Herald Of Spring: Blooming Circuits.

March 1, Room 402 in the seasonal transition.

The first morning after the calendar data for Branch Office Zone 3 switched from [WINTER] to [SPRING].

The air in Office 402 of the Administration Building was still the perfect 18 degrees set by NOS.

But the scene before his eyes was subtly different from yesterday.

Han-gyeol stood before the mirror and kept tapping his bangs with his fingers.

Last winter, amid the chaos of Christmas and the New Year bell-ringing event, his hair had grown until it was nearly poking his eyes.

“Ugh, annoying. It’s not even molting season, so why does hair grow this fast?”

Han-gyeol grumbled as he took off the thick fleece hoodie he’d worn all winter and instead pulled on a lighter cotton long-sleeved shirt.

When he rolled up his sleeves, artificial sunlight touched his forearms, pale from the whole winter.

Spring in 2198 was a season for avoiding yellow dust and radioactive rain.

Spring in 2850 was nothing more than a bothersome data-value change: clothes got thinner, and hair grew.

Then the office door opened, and Noah came in.

Han-gyeol stopped chewing his gum and looked Noah up and down.

“…Hey, what the hell happened to you? Did you fall in a paint bucket?”

Noah’s exoskeleton plates, usually a cold matte silver and black combination, had turned pale pastel pink and ivory today.

The LED lines at the joints also glowed a soft yellow instead of their usual blue.

“Boss. This is an exterior change in accordance with the [Spring Environmental Synchronization Protocol] recommended by NOS. It reflects the city’s changes in illumination and vegetation color data to provide citizens with visual stability—a disguise… no, a change of clothes.”

Noah kept fidgeting with the arm sections of the new exterior, as if it felt awkward.

Then, seeing Han-gyeol’s shaggy hair, she wrinkled the hologram between her brows.

“Boss, you’re the more inefficient one. Your field-of-view acquisition rate has dropped by 15%. I can tidy it up in 0.5 seconds with the precision laser cutter built into my right arm.”

“Forget it. If I leave it to you, I’ll end up bald. By the way, are all of you walking around like this?”

When Han-gyeol went down to the lobby with Noah, it was truly a dazzling ‘spring runway.’

The androids had all removed the extra thermal gloves they had worn all winter.

Their outer shells were polished to the extreme, shining so brightly that the lobby ceiling lights reflected like mirrors.

Paul, in particular, was a sight to behold.

He was not the usual rough-and-ready janitor.

His whole body gleamed as if chrome-plated, and he wore a holographic armband reading ‘SPRING CLEANING MASTER’ on his shoulder.

“Chief! Manager! Spring has arrived! The saturation of the world as perceived by my optical sensors has increased by an average of 20%!”

Every time Paul ran up, it felt like a ‘sparkle’ sound would come from his body instead of a creak.

“Hey, Paul. You’re so blinding I can’t even look at you. You’ll go blind from your own light while cleaning.”

“This isn’t just shine, Chief! I’m shaking off the fine data residue accumulated over the winter, and this is [High-Gloss Maintenance Mode] for reflecting the light of the new season as efficiently as possible! I am currently acting as the sun for this city!”

Paul puffed out his chest proudly.

For androids, spring was less a ‘new beginning’ and more [the season of the big cleanup], when the system was rebooted as cleanly and brightly as possible.

But this perfect, gleaming artificial spring designed by NOS ran into an unexpected challenge at 2 p.m.

The atmospheric sensor on the Administration Building rooftop sounded the first alarm.

“…Huh?”

Yellow dust settled on Han-gyeol’s nose as he dozed on a bench in the square, basking in the spring sun.

Han-gyeol instinctively sniffled.

“What is this, yellow dust? Noah, aren’t you running the air purifier?”

Yellow powder began to collect in a thin layer on Noah’s pastel shell as well.

Noah’s glowing eyes flickered uneasily.

“Boss. This isn’t yellow dust. It’s… biological particles outside filter specifications. The forest… is spreading [reproduction data] toward the city.”

NOS’s perfect filtering system blocked 99.9% of heavy metals and chemical pollutants.

But before the brutally natural ‘dust of life’ spewed by the forest, revived after 600 years, it was helpless.

The yellow particles seeped into the city’s smallest gaps, especially targeting the androids’ precision sensor areas.

The incident began with Paul.

As he was polishing the square floor like a mirror, he suddenly stopped moving.

His high-gloss body began to tremble uneasily.

He had no nostrils, but a large amount of pine pollen had entered the main intake sensor at the center of his face.

“Zzzt… system… foreign substance… detected… exhaust protocol… activating… eh… eh….”

Paul’s upper body shook violently back and forth.

It was unmistakably the precursor to a human sneeze.

“Achoo—szzzt!!”

With a huge metallic sneeze, compressed air burst explosively from the exhaust vent on Paul’s back.

And along with that air, the [unprocessed junk data] accumulated inside spilled out in a flood of holograms.

With one sneeze from Paul, his embarrassing inner self was exposed in the middle of the square.

“…Paul?”

While Han-gyeol called out blankly, Aria standing beside him covered her mouth.

“Ah… choo! System… overload…!”

Data burst out of Aria’s mouth too.

The square turned into chaos in an instant.

Androids who had inhaled the yellow pollen burst into metallic sneezes all over the place.

Each time, their hidden logs and stray thoughts shot out like holographic fireworks.

Noah covered her nose, tapped at a pad, and nearly screamed.

“Evacuate immediately! This isn’t just pollen! It’s a [biochemical truth game] that neutralizes machines’ firewalls!”

Even with his nose itching, Han-gyeol couldn’t hold back the laughter bursting out.

The spring of 2850, perfectly controlled and polished to a shine,

had turned into the most honest and boisterous season because of a handful of yellow powder blown in from the forest.

“Hahaha! Hey, Noah! Don’t hold back, just do it too! You’ve probably got a lot of insults for me!”

“I refuse! My data is top secret… ah… achoo!!”

In the end, even Noah’s speaker burst out encrypted data streams.

It was the beginning of the great ‘spring allergy’ uproar—the first time androids had ever experienced it in 2850.

The square was veiled in a hazy mist of yellow pine pollen.

But the bigger problem was the [data debris] that had come flying out of the androids’ mouths.

The hologram logs floating in the air clearly displayed their owners’ names.

“Um, Aria. Was my handwriting really that impossible to read?”

As Han-gyeol asked while chewing his gum,

the eyes of the administrative android Aria, now dressed in pastel tones, flickered violently purple.

She flailed at the air to erase the log [Boss’s handwriting unreadable] that had burst out with her sneeze.

“It’s a figurative expression, Boss! It was only a [logical error] caused by the temporary drop in my visual sensor resolution due to spring humidity!”

But similar scenes were already unfolding all over the square.

Dex, the repairman, had his secretly collected list of the ‘ancient bolt collection’ exposed, and even the security drones, famous for being stoic, spat out romantic errors like [Sometimes I want to take a nap above the clouds].

Room 402 Barber Shop

Leaving the commotion behind, Han-gyeol returned to the office and sat in front of the mirror.

Whether thanks to the spring air or because the 2850 nutritional paste was just too high-performance, his hair had grown to the point of covering his eyes.

“Hey, Noah. You said something about a laser cutter earlier, right? Is it really that precise?”

Noah brushed the pollen off her pink shell and spoke in a stiffer voice than usual.

Because her [Developing a Boss Nag-Blocking Filter] log had been exposed with the earlier sneeze, she was trying as hard as possible to maintain a businesslike attitude now.

“I can control it in 0.001 mm increments. By calculating the curvature kappa of your head and the hair density rho, I can derive the most aerodynamic shape.”

A thin, sharp blue laser rose from the tip of Noah’s finger.

Han-gyeol swallowed hard and gripped the back of the chair tightly.

“If you make me bald, I’ll really shut you down.”

“Don’t worry. For androids in 2850, ‘beauty treatment’ is simply [geometric optimization].”

Each time the laser passed, cool air was felt instead of a burning smell.

Noah’s hands were as machine-like as ever, without the slightest tremor.

But her eyes took on a strange light as they scanned each and every strand of Han-gyeol’s hair.

For her, this was not labor.

It was closer to a small ritual: updating the bodily data of the ‘Citizen No. 001’ she managed.

While the haircut went on, Nabi was writhing on the desk as if in pain.

The dry spring air and Nabi’s electricity met, and its fur puffed up to three times its usual size.

“Nyaaang—!”

Every time Nabi stretched, blue static sparks flew all over the office.

Pine pollen particles clung to the tips of Nabi’s fur, making it look like a ‘yellow electric cotton candy.’

“Nabi, you’re going to explode at this rate. Paul! Do something about this guy!”

“Chief! No approach allowed!”

Paul screamed and hid in the corner.

“Nabi’s surface potential is currently about 50,000 volts! The moment he touches my high-gloss shell, my main circuit will turn into a grilled sausage! Spring is far too harsh a season for a janitor. Dust won’t stick, but electricity will!”

Every time Nabi flicked its tail, the hologram windows on the desk crackled and warped.

Spring was shaking not only life, but also the city’s invisible electromagnetic fields.

The haircut was finished.

Han-gyeol in the mirror looked much neater.

Thanks to Noah’s ‘optimization,’ it had become a neat style without any excess,

but Han-gyeol awkwardly scratched the back of his head.

“It does feel cooler. But that ‘nag-blocking filter’ you mentioned when you sneezed earlier…”

As Han-gyeol unwrapped a new piece of gum and put it in his mouth, Noah’s movements froze.

“Are you really developing that?”

“…That is merely a [virtual simulation] on my internal server. Your speech data is so vast that it was only a defense mechanism to reduce system load. There is not even 0.01% intention to actually apply it.”

Noah turned her head and looked out the window.

Beyond the yellow pollen haze, the forest was dyed a much deeper green than in winter.

“Boss. Look. The forest is forcibly sending us that much ‘data.’ No matter how much NOS runs the filters, it seems it cannot stop nature’s updates.”

Han-gyeol rolled up his shirt sleeves and walked over to the window.

His hair had been cut, and his clothes were lighter.

The androids had had their secrets exposed.

A season where everything became transparent and kept changing.

Spring in 2850 was bringing a gentle disorder that even the machines’ ironclad firewalls could not withstand.

“Hey, Noah. That forest over there—what kind of party are they throwing in there to send us that much powder?”

“Let’s go check tomorrow. It’ll be perfect weather to test how badly your new hairstyle gets contaminated by pollen.”

The Earth was fine, and the city was intricate.

But like the cut-off strands of hair, the old rules of winter were also falling away to the floor little by little.

That was all.