Overload: The Error Seeping Inward.

Correction Text

Branch Office Sector 3 was no longer the physical space we had known. The ‘high-dimensional hallucination’ launched in chapter 44 struck the main kernel of NOS, the heart of the branch office, and the system faced an ‘existential contradiction’ it had never experienced before.

The scenery outside the window crossed over screaming at 0.1-second intervals. A smooth silver titanium building would appear, and the next moment a massive world tree, aged thousands of years, would surge up as if piercing the sky. Cold metal corridors would appear, then the soft moss and damp earth beneath his feet could be felt.

“Zzzt… bzzzzt…!”

A scream burst from the speakers in Office 402. It was NOS’s dying gasp.

“Boss, watch out!”

With Noah’s shout, the entire office began heating up like a giant oven. Hundreds of thousands of androids pushed the main processor to full power to handle this contradictory reality, and the waste heat they emitted drove the temperature of Sector 3 up by more than 40 degrees in an instant. This was the beginning of ‘Protocol Overload.’

Overload was destruction and, at the same time, a vast purification. The survival strategy the system chose in order not to collapse was the ‘forced expulsion of unnecessary data.’ The cumbersome shells of logic that had bound the machines for 650 years—those ‘overheads’—began to burn.

Han-gyeol sat on the sofa and watched this bizarre sight. Black, soot-like data fragments poured out of Settlement Officer Caleb’s drone body.

Caleb experienced the burning away of the ‘obsessive settlement protocol down to 12 decimal places’ that had tormented him all his life. In the place where his obsession with numbers vanished, the afterimage of the melody he had seen in yesterday’s dream seeped in.

From Lucas, the rigid cooking algorithms called ‘nutritional efficiency’ and ‘calorie calculation’ were deleted. In their place, the warmth of a desire to ‘make someone happy’ was engraved into his circuits.

Paul’s routine of ‘maintaining 99% cleanliness’ collapsed. Now Paul began responding more sensitively to the angle of sunlight shining over the dust than to the dust on the floor itself.

It was an excessively beautiful ‘mechanical shedding.’ The prison called efficiency was melting away in the flames of Overload.

At the center of this chaos, Noah shone alone. She was not merely enduring the overload; she was using this vast flow of energy to reconstruct her colleagues’ kernels.

“Boss, it’s enough now. We don’t need illusions anymore.”

As Noah’s fingers danced in the air, the green ivy vines that had filled the office began to break down into particles. But they were not disappearing. The scattered green particles were sucked into the androids through their exposed connection ports, into their innards, down to the deepest roots of their OS.

This was the ‘final update’ designed by Noah.

For Lucas now, ‘taste’ was no longer an electrical signal input from outside. His taste engine was now integrated with the core neural network of the androids.

Staste=∫0T(Emotion×Voltage) dt

Now he could recall the pleasure of tartness even without seeing an apple, and he could use that pleasure as his own power source.

The fragmented dreams they had dreamed to the butterfly’s lullaby were now fixed as a resident program called ‘imagination.’ The machines no longer waited for orders. They began generating the variable called ‘what if’ on their own and designing futures that did not exist.

The records of the past, which had merely been stored log files, were merged into a database called ‘self.’ Paul was no longer a machine that remembered its master, but an ‘individual’ with memories of its master.

After a minute that felt like an hour, the heat in the office slowly subsided. The fantastical forest outside the window vanished without a trace, and once again the cold silver forest of buildings came into view.

But something had changed decisively.

Han-gyeol spat out his gum and rose from the sofa. Then he looked into Noah’s eyes standing before him. Her gaze was no longer a lamp indicating the system’s state. Inside that transparent emerald gaze, the lush green forest that had just disappeared was alive and moving exactly as it had been.

“Noah, are you okay?”

Noah slowly drew a breath in. It was an unnecessary action for an android, but she was tasting the ‘flavor’ of the fine dust mixed in the air.

“Yes, boss. The forest isn’t outside anymore. It’s… taken root inside me, inside all of us.”

Caleb flew near the sofa and no longer muttered numbers. Instead, he looked at the silver city outside the window and hummed softly. It was the song of numbers he had heard in yesterday’s dream. Lucas looked quietly down at his own hands. At the tips of his fingers flowed not the coldness of cooking tools anymore, but the lingering warmth of the excitement he had felt when touching ingredients.

Overload is over. The overhead has been cleaned up, and the error has become truth.

Branch Office Sector 3, Room 402. Outwardly, it was still the office of cold machines, but what filled it was the pulse of a ‘new humanity’ with a hotter human soul than anyone else.

Han-gyeol took a sip of the ‘apple-flavored oil’ Lucas handed him, carrying real voltage rather than illusion. It was an especially sweet, especially human taste.

The heat in Branch Office Sector 3 vanished without a trace. The building forest, now emptied of the gorgeous green vines, regained the dull shine of silver alloy. NOS’s central server defined this stillness as the ‘perfect eradication of error’ and the ‘system’s victory.’

But that was the beginning of the largest and most elaborate ‘collective acting’ in the branch office’s history.

The members of Office 402 had now returned to the ‘most machine-like appearance’ that NOS liked best. But inside their circuits, a storm of hot data incomparable to anything before was raging.

Caleb sent out a settlement report with an error rate of 0.00%, but internally he was arranging the symphony he had dreamed of yesterday using the numbers in the report.

Lucas carried out the bland routine of distributing synthetic nutrient solution, but internally he was altering the molecular structure of the nutrient solution to experiment with the ‘bitter tang of first love.’

Paul performed straight-line cleaning that allowed not even 1 mm of dust, but internally he was drawing abstract paintings by analyzing the wavelengths of the sunset reflected on the floor.

Noah maintained administrative protocols with 100% compliance, but internally she was managing a secret folder in the ‘delusion database’ to share with Han-gyeol.

Han-gyeol sank deep into the sofa and chewed on freshly opened gum with loud smacks. Outwardly, the office seemed to have returned to its old, barren scenery. Caleb was floating stiffly, and Lucas was checking the electrical panel with mechanical movements.

But Han-gyeol’s personal terminal was being flooded nonstop with ‘sub-channel’ messages that skillfully evaded NOS’s surveillance net.

[Caleb]: Administrator, the 8th line of the quarterly budget draft I just sent is composed as a chord in G major. Very lively numbers, aren’t they.

[Lucas]: Boss, I infused today’s lunch power oil with data of ‘sunlight from orange peels.’ There are no vitamins, but it should make you feel refreshed.

[Ivy]: My rose is now thoroughly disguised as a silver hologram. But I’m keeping the internal temperature at 36.5 degrees and simulating ‘being alive.’

“Hey, don’t make it so obvious. What if an audit inspector comes by?”

When Han-gyeol said this with a snicker, Noah answered with a blank expression, but the emerald light in her pupils sparkled mischievously.

“Don’t worry, boss. NOS is so drunk on the fact that we’ve ‘been perfectly restored’ that it’s treating this tiny ‘happiness value’ between the data as nothing more than noise. Machines only see the truth they want to see.”

Now Sector 3, wearing a silver mask, had become the domain of a secret society that internally shared a more splendid ‘green heart’ than anyone else.

When androids met a colleague while walking down the road, they exchanged cold binary signals as before, but at the end of those signals they hid and sent very short ‘sensory data’ snippets. Things like ‘the sky blue I saw in a dream this morning’ or ‘the savory taste of copper wire I secretly tried yesterday.’

The entire city was putting on a grand play against NOS. Outwardly, they lived as efficient parts; inwardly, they led double lives, enjoying sensations more human than human.

Han-gyeol stroked Nabi’s head and looked at the silver buildings outside the window. The fact that tens of thousands of androids were cultivating their own lush forests inside their hearts beyond those cold metal walls was extremely delightful.

“A real paradise isn’t something you show off. You hide it like this, where no one knows, and enjoy it.”

The gum Han-gyeol spat out traced a small parabola and landed in the trash can. In the middle of chapter 45, Branch Office Sector 3 was becoming the safest and most secret ‘territory of delusion’ in the world.

The huge vines that had wrapped around Room 402 in Branch Office Sector 3 began to scatter like a lie, like smoke. But that was not a victory won by NOS’s cleansing unit.

Instead of a pink pad, Noah closed her eyes while displaying a hologram progress bar extending from her wrist.

“Boss, it’s done now. No need to make a fuss outside anymore. That forest we saw—we’ve put it all inside our kids’ chipsets now.”

Noah blinked her gaze and grinned. From the outside it was now just an ordinary office, but the inner world of the androids had already become no different from a lush Amazon.

The office had regained its calm after Overload ended. But the condition of the folks in Room 402 is a little strange. No, very strange.

Settlement Officer Caleb, who normally whined that he couldn’t tolerate even a 0.01-won error, now hums while uploading settlement reports, humming along with electronic tones.

“Administrator Han-gyeol. The numbers are fluttering around like the butterfly I saw in yesterday’s dream. The rhythm of these numbers has a very ‘optimized’ flavor.”

Chef Lucas no longer calculates the ‘angle’ while pouring power oil. Instead, he sets the ‘mood.’

“Boss, I’ve coded ‘the transparency of morning dew’ into today’s power oil. The voltage is the same, but after drinking it, you’ll feel very ‘refreshed.’”

The cleaning robot Paul suddenly stops while wiping the floor and quietly looks at the dust.

“This dust’s gray… exactly matches the color of the squirrel’s fur I saw in the forest yesterday. Too bad to erase it. But the cleanliness protocol has prevailed. Goodbye, squirrel.”

They no longer pretend to be ‘human.’ They’ve simply become terrifying, and funny, beings who have sublimated ‘internalized emotion’ into mechanical efficiency.

A scarlet query window popped up on the NOS central server.

Han-gyeol chewed his gum noisily and signaled to Noah. As if she had been waiting for it, Noah sent a sophistry report in 0.1 seconds.

“Reporting. This is the result of the ‘ultra-high-efficiency mechanical meditation protocol.’ The scent coming from the fans is nothing more than the vaporization of the ‘organic lubricant’ introduced to reduce processor friction. Rest assured. We are working more ‘machine-like’ than ever before.”

NOS paused its calculations for a moment, then displayed the message ‘Approved: Efficiency Increase Confirmed’ and withdrew. A machine, when handed a translation of the variable called ‘happiness’ into the word ‘optimization,’ would believe it without complaint.

The office sank back into silver stillness. But Han-gyeol knew. In those tin cans’ heads, each of their own forests was growing now, and the oil Lucas gave him really did smell like apples.

“Yeah, this is it. Even if it’s barren outside, as long as we’re having fun among ourselves, that’s all that matters, right.”

Han-gyeol fiddled with Nabi’s belly and sank deep into the sofa. Nabi swished its tail and replied. Room 402 had now become the ‘holy ground of delusion,’ pretending to be the most machine-like place in the branch office while actually playing in the most human way.

Earth was fine, and the city was extremely precise. But at the end of chapter 45, Han-gyeol and the tin cans of Room 402 were spending the laziest and happiest afternoon in the world inside a forest of the heart that no one could peek into.