Kim-Do's unconsciousness was an abyss populated by numbers and cold lights. There were no dreams or nightmares, only the residual flow of the Core, a torrent of impersonal data that was leaching the last vestiges of his individual consciousness. It was floating, dissolved, an anomaly melting into the background of the system.
Then the image came back. The sunset. Not as a memory, but as a fixed point, a stable coordinate in the chaos. The green grass of the park, the orange light that lengthened the shadows, the lazy late-day heat on the skin. And the real Kim-Do, sitting on a bench, his face strangely relaxed, almost serene. It was not the fighter's rage, nor the leader's cold determination. It was a disturbing simplicity. Human.
This image, this conceptual virus, was the lifeline. She created a bubble of silence in the din of data. Kim-Do clung to it with all the fibers of his torn being. This is real, he said to himself, or tried to say to himself, in a language that was no longer made of words. This was him. This is... a choice.
The return to consciousness was violence. It was not a startling awakening, but a slow and painful reconquest. The first sensation was a dull, ubiquitous pain, as if every cell in his brain had been bruised. Then came the noise: muffled, hurried voices, the sizzling of electronic equipment, the metallic sound of a door that is locked.
He opened his eyes. The ceiling was low, made of raw concrete, lit by the faint bluish glow of a screen. He was lying on an impromptu mattress in a corner of the Convent. The air smelled of dust and fear.
"He's coming back to himself," whispered a voice. That of Cassiopeia.
A silhouette bent over him. Joon. His face was pulled, dark circles under his eyes, but he sketched a semblance of a smile. "You gave us a beautiful fright. Don't do it again."
Kim-Do tried to speak. His throat was dry, ravaged. A hoarse sound came out of it.
"Don't force," said Lyra, appearing in her field of vision. His face was paler than usual, but his gray eyes shone with an intense, almost feverish glow." The code was introduced into a level 3 emotional processing sub-process. It's minimal, but it's a start."
"The... sunset," Kim-Do managed to articulate in a breath.
Lyra and Joon exchanged glances. "This is the signature of the virus," Lyra explained. "A peaceful, non-threatening memory, but profoundly illogical in its uselessness. It's designed to create unnecessary thought loops, to waste computational cycles on concepts like beauty, nostalgia, tranquility."
"He saw it," Joon added, looking carefully at Kim-Do. That's it?"
Kim-Do nodded weakly. The image was red-ironed in his mind, more real than the room he was in.
"Interesting," commented Lyra, her analytical mind already dissecting information. "The virus doesn't just corrupt the kernel. It creates a... resonance bridge. The information it introduces seems to resonate with you, the Anomaly."
It was too much to assimilate. Kim-Do closed his eyes. The pain was too strong, and beneath the pain, a deep existential nausea. Was he lost in the nucleus? Had any part of him remained there, dissolved in the stream? Was it the real Kim-Do he had seen, or just a construction of the virus?
His recovery was slow. For two days, he remained prostrate, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes, overwhelmed by dazzling migraines. The others went about their business, the atmosphere of the Convent tense but electrified. They had hit the system. Really hit. They were now waiting for the reaction.
It came on the third day, not in the form of a frontal attack, but a subtle, more disturbing change.
Sirius first noticed this, monitoring public communication channels. "The protocols for analyzing behavioral deviations have been... revised," he announced, a perplexity in the voice. "The parameters of tolerance to "superfluous" emotions or "non-optimized" actions have been slightly expanded. 0.3%."
Orion scolded. "It's a statistical tolerance. A margin of error. It doesn't mean anything."
"Yes," Lyra contradicted, scanning the data Sirius was displaying. "The system has no margin for error. Every change, even infinitesimal, is intentional. The virus works. It introduces flexibility. Inefficiency."
This idea, that their action had had an effect, even a tiny one, changed the atmosphere. A glimmer of hope, tenuous but real, began to dawn. But for Kim-Do, it meant something else. If the virus, born of this peaceful image, changed the system... then the image itself had power. And she was in him.
During his brief moments of lucidity, he began to meditate on this stage. Not to remember it, but to understand it. Why this one? Why this moment of peace in the violent and tormented life of the real Kim-Do? Was it a lie, a fantasy created by his suffering mind? Or was it a fragment of hidden truth, a secret that the real Kim-Do himself would have ignored?
One evening, as the pain faded slightly, giving way to deep fatigue, he asked Joon, who was standing guard near him, the question.
"Could it... could it be like this?" Quiet?"
Joon looked at him for a long time, as if he weighed his words. "The Kim-Do I observed was a storm of rage and ambition. But every storm has an eye. A center of calm. Maybe that memory is one. Or maybe that's what he wanted to be. The virus may have been tapped into a desire, not a memory."
A desire. The idea made its way into Kim-Do's painful mind. What if the virus, by seeking to corrupt the logic of the Core, had also touched the essence of what it was supposed to represent? To the soul of the real Kim-Do, somewhere trapped or erased?
This thought became an obsession. The sunset was not just a weapon. It was a message. A key.
A few days later, when he could stand again without vertigo, he went to Lyra. It was absorbed by analyzing new system signatures, tracking virus-induced micro-changes.
"I need to try something," he said, his voice still weak but determined.
She looked up. "What?"
"Reconnect me. Not at the Core. To the virus itself."
Lyra frowned. "It's too risky. Your mind is still fragile. And the system is now on heightened alert against this type of intrusion."
"Not an intrusion," Kim-Do insisted. "A... listen. The virus is there, in the system. He's issuing a signature, isn't he? This picture. I can feel it. I want to try to follow her. To see where it leads. Maybe she can show us something else. A weakness. Another entry point."
Lyra considered him, assessing the risks with his usual cold logic. "The chances of success are tiny. The chances of your mind falling apart under the residual pressure of the Core are significant."
"I survived the first connection," he recalled. He did not feel courageous, only driven by an inner necessity. The image had become its own virus, its own mystery to be solved.
Joon, who was listening from the entrance, intervened. "If that's what he wants to try, I can anchor him. Better than last time. Now that we know the signature of the virus, I can help guide it to it, like a magnet."
Lyra hesitated again, her gaze ranging from Kim-Do, determined but fragile, to Joon, solid. The calculation was different this time. It was no longer an attack, but a reconnaissance. An intelligence mission on the enemy's own ground.
"Okay," she finally said. "But at the first anomaly, at the first sign of drift, you are brought back. Even if it means making you unconscious."
The preparations were simpler, but equally distressing. No need for physical infiltration this time. They settled in the center of the Convent. Kim-Do sat cross-legged, Joon behind him, with his hands on his shoulders. Lyra plugged into a console, ready to monitor her neural activity and cut the link if necessary.
"Focus on the picture," Joon whispered. On the heat. Let yourself be guided by her. I'm going to amplify the signal."
Kim-Do closed his eyes. He brought back the sunset. The grass under your fingers. The golden light. The soothed face of the real Kim-Do. This time, he couldn't resist the connection that wanted to happen. He invited her.
The sensation was radically different. It was not a raging torrent, but a stream, a river of warm light that flowed through the cold ocean of system data. The virus had created a path, a vein of daydreaming in the machine's brain. Kim-Do slipped in.
He traveled. Not in space, but in layers of meaning. The image of the park was like a diamond with infinite facets. One facet showed the real Kim-Do as a child watching a sunset with his mother. Another showed him as a teenager, training to exhaustion, the setting sun being his only witness. Another was a simple desire, a fantasy: to stop. Just stop.
And then, deep down, he found something else. It was no longer an image, but a sensation. A coordinate, different from that of the Core. Smaller, more discreet, almost hidden. It was not vibrating with the overwhelming power of the system, but with a lower, more human frequency. Frequency of regret. Unfinished things.
It was like a back door. Not in the Core, but somewhere in the very architecture of the replacement. A flaw left by the real Kim-Do at the time of his erasure? A scar in reality?
Suddenly, the warm current turned cold. A presence became aware of his intrusion. Not the entire Core, but a defense subsystem, attracted by this anomaly in the anomaly.
"Kim-Do, come back!" Joon's voice, distant, tense.
He tried to retreat, but the little coordinate held him, as if magnetized. She wanted him to see. Let him understand.
A final image bursts forth, swift, violent: a hand extended towards his own, not in attack, but in supplication. The face of the real Kim-Do, this time distorted by absolute terror, with his eyes wide open to an impending void. And a word, blown into a deafening mental silence:
" Help... "
The link broke sharply. Kim-Do found himself thrown back, gasping, his heart beating. Joon held him firmly, panting too.
"What did you see?" asked Lyra, already analyzing the captured data.
Kim-Do, trembling with all her limbs, looked up at her with a new use of horror and understanding.
"He didn't leave," he whispered, his voice broken. "He wasn't erased. He is... a prisoner. Somewhere. And he calls for help."
The virus was not just a weapon. It was a trace. A distress beacon. And Kim-Do had just heard it.