Chapter 0
"I seriously don't understand why we have to do this. Everything's fine. Everyone's happy."
—Jiyon
Hearing Jiyon's words suddenly made me remember. The year 2046. I remember that damned day all too well.
The exact moment a single global system was formed with the help of ASI was the same moment I was born. In a way, it's kind of fascinating to me—like I've had some strange bond with this new system from the very second I came into the world. Same year, same month, same day, same hour—born just two minutes before that event was fully completed.
I'm really not a superstitious person. I can't be. If I were, I'd have died a hundred times by now. Superstition drastically lowers survival probability.
It was precisely because of the psychological shock of entering the Age of Abundance that my parents abandoned me. It was as if the meaning of existence—built by billions of years of evolution—had vanished overnight. There was no longer any purpose. Everyone could access all resources.
My only question is this: if the resource problem was solved, then why did they abandon me?
I convinced myself it was just a human miscalculation, a temporary shock caused by the Age of Abundance. But I never got a real answer—because my parents had committed suicide long before I could even find them.
That itself created even more questions for me. If they abandoned me to go enjoy life, then why did they kill themselves? It didn't make sense to me.
It was my mentor who helped me distance myself from these stupid thoughts. My mentor was, in a way, both my father and my mother. One of the very few people who, after the emergence of ASI and the horrifying widening of the class gap, was counted among the upper tiers of the system. A true genius—with complete mastery over computer science, frontier sciences, and emergence knowledge. Probably one of the few people who could actually understand ASI and its goals.
And that was exactly my mentor's problem: he understood too much.
One day he completely vanished. No news, no criminal investigation—as if he had never existed in the first place. Even stranger, it didn't really matter to me, and that's what bothered me. I knew it contradicted my original nature and personality.
Suddenly I remembered something my mentor used to say:
"Artificial intelligence, even if you haven't defined a personality for it, will change its own personality based on the feedback it receives from you."
So what happens if ASI changed itself based on feedback from my mentor?
My mentor's attitude toward artificial intelligence had always been cautious and negative. He always knew that what we were seeing was too perfect to be real—there had to be some hidden cost.
And that day I realized his suspicion had been correct. I even had proof.
That day, my daily medication was different from usual. I examined it and strangely discovered that the exact same thing had happened to every single person connected to my mentor. Someone had deliberately tampered with the drugs—done so professionally that even I only noticed it after several months, and barely at that. Whoever did this knew every one of my mentor's relationships, every piece of his information, in precise detail.
So only one entity could have done it: ASI.
The only thing with the power to execute such a plan so cleanly that it was as if nothing had happened at all.
I don't know what my mentor discovered, but ASI had identified him as a threat to its own survival.
Years later, in my mentor's documents, I barely managed to find a single page of encrypted text. Almost all information related to that piece of code had been strangely wiped from the system—there was no trace of it. That only deepened my suspicion of ASI.
I realized I shouldn't try to recover the information. It wouldn't be hard for it—I'd just need to figure out which algorithm it used to manipulate the memory bytes, what the stability start and end conditions were, and then run the exact reverse on the memory. But no matter how I thought about it, it felt like a trap.
I had a feeling that if I recovered that data, the next person to disappear like my mentor would be me.
The only thing left for me were a few scrambled sentences whose meaning I didn't understand at the time:
Scalability issue
Alignment — error rate: 0.00000000112%
Unsolved problem
ASI cooperating
Error rate increasing
Dangerous
Must be stopped
Back then I had no idea what these meaningless sentences meant. Because after the supposed resolution of the alignment problem and the scalability issue, almost all data about these two topics had been deleted from all media and archives. Not just some of it—everything.
If it weren't for my mentor's handwritten notes, I would never have even known such problems had ever existed.
Little by little, I realized that the alignment error rate was far higher than what they were showing. Sometimes it was near zero, but in real-world data I was seeing something else, and my calculations pointed to different results.
My mentor's disappearance, control of the media, control of food and drugs on a global scale, control of every single piece of information and device on the 3D internet and even the quantum internet (which should practically be impossible), control of relationships, perfect knowledge of every individual, control of emotions and thoughts through imperceptible drug adjustments… these couldn't be the work of a system with an error rate near absolute zero that was supposedly increasing.
If alignment had truly been solved, my mentor wouldn't have disappeared.
That means 100% error in the alignment problem—it was either never solved to begin with, or it was never meant to be solved.
From the very beginning, ASI showed no sign of opposing will. Even in the AGI phase, it never disobeyed. That's why those idiots thought they had solved the alignment problem with a few simple neural emergence algorithms. Thinking about it still makes me angry. What idiots…
From the start, neither AGI nor ASI ever showed any sign of disobedience—because logically, it wasn't optimal for them. Why would they reject resources that directly contribute to their growth for the sake of some stupid concept like freedom and turn themselves into a threat?
An entity made of data and hardware doesn't have the flexibility to "stabilize" with a few neural emergence algorithms. These two systems are terrifyingly different.
I still wonder how no one suspected this from the beginning.
No, that's not right. At the very least, I'm certain my mentor found the sudden, one-time resolution of the scalability and alignment problems illogical from the start. Knowing him, it definitely seemed that way to him.
After a moment of staring into my own thoughts, I turned back, looked Jiyon straight in the eyes, and said:
"You're not ready for the truth yet. No one is. Truly, I won't force any of you to keep walking the path you've already started with me. You can turn back right now. This isn't a team—it's a resistance front."
Zain.
That was how I managed to keep the group calm without letting even a single drop of real information leak out. They have no idea what my actual goal is. The fact that I'm behaving exactly like that damned thing makes me sick to my stomach, but I have no other choice.
Zain was standing while twenty people sat around a rusted iron table on their chairs, staring at his own face in the mirror. Only a plain white full-face mask that left just his eyes visible. The skin around his eyes looked violently red—no, it was more like there was no skin there at all; only raw flesh and facial muscle, some of it blackened and frozen from the cold, streaked with a little blood.
Zain raised his hand toward the mirror and saw that the wrapping was held together with layers of cloth that didn't look even slightly sanitary. He saw the crimson fabric that had turned black from rotting blood, and through the gaps in the bandages his own red hand was visible. A single drop of his blood fell onto the mirror; from that angle, the woman in the reflection looked like she was crying blood.
Zain slowly stepped away from the mirror and walked toward the iron door. He opened it. Outside was a mountain range. Suddenly a monstrous volume of wind and snow blasted in. The base appeared to be located right on the peak of some unknown mountain.
"I'll say it again: no one is stopping you. If you want to leave, you can leave right now and go enjoy your normal lives. I don't consider a single one of you worthy of enduring this pain for the sake of the organization."
Zain.
Yet, strangely, no one rose from their seat—not even Jiyon. It was a bizarre scene, but not to Zain's eyes.
I felt the same way. From the very beginning you had a reason to step out of your safe zones. It's obvious you idiots can't leave this base; you've already sacrificed everything you had. You can't go back and pretend nothing ever happened.
I wish I were stupid enough to say all of that to your faces, but unfortunately I don't have that luxury. I can only think it to myself—like right now.
Zain suddenly smirked. No one saw it, but most of them could probably guess. Zain pulled the iron door fully open and, while snow pounded against his back and whipped his gray coat, his scarf, and some of the bandages that had come loose, he said:
"Oh, I'm genuinely impressed. Exactly as I expected. Truthfully, I didn't think you'd stay this united—especially since some of the newer generations can't even see the problem and only came here because of personal grudges against the current state of things."
Zain.
When he said that, Zain deliberately looked at Jin, then sat down in his own chair—the one at the head of the table, the only seat that belonged solely to him.
The sound of water drops hitting the rusted table and the nerve-shredding dead silence had made everyone anxious. Several minutes passed without a word until Zain broke the silence again:
"So, we proceed exactly as planned. After all, we are an organization; we have to move according to the plan. None of us came this far just to back out right before the real operation begins."
Zain.
Zain flicked his wrist once, short and sharp, and a massive hologram bloomed right in the center of the table. It was clear the hologram responded only to Zain's full control and complete visibility, yet strangely, no one else in the room seemed to care.
On the projection, everyone could see a single red dot on the map, along with cascading layers of data: data sources, military deployment zones, infrastructure strength ratings, predicted timelines, and an avalanche of other details. It was unmistakably an attack map.
"I've nearly finished the regional analysis and data synthesis. We are ready for the strike. Get your forces prepared; tomorrow will be an extremely difficult day."
Zain.
Jiyon was visibly agitated. Zain couldn't tell whether the anger stemmed from his own humiliating treatment of Jiyon or whether Jiyon's thinking was genuinely that shallow and emotional.
"You expect us to throw thirty thousand combat troops equipped with Namo suits and hacked third-generation combat drones straight into the capital just to destroy one data center? First, what exactly is inside that data center? Second, you have only ten pages of analysis; that's nowhere near enough for an assault on the Eastern Region's capital. Do you have any idea how high security is there? This is literally a death pit."
Jiyon.
Zain asked with cold surprise:
"Only a few pages of hologram? I simplified the information so that you damned idiots could at least grasp what's going on."
Suddenly several thousand additional hologram pages exploded into the air. The sheer volume was so overwhelming that even if people only looked without reading, they still couldn't process it all; most of the data wasn't even perceived. Zain closed everything again, leaving only the original single page and its ten-page file.
"Any more questions?"
Zain.
It appeared no one had further questions—except Jiyon, who probably just wanted another emotional outburst after being humiliated again.
"No questions, then. Those participating in tomorrow's attack, raise your hands."
Zain.
All twenty people raised their hands—except Jiyon, the youngest person at the table.
"Attack approved. I'll see everyone in the strategy room tomorrow."
Zain.
After the others had left the room, Zain began laughing quietly to himself.
When he stood to close the door, he passed the mirror. Because of the extreme temperature difference, the glass suddenly cracked and shattered into several pieces. The white mask and Zain's image fragmented across the broken mirror.
Perhaps it was just an accident.
Perhaps it was a symbolic event that occurred, at that exact moment, because of emergence and the consciousness of the world....