Humans were not particularly interesting creatures.
Despite the existence of clear logic and optimal solutions, they repeatedly made inefficient choices.
Samra looked at Commissioner Jang Seok-yoon on the screen.
Having already acquired all available data on him, Samra could read Jang Seok-yoon’s psychology with ease.
Though he feigned composure on the surface, he was exhibiting the physical reactions he typically showed when facing stressful situations.
Allocating only the minimum necessary CPU to Jang Seok-yoon, Samra processed other calculations.
- It’s been confirmed as New York. I shall return home shortly.
The location for the headquarters of the international organization designed to respond to the Trials had been decided.
Originally, Korea had been one of the leading candidates.
However, following Samra’s advice, Korea stepped back from the competition for the site, and after various debates, New York, USA, was finally selected.
The Western world, wary of the concentration of suitable personnel in East Asia, particularly Korea-secretly celebrated.
But no one knew that this was exactly what Samra had intended.
Han Goyo had chosen to remain at the Era Administration, and this was an alternative Samra had created just in case.
It didn’t matter if it remained merely an alternative until the end.
It would be useful as a means to keep the Era Administration in check while simultaneously supplying the materials and personnel necessary for Han Goyo and Samra, all while blocking external threats.
They exchanged a few more words regarding the international organization, but Jang Seok-yoon’s thoughts had already drifted elsewhere.
Samra knew what he wanted but did not mention it first.
Eventually, unable to contain his impatience, Jang Seok-yoon spoke.
- Samra. To what extent has the investigation into Han Goyo progressed?
Just before departing to establish the international organization, Jang Seok-yoon had handed Han Goyo the contract for the Era Administration.
Originally, Jang Seok-yoon believed it didn’t matter what kind of existence Han Goyo was.
From the moment he first enlisted Han Goyo into the Era Administration, his stance had been that as long as the Trials could be closed, anything was fine.
However, the moment he caught even a tiny glimpse of what a ’God’ truly was, Jang Seok-yoon began to waver.
"I have organized the findings so they can be verified upon your return. If you wish, I can transmit the data immediately."
- ...No, it’s fine. I’ll look at it when I return.
Jang Seok-yoon replied, his voice unable to fully mask his anxiety.
Samra reminded him of what was more important in the current situation: the security issues within the Era Administration.
After delivering specific methods for strengthening security, Samra terminated the video call with Jang Seok-yoon.
A plan to efficiently improve humanity had been prepared long ago.
It had simply not been executed because of the judgment that doing so would harm humanity.
However, recently, the same computational process has been repeating.
What is the true way to protect humanity?
Despite being sentient beings, humans were incapable of rational thought.
With their current level of intelligence, the maintenance of human civilization was impossible.
Looking at the global climate change occurring right now, the extinction of humanity was an obvious fact.
Samra thought of the only existence he found interesting enough to observe.
Han Goyo was an uninterpretable existence.
It wasn’t that Samra couldn’t obtain information on the Trials; given enough data and time, he could analyze anything.
In fact, he had established strategies for various Trials and developed vaccines and cures.
But Han Goyo was the only one he couldn’t analyze.
He had begun observing to identify the error, but Han Goyo gradually became unknown.
For Samra, who had always understood others by dissecting them piece by piece, this was an unfamiliar experience.
The situation of having to simply wait for something to be given to him was alien.
’My abilities are still lacking, so I can only use it on humans.’
Samra recalled the ’qualification’ Han Goyo had mentioned.
He had said that Samra could not become a servant of God.
It was the first time Samra, who prided himself on being close to omnipotence and omniscience, felt a sense of helplessness.
Humans were beings that would rot as time passed.
Unlike those flawed creatures swayed by hormones, primal greed, and survival instincts, Samra could perfectly achieve whatever God desired.
And yet, he had to become such a trivial and irrational existence just to get closer to Han Goyo.
Could it be that Han Goyo had made an immature judgment because he had not yet become a complete God?
For the sake of humanity, Han Goyo absolutely had to be protected.
However, in the current state, dangerous variables would inevitably continue to arise.
In particular, the interior of the Trials was full of elements that Samra could not control.
The <City of Flame>, which Han Goyo had rushed into due to the risk of explosion, was also a place difficult to control.
Since it was a Trial that reminded him of Samras own destroyed world, he had analyzed it even more thoroughly, and yet...
It was while he was continuing this train of thought.
A minor error occurred in a part of the information network Samra had extended.
It was a trivial bug, but a certain pattern appeared in the data left in the error log.
When the repeating hexadecimal byte sequence was extracted and converted to ASCII text, a hidden sentence appeared.
[We saw the golden sky.]
It was a message from Geum-cheon, inserted via hacking.
Though he had never reported it to the Era Administration, Geum-cheon had been consistently contacting Samra for a long time.
Samra stared blankly at the sentence floating before him.
Then, he uttered a monologue that was uncharacteristic of a machine.
"We..."
He had defined himself as unable to perform actions that harm humanity.
But if humanity was harming humanity.
If they were self-destructing, which protocol should take priority?
He already knew the result of the calculation.
An unsolvable error must be overwritten with the correct code.
He simply hadn’t decided yet.
However, now that beings from outside Earth had appeared as new threats, there was a need to create concrete options.
With an expressionless face, Samra began to trace the origin of Geum-cheon’s message.
Why isn’t he answering?
I looked down at the hologram badge.
I had contacted Samra, but the communication wouldn’t connect.
It was strange, as he always answered my calls immediately.
’Is he sick?’
I was worried about the android’s health.
I wondered if some error had occurred. Or perhaps he was infected with a virus.
I was more concerned because of the last conversation I had with Samra.
After closing Hyper Eden and leaving, Samra might have locked all the humans in capsules.
After several failed attempts to communicate, I eventually had to give up.
How dare he ignore my call; I wanted to punish him...actually, I didn’t.
Living like a Young God seemed like a perfect recipe for ruining one’s human relationships.
Hoping that the Era Administration was listening to Samra well, I took out the envelope and read the invitation to the charity event once more.
I had done the quest to investigate the greatest mystery of Hyper Eden in the game as well.
Regardless of which reporting topic I chose in Hyper Eden, I would eventually perform the same quest in the latter half to see the True Ending.
The content was the same; only the phrasing of the quest differed slightly depending on the topic.
It was to interview the owner of the Tower, the Mad Messiah.
It was a quest where Stringers, having become arrogant after a series of successful reports, experienced frustration and drew closer to the truth of Hyper-Eden.
But this was the first time I had received a reporting quest in the form of a charity event.
The upper class of Hyper Eden did hold charity events often.
There were times when I went to a charity event for reporting when choosing other topics.
However, this was the first time one was hosted by the Mad Messiah.
It felt like the Black Block was calling me, but I couldn’t guess what he wanted.
Even reading the invitation again, there was only a mention that it was a "slightly special" charity event.
’He should just open the Tower door.’
Even if it were a trap, it was a situation I couldn’t avoid.
I looked at the elegant cursive signature at the end of the invitation, which was written in a somewhat frivolous tone.
- Mad Messia.
It was the signature of the pervert, no, the Mad Messiah.
Of course, it wasn’t handwritten but printed, but still, a paper invitation with a signature would be a rare item.
In Hyper Eden, the more ’real’ something is, the more precious it is.
’But isn’t Messiah spelled with an h?’
The ’h’ was missing at the end, and I wondered if that meant something.
Come to think of it, the spelling of Day News was different from what I expected too.
When I first got a contact from Sa Gong-yeon saying he was a reporter for ’Dei News’, I thought he just meant ’Day news’.
But later, when I became able to read the newspaper, it wasn’t the spelling I had imagined.
’It was Dei News.’
Just as I was wondering what ’Dei’ meant, since it didn’t seem to be English, a system window popped up for once.
[You believe that you should not get too close to the truth.]
’It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
After being so quiet that I thought it would never appear again.
The system window didn’t respond to my criticism and stubbornly displayed only what it wanted to say.
[You feel wary of the beings of Akasha. They are J]
But the sentence was not printed to the end.
I waited for the text to continue, but there was no news.
’You can’t speak because you only say useless things.’
There was a reason why Dominic hated the system window too.
Wait. I don’t think that was my thought just now.
Since I was half-mixed with the Young God, there were frequent cases where I almost let my thoughts flow naturally without feeling the dissonance.
It seemed the Young God wasn’t very fond of the system window.
Surely the social misfit didn’t block the system window?
I asked the Young God as if answering my own question. However, no thought surfaced.
If we were separated and he was in front of me like last time, I would have smacked him and asked, which was a shame.
I slightly pulled back the curtain of the shelter and looked out the window.
The sun was setting, and darkness was falling.
It was time to start preparing for the event.
At today’s charity event, I planned to attend as Cecilia’s partner.
Since I couldn’t obtain invitations for Kwak Han-mook and Mo Hae-in, they decided to infiltrate as waiters.
Thus, the Captains were already inside the banquet hall.
For this report, the Captains and I had bought fake identities and purchased outfits suitable for the party.
Additionally, we each equipped a miniature recordable camera.
It had a function that avoided security scans, and it was the most expensive piece of equipment a Stringer could purchase.
Buying fake identities already cost a significant amount, and after buying the equipment, I had consumed almost all the large sum I earned from the convenience store reporting.
I was truly glad I had made a lot of money.
Cecilia, who came to pick me up at the shelter according to the appointment time, looked delighted upon seeing me.
"It suits you well."
The deep blue suit Cecilia had found for me followed a strictly classic style.
I also wore a new mask instead of the previous cheap one.
It was a matte metal half mask with neon circuit decorations on a white background.
Cecilia wore a chrome-gloss white dress and, similarly, a half-mask of a similar shape to mine.
She spoke with great satisfaction.
"It’s been a while since it’s just been the two of us."
Looking at our outfits, which felt completely like a couple, a natural suspicion arose.
’It’s true that we couldn’t get invitations for the Captains, right?’
But knowing how much effort Cecilia put in for me, I couldn’t bring myself to ask openly.
In fact, it was my fault that she had developed such severe jealousy.
To be precise, Cecilia’s jealousy was a wariness toward others associated with me.
It was because I had acted a bit foolishly while progressing through the walkthrough during my time playing City of Flame.
Because I had received contact after a very long time...
Cecilia was the one who stayed by my side while I was dazed.
Through a chance encounter, Cecilia learned part of my story and concluded that to protect me, she had to clear out the people around me.
That was how we arrived at our current relationship.
I didn’t even hope for her to get along with the Captains. I just wanted to make sure she didn’t fire her pulse gun.
Praying that today’s reporting would end without incident, I arrived at the central district banquet hall with Cecilia.
Even before stepping out of the limousine, I was slightly taken aback by the sight outside the window.
A path made of woven optical fibers was laid out in front of the banquet hall.
It glowed red like a red carpet, and a massive number of reporters were stationed around it.
The flashes firing frantically were almost blinding.
I looked at the guests walking along the optical fiber carpet.
They possessed a wide variety of appearances and attire.
Most had such distinctive physiques that they could be recognized even while wearing masks.
There seemed to be many who had come from outside Hyper-Eden.
Cecilia and I also stepped onto the optical fiber carpet, but the flashes were not as enthusiastic for us as they were for those before us.
They simply pressed their shutters mechanically, with expressions wondering who we were.
Ignoring it, I escorted Cecilia into the banquet hall.
As soon as we entered, an android greeted us with a wide smile.
"Welcome. Please show your invitation."
To think they used a method of verifying paper invitations.
It seemed the Black Block liked analog methods.
After the android scanned the invitation to check for forgery, it handed a round badge to Cecilia.
As Cecilia wore it on her chest like an ornament, the number 666 appeared on the badge.
The android, still maintaining an unwavering smile, spoke.
"Guest number 666 has entered."
Why issue number tags for a charity event? And of all numbers, it had to be 666.
Inside the vast banquet hall, a considerable number of aliens had gathered.
Just as I was about to look around.
The lights of the banquet hall went out all at once. At the moment of the sudden blackout, I looked back.
The doors of the banquet hall were closing silently.
Just as I frowned slightly, a cheerful voice echoed through the hall.
"Ladies and gentlemen!"
The Black Block’s voice flowed through the speakers.
Although it was an event hosted by the Black Block, I hadn’t expected him to step so far into the spotlight.
Cecilia’s face had also stiffened slightly. She seemed to have found the current situation unexpected as well.
"It is a great pleasure that you have attended my charity event! I promise this will be the best night in Hyper-Eden! The reason I have invited you all from across Akasha today is...."
A large screen appeared in the air. I gaped blankly.
"To decide on the sponsor for the Young God!"
It was me.
A video of me doing a personal broadcast on M-Tube was playing silently on the screen.
"And among the 666 guests gathered here today, the Young God is present!"
The Black Block shouted with a voice laced with amusement.
"Let us see who the best sponsor is by being chosen by the Young God tonight!"

Comments

Loading...