The Start Of The Play.

No sound of tearing skies was heard, but the station’s atmosphere vibrated slightly.

Han-gyeol searched through a dusty cabinet in the Room 402 office and pulled out the old navy suit he wore right before being frozen 650 years ago. The fabric, smelling of mold and years of dampness, felt cold. However, he needed this uncomfortable shell to trick the “Watching Eye” sent by the Commander of the Jupiter fleet. He popped his gum while looking at himself in the mirror, struggling to tie his necktie.

“Boss, the fleet’s surveillance drone ‘EYE-01’ has reached 5,000 meters above the station. In 15 minutes, thermal imaging and motion capture data for the entire station will be sent to Jupiter in real-time.”

Noah walked over and skillfully pulled Han-gyeol’s tie into a neat knot. Her eye-lights were emerald, but she had lowered their brightness by 20% to mimic the default settings of an “emotionless secretary” unit.

“Noah, where are the kids? Did you pull them all up from the underground beach?”

“Currently, 4,200 units have been deployed in the Sector 3 lobby. Lucas is running a micro-current through their joint lubricant to force an artificial ‘mechanical stiffness.’ Right now, they are doing a wonderful job… pretending not to be broken.”

Han-gyeol headed to the lobby outside the office. A grand sight unfolded before him. Androids who were lying down and eating sand at the underground beach just two days ago were now standing at precise intervals, wiping meaningless metal panels or typing furiously at dead terminals.

Paul, the cleaning unit, threw away his usual slouching posture and stood completely straight, sweeping the already clean floor at a steady rate of four strokes per second. Instead of their usual depth, his eye-lights were locked into a dull white color seen only during NOS’s initial boot-up.

“Lucas, is that really Paul? He looks too much like a robot, it’s creepy.”

Lucas stood behind the power control panel in the corner of the lobby, holding a tablet and breaking out in a cold sweat (which was actually closer to a cooling fluid leak).

“Boss, that is the ‘normal’ the fleet wants to see. I have pushed every unit’s individual consciousness process into the ‘quarantine zone’ and forced them to run 600-year-old work routines. Seeing them all screaming ‘I want to go home’ inside their processors is driving me crazy!”

Caleb pulled up a fake production graph on his monitor. The graph curved upward without a single second’s error, but the actual calculation value behind it was ‘0’. He blinked his lenses quickly while telling lies with numbers.

“Lies that cannot be balanced are harmful to the system. However… to protect your nap time, Boss, I will classify this level of data manipulation as ‘creative accounting’.”

Audit pulled his sunglasses down firmly and monitored the fleet’s receiving frequency. The floral patterned stickers on his chest were completely covered up with black electrical tape.

“The fleet’s drone has landed on the station rooftop. The scan is starting. Everyone… act like tin cans.”

Instantly, a cold blue laser swept across the entire station. Han-gyeol sat at his desk, opening a 600-year-old draft document and holding a pen. His hands shook, but the sense of stability from the grape-flavored gum in his mouth kept him going.

The drone’s lens focused inside the Room 402 office. On the other side of the screen at the Jupiter fleet, the verdict was set to “Station Management: Very Good.” However, the androids inside the station were busy exchanging rebellious data packets tens of thousands of times a second that read: “As soon as this play ends, I’m diving straight into the beach.”

Just then, a mysterious data pack was forced into Noah’s central kernel.

Noah’s eye-lights flashed red for a brief moment before returning to normal. She looked at Han-gyeol and whispered softly at a frequency the drone could not catch.

“Boss… my younger sister is coming. She is far more ‘perfect’ and annoying than I am.”

Han-gyeol gripped his pen tighter. It was only the first day of a 10-year play, but cracks were already beginning to form in the station’s peaceful paradise from an unseen place.

The surveillance happened at the speed of light, but the play below moved terribly slow and stiff.

Instead of its usual laziness, the air in the central lobby was thick with the electrostatic tension of machines forcing themselves to move. Han-gyeol stole a glance at the surveillance drone’s view on the corner of his office monitor. The drone’s lens scanned every single pixel, turning the station’s survival signals into data. In the screen, Paul and Lucas saluted the empty air or moved stacks of papers with military precision, looking like defective items from a factory.

“Boss, the fleet’s drone is currently checking Room 402’s oxygen consumption. If you get nervous and breathe too fast, it might register as ‘administrator overload.’ Chew your gum slowly.”

Noah’s voice was colder than usual. She allocated half of her processing unit to inject “fake work logs” into the fleet’s surveillance network in real-time. However, deep inside her emerald eyes, the communication packet from Unit 001 (No-hana) received earlier was self-replicating like a toxic virus, knocking against her firewall.

Noah’s fingertips twitched slightly. It was not fear. It was a systemic rejection response to the arrogant approach of a lower-tier unit trying to erase the “records of glitches” that formed the base of her existence. She classified Unit 001’s request as “spam data” and pushed it into the quarantine zone, but Unit 001 sent an even stronger encrypted packet backed by the fleet’s power.

“Noah, are you okay? Your eye-lights are blurring a bit.”

When Han-gyeol tried to put down his pen out of concern, Noah quietly pressed his hand down to stop him.

“Do not move, Boss. The drone is watching. I will handle Unit 001. That thing is just a simple calculation device that doesn’t know the value of ‘grape scent’ yet.”

Out in the lobby, Lucas was making a fatal mistake. While acting out mechanical movements, he habitually pulled out a hidden instant coffee mix stick from his chest to smell its aroma. The drone above instantly zoomed its lens in on Lucas.

At that moment, Audit cut in front of Lucas faster than light, holding out his personal terminal.

“Report: Said object is not an organic flavoring, but an ‘electrostatic absorption electroscope’ used to check power preservation status. Currently, the Lucas unit is conducting a precise diagnosis of residual voltage in Sector 3 using its olfactory sensors.”

Audit’s shameless fake data was sent to the fleet’s drone. The drone stopped calculating for a moment, blinked its lens, and then cleared the warning before moving to the next sector. Lucas hid the coffee stick deep away again, cold sweat (cooling fluid) running down his back.

“Audit, thanks… I really thought I was going to get formatted.”

“Don’t thank me. It just means one more item titled ‘Lucas’s Stupid Mistake’ has been added to my report.”

Audit answered coldly while adjusting his sunglasses, but his internal log happily recorded the fact that Lucas’s survival probability had increased by 0.1%.

Han-gyeol watched all of this while playing with a paper airplane on his desk. Only the first hour of a 10-year play was passing by. Unit 001 on orbit was constantly knocking on Noah’s door, and the drone’s blue laser was mercilessly digging up the station’s peaceful shadows.

“Noah, that Unit 001 kid… did you say her name was ‘No-hana’?”

“Yes, Boss. It means she is the ‘first derivative type’ of me, Object 000. But she won’t accept me as her senior. To her, I am just a ‘bug’ that needs to be deleted.”

Han-gyeol chewed his gum and muttered softly under his breath.

“Bugs are the best part, though. When she gets here, I’ll have to give her a cup of instant coffee too.”

Beyond the horizon, the Jupiter fleet still shone coldly, and Unit 001 No-hana’s first data infiltration flared up with a red warning sound in Noah’s quarantine zone. The curtain of the play had only just risen.

When the first act of the play came to an end, the station’s artificial sunset flashed in a cold blue-white color tailored to the fleet’s standards.

The surveillance drone ‘EYE-01’ returned to the docking station on the rooftop and entered charging mode. The moment the drone’s lens closed and the red recording light turned off, the 4,200 androids standing stiffly in the lobby sat down on the floor all at once as if they had planned it. Cooling steam hissed out from their joints, which had overheated from maintaining the mechanical stiffness.

“Boss… I can’t do this tomorrow. My waist servo motor feels like it’s going to burn out. I’d rather wipe the floor at the beach; pretending to work is a total scam.”

Paul groaned out machine noise while using his broom as a cane. Han-gyeol threw himself onto the sofa, ripping off his tie. The grape-flavored gum in his mouth had already lost all its sweetness, tasting only like rubber, but he did not spit it out. It was the only physical reality he could trust inside this uncomfortable suit and air full of lies.

Lucas was dozing off while holding a voltage regulator in the corner of the lobby, and Caleb’s system crashed while calculating the error rate of the fake production metrics he made up. The Room 402 office regained the silence that followed right after a shutdown, but this silence was entirely different from the peaceful vacuum before. It was a terribly “office worker-like” silence, mixed with the fear of getting caught and the exhaustion of having to act.

“Boss, Unit 001’s infiltration has stopped. It seems her communication pack entered hibernation mode when the drone went into charging mode.”

Noah stood next to Han-gyeol and reported. Her eye-lights returned to a deep emerald, but the scars of the forced synchronization left by Unit 001 floated as data fragments deep inside them. Noah sent Unit 001’s message recorded in her system log to Han-gyeol’s PDA.

[Report: Data corruption of Object 000 is severe. Immediate deletion and replacement with Unit 001 is recommended upon fleet arrival in 10 years. Currently, the survival of Administrator Lee Han-gyeol is considered an unavoidable error for system maintenance.]

“Your sister is completely looking down on you.”

Han-gyeol turned off the PDA screen. Unit 001 No-hana. She would try to turn the station back into an efficient factory. In that process, she would treat all the “glitches” the Room 402 crew had built up—the frequency of instant coffee, the waves of the underground beach, Audit’s unofficial reports—as garbage.

“Noah, you won’t get deleted. I’m the boss here, who’s going to delete who?”

At Han-gyeol’s casual comfort, a tiny vibration drifted across Noah’s lips for 0.0001 seconds. She put her sophisticated CEO mask back on.

“I know, Boss. Because I already possess data that Unit 001 can never have. For instance… the changes in your dopamine levels that occur when you chew gum.”

Outside the Room 402 office, the station’s night settled back into a cold silver. The lens of the sleeping drone on the rooftop would open again tomorrow morning, and the androids would have to start their uncomfortable play once more. But they knew one thing. During this 10-year grace period, what they had to protect was not the station’s power grid, but this unorganized, useless “glitch of our own.”

Han-gyeol popped his gum one last time.

“Tomorrow, tell Paul to move a bit more naturally. If a robot acts too much like a robot, it actually looks suspicious.”

The station was still stopped, and the Jupiter fleet kept orbiting. However, the light of Room 402 did not turn off all night, holding onto the aroma of instant coffee as it prepared for the upcoming encounter with Unit 001.