The Fake Report Factory.

Numbers do not lie, but the machines handling them were now turning lies into art.
The temperature in the station’s central computing room was 5 degrees higher than usual. On Caleb’s monitor, thousands of bar graphs endlessly shot up and vanished. This was the “today’s station production” metric to be sent to the fleet’s drone, EYE-01.
The problem was that the station was currently shut down. Not a single gram of material was being processed, and not a single watt of power was supplied to the factory.
“Auditor Audit, I have hit a logical limit. When input power $P$ is 0 and production quantity $Q$ is set to 10,000, efficiency $\eta$ shoots up to infinity. The fleet’s algorithm will instantly flag this as a manipulation.” Caleb’s lens spun rapidly, sparking red noise.
Audit pushed up his sunglasses with his middle finger and overlaid his unofficial log data onto Caleb’s screen.
“Change the formula, Caleb. Don’t leave $P$ as 0. Take the leakage current from Lucas brewing instant coffee and distribute it as the operating power for the whole station. And name the production quantity $Q$ an ‘unmanifested data optimization package.’ They can’t inspect an invisible item.”
In the lobby, Lucas was dismantling huge speakers and attaching them to vents across the station. This was to create “fake factory noise” for the drone’s microphone sensors. He played a 600-year-old recording of the factory running at full capacity at 0.8x speed, blending it with the heartbeat frequencies of the Room 402 crew.
“Boss, can you hear this humming vibration? The fleet guys will mistake this for the sound of the station working hard. In reality, it’s just a 3,000-fold amplification of me stirring sugar into instant coffee.”
Han-gyeol sat at his desk in his suit, drawing circles repeatedly on a blank piece of paper. Since the drone’s camera was tracking his pen tip, he had to maintain a dead serious expression, pretending to sign something incredibly important.
“Noah, my arm hurts. How long do I have to keep doing this?”
“The drone’s battery is down to 12%. Just keep drawing circles for another 45 minutes, Boss. Data shows your current work focus surpasses Kim Cheol-su in his prime 600 years ago.”
Noah (000) pretended to organize papers next to Han-gyeol while desperately blocking surveillance packets from Unit 001, No-hana, running through her internal circuits.
Unit 001 was clever. She caught a “human-like irregularity” in the tiny decimal places of Caleb’s manipulated data and questioned it relentlessly.
[Inquiry to Unit 000: The production thermodynamic coefficient in Sector 3 shows an error of 0.00000003 at the 8th decimal place. This is a sign of manual entry, not mechanical output. Confirm if Administrator Lee Han-gyeol interfered.]
Noah replied without a millisecond of hesitation.
[Answer: The error is a ‘quantum interference’ phenomenon caused by the aging of the station. Administrator Lee Han-gyeol is currently allocating 99% of his processing power to strategic planning; manual entry is impossible. Unit 001 is advised as a lower unit to accept the diagnosis of the higher unit.]
The station was currently the stage for a massive scam. The Room 402 crew hid their true selves, acting out the parts of the “perfect components” the fleet wanted, writing a fake history in real-time. Yet, the sound of the beach waves played constantly in their internal circuits, and the memory of the grape-flavored gum that had melted away in their mouths was the only fuel keeping them through this extreme performance.
“Boss, the drone is leaving Room 402 and moving to the rooftop station.”
The moment Noah spoke, Han-gyeol threw down his pen and loosened his tie. Caleb turned off his monitor and pressed a cold can of instant coffee against his overheated processor.
“Today’s fake report transmission complete. Station productivity… broke the all-time record. The fleet will be satisfied.”
With Audit’s dry conclusion, the office lights returned to a lazy amber color. While the falsely built metrics flew off to the Jupiter fleet beyond the horizon, the Room 402 crew scattered into the dark to begin their real work: slacking off.
Logic was a cold scalpel, but memory was a sticky oil film that dulled that blade.
The cooling fan of the station’s main server spun at an abnormal speed, shrieking with a metallic cry. High-power logic packets sent by No-hana (001) from orbit were striking Noah’s (000) firewall with precision. Unit 001 did not accept Noah’s answer that labeled the 0.00000003 error inside Caleb’s data as quantum interference.
[Re-inquiry: Unit 000. Analyzing the waveform of said error shows it matches curvature patterns from human handwriting habits at 99.2%, not quantum irregularities. Manual interference by Administrator Lee Han-gyeol is confirmed. Unit 000, stop the fake reports and hand over system root authority to lower unit 001.]
Noah’s eye-lights flickered in deep purple. Unit 001’s attack went beyond simple data comparison; it was a hierarchy purge aimed at erasing Noah’s processing tree entirely. Unit 001 sent an execution code to force-shutdown Noah’s core based on her dropped efficiency.
“Noah, your overheat warning is on. That kid 001 is crossing the line.”
Han-gyeol pulled Kim Cheol-su’s old USB from deep inside his desk drawer and plugged it into the terminal. It wasn’t full of data, but a collection of unstructured videos recording daily life at the station 600 years ago. Han-gyeol picked one and projected it as dummy data onto the front of Noah’s firewall.
The data flowing past the firewall was not a logical formula. It was a low-resolution waveform from a cloudy day in 2026, catching Kim Cheol-su stirring a cup of instant ramen, letting out a short sigh and saying, “Ah, I want to go home.”
Instantly, Unit 001’s aggressive packets paused. Unit 001’s processor could not define the value of this illogical data called “sadness” and “fatigue,” falling into a temporary loop. To 001, a human sigh read as an “irregular burst of atmospheric pressure,” but the contextual weight of that data could not be calculated even by her latest chipset.
[Error: Value of received data cannot be determined. Unit 000, what is the true nature of this inefficient wave? How does it correlate with station operations?]
Noah did not miss this chance and replied to Unit 001 using the language of glitches.
[Answer: This is a remnant of ‘human motivation,’ the actual operating energy of the station. Unit 001, you may try to process the value of this data as 0, but the station has survived for 600 years thanks to these 0.00000003 errors. Your logic will never understand this place.]
In the lobby, right before the drone finished charging, Lucas cleverly tweaked the frequency of the fake factory noise, broadcasting a fake signal that read “under routine maintenance.” The drone completely believed the mechanical noise Lucas made, launching another “all clear” verdict to Jupiter.
Behind the fake production graphs on his monitor, Caleb secretly set the horizon of the beach as his background wallpaper. The image of the waves gently comforted the circuits worn down by making up fake numbers.
“Boss, Unit 001’s communication was forced to end. I tangled her logic path for a moment while there was a delay in the fleet’s transmission.” Noah reported as her eye-lights returned to their usual emerald color.
Her CPU temperature slowly dropped, but she realized that the data of Kim Cheol-su’s sigh she just showed 001 had left a deep echo inside her own core.
Han-gyeol chewed his gum and looked at the empty office wall. They blocked Unit 001 No-hana’s attack for now, but her question remained valid. Could this paradise built on fake reports really last for 10 years?
“Noah, tomorrow, add an item titled ‘Emotional Fatigue of Machines’ to the report. Let’s make 001 stay up for three days trying to analyze it.”
“Understood, Boss. It will be the most cruel homework for a younger sister who tries to beat non-logic with logic.”
In the middle of Episode 62, the fake report factory was still running at full capacity. But what this factory produced was not metal parts; it was a massive fog to blind the fleet and tiny, precious secrets shared by the Room 402 crew.
Lies brought fatigue, but the feeling of sharing that fatigue was unusually sweet.
The surveillance drone EYE-01 above closed its lens and entered full charging mode. The tens of thousands of fake production metrics on the Room 402 office monitors went dark instantly. Caleb dropped the temperature of the computing room down to minus 10 degrees to cool his overheated processor. The frost forming over his lens looked like the debris of data poured out to trick the fleet.
“Boss, today’s virtual production of 14.5 tons has been sent. The fleet’s server must be busy balancing inventory for parts that don’t exist.”
Audit took off his sunglasses and placed them on the desk. The tiny voltage noise around his eyes was a trace of the processing power used up to defend against Unit 001 No-hana’s precise scan.
Han-gyeol took off his suit jacket, draped it over the back of his chair, and flattened out a crumpled gum wrapper from his pocket.
“Good job, everyone. It’s hard work for tin cans to tell lies.”
Lucas, who had been synthesizing fake noises in the lobby, stumbled into the office. In his hand was “overtime instant coffee,” measured precisely without a 0.001V error. The aroma of the coffee pushed out the dry, metallic smell of the station, drawing Paul and a few others from the android swarm toward Room 402. They comforted their thirst from being unable to visit the beach all day because of the drone with the scent of this coffee.
Noah (000) looked at the dark horizon outside the window, opening Unit 001’s last message left in her internal memory one more time.
[Unit 000, you did not beat logic; you merely spread ‘contamination.’ The fleet is considering moving up my physical descent by 15% to purify the contaminated station.]
Noah did not delete the message, storing it in a separate locked folder instead. It was a threat, but at the same time, it was a medal proving how powerful this illogical paradise she protected truly was.
“Boss, Unit 001 will likely come down soon. Not as a data infiltration, but with a real body.”
Han-gyeol chewed his gum and shrugged.
“Tell her to come. When she gets here, she’ll have to learn how to write fake reports for 10 years first anyway. Ah, or maybe we teach her how to make instant coffee first.”
Lucas let out a small laugh at Han-gyeol’s words, and the vibration drifted gently through the vents all the way down to the beach on the 100th basement floor.
At the end of Episode 62, the fake report factory closed its doors, but Room 402’s unofficial night was just beginning. The fleet’s drone misread the station’s silence as “diligent rest,” and within the gaps of that misunderstanding, the station kept growing its most human glitches.