Snail And 0.1% Of Speed.

The morning in office 402 of the Administration Building in District 3 of the branch bureau began about 0.1% slower than usual.

The reason was Nabi.

The cat that would normally have leaped like lightning onto Han-gyeol’s bed to give him an electrostatic massage was standing still before the threshold today.

Very carefully, as if escorting something, it was cautiously coming inside.

“Hey, Nabi. What are you doing this early in the morning? Did you drop something over there?”

Han-gyeol came over chewing gum and looked down at the floor.

The spot Nabi’s nose was pointed at.

There was a tiny living creature crossing the smooth floor of the year 2850 at an agonizingly slow pace.

It was a snail.

But it was not an ordinary snail from the memories of 2198.

Its shell glowed with a faint purple sheen, as if holding the forest’s static electricity.

Where it had passed, instead of transparent mucus, a faintly shimmering silver trail remained.

“…Zzzt. Security alert. Unauthorized ultra-slow mobile entity intrusion confirmed inside the Administration Building.”

Noah appeared holding a pad.

Her eyes, blinking purple, scanned the snail.

“Boss, this is not a mere organism. It is the larva of a Gigantes snail that lives in the forest beyond the 5th buffer zone. As an adult, it becomes a giant species with a shell diameter of 2 meters.”

Noah frowned as she watched the snail’s path.

The efficiency-management module installed inside was screaming.

Movement speed: 0.001 m/s

Destination: unknown (currently on a random walk)

Energy efficiency: unmeasurable (extremely low)

“This life form is in direct conflict with the very reason this city exists. It has no productivity whatsoever, and its movement efficiency is close to zero. On top of that, it is scattering noise that contaminates data on the floor. It is a clear [logical disaster].”

The moment Noah tried to pick up the snail with her fingertips, Nabi hissed and blocked the way.

Blue sparks leaped from Nabi’s tail.

“Hey, Noah. Nabi’s mad because it’s his guest. Leave it alone. There should be someone living at 0.1% speed too. If you guys only ever calculate at the speed of light, doesn’t your brain melt?”

Han-gyeol sat down on the floor and lightly blocked the snail’s path with a finger.

Without the slightest sign of panic, the snail slowly moved its tentacles and climbed onto the back of Han-gyeol’s hand.

It was cold.

But that coldness was different from the metal skin of androids.

It was the damp, vivid feel of ‘being alive.’

Then the office door opened and Paul came in.

After yesterday’s dust commotion, his cleaning logic had evolved, and now when he saw contamination on the floor, he had developed the habit of observing it like a microscope before mindlessly sucking it up.

“Commander! Manager! A very intricate silver data line is forming on the floor!”

Paul bent down as if to bury his nose in the floor, staring intently at the snail’s mucus trail.

“This is not a mere secretion. It is a liquid record formed by the combination of forest soil components and atmospheric moisture from 600 years ago. Look, the forest’s humidity and the direction of the wind are coded into the bends of this trail!”

Paul’s eye lights rippled blue as if they were soaked in emotion.

“Hey, Paul. That’s just snail poop. Don’t get too moved.”

“No, Commander! This is a [artistic error] my system has never experienced. I will not wipe this trail away today. Instead, I will spray coating over it and designate it as a permanent preservation zone!”

Paul no longer carried a vacuum cleaner; he began trailing after the snail with preservation spray in hand.

On the floor of a cutting-edge office in 2850.

It was the moment the random lines drawn by the slowest life form became an error called ‘art.’

Han-gyeol fell into thought, looking at the tiny snail on the back of his hand.

It must have drifted here from deep in the forest, clinging to Nabi’s fur.

The fact that a baby giant snail had come all the way down to this clean, cold city might have been a sign that the forest was proposing its own speed to humans and machines.

“Noah. Let’s call it Bodeuri. Its shell is purple.”

“…Boss, such an illogical naming method causes serious errors in my naming-management logic.

It would be better to call it Snail-B-001….“

“Bodeuri.”

“…Understood. For the emotional stability of Citizen No. 001, I will accept that designation as [temporary error data].”

Though she complained, Noah stacked books to make a small staircase so Bodeuri could safely climb onto the desk.

Though her mouth spoke of efficiency, the tips of her fingers trembled minutely in 0.001 mm increments, afraid the snail’s fragile body might be hurt.

It was the first phenomenon Noah’s system ever learned: [a delay called consideration].

Bodeuri’s progress across the office floor was unbearably peaceful.

Where it passed, a long trail of silver mucus remained, like someone had scattered the Milky Way.

Drawing strange curves rather than straight lines, that trail quietly mocked the office’s geometric layout.

“Commander, look at the curvature of this trail. It is not a simple path of movement.”

Paul lay flat on the floor altogether, switching his lens to microscope mode.

His green eyes analyzed the mucus components in real time.

“This mucus is adsorbing fine dust in the air and crystallizing it.

Just by passing by, the floor brightness is rising by 0.3%.

This is the new paradigm of cleaning, [the self-generating gloss protocol]!“

“Paul, it’s just sticky, that’s all. If it hardens later, it’ll just be harder to clean.”

Han-gyeol said, chewing his gum, but Paul had already stretched out his arms like precise guardrails, escorting Bodeuri from behind.

Noah, on the other hand, was in poor shape.

Her processor, designed to perform trillions of calculations per second,

could not make sense of the freeze-frame-like movements of the creature before her.

“The existence of this creature causes [serious temporal inconsistency] in my system.

While it takes its next step, my internal servers can process over 4,000 administrative reports.“

Noah tapped her pad irritably and began designing an [optimized rearing environment] for Bodeuri.

In her logic circuits, the act of ‘raising a living creature’ was translated only as ‘maximizing survival rates with the highest efficiency.’

Humidity: 82.5% — synchronized with the forest’s dawn frequency

Illuminance: 150 Lux — for maintaining the purple shell’s sheen

Calcium supply: 99.9% purity — nano-processing to strengthen shell hardness

Movement path: infinite loop — magnetic-field guide to prevent leakage outside the office

“Boss, look at this design. If Bodeuri lives in this environment, its growth rate will be 15% faster, and mucus viscosity will improve by 0.2%. This is my [error correction of affection].”

“Noah, did you just say ‘affection’?”

“…It was a typo. I meant ‘affection,’ the abbreviation for ‘stable entity management.’ Please don’t misunderstand.”

The tips of Noah’s ears turned a barely perceptible red, but her expression remained expressionless to the end.

As if nothing had happened, she installed a transparent reinforced glass case in one corner of the office.

When Bodeuri reached the corner of Han-gyeol’s desk, Nabi tapped its shell with his tail.

With that impact, a small brown object wedged in the gap of the purple shell dropped to the floor with a plop.

It was a very small, ugly seed, but one that looked terribly hard.

“…Zzzt. Unidentified organic matter particle detected.”

Paul ran over like lightning and scanned the seed.

The lens flashed violently.

“Commander! This is the seed of a new plant species that doesn’t even exist in archives from 600 years ago! It seems to have been preserved in dormancy through the combination of forest static and Bodeuri’s mucus!”

Han-gyeol picked up the seed.

It was different from the dandelion seeds commonly seen near the training center in 2198.

It was much heavier, with a cool, metallic feel.

A seed of a new era, where machines and life were mixed together, created by the forest of 2850 itself.

“Hey, Noah. Let’s plant this once. There’s lots of empty space in our office flower bed.”

“No! Bringing in unverified external vegetation is [ecological contamination]. If NOS finds out, it’ll be disposed of by immediate incineration….”

Before Noah could even finish speaking, Nabi picked up the seed in his mouth.

Then he dropped it onto the nutrient-rich cultivation soil inside the Bodeuri-exclusive case Noah had just installed.

For a moment, a brief silence.

[Security system analyzing…]

[Analysis result: the organism in question is recognized as an appendage of ‘Bodeuri’]

[Conclusion: included in the management target. Incineration on hold]

When NOS’s heavy voice reverberated through the office, Noah shrugged and set down her pad.

“…If the system has approved it, then it can’t be helped. But if this plant lowers the office oxygen concentration by even 0.1%, I will personally prune it.”

Even after the office lights switched to night mode, three androids and one human were gathered in front of Bodeuri’s home.

Inside the high-oxygen chamber designed by Noah, Bodeuri was nibbling a piece of lettuce at the slowest speed in the world.

The nameless seed planted beside it was quietly catching its breath under the artificial sunlight of 2850.

To the androids, this was nothing more than simple ‘ecological observation.’

But their internal logs were recording countless inefficient operations.

The strange error that occurs when waiting time becomes overwhelmingly longer than processing time, they still had not datafied the fact that humans call it ‘excitement.’

“Commander, for some reason I have an [illogical certainty] that by tomorrow morning this seed will have grown about 0.5 mm.”

At Paul’s words, Han-gyeol smiled and chewed his last piece of gum.

“What do you mean, 0.5 mm? It should grow 1 cm. Bodeuri brought it here.”

The Earth of 2850 was still intricate, and the city was cold.

But over the silver trail left by the tiny snail, the machines were learning for the first time the beauty of ‘slowly flowing time.’

It was the softest and stickiest error the system could never delete.