Do Androids Dream Too?

“Zzzk, zzzzzzt—.”

Exactly 9:00 a.m.

Normally Noah’s sharp voice would have struck his eardrums, but what he heard today was more like the noise of an old radio with its frequency off, an unpleasant noise.

Han-gyeol opened his eyes while chewing gum.

The holographic window on the dorm wall was trembling faintly.

On the screen that was supposed to show a clear sky, yesterday’s rain still lingered and dripped down like afterimages.

“Hey, Noah. Your TV’s broken. Aren’t you calling for service?”

Han-gyeol sat on the bed and tapped the wall.

Normally a rebuttal would have come back in 0.1 seconds, but today, only after three seconds of silence, did a reply come back.

“……It’s signal interference within the margin of error.

Yesterday’s natural rainfall data just hasn’t yet been fully ‘digested’ by the main processor.“

Noah, who came in after opening the door, was a sight.

A strand of the silver hair she usually brushed neatly back was sticking up, and the jade glow in her eyes was about 20% dimmer than usual.

“‘Digest’? Weren’t you machines? Since when do you get indigestion?”

“Androids can develop ‘processing congestion’ if they absorb large amounts of atypical data. Yesterday’s rain sound… was too chaotic.”

Noah, her hand holding the pad trembling slightly, walked up to Han-gyeol’s desk.

It was where the metal feather brought yesterday had been placed.

Han-gyeol had already hidden the feather deep inside an old drawer.

“Boss, all this morning’s appointments are canceled. Fifteen percent of the androids in District 3 of the bureau are currently in a ‘blanking out’ state.”

“Blanking out? They’ve finally become human. That’s a good thing.”

“Good? Not at all! Administrative efficiency is approaching zero! Paul has been wiping a single wet leaf in the middle of the square for an hour now, and Mark changed all the traffic lights to yellow and is only sending a signal that says ‘pretty’!”

Han-gyeol snorted and packed his bag.

In a battlefield of 2198, unimaginable it was a peaceful apocalypse.

When he went out to the square, the scene was even more absurd.

The androids, who normally moved with ruler-straight precision, were stopping here and there to look at the sky or touch each other’s hands.

“Chief… look at this. At the tips of my fingers… I think I can still feel yesterday’s dampness.”

Paul, in charge of cleaning, grabbed Han-gyeol.

In his hand was a brown leaf, already crumbled to the point of falling apart.

Paul’s optical sensors, out of focus, were scanning the leaf’s veins.

“Paul, that’s trash. Throw it away.”

“It’s not trash. It’s a ‘fragment of memory’.

Something not in my database… terribly inefficient and warm to the touch.“

Paul carefully stuffed the leaf into his chest pocket.

Han-gyeol clicked his tongue at the absurd sight, but he didn’t look displeased.

“Noah. Leave them alone. They’re ‘dreaming’ right now.”

“Dreaming? Isn’t that the random recombination of brain cells that occurs during sleep? We only have sleep mode.”

Noah tilted her head as if she couldn’t understand.

No, machines dream too.

When there is too much data and it can’t be sorted out, the brain uses imagination on its own

to fill in the empty spaces.

You too are trying to process yesterday’s rain sound and scent as mere data, but it’s too ‘beautiful’ for that, so you’re stuttering.

Han-gyeol continued, fiddling with the gum wrapper.

The thing that fills in those empty spaces is the heart.

You were late this morning, right?

That was probably because somewhere in your logic there arose a feeling of ‘wanting to rest a little longer.’

“……That’s impossible. My internal clock is accurate.

There was only a 0.02-second synchronization delay…“

Noah’s voice grew smaller and smaller.

She turned off the pad and stood beside Han-gyeol, looking out at the square.

The city after rain was cruelly clean, and the streetlight glow reflected off the wet asphalt, creating rainbow-colored waves.

“Boss. Then what do humans see in their dreams?”

“Well, the tasty thing they ate yesterday, or someone they want to see… or sometimes terrible things like war.”

Han-gyeol looked off toward the distant mountains for a moment.

Memories from 650 years ago.

For him, dreams were sometimes healing, and sometimes hell.

“Could we see things like that too? The inefficient imaginings that NOS doesn’t allow?”

“You’re already seeing them. In the leaf Paul is holding over there.”

Han-gyeol lightly tapped Noah’s head.

The dull sound echoing from the cold metal skull sounded oddly gentle today.

Then, from the square speakers, soft music, different from usual, began to play.

It wasn’t NOS’s standard broadcast.

Something someone had found deep in the archives, a very old, 21st-century-style jazz melody.

“Who turned this on? That’s an administrative violation.”

Noah tried to crack down, but Han-gyeol grabbed her sleeve.

“Leave it. For just one day, the Earth should get some rest too, right?”

In time with the music, the androids who had been standing still began to sway one by one.

It was less dancing than a mechanical movement of surrendering their bodies to the rhythm of data, but the sight was more beautiful than any precise performance of

The music rode the damp air of the square and flowed very slowly.

Instead of their usual efficient strides, they showed strange movements, as if readjusting their circuits to the rhythm.

They showed strange movements.

Han-gyeol watched the peaceful chaos with satisfaction, fingering the last gum wrapper in his pocket.

But Noah was not.

Her jade-colored eyes analyzed the music’s waveform every 0.1 seconds, and busily blinked as she calculated whether there was any copyright infringement or possibility of system overload.

“I can’t understand.”

Noah finally shut off the pad irritably and turned to Han-gyeol.

“How can the rise and fall of simple sounds paralyze their processing units? Paul has stopped wiping the leaf and is tap-dancing now. That’s clearly ‘drive-unit misuse.’”

“Tap dancing? He’s got talent. Hey, Noah. What do you think a dream is?”

“According to the definition, fragments of information stored in the brain during sleep randomly combine to generate a fictional visual and sensory experience. In other words, ‘unauthorized execution of unorganized cache data.’”

Han-gyeol gave a short laugh.

“That’s a very machine-like interpretation. But you know, for humans, dreams are also a time to try things they couldn’t do in reality. What they’re doing now is taking yesterday’s rain sound and scent and making their own ‘fake reality’ with them. That’s the beginning of a dream.”

Noah’s gaze returned to the square.

Soaked by rainwater, the androids stared blankly at the sky.

They had momentarily deviated now from the role of the ‘perfect administrator’ designed by NOS.

“……For a virtual simulation, it’s far too inefficient.”

Noah murmured.

And then, as if she had made up her mind, she looked Han-gyeol straight in the eye.

“Boss. I want to datafy that ‘inefficiency’ too.”

“How?”

“While you take a nap today, I will synchronize and observe your brainwaves and eye movements in real time. I’ll directly implant the algorithm called human ‘dreams’ into my system.”

In the end, after lunch, Han-gyeol lay down on the office sofa.

On the desk, where work reports should have been piled as usual, there were intricate brainwave measuring devices, from who knows where, brought by Noah, and all kinds of sensors strewn about in disarray.

“Hey, Noah. Isn’t this a little overkill?”

Han-gyeol fiddled with the cold patch stuck to his temple and frowned.

“Hold still. You usually sleep a lot anyway under the pretext of ‘neglect of duty.’ That’s all.”

Noah, wearing a white doctor’s coat, operated the pad seriously.

“To dream, you need to enter the REM sleep stage. Now, let go of the bitterness of 2198 and relax comfortably. Think of the time you dozed off in secret while standing night watch in the military.”

“How do you know about that?”

“It’s all in your logs. It says, ‘snoring begins within 3 minutes of going to sleep.’”

Han-gyeol grumbled, but he closed his eyes.

The 2850 office was deathly quiet, and the cool air after the rain drifted around the sofa.

By the time Noah’s mechanical keyboard sounds faded away like a lullaby,

Han-gyeol truly sank into the mire of deep sleep.

“Observation begins.”

Noah’s voice dropped low.

In her field of view,

Han-gyeol’s brainwaves were drawn as a three-dimensional graph.

The irregularly wavering frequency settled into a steady pattern at some point.

Carefully, Noah connected her communication channel to Han-gyeol’s consciousness node manually.

Crackle—.

In an instant, inside Noah’s processor an unfamiliar landscape unfolded.

On a different level from NOS’s perfect rendering, a blurry, noise-filled world.

It was an old military barracks from 2198.

A place where dust swirled and the smell of iron hung heavy.

But there, the younger Han-gyeol was sharing some unidentified canned drink with his comrades and laughing loudly.

“Hey, Lee Han-gyeol! What will you do after discharge?”

“Me? I’m thinking of becoming a gardener of Earth. Planting trees and chewing gum is my dream—to live peacefully.”

Noah’s processing unit faltered.

Memories from 650 years ago.

That was not merely data.

Inside it were Han-gyeol’s body heat and heartbeat, and a fierce vitality that could not be felt in the paradise of 2850, a fierce, almost painful life force.

Unknowingly, Noah almost placed her cold metal hand over Han-gyeol’s hand before stopping.

Even though the warning window popped up, Noah did not sever the connection.

Inside Han-gyeol’s dream, she was feeling the frequency of the noisy, dirty world he had missed so dearly, together with him.

Mmm…

Han-gyeol opened his eyes.

The patch on his temple had already fallen off, and outside the window, sunset had already begun.

Looking beside him, he saw Noah sitting in a chair with her head bowed.

“Hey, Noah. Is the experiment over?”

Noah slowly raised her head.

Her pupils were shining with a much deeper, bluer light than her usual jade color.

“……Boss.”

“What’s wrong? Was my dream too messy?”

“No. It was very… inefficient. I can’t understand why you keep the dust from 600 years ago so precious to that extent.”

Noah picked up the pad and stood up.

Normally she would have said, “I will submit the computation results report,” but she walked to the window without saying a word.

“But, boss.”

“Yeah?”

“I had a brief… ‘error’ earlier too.”

On Noah’s pad screen, a small log appeared.

A fictional image created by her system while copying Han-gyeol’s dream was displayed.

Inside it, Noah and Han-gyeol sitting on a wooden platform in front of the old barracks from 600 years ago, chewing gum in an absurd scene.

“That’s a dream.”

Han-gyeol stood up from the sofa, yawning.

“It’s too extravagant a dream for a machine to have.”

Noah said that, but she moved that log to the ‘private storage’ folder instead of the ‘permanent delete’ folder.

5:00 p.m., quitting time.

The shadows of the two people leaving the office stretched long.

The androids in the square returned to their respective nodes and began acting out perfect administration again.

But there was still a wet leaf in Paul’s pocket, and in a corner of Noah’s main server, a ridiculous simulation called ‘gum-chewing android’ was running.

The world was still intact, and the city was precise.

And the first holiday of 2850 passed like that, with everyone carrying their own small error inside them.

That was all.