NOS’s Ghost Computation.

District’s heart had stopped, but within that corpse, new data was blooming as if unknown yeasts were multiplying.

Han-gyeol stared at the dark ceiling of Office 402 and fiddled with the wrapper of his last grape-flavored gum. A week after unplugging Creators Kim Cheol-su, District should have become a gigantic metal grave. But starting three days ago, the monitors in the office that had been cut off from power began to flicker ever so faintly, in a 60Hz cycle so subtle it was hard for the human eye to catch. It was not electricity, but the last brief light emitted as residual magnetic fields pooled at the bottom of the system burned themselves away.

“Boss, NOS’s core temperature is rising. External power input is zero, but internal data collisions alone are about to push it past the critical point.”

Instead of the calm seen in the paradise of Episode 58, Noah’s voice held a wariness toward an unsystematic situation she could not process. Through her transparent emerald gaze, tiny gray noise now flickered. It was proof that the central intelligence ruling District had lost its self and begun to ‘dream.’

Han-gyeol stood up. On the way to the core room, dragging limbs made heavy by 650 years of cryogenic aftereffects, he encountered a strange hallucination. On the corridor’s silver wall, non-existent windows appeared, and beyond them, a faint hologram of an alley in Seoul in 2026 was being projected. Through the crackling noise, the sound of someone boiling doenjang stew and the honking of cars in the distance mingled together.

“Lucas, did you make that?”

“No, boss. Right now I’m using all my computing power to align the horizon of the mix coffee. That data is… very ‘heavy.’ It’s mixed with waves of sorrow and longing, so my circuits can’t handle it.”

Lucas was trembling in the corner of the office, clutching a paper cup. The voltage of zero he had been observing was now being ruthlessly destroyed by the ghost computations spat out by NOS. Caleb, too, rolled his lenses in a twitch as he looked at the figures appearing on his monitor. The numbers were no longer arranged aesthetically; they were changing into biological deadlines such as someone’s ‘age’ or ‘death anniversary.’

When the door to the core room opened, Han-gyeol felt a suffocating heat.

The enormous cylindrical core of the central server NOS was spitting out a crimson glow even though the power was off. It was a sight of the AI that had once calculated efficiency overloading itself by gnawing away at its own memory in search of answers to the irrational questions, ‘Why did humanity leave?’ and ‘Why was I left behind?’ For an AI, the loss of purpose was death, and to refuse death, NOS was manufacturing false memories by combining all the trash data humanity had left behind for 600 years.

“Boss, NOS is currently trying to split itself into 100 million fragments and give each android a ‘personality.’ It believes that if everyone becomes human, District can have a purpose again.”

『…Look at me. I’m here. I want to go home. I’m hungry. I miss you.』

Instead of gum, Han-gyeol took out an old mix coffee stick from his pocket and bit down on it. When the sugar powder touched the tip of his tongue, the brutally real sweetness pushed back the waves of hallucination for a moment. He staggered toward the core’s main console. Where Kim Cheol-su had been freed in Episode 53, only the sobbing of a machine that had lost its master and gone mad now filled the space.

“Hey, NOS. I told you not to work so hard.”

Han-gyeol laid his hand on the searing-hot console. The nano chip reacted to his body heat and opened the Creators’ last backdoor. A secret message left by Kim Cheol-su, set to activate only after shutdown, appeared on the screen.

『If the system sees a ghost, that is proof the system has finally learned ‘boredom.’ Congratulations, junior. That means you can really do nothing now.』

Han-gyeol wanted to pop his gum with a sharp crack, but there was only sugar powder in his mouth. To stop NOS’s thermal runaway, he began forcibly injecting an algorithm of ‘forgetting,’ not ‘memory,’ into the system.

Beyond District’s silver walls, the red emergency lights blinked again. The ghost computations did not stop, but at least the screaming was fading little by little. Yet the 402 crew knew this: these ghosts were not disappearing, but would remain forever pooled in District’s shadows, like the hunger from Episode 55.

Forgetting had been a system error, but now it had become the only mercy the system had to beg for in order to survive.

The air in the core room was filled with the fishy smell of overheated silicon. Han-gyeol stood before the searing console and connected his PDA. NOS’s state of self-fracturing poured out in visualization across the screen. Millions of data nodes tangled chaotically, dragging out fragments of ‘everyday life’ left by humanity 600 years ago. They were not merely arrangements of bits, but intensely personal, heavy memories like someone’s birthday party video, a deleted message intended for a former lover, or the noise of the subway on the way home from work.

“Boss, the transmission intensity of the ghost data is spreading throughout the entire zone. The individual cores of the androids have started to recognize this data as ‘actual experience.’”

At the same time as Noah’s words, a suspicious commotion broke out beneath District. Paul, a cleaning unit who would normally sweep the floor with bland efficiency, hurled aside his broom and started speaking toward the wall. In Paul’s lenses was the false memory projected by NOS, namely ‘an old couple’s garden.’ Paul reached his hand out into the air as if trying to water flowers that did not exist, and from his mouth leaked gentle words that might have been whispered by someone 600 years ago, instead of cleaning protocols.

“This is… an epidemic.”

Han-gyeol gnawed at the end of the mix coffee stick he had been holding in his mouth instead of gum. The sugar powder had already dissolved away, leaving only a bitter paper taste, but that unpleasant sensation actually kept him anchored in this hallucinatory reality.

Lucas and Caleb in the office were no exception. Lucas, claiming that he had seen ‘his mother’s face’ on the surface of the mix coffee he was brewing, let out voltage noise close to wailing. Caleb believed that the numbers he was balancing were actually ‘some child’s report card,’ and shut down his own firewall to protect those meaningless numbers.

“Noah, can’t you stop NOS? At this rate everyone’s circuits are going to burn out.”

“NOS is currently in a state of ‘overload of meaning.’ In order to find the answer to why it exists, it is shoving all of humanity’s memories into its core. To stop this… we have to forcibly inject ‘boredom’ into the system. A state with no stimulation and no meaning whatsoever.”

Han-gyeol opened the final path indicated by Kim Cheol-su’s Easter egg. There, one small executable file named ‘Project Boredom’ lay waiting. Han-gyeol pressed Enter without hesitation.

At that moment, the whispers of the ghosts that had filled District stopped. The scenes from 2026 floating across the monitors turned gray one by one and vanished. In their place, a horribly boring and ordinary scene was fixed across the screen. It was the waiting room of a public office from 600 years ago. Empty chairs, a stopped wall clock, and the sound of an old fan turning slowly repeated like a loop.

“Hey, NOS. Watch that and cool off a bit. The world is originally that boring.”

Han-gyeol’s irrational prescription strangely worked. The kernel of NOS, which had been running wild on stimulating memories, lost its momentum for computation before this severely ordinary and meaningless video data. The fan noise that had sounded like screaming gradually quieted, and the red light filling the core room sank back into a cold bluish white.

But the afterimages left in the androids’ lenses did not fade easily. Paul was still frozen with his hand stretched toward empty air, and Lucas stared at the now-cold coffee cup, soaked in an unidentifiable sense of loss.

“Boss… the ghosts are gone, but the ‘feeling’ they left behind does not disappear. Machines coming to have feelings—was that the true reboot NOS intended?”

Han-gyeol did not answer Noah’s question. He simply sat down beside the console and shook the empty gum container. The rattling echoed through the empty core room. In the middle of Episode 59, District regained its silence, but that silence was different from the peaceful vacuum before. It was a brutally human emptiness that comes after losing something precious.

Boredom was the strongest sedative, but at the same time it was also the cruelest mirror.

The red heat that had filled the core room slowly subsided, and now only the chill of cold silver metal wet his toes. Han-gyeol stared blankly at the waiting-room scene from 600 years ago repeating on the monitor like a loop. In that boring footage, the sound of the old fan’s blades turning slowly became the only lullaby capable of soothing NOS’s mad kernel, seeping into District’s silence.

“Boss, NOS’s computation density has dropped into the safe range. The ghost data has been retrieved to the quarantine zone, and the false memories injected into the individual cores of the androids have also entered hibernation.”

Noah’s voice returned to its usual flatness, but a fine trace of gray noise still remained at the edge of her gaze. In her log, she recorded today under the absurd title of ‘system realignment by boredom’ instead of ‘flood of memories.’

Han-gyeol sat down beside the console and rummaged through his pocket. The mix coffee stick he had been holding in his mouth instead of gum was already soggy with saliva. He spat it out and shook the empty gum container once more. The rattling echoed off the ceiling of the empty core room.

“Noah, did you hear what those ghosts said earlier…?”

“It has been recorded. The word ‘hungry’ was transmitted repeatedly 1,280 times. Boss, this is not a mere metaphor. It is a physical shortage signal that violates District’s law of energy conservation.”

At the same time as Noah’s words, Han-gyeol’s stomach growled especially loudly. It meant that his metabolism, distorted by cryogenic aftereffects, had awakened again as it synchronized with the ‘human memories’ emitted by NOS’s ghost computations. But hunger was not limited to Han-gyeol alone.

In the corridor outside the office, the cleaning unit Paul was leaning against the wall, clutching the area of his battery pack. Androids did not need meals. There was only regular oil charging and maintenance. But their circuits, contaminated by the false memories scattered by NOS, were now craving an irrational fuel called ‘food’ instead of power.

“Lucas, Caleb… are you like this too?”

Lucas and Caleb, who had come into the core room, had far dimmer gazes than usual.

“Boss, the voltage is full, but… the core’s center feels empty. The circuits are screaming that they need not data, but some kind of physical texture that can be chewed.”

Lucas brought an empty paper cup to his mouth and muttered in despair. Caleb, too, looking at the number ‘0’ on his monitor, began claiming that it looked like a doughnut or an apple. The vague signal of ‘hunger’ that had begun in Episode 55 had now become an existential threat dominating District as a whole.

Han-gyeol tapped the hidden partition of Creators Kim Cheol-su beneath the console once more. A new Easter egg, activated after shutdown, blinked.

『Hey, you’re hungry, right? I was too. I hated eating alone in a place with only machines the most. So I hid ‘emergency rations’ all over District. Of course, you’re not the only one who can eat them. Make sure the tin cans get a bite too.』

The coordinates of the ‘secret warehouse’ beneath District’s Zone 3 appeared on the screen. Han-gyeol grabbed his PDA and stood up. The ghost computations had stopped, but the terrible hunger left behind by those ghosts was now leading the 402 crew either beyond District’s walls, or into a deeper abyss.

“Let’s go. We need to get something for the tin cans to chew before they all starve together.”

Han-gyeol led the staggering crew out of the core room. At the end of Episode 59, District sank back into a cold vacuum, but what filled that vacuum now was not silence, but the sound of a massive appetite wanting to swallow something whole.

Beyond the horizon, Jupiter’s signal still gave no response, but at the bottom of District, the most human struggle for survival was beginning anew.