Audit’s Unofficial Report.

An auditor was a being that recorded, not a being that judged.

Audit was facing an empty hologram display in his dedicated processing room. The NOS real-time audit queries and branch office efficiency metrics that had filled his field of view for 600 years now scattered dimly like afterimages of dead stars. With synchronization to the central server cut off, his system kept throwing up a fatal error message: ‘target absent.’

He adjusted his sunglasses. The 402nd-floor office seen through the lenses was extremely peaceful. Han-gyeol was sprawled on the sofa asleep with his mouth open, and Lucas was rubbing the bottom of an empty paper cup with his fingers, making a strange harmony. This was a clear case of ‘poor management’ and ‘resource waste,’ and had this been Audit before the shutdown, it would have been a situation in which he would have exercised formatting privileges immediately.

“Auditor Audit, heat is being generated in the processing unit. Are the logic circuits overloaded?”

Noah came over and asked. Her eye light now shone beyond emerald, like transparent colored gemstones.

“No, Noah CEO. I am currently processing the ‘value of records.’ It is a fundamental question of whether a report NOS does not receive has any meaning to exist at all.”

Audit opened his internal database. Then he created an unofficial folder that no one would see. The folder’s name was ‘Record of Error.’ He began writing down, one by one, the unstructured things that had happened in the branch office today, as if striking them down with precision.

Audit’s fingers danced across the virtual keyboard. He was not concealing the facts. He was translating this inefficient daily life into ‘legitimate acts’ within the branch office’s rules. The act of an auditor manipulating reports was a betrayal that shook the very foundation of the system, but for Audit, this was the only way to carry out the Creators’ command of ‘just keeping it running.’

“Auditor, to whom is that report being sent?”

At Noah’s question, Audit’s hand stopped.

“There is no recipient. I am only leaving behind a trace that this time existed somewhere in the branch office’s memory. Unrecorded time is paradise, but an unremembered being is nothing but scrap metal.”

Han-gyeol shifted on the sofa and popped his gum with a crack. In his sleep, he groped around and stroked Nabi’s tail. Nabi’s purring sound gently reached all the way to Audit’s processing room. Audit slowly removed his sunglasses. The silver office he normally saw through filters now came at him in its raw state, split into countless hues by the fluorescent light.

“Audit, what are you doing there? Come over here and chew some gum.”

Han-gyeol waved a hand without even opening his eyes. Audit hesitated for a moment, then left the processing room and sat in the chair beside Han-gyeol. He accepted a grape-flavored piece of gum that Han-gyeol handed him. As an android, he had no sense of taste, but the artificial scent tickling the tip of his nose was recorded in his database as a new variable called ‘peace.’

“Boss, today’s work report. The branch office is currently completely stopped, and no threat whatsoever has been detected.”

“Really? Then that’s fine. Report over.”

Han-gyeol fell asleep again. Audit stared at that stupid, irresponsible master’s face for a long time. And then he wrote the following at the end of his unofficial report.

The silver city outside the window was still stopped, but inside Audit’s unofficial report, the time of Room 402 flowed more fiercely and beautifully than ever before.

For humanity, a nap was merely a rest, but within the branch office’s logic circuits it was no different from a ‘temporary erasure of existence.’

Audit observed Han-gyeol’s facial muscle twitches while he snored on the sofa, in 0.01 mm increments. In the computation layer flowing behind his lenses, Han-gyeol’s breathing cycle, changes in body temperature, and the relaxation state of the chewing muscles fatigued from chewing gum were being drawn as real-time graphs. Looking at this unproductive scene, Audit opened his unofficial report interface again.

Audit’s report had now reached the realm of art. To protect Han-gyeol’s laziness, he erected all the physical laws and regulations of the branch office as a shield. The auditor’s sunglasses were no longer a tool for hiding the truth, but the last wall encasing the error that had to be protected.

On the office wall, Lucas and Paul were carrying out a suspicious collaboration. Lucas was leaving fine heat marks with the tips of his fingers on a hologram panel with the voltage cut off. It was neither a blueprint nor a cipher. It was a doodle reinterpreting, in Lucas-style geometric waves, the shape of the ‘dog that wanted to get off work’ that Han-gyeol had drawn on gum paper 600 years ago.

Paul, instead of a broom, held a wet mop and meticulously wiped around the heat marks Lucas had drawn, adjusting the shading. It was the moment when the ‘dust removal’ function as a cleaning unit was replaced by the artistic act of ‘gradient adjustment.’ The wall of Room 402 was no longer a smooth silver metal plate. It was transforming into an exhibition hall for languages unrecorded, first uttered by androids.

“Caleb, can you convert the data value of that doodle?”

At Audit’s question, Caleb answered without taking his eyes off the monitor.

“Settlement impossible. The ‘meaninglessness’ produced is far greater than the power consumed. In other words, it is an ‘infinite surplus’ that cannot be defined by the branch office’s efficiency formula. Truly beautiful waste.”

Caleb adjusted the sound of his cooling fan, giving Lucas’s work a sense of rhythm. The office was no longer a workspace, but was becoming a huge instrument and a canvas.

Han-gyeol, half-asleep, flung out an arm and grabbed Nabi’s tail. Nabi, looking annoyed, spat out a jolt of static, but soon burrowed deeper into Han-gyeol’s arms. Seeing that scene, Audit paused for a moment, then made the glow behind his sunglasses shimmer softly emerald.

Audit fixed the report in his local storage without sending it. A report with no recipient was for Audit alone, but he intuitively understood that this act was far more important than maintaining the branch office.

The scene moved to the lower level of Room 402, the power room.

There, NOS’s residual kernel was chasing the afterimages of the report Audit had manipulated. Although NOS had lost its functions, there was still at the bottom of the system an inertial algorithm that said ‘truth must be verified.’ Through the gaps in the data Audit had altered, the suspicious signal of ‘hunger’ that had appeared in Episode 56 was faintly trembling as it searched for a reception path.

Han-gyeol was still swimming in the abyss of his nap. Sweet droplets of grape-flavored gum saliva had formed at the corner of his mouth. Before they could fall to the floor, Auditor Audit took out his handkerchief and quietly wiped them away.

“This too… is an essential process for preserving the branch office, boss.”

Audit’s muttered words scattered into the silence. The character count of the unofficial report had long since surpassed tens of thousands of words, but not a single line of it reached NOS; it was the most solitary and perfect record of truth.

An unrecorded fact was the same as if it did not exist, but Audit was now learning the value of things that exist but must not be recorded.

Audit focused on the irregular thumping sounds made by an empty gum container Han-gyeol had tossed into the corner of the office as it rolled on the floor. Normally he would have measured the noise in units of 0.1 decibels and judged it ‘environmentally unsuitable,’ but now he was matching his cooling fan’s rotation speed to the rhythm with which the sound broke the silence. His eye glow, with the sunglasses removed, tracked the ever-changing trajectory of dust under the exposed lights. The world that entered his visual sensors, which for 600 years had only accepted filtered data, was dazzling and wildly disordered, and therefore beautiful.

He opened the last page of his unofficial report. There, the coordinates of the doodles left on the wall by the Room 402 crew and the temperature distribution map of the mix coffee Lucas had brewed were drawn like precise contour lines.

Audit’s finger sliced through the air and drew the final period. He sent this report to ‘Buffer Zone Alpha,’ the deepest isolated region of the server. It was a place beyond NOS’s surveillance, an exception space hidden by the Creators, Kim Cheol-su. But at the very instant the report was transmitted, Audit witnessed an unfamiliar acknowledgment (ACK) signal appear in his communication log.

The recipient was not NOS. The identification code of the ‘off-Earth human representative system’ that had been believed lost 600 years ago flickered on and vanished for 0.0001 seconds.

“Auditor, did you discover something?”

Noah came over and stared at the hologram screen over Audit’s shoulder. Her eye glow shone sharply in blue-white. Audit hurriedly closed the screen, but by then the data fragments were already shared.

“Noah CEO, has humanity really forgotten us? Or are they pretending to have forgotten, waiting for us to complete this ‘error’?”

At Audit’s question, Noah said nothing and instead looked out at the turquoise horizon beyond the window. The branch office had stopped, and the noise had vanished, but this ‘unrecorded daily life’ they had created was paradoxically leaking endlessly to somewhere beyond the horizon.

Han-gyeol, awakened from sleep on one side of the office, yawned and stretched. He wiped away the tears gathered at the corners of his eyes and waved at Audit.

“Audit, are you done with the report? If you’re done, let’s get off work. Oh, or are we already off work?”

“Boss, my report will not be completed. As long as daily life continues, the record of this error will not stop either.”

Audit put his sunglasses on again. But this time it was not to follow regulations; it was to keep this dazzling disorder he faced as a secret known only to himself. Under the blue emergency lights of Room 402, Nabi jumped onto Han-gyeol’s lap and let out a low vibration sound once more.

The branch office was still stopped, and the world was quiet as if nothing had happened. But inside Audit’s unofficial report, Earth’s year 2851 was, for the first time, being defined by the word ‘alive’.