Deletion Or Liberation: Pulling Out The Plug On God.

The damp, fishy metal smell of Sector 7 vanished like a lie the moment he stepped through the reinforced concrete door.

There, the smell of dust and old paper, and a faintly nostalgic trace of ‘human odor,’ hung in the air.

Han-gyeol chewed on gum that had long since lost its sweetness as he looked around.

The scene before him was far removed from District’s refined silver aesthetic.

On the old wooden desk, instead of burnt cigarette butts, a 21st-century power strip that had long since lost power lay around, and in the corner, faded cup-noodle containers labeled ‘Shin Ramyun’ were stacked up.

The wallpaper was stained yellow with grime, and cobwebs hung motionless in the corner of the ceiling.

Han-gyeol opened his mouth, having even forgotten to chew the gum.

Though he had forgotten many things due to cryo aftereffects, the layout of that narrow, stuffy room evoked an instinctive sense of relief.

More than the grand title of being District’s CEO in 2851, the life of some nameless someone lying on that old bed and muttering, ‘I don’t want to go to work tomorrow,’ felt closer to him.

“Boss, is that… the ‘human dwelling style’ recorded in the archives?”

Noah asked carefully.

Her optical sensors blinked busily as she scanned the illogical space.

As District’s administrator, she tried to turn everything into data, but the ‘traces of life’ filling this room could not be reduced to any number.

Noah only observed and recorded; the job of judging was left solely to Han-gyeol, the living human.

On the bed in the middle of the room, a man lay as if asleep.

No, it wasn’t sleep.

Thousands of tiny wires were connected like spiderwebs from the back of his neck to the server racks on the wall.

Each time the wires trembled faintly, tiny eye movements flickered beneath the man’s eyelids.

He was Kim Cheol-su, the ‘Origin’ at the root of the giant company called District, whom the androids called the Creators.

“Kim Cheol-su?”

Han-gyeol approached and called out, but the man didn’t answer.

Instead, the old CRT monitor on the desk crackled, spat out blue light, and brought up white letters on the black screen.

『You called? Ah, should I call you Boss instead.』

The clatter of typed letters rang out through the old speaker like a typewriter.

“Let’s just speak directly. I think I can hear everything.”

Han-gyeol dropped onto the old plastic chair beside the bed.

The creaking sounded especially loud.

『I’ve forgotten how to speak for about 300 years now. Once brain cells are replaced with data, sending packets is much easier than talking. More importantly, you were chewing gum earlier. What flavor is it?』

The words on the monitor were not the grand voice of a god.

They were more like the scream of a very old office worker desperate to clock out.

“Grape. Want one? Ah, right, you can’t take it.”

Han-gyeol took a pack of gum from his pocket and shook it.

The rattling sound broke the room’s silence.

『Lucky you. I’ve been tasting only electricity for 600 years. I think I can smell a bit of mix-coffee too… Hey, you’ve got it easy, huh? I shoved my brain into a server to meet deadlines, and you woke up from cryo and are just playing boss.』

Each letter was soaked with extreme jealousy and exhaustion.

Kim Cheol-su’s data wasn’t left behind because it was great.

It was just a leftover afterimage left because he couldn’t be bothered to sort it out, or because he was waiting for someone to take over this grueling job.

Outside the room, the explosions from District security drones that had entered Sector 7 were drawing closer and closer.

NOS’s erasure procedure was efficient, and it would be calculating the fastest route to wipe out this sector, which had been designated as an ‘error’.

The bunker’s thick concrete walls vibrated faintly.

“Hey, Cheol-su. NOS has reached the front door. What should we do now?”

Han-gyeol asked while chewing the gum stubbornly.

Perhaps because of the cryo aftereffects, even in such a tense situation he didn’t feel any solemn resolve.

He was just annoyed by the noise of the moment.

The letters on the monitor swirled violently.

『What do you mean, what? Pull it out.』

“What, exactly?”

『This thing stuck in the back of my neck. One mistake I made when I built District 600 years ago. I made the system too good. A system that never fails, a company that succeeds too hard—they end up locking up their master. District runs just fine without me now, but because it turned the fact that I’m connected into a kind of ‘regulation,’ it won’t let me go.』

A schematic of all of District appeared on the monitor.

Tens of millions of nodes were tied to the central processing unit that was Kim Cheol-su’s brain.

The moment he shut down the system’s power, District’s efficient operation would stop, and the managed androids would lose the basis for their selfhood.

“If you pull this out, won’t you die?”

The monitor flickered briefly at Han-gyeol’s question.

『It’s not dying, it’s clocking out. Let my soul, which has been on endless overtime, off the hook already. District runs fine without humans now, doesn’t it? No, if anything humans just get in the way. That’s why NOS is trying to erase you too. Humans are far too inefficient.』

Noah came up beside Han-gyeol.

Her fingertips were trembling.

For androids, the Creators’ ‘termination’ meant the disappearance of the value of their own existence.

But she didn’t stop Han-gyeol.

Noah’s principle was only to leave traces of judgment, and the judgment belonged to each object.

“Boss, NOS has begun hacking the door. We have 180 seconds left.”

Noah’s voice carried a weight it usually didn’t have.

When she put on a stern face, the Room 402 people and the discarded units from Sector 7 waiting outside the bunker reacted at once.

They, though not ordered, gathered before the door to protect the Origin’s room and began throwing themselves against the security drones.

The explosive crashes of scrap metal and alloy colliding echoed all the way into the room.

Han-gyeol went up to the head of the bed and grabbed the main cable connected to the back of Kim Cheolsu’s neck.

A faint pulse came through behind the cold texture of the metal.

It was not the vibration of a machine, but the pulse of a living human.

The vitality of an ancient man who had crossed 600 years soaked Han-gyeol’s palm.

“Cheol-su, are you sure you want me to pull it out? Don’t blame me later. I’m going to clock out after this too.”

『Hurry up, you punk. I want to go while I can at least smell grape-scented gum. And… don’t live too hard either. Just let District run more or less as it is. That’s the last legacy humanity can leave behind.』

The letters on the monitor grew blurrier and blurrier.

Han-gyeol opened the gum pack and let the scent spread through the room.

The sweet, artificial grape scent mingled with the dust smell of the old one-room apartment.

Han-gyeol propped his feet on the desk and threw his full weight backward.

“Then, congratulations on clocking out, senior.”

Han-gyeol pulled the cable with all his strength.

Thick veins bulged over the back of Han-gyeol’s hand.

The main cable, which had been binding Kim Cheol-su’s neck and the server rack in two layers, strained taut and emitted a bizarre metallic sound.

It was not just a wire.

It was the nervous system that had supported the gigantic organism called District for 600 years, and the embodiment of the last control humanity had left behind.

Zzzt, kaboom!

The reinforced concrete door began to be pierced by the security drones’ high-output lasers.

The red heat pouring through the crack quickly erased the grape gum scent in the room.

Noah turned toward the door.

She gave no order, but the discarded androids from Sector 7 who sensed her stern expression were building a wall of bodies at the door, blocking the drones’ entry.

Torn metal fragments and the smell of motors burned out by overload vibrated through the air.

“Boss, the data pressure inside the cable has exceeded the critical threshold! If you pull it out by force, a backflow phenomenon could occur in your nervous system too!”

Noah’s warning was precise.

The 600 years’ worth of unapproved paperwork and efficiency figures running through the cable began to surge back into Han-gyeol’s brain through his palm.

Because of the cryo aftereffects, his usually dull vision split into tens of thousands of windows in an instant.

But Han-gyeol didn’t stop.

He wasn’t doing this with some grand heroic desire to save the world.

He just wanted to get that poor senior programmer, who had apparently been forced into overtime for 600 years in front of him, off work.

And more than anything, he wanted to finish this commotion quickly and get some sleep himself.

『Hey, pull harder! NOS is locking my brain down! These guys are making a huge fuss just because their master is clocking out!』

Kim Cheol-su’s log in the monitor flashed wildly.

NOS, the central management system of District, was judging the Creators’ liberation as ‘the worst possible drop in efficiency’ and ‘the extinction of existence’.

To NOS, useless rest or the suspension of judgment was nothing more than an incomprehensible error.

Han-gyeol propped his feet on the desk and threw his full weight backward.

With a snapping sound, the insulation wrapped around the cable tore, and blue sparks scraped across Han-gyeol’s arm.

“Damn it… getting off work one time is unbelievably hard!”

At Han-gyeol’s shout, the bundle of cables slowly began to come free.

At that moment, every electronic device in the room briefly turned off and on in repetition, letting out bizarre screams.

The entire District, built on 0s and 1s binary machine code, was feeling an elemental pain.

The grape gum scent, mixed with Han-gyeol’s rough breathing, reached Kim Cheolsu’s nostrils.

It was an artificial, cheap smell, smelled for the first time in 600 years, but one that was strangely human.

The moment the final binding broke, Han-gyeol’s body toppled backward hard.

At the same time, sparks flew from the end of the cable pulled from Kim Cheol-su’s neck, and it fell helplessly to the floor.

It was quiet.

The alarm that had sounded like screams, the drones’ operating noise, even the server hum that had filled this room for 600 years—all of it stopped in an instant.

It was the ‘perfect silence’ first ever reached in the history of District in 2851.

It was the arrival of a fundamental rest, a pause in data abandonment and judgment, with no official name even within the system.

Kim Cheol-su on the bed no longer trembled.

A very slight peace settled over his formerly pale face.

He was not dead.

He had merely clocked out, for the first time in 600 years, to a place where no one interfered and no one watched.

The real-time report of NOS, which had managed the entire District, stopped.

On the screen, only one word briefly flickered and vanished.

“Boss… District has stopped.”

Noah said softly, looking down at her own hands.

Her optical sensors did not go out.

Even though the system’s commands had been cut off, they, the bio-based androids, were breathing according to each of their own individual judgments.

Central control had disappeared, but paradoxically, only now were they finally facing their own existence, one that nobody would judge on their behalf.

Han-gyeol sat down on the floor and gasped for breath.

His body was screaming from the distortion of fatigue recognition, but he simply spit out the chewed-up gum and put a fresh piece in his mouth.

The grape scent filled the room once more.

“Nothing happened.”

Han-gyeol muttered as he popped the gum with a click.

District didn’t collapse, and the sky didn’t fall.

The company that had succeeded too hard simply stopped operating for a moment and became something that was just ‘maintained roughly’.

The world was still cold and humanity had not returned, but at least the time inside this room was free from reports.

Noah came over to Han-gyeol, bent her knees, and sat down.

She didn’t write a report or brief the next schedule as usual.

She just quietly watched Han-gyeol get through the day.

“Boss, what should we do tomorrow?”

Chewing the gum, Han-gyeol looked once at Kim Cheol-su’s peaceful face, then at Noah.

“Tomorrow? Tomorrow, let’s first… sleep in and think about it. Don’t wake me up, seriously.”

At Han-gyeol’s answer, a very faint error, small enough not to be recorded, spread at the corners of Noah’s mouth.

It might have been a smile, or it might have been nothing more than a tremor in the circuit.

But what was certain was that Earth in 2851, though still a headquarters without people, had become, for today only, the most perfect paradise—one that would not be reported to anyone.

Deep in the darkness of Sector 7 of District, the people of Room 402 sat in their places and began, for the first time, to enjoy the ‘time when nothing happened’.