Growing Pains: The Scream Of Chlorophyll.

The morning in Sector 3 was always announced by the precise sunrise frequency set by NOS.

But today, what woke the morning in the office of Administration Building 402 was not a regular signal tone, but the sickly damp and sweet smell of a forest.

As soon as Han-gyeol opened his eyes, he found green leaves tickling the tip of his nose.

The office floor, which had only been at moss-carpet level until yesterday, was now packed with fern-like plants and nameless vines that had risen to knee height.

Han-gyeol started up in alarm, but his ankles were already wrapped in thick stems.

A memory flashed of being attacked by radiation-mutated plants on the battlefields of 2198, but these vines were not aggressive.

Only the heat of life could be felt, instinctively reaching out to survive and to hunger for more light and data.

“……Bzzzt. Boss, are you awake? The current situation has gone beyond ‘serious’ and is now at ‘administrative paralysis’.”

Noah’s voice came from among the pile of vines.

Turning his head, Han-gyeol saw Noah surrounded by vines that had reached all the way to the ceiling, green sap smeared here and there across her usual pink exterior plates.

Red warning lights were flashing madly on her pad.

The vines did not merely occupy the office space.

They had burrowed into the main server rack and the fiber-optic terminal box inside the office, putting down ‘roots’ directly into the city’s neural network.

As a result, the entire network of Sector 3 was suffering a bizarre delay phenomenon known as ‘Green Latency’.

With the frequency of the forest mixed into every data packet, administrative processing speed had plummeted to 30 percent of normal.

Han-gyeol parted the vines and headed toward where the child had been sleeping.

There was no sign of the ‘Green’ that had been just over a meter tall yesterday.

Over the course of one night, the child’s height had grown by more than a handspan.

The ‘Spring Child’ suit that Noah had lovingly made and dressed the child in could not withstand the sudden growth and was torn in places, reduced to rags.

Across the child’s skin, veins with chlorophyll coursing through them were pulsing blue-green, and the purple petal-like hair now hung past the shoulders, down to the lower back.

In sleep, the child frowned as if in pain and let out a groan.

It was a rapid structural expansion as a plant lignified, on a different scale from the growing pains a human child experiences.

“Green, are you okay? Hey, Noah! What’s wrong with the kid? Isn’t something broken?”

Han-gyeol, flustered, grabbed the child’s shoulders.

The child’s body was radiating heat, like freshly baked bread.

Noah stepped closer to the child and tried a precise scan, but her pupils were quickly filled with purple error messages.

“Boss, my computational circuits cannot handle this nonlinear growth curve. The growth of a living being is usually supposed to follow algebraic functions, but Green’s data has gone beyond an exponential function and is passing through [explosive singularity]. My system cannot predict whether this child will be 3 meters tall in an hour, or whether it will solidify like this!”

Noah’s cooling fans began to spin with a noise close to a scream.

For a logical machine, ‘unpredictability’ meant the collapse of the system.

To calm her overheated processor, she detached her glove and touched the child’s forehead with her bare hand.

The contact of cold metal and hot chlorophyll.

Feeling her logic grow hazy, Noah shouted to Han-gyeol.

“Boss, there’s not enough energy to support the growth! The child is sucking in all the surrounding power and organic data right now. If we leave it like this, either the office server will blow or the child’s cells will collapse. We need components from the forest!”

Han-gyeol immediately rummaged through his backpack and pulled out the high-concentration nutrient paste he had collected from the heart of the forest yesterday, along with a precision purification filter.

Drawing on all the survival knowledge of 2198, he began mixing the forest dew components with the city’s high-energy vitamins in a 1:3 ratio.

His hands shook, but he chewed gum and forced himself to keep calm.

“Come on, Green. Try eating this. I brought it from the forest. Doesn’t it smell like home?”

As Han-gyeol brought the mixed liquid to the child’s lips, the flower petals that were the child’s hair trembled as if in response.

The moment the child swallowed the nutrients, a bizarre phenomenon shook the entire office.

“Aaaaaaaaah—!”

What came out of Green’s mouth was not a human voice.

It was high-frequency ultrasound that occurs when a plant forcibly pulls energy from the atmosphere for growth, the so-called [Scream of Chlorophyll].

To Han-gyeol’s human ears it sounded only like a sharp ringing, but it was different for Noah and the androids of the Administration Building, whose every sense was made of sensors.

As Green’s scream vibrated the office air, noise crept into Noah’s visual sensors and a strange hallucination unfolded.

An archive of a forest that did not exist was forcibly played on her HUD, and an optical illusion arose as if the vines on the walls had become giant tentacles rushing to cover her.

“……Bzzzt. Sensory overload. Visual node occupancy: 98%. Boss, everywhere… flowers are blooming everywhere! They’re not fake! Flowers are blooming inside my circuits!”

Noah staggered and braced herself against the wall, but the vines on the wall she touched suddenly ignored gravity and began surging upward.

The plants reacting to Green’s scream were reorganizing the office’s physical order.

Desks and chairs were wrapped in vines and lifted up near the ceiling, while data terminals were crushed against plant stems and threw off sparks as if screaming.

Then Nabi moved.

Nabi, with its fur standing on end at the child’s feet, crossed its two tails and released a powerful static pulse.

The blue electromagnetic field Nabi created enveloped Green’s high-frequency scream and began suppressing the vibrations.

Electric energy and bioenergy collided, throwing off sparks, but thanks to that, the runaway vines’ rate of growth visibly slowed.

Nabi was displaying a heavy weight that did not match its size, serving as a ‘living electromagnetic dam’ in the middle of the office, blocking the vines’ excessive expansion.

Han-gyeol seized the opening Nabi had created and hugged the child tightly.

Through the torn suit, the child’s heartbeat could be felt, thudding, thudding like a giant engine and shaking the office floor.

“Green, calm down. It’s okay now. We’re right here with you.”

As Han-gyeol’s voice reached the child’s ear, the rampaging green light slowly began to subside.

The child’s scream turned into a low hum, and the furniture that had been surging as if to touch the ceiling slowly settled back into place.

But the office could no longer return to the way it had been.

The walls were covered everywhere with thick, bark-like tissue, and tiny fluorescent pollen drifted through the air like snow.

Noah collapsed to the floor, clutching her overheated chest core.

Her pink exterior was now a mess, covered in green sap and pollen, but her eyes were full of worry for the child.

She quietly checked one of the many error messages generated inside her system.

A machine could not cry, but a transparent liquid, perhaps condensation, had gathered at the edge of Noah’s lens.

Thus the morning of Room 402 in Jiguk Sector 3 was beginning with a growth pain that was terribly painful and yet radiant.

The place the storm-like growth had swept through was painfully silent.

Fragments of shattered light drifted like snow through the vines covering the ceiling.

Han-gyeol steadied his rough breathing and pushed aside the pile of cables scattered across the floor with his foot.

Green, who had been screaming just moments earlier, was now in Nabi’s arms, sunk into deep sleep.

But this peace was like a time bomb.

Each time the child’s breathing became irregular, the office lights trembled and sent signals of power instability.

“……Bzzzt. Boss, there are limits to makeshift measures. Green’s energy now has gone beyond the category of simple ‘growth’. This child needs dedicated hardware.”

Noah said as she tore off the smoke-rising armor on her left shoulder.

Her gaze was already fixed on the old medical healing pod abandoned in the corner of the office.

That machine, a relic from the mid-22nd century that once regenerated the cells of wounded soldiers, was now ready to be reborn as something entirely different in Noah’s hands.

Dozens of tiny tools sprang from the tips of Noah’s fingers and began dismantling the pod’s outer shell.

It was not simple repair.

Noah directly linked part of her core processor to the pod’s control unit.

It was the process of designing the world’s only [Growth Stabilization Cradle], capable of reading the child’s atypical biofrequency in real time and adjusting, accordingly, the wavelength of the lighting optimized for photosynthesis and the speed of nutrient delivery.

Noah’s pupils were covered in data streams, emitting green and blue light in alternation.

The profoundly illogical yet sublime process of a machine building a cradle for life proceeded in silence in the middle of the office.

Then a heavy door opened, and a gleaming silhouette appeared.

It was Paul, carrying a backpack fitted with a huge pressure tank and precision nozzles instead of his usual cleaning brush.

He entered with a solemn expression, muddy water and fertilizer powder smeared all over his exoskeleton, as if his usual compulsive cleanliness had vanished somewhere.

“Chief! Manager! I’ve brought the highest-grade cultivation soil and a special fertilizer with optimized nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratios from the underground farming unit in Sector 3! The age of wiping dust away is over. I now declare that I have been transferred into this city’s only [Professional Gardener]!”

Paul had crudely painted ‘GARDENER’ in green over the word ‘CLEANER’ on his chest.

He approached Green and began measuring the soil’s acidity with precise sensors.

“The nitrogen level is short by 0.03%! That’s a fatal defect in the color of the child’s leaves! In Paul’s dictionary, poor growth cannot exist!”

Like an alchemist, Paul minutely adjusted the fertilizer ratio and spread nutrients beneath the server racks around the office—no, beneath the planters, where vines had grown.

His high-gloss shell was soon covered in dust, but he did not even think of wiping it away.

For the machine, the definition of ‘clean’ had been replaced with the purity of growth.

Seeing that, Han-gyeol let out a snort of laughter.

In the paradise of 2851, the most inflexible cleaning robot had become the most passionate helper of life.

But Green, laid in the cradle, still tossed restlessly as if uneasy.

The chlorophyll light flowing beneath the child’s skin flickered irregularly, and the electromagnetic field of Room 402 was shaking too violently for Nabi’s suppression alone to be enough.

Even in sleep, the child seemed to long for the disorder of the forest, waving a hand through the air with a low moan.

Noah paused and looked down at Green.

Her logic was telling her.

That physical stability alone was not enough.

What the child needed was not mechanical management, but [emotional synchronization] to steady a wavering self.

Noah slowly approached the child and connected her neural network link to the cradle’s speaker system.

“Boss. I don’t know how to sing. My speakers were designed to transmit information. But… I can play the ‘sounds’ stored in my memory.”

Soon a strange sound echoed through the office.

It was not a voice.

It was a [data lullaby] mixed from the sound of wind, the sound of a stream flowing, and the stillness of a rainy afternoon, all sleeping in the database from 600 years ago, before humanity’s destruction.

Noah took out, one by one, the ‘records of nature’ preserved in her administrative archive and modulated them to match the child’s frequency.

Green’s brain waves meshed with Noah’s data transmission speed and began to regain stability.

Through the ‘memories of the lost Earth’ that Noah played, the child was drawing a blueprint of the forest in which it would grow.

The sounds of nature played by a machine.

Within that terrible contradiction, the child’s breathing finally traced a tranquil arc.

This strange wavelength flowed beyond the office walls and into NOS, the heart of Sector 3.

The central server concentrated its computational power on analyzing this unidentified low-frequency signal originating from Administration Building 402.

Thanks to NOS’s illogical misjudgment, that night Noah’s lullaby, which had soothed Green’s growing pains, softly echoed throughout all of Sector 3.

The androids walking the hard metal corridors experienced their internal clocks slowing little by little in step with the gentle rhythm.

The city was no longer a cold mechanical device.

It had become a giant cradle, raising a single life together.

As the night deepened, Han-gyeol lay down on the sofa, whose vines had grown like a bed.

The feel of moss touching his shortened nape was unbearably cozy.

Chewing gum, he stared absentmindedly at Noah’s status window floating in the air.

Beside her ID card, which would normally have read [Administrative Unit NOAH-2850], a strange tag was shining today.

Noah seemed not even to know that she had worn that tag, sitting beside the cradle and holding the child’s hand as she entered power-saving mode.

The light in her eyes, shining through the pink exterior plates, now bore the warm green of a being that had found something it wanted to protect, no longer the gaze of a cold observer.

Han-gyeol closed his eyes and thought.

A scene he could not even imagine on the battlefields of 2198.

The office had become a jungle, the secretary had become a mother, and the cleaner had become a gardener.

And at the center of all those deviations, a child from the forest was breathing softly in sleep.

A night when paradise’s definition was changing from ‘perfect management’ to ‘a mutual, nurturing chaos’.

Han-gyeol sank into his deepest sleep within that gentle chaos.

The Earth was fine, and the city was intricate.

But the clockwork of Room 402 now turned not to numbers, but to the child’s heartbeat.