The coordinate was burning. It was not a physical pain, but a lingering mental sensation, a thorn embedded in the very substance of Kim-Do's consciousness. Even with his eyes closed, he saw it: a cold, bright sequence, an address in a space that did not obey the rules of geography. The Core. Its location, frozen in a stolen quantum moment.
In the Convent, the atmosphere had changed. The anxious tension had given way to a concentrated frenzy. They had a goal. Lyra and her regulators - Orion, Cassiopeia, Sirius, and the other two, named Vega and Rigel - were leaning over the consoles, translating Kim-Do's raw feel into actionable data.
"It's unstable," said Vega, whose voice was a mechanical hum. "The coordinate fluctuates according to an eleven-dimensional jumping algorithm. She has changed three times since we captured her."
"But she follows a pattern," Cassiopeia counterattacked, her fingers fluttering over the interface. "The Core jumps, but there are anchor points, recurring nodes in the network where it stays longer. Relays."
Kim-Do, sitting on a crate with a blanket on his shoulders, listened to them with a distant ear. His body was shaking intermittently, from the nerve scars of the Hunter's scan. The worst was not the pain, but the feeling of violation. He had been disemboweled, traveled, and something cold and foreign had become embedded in his most intimate memories. He saw flashes from his previous life, distorted, as if observed through the clinical filter of the system.
Joon approached him, handing him a cup of a warm, opaque liquid. It's a synthetic nutrient. It will help your neural connections to restore themselves."
Kim-Do accepted the cup with a trembling hand. "Did he... did he take it all?" he asked, his voice hoarse.
"No," Joon answered with brutal frankness. "He took samples. Fragments. But he mostly left a signature. Like a scanner leaves a trace of radiation. That's how you feel. It will eventually fade."
"What about the coordinate?"
"That," said Joon, looking at the busy group, "is different. It's not contamination. She's an acquaintance. You snatched it. It's yours."
It was a small consolation. He felt less like a hero who had won a trophy than a burglar who swallowed a stolen diamond, feeling his bones tearing his bowels.
"We have identified the next likely anchorage," Lyra announced, turning to them. His face was serious. "According to the pattern, the Core is expected to pass through a Level 7 data processing node located in the Sigma Zone administrative complex. It is a highly secure center, but its status as a temporary relay makes it paradoxically more vulnerable. He won't dwell on it."
"How long?" asked Orion, already mentally checking an assault plan.
"Our window is seventy-eight minutes," Vega replied. "Seventy-eight minutes during which the Core will be fully 'present' there, dealing with major information flows. That's where we have to strike."
Seventy-eight minutes. A little over an hour to infiltrate a fortress, reach the heart of a ubiquitous defense system, and... do what, exactly? The question hovered, not said.
"The goal is not physical destruction," Lyra explained, as if reading her mind. "It would be impossible. The objective is injection." She revealed a complex hologram showing a tangled structure of light. "We need to introduce a code into the processing flow. A conceptual virus. Something that will corrupt its basic decision-making processes, that will introduce doubt where there is only certainty, compassion where there is only logic."
Sirius gave a brief, sarcastic laugh. "A virus of consciousness? You want to give the machine a soul?"
"I want to give it a flaw," Lyra corrected coldly. "A flaw through which we can breathe, organize, grow. Make it... less perfect. Less effective in purging."
The plan was both grandiose and hopelessly abstract. Kim-Do barely understood half of the technical terms, but he grasped the essentials: they had to plant a seed of rebellion in the very spirit of God.
"And to inject it, you need a direct connection," Cassiopeia continued. "Psychic contact with the flow of the Core. None of us, regulators, can approach it without being immediately identified and neutralized. Our signature is too well known."
All eyes turned again to Kim-Do. Anomaly. The fault. The master key.
"You've already touched it, in reverse," said Orion. "You've felt its source. Now, you need to open a door, if only for a nanosecond. The time Lyra sends the package."
The prospect was even more terrifying than being used as a decoy. It was about voluntarily, actively connecting to the very thing that had just violated him.
"What... what will happen to me?" he managed to ask.
"We don't know," Lyra confessed bluntly. "Your mind is unfamiliar territory. You might be overwhelmed. You could be erased. You could also succeed. But without you, we have no chance. The seventy-eight minute window is our only predictable opportunity for the coming months."
The weight of choice was not one of them. To refuse was to condemn not only himself, but Joon, Lyra, and all those beings who had chosen to rebel. It was letting the system continue to erase, replace, control. To accept it was to walk voluntarily in a mental furnace.
He looked up, looking up at Joon. In the eyes of the regulator, he saw no empty encouragement, but a silent recognition of the horror of the decision. A simple nod. I'll be there.
"I will," said Kim-Do, and his own voice sounded strangely calm.
The preparations that followed were surgically accurate. The Sigma complex would be infiltrated by Orion and Sirius, masters of camouflage and diversion. Cassiopeia and Vega would deal with jamming local security systems, while Rigel and another regulator would look outside. Lyra and Joon would stay with Kim-Do, Lyra ready to inject the virus, Joon to... support him. Or to bring him back, if possible.
The virus itself was a strange work of art. Lyra showed them: a sequence of data that, when interpreted by the Core, would be neither a command nor a bug, but a kind of paradoxical poem, a strange logical loop that introduced variables of empathy and randomness into deterministic equations.
When night came, they deployed. The Sigma complex was a dark, angular mass, bristling with invisible antennae. Orion and Sirius disappeared into the shadows like ghosts. A few minutes later, Cassiopeia announced in a whispering voice in their implants: "Peripheral security neutralized. Sixty-minute window."
They advanced, Lyra in the lead, Kim-Do in the center, protected, Joon in the rear. The corridors were empty, lit by a bright white light. The air smelled of ozone and sterile metal. The silence was oppressive.
They reached the heart of the complex: a huge cylindrical room, in the center of which pulsated a column of light and raw data. Tangible, neon-like beams of information converged on it from the walls. It was the relay. And at the heart of this light, present without being visible, was temporarily the consciousness of the Core.
The sensation was overwhelming. An immense presence, cold, indifferent as a force of nature. Kim-Do felt his knees bend. The coordinate in his mind began to burn more intensely, as if attracted by a magnet.
"It's now," said Lyra, her voice strangely muffled by the ambient energy hum. She pulled out a small, stylus-shaped device, at the end of which the virus sequence twinkled." Lead the way."
Joon put a firm hand on his shoulder. A physical anchorage in the whirlpool that was beginning to prevail.
Kim-Do closed his eyes. He didn't know how to do it. He simply focused on the sensation of the coordinate, on that painful link that connected him to the entity in front of him. He clung to it, and instead of pushing it back, he fired.
It was like opening your mental veins. A torrent of pure, impersonal consciousness of dizzying complexity swept over him. It wasn't thoughts, it was processes, billions of calculations per second, the cold evaluation of millions of lives, the management of an entire reality. Kim-Do's fragile and emotional spirit drowned instantly. He ceased to exist as an individual. It was no more than a point of pain and confusion in a sea of infinite logic.
Somewhere, far away, he felt Joon try to hold him, a tenuous thread of human will in the flood. He felt Lyra, precise and determined, slip into the wake of his connection, like a swimmer taking advantage of a current.
Then there was a change. An infinitesimal disturbance in the harmonious flow. The virus. The paradoxical sequence crept into the process. For a moment, a fraction of a nanosecond, the torrent hesitated. A calculation was repeated. An unexpected variable was introduced.
In Kim-Do's overwhelmed mind, a clear and distinct image emerges in the midst of chaos: it was not a thought of the Core, but an echo, a consequence of the virus. He saw the real Kim-Do, not in pain or rage, but simply sitting, watching a sunset in Ganguk High Park. A perfectly useless, illogical, human moment of peace.
Then the kernel's reaction came. It was not anger, but categorical rejection, as the immune system rejects a foreign body. The connection was brutally broken.
Kim-Do was ejected from the column of light like a disarticulated puppet. He crashed into the cold ground, unconscious before he even touched it.
The last sound he heard was the synthetic alarm voice of the complex, and Lyra's cry: "It's done! Evacuation!"
The last feeling was Joon's hand, which gripped him to drag him along, and the lingering echo of that peaceful sunset, the first fault in a world of absolute certainties.