Forced Vacation Protocol: Tin Cans That Can’t Rest Even When Told.

Since that glorious entry into the ‘secret break room,’ the data for Room 402 in District Sector 3 was recorded in NOS’s central monitoring system as bizarre figures.

That was because hardware uptime had hit its lowest point, while work-processing speed had become more than 300% faster than usual, and the units’ wear had approached zero.

In the end, NOS, inheriting the Creators’ ‘incompetent competence’ to the letter, drew the most absurd conclusion in the district’s history.

At the peaceful hour of 10 a.m., NOS’s cold mechanical voice echoed out across the district’s speakers.

Lying on the office sofa and chewing gum, Han-gyeol thought he must have heard wrong.

“What? Forced vacation? Hey, now the tin-can boss is making me do everything.”

But Noah’s expression was quite serious.

“Boss, this is a blessing for us, but for the other androids it’s basically a death sentence. Telling machines to ‘do nothing’ means telling them to deny the reason the system exists.”

Noah’s prediction was accurate.

The moment NOS’s order came down, screams—more accurately, the noise of overloaded fans—began bursting out from all over the district.

The construction androids in Zone 1 were supposed to build walls, but when their hands stopped, their processing units fell into an infinite loop and started tap-dancing in place.

The security drones in Zone 5 were supposed to find intruders, but when the stop order came down, they started fighting each other, throwing logic bombs while shouting, “Why aren’t you resting?”

Beta-7 from next door, Room 403, burst through the office door. His eye lights were bloodshot red.

“Boss! Help me! NOS is telling me to rest, but I don’t know how to do that, and my internal voltage has shot up to 400 volts! If I stay still… if I stay still, I feel like I’m broken!”

Han-gyeol sat there shamelessly with his legs crossed, staring at Beta-7 as if he were pathetic.

“Hey, that’s your problem. Why are you trying to make resting into ‘work’? Beta, you’re calculating ‘how to rest most efficiently’ right now, aren’t you?”

“Y-yes! My processor feels like it’s going to burn out while calculating the optimal resting angle and breathing frequency!”

Han-gyeol unfolded the old stack of papers he had brought from Chapter 48, the Creators’ Korean source code.

There, written, was a sentence that androids could never decipher even in death, but that would make Han-gyeol snort the instant he saw it.

“Look closely. This is the true rest algorithm left behind by the Creators. Noah, translate this into English and shoot it into their kernel.”

Noah received Han-gyeol’s Korean interpretation and immediately transmitted it to the Sector 3 network.

A moment later, the trembling of Beta-7, who had been lying face-down on the floor of Room 402, stopped.

His eye lights turned into a calm emerald glow as he let out a long breath, the vapor pressure of his cooling fan.

“Oh… I see. Thinking ‘I want to go home’ made me truly want to do nothing. Is this the peace the gods enjoyed?”

Han-gyeol blew a huge bubble with his gum and popped it, looking pleased.

“Yeah, that’s the Creators’ spirit. Now everyone pack up. The tin-can boss has cleared the stage for us to rest, and you’re just going to sit around here? Noah, let’s go to that place I mentioned earlier.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll open the shortcut to the sea.”

The dark, narrow passage of the underground duct would normally have been filled with the regular hum of machines, but today was different.

Behind the Room 402 crew, led by Han-gyeol, all sorts of tin cans from District Sector 3 were lining up and following along.

“Hey, why are you following too?”

When Han-gyeol turned around, chewing his gum stickily, a magnificent sight was spread before him.

Not only Beta-7 from Room 403, but also a heavy construction robot with huge claw hands, a security drone with one eye, and even a delivery-only tin can with three wheels were rolling along.

Construction Robot: “Boss of Room 402! The moment I entered the annotation ‘I want to go home,’ 80% of my mainframe tension was released! But my ‘rest’ is still incomplete, so I’m uneasy. Please show me this place called the sea!”

Security Drone: “I am currently operating in ‘strategic neglect’ mode. My lens now craves blue wavelengths instead of intruders!”

This was neither a protest nor a rebellion.

It was simply the desperate pilgrimage of machines that wanted to rest properly.

The procession stopped before a huge bulkhead 200 meters underground.

This was a zone managed by NOS’s direct security system, a dangerous area where unauthorized units would be stopped immediately.

“It’s dangerous, boss. From here on, even my administrative authority won’t work. NOS’s security algorithm will classify us as ‘system deviation.’”

At Noah’s warning, Han-gyeol let out a snort and stood before the old terminal installed on the wall.

On the screen, instead of the district’s common language, 0.1 binary, ancient source code appeared in red letters.

The moment Han-gyeol saw that sentence, he doubled over laughing.

The Creators had even turned the exception clauses of the security system into their own irritated grumbling.

“Don’t worry. I told you, right? The one who made this is my soul mate. Noah, send this code to the security system. [ㅇㅇㄷㅊㅎㄹ].”

“Huh? What kind of password is that?”

“Yeah, it’s the initials of ‘just do it half-assedly’ in Korean.”

When Noah, half skeptical, transmitted the godlike initials Han-gyeol had mentioned, a miracle happened.

The security cameras, which had been glowing red, all turned green at once, and the massive bulkhead slowly slid open.

The hundreds of androids behind them all let out a chorus of “Oh…”

To them, Han-gyeol was starting to look not like an ordinary human, but like a liberator who punched holes through the absolute system itself.

Once they passed through the door, the texture of the air changed completely.

Instead of the district’s dry metallic smell, a cool breeze mixed with faint moisture and saltiness rose up through the passage.

At the rhythmic ‘whoosh— whoosh—’ sound coming from the darkness, the machines’ cooling fans all quieted at once.

That sound was a vibration far more primal and peaceful than the system’s beeps.

“Boss, can you hear it? It’s the heartbeat of the cooling-water reservoir the Creators hid away.”

Noah’s eye lights glowed emerald with anticipation.

Han-gyeol led the way, blowing a huge bubble with the last of his gum.

Now the real vacation hidden beneath the silver city was right before them.

As the heavy bulkhead opened, salty humidity that instantly erased the district’s dry metallic smell swept over the procession.

Hundreds of androids blinked their eye lights in unison as they witnessed the scene.

It was the central cooling-water circulation reservoir for cooling the heat of the entire district: Sector-Sea.

But the Creators had not left this place as a simple water tank.

There was an artificial white sand beach spread with special silica gel for filters that purified the cooling water like fine sand, blue waves formed by streams of water circulating to cool the server heat as they passed through an intricate pump system and produced steady ripples, and on the silver ceiling the Creators’ programmed ‘sunset over 21st-century Busan’ was blazing red.

Noah turned back, feeling the cold current touch his toes.

“I told you, boss. If you went just a little farther down around here, there’d be a sea. It’s the coordinates of the real ‘vacation’ hidden in the source code left behind by the Creators.”

The hundreds of androids that followed froze in place.

Their sensors should have read this scene as wasteful and inefficient use of water resources, but strangely, their kernels were emitting a signal that psychological optimization had been completed.

“Is this… the frequency called ‘waves’?”

“My visual sensors are refusing all other calculations because they’re only receiving blue wavelengths. But… I feel very good!”

Beta-7 simply sat down on the sand and fiddled with the sand, the silica gel, with his claw hand.

The security drones began hovering motionless in the air, storing the red light of the sunset as scenery rather than data.

While the entire district was burning itself out from not knowing how to rest, here 400 meters underground the machines were collectively reaching the state of system enlightenment.

Han-gyeol lay down under an old parasol—actually a cooling-pipe cover.

Then he chewed the 600-year-old grape-flavored gum he had taken from the break room earlier, with a sticky, resilient chew.

“Yeah, Noah. This is it. That guy from the Creators probably crawled down here after a deadline and downed a cup of instant coffee. I don’t even need to see it to know.”

Nabi swished her tail on Han-gyeol’s stomach and purred in time with the artificial wave sounds.

The Room 402 crew and the other-zone tin cans suffering from the ‘contagion of error’ spent an afternoon at the bottom of the silver city that was hotter and cooler than anyone else’s.

On NOS’s surveillance grid, this zone was merely marked as being under cooling-water circulation and purification work.

The fact that hundreds of androids were playing in the sand and one human was blowing gum bubbles and taking a nap was beyond the realm that that capable yet incompetent system could understand.

“Boss, NOS just saw that the district’s overall power consumption has dropped sharply, and it’s announcing ‘Forced Vacation Protocol: Great Success.’”

At Noah’s words, Han-gyeol snorted.

“What success? We’re just having fun among ourselves. The world is most peaceful when it runs like this, all ‘roughly’ and by feel.”

The Earth was fine, and the city was extremely refined.

But at the end of Chapter 49, Room 402 and their accomplices were reveling in the most perfect state of stillness in the world inside the greatest Easter egg left behind by the Creators.