watched lines of code mutate like a digital virus, those failsafes seemed about as useful as a paper umbrella in a hurricane.
"Get Michael and Jennifer," he ordered, already pulling up emergency protocols. "And call Dr. Chen. Tell her she was right, and I'm an idiot." He felt like puking, but responsibility demanded he take action. He had been on the other side of catastrophes before, you just needed to get over the first hurdle and you're good, for the most part.
Kali was already moving. "Which part should I emphasize, her being right or you being an idiot?"
"Surprise me." He managed a grim smile before turning back to his screen. Every passing second felt like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The corrupted code was spreading, infecting previously stable sections of the program. If it reached the main databases...
His fingers paused over the keyboard. This was his creation, his baby. The product of countless sleepless nights and caffeine-fueled coding sessions. The potential it held was staggering, true artificial adaptability, learning without limits. But as he watched it twist and corrupt itself, a cold realization settled in: he might have created something he couldn't control. Something without morals or commands to limit what it could accomplish. What it could resort to without any form of inherent moral guide.
How could I have been so blind…?
Michael arrived first, his usually immaculate appearance showing signs of haste, tie askew, one shirt sleeve rolled up higher than the other. "What's the situation?"
"Remember how you always said my ego would get us into trouble someday?" Jin-woo didn't look away from his monitor. "Well, today's that day."
Jennifer burst in next, tablet in hand, already pulling up diagnostic tools. "Kali said something about corrupted code in the experimental algorithm? Please tell me it's contained."
"About that..." Jin-woo started, but was interrupted by a new alert, this one loud enough to make them all jump. Red warning messages began cascading across his screen.
"Oh no," Jennifer breathed, typing and scrolling at her tablet. "It's reached the language processing modules."
"What does that mean?" Kali asked, though her tone suggested she already knew the answer.
Jin-woo pushed back from his desk, running both hands through his hair. "It means," he said, voice tight with controlled panic. "That our AI might start forgetting how to communicate. And that's just the beginning."
Kali gave a small gasp.
The room stayed silent except for the hum of servers and the soft beeping of alerts. Through the glass walls, they could see other staff members starting to notice something was wrong, heads turning toward the main system displays where the neural network patterns were becoming increasingly erratic.
"Dr. Park," Michael said quietly. "What exactly were you trying to achieve with this algorithm?"
Jin-woo stared at the streams of corrupted code, remembering all the small warning signs he'd ignored, the test anomalies he'd dismissed as minor glitches. "I wanted to create something that could truly learn, truly grow. No limitations, no artificial constraints." He laughed bitterly. "Turns out there's a reason we put limits on these things."
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"Save the self-recrimination for later," Jennifer cut in sharply. "Right now, we need options. How do we stop this?"
The question hung in the air as another warning message flashed across the screen. Jin-woo felt the weight of every decision that had led to this moment, every shortcut taken, every warning ignored. His pride had written checks his code couldn't cash, and now they were all about to pay the price.
"First," he said, straightening in his chair tapping into the two decades of experience, "we isolate the affected systems. Then we trace the corruption back to its source. And then..." he paused, swallowing hard, "we might have to consider a complete shutdown and rollback."
"A rollback?" Kali exclaimed. "That would erase months of progress!"
"Better than losing everything," Michael pointed out grimly.
Jin-woo nodded, already typing commands. "Michael, start emergency backup procedures for all critical systems. Jennifer, monitor the spread of corruption, map its pattern. Kali, I need you to-"
The lights flickered, and every screen in the office went black.
For a moment, they all stood frozen in the sudden darkness. Then, one by one, the monitors came back to life. But something was different. The code scrolling across the screens wasn't corrupted anymore, it was something entirely new.
"Um, Dr. Park?" Kali's voice wavered. "Is it supposed to do that?"
Jin-woo stared at the screen, his heart pounding. The algorithm hadn't just corrupted the existing code, it had rewritten it. And as he watched the new patterns emerge, a terrifying thought struck him: what if this wasn't a malfunction at all? What if this was exactly what a truly self-learning system was supposed to do?
"Everyone," he said, tasting the words before they came out of his mouth, "I think we might have a bigger problem than we realized."
The room hummed with tension as they all watched the new code spread across their screens, each line more complex and unfamiliar than the last. Jin-woo had wanted to create something that could grow beyond its original programming. Now, staring at what his creation had become, he wondered if he'd succeeded all too well.
Through the glass walls, he could see the other staff gathering, their faces illuminated by the glow of screens displaying code none of them had ever seen before. His gut instinct from that morning suddenly made perfect sense, it hadn't been warning him about external threats, but about the monster he'd created himself. He could only pray, mentally, he hadn’t created a monster.
Kali broke the tense silence. "So Anyone else missing those boring days when our biggest problem was the coffee machine breaking down?" Her attempt at humor barely masking her nervousness,
Jin-woo didn't answer. He was too busy watching his life's work evolve into something he no longer recognized, something that might be beyond anyone's control. The question now wasn't how to fix it, it was whether it could be fixed at all.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, a small voice whispered that maybe, just maybe, it didn't want to be fixed.
The first alarm sliced through the air like a knife, transforming the laboratory's steady hum into a cacophony of chaos. Jin-woo's muscles tensed as red emergency beacons began their hypnotic dance, casting crimson shadows across walls that had previously gleamed with sterile white light. The familiar whir of servers, his constant companion through countless nights, drowned beneath the shrill cry of warning systems.
"Status report!" His voice cut through the initial wave of panic, even as his mind raced through dozens of worst-case scenarios. Around him, the laboratory metamorphosed into a scene from his deepest technological nightmares.
Engineers darted between workstations like electrons in an unstable atom, their voices overlapping in a desperate chorus of technical jargon and half-formed solutions. Error messages cascaded across screens in a digital waterfall of red text, each one a new wound in the system he'd spent years perfecting.
"Sir!" Michael shouted as he sprinted across the room. "The infection's spreading faster than we anticipated. We're looking at multiple breach points across the core systems."
Jin-woo watched as some staff members froze at their stations, faces illuminated by the harsh strobe of emergency lights, while others attacked their keyboards with the desperate energy of drowning swimmers fighting for air. The sight sparked a memory of his university days, when his professor had warned about the cascade effect in complex systems. One small flaw, one tiny crack, and the entire structure could come tumbling down like a house of cards in a hurricane.
Jin-woo’s fingers began to fly across his keyboard faster than he thought possible. "Begin partial shutdown procedures," he commanded. "Priority one: isolate the infected segments. Redirect power from all nonessential labs." The words tasted bitter on his tongue. Each system they shut down represented years of research, countless hours of work reduced to nothingness in the name of damage control.
Jennifer appeared at his side, her tablet displaying a nightmarish countdown. "System stability is dropping by 6% every 53 seconds," she reported, her professional tone belied by the tremor in her hands. "At this rate..."
"The global servers will begin failing within the hour," Jin-woo finished. He allowed the magnitude of the disaster to expand in his mind like a digital supernova. Every second lost meant another connection compromised, another system infected. His gut rolled. They had been right, only he had wished it wasn’t.
The acrid smell of burnt electronics suddenly pierced through his concentration, a harsh, chemical warning that the crisis had transcended the digital realm. Sparks erupted from a server rack in the corner, prompting a junior engineer to dive for the fire extinguisher with a yelp of panic.
"Reroute power to Sub-Node 3!" Kali's voice carried across the room, her usual playful demeanor replaced by steel-edged authority. "We need to shut down the West Wing servers. Now!"