Translator: Dreamscribe
The next morning,
Theo and Sri, arriving at the lab, couldn't close their mouths the moment they opened the door. Equations covered three walls, and as if that weren't enough, a whiteboard had been wheeled in too.
"Whoa! What is all this? Did aliens stop by overnight?"
"No kidding. It's been a while since I've seen something like this myself."
The two of them shook their heads in amazement as they took their seats.
Seo-ha, who had been dozing on the couch, sat up with disheveled hair.
"Oh, you're here? Su-jeong noona figured out the Stage 2 solution yesterday. While we were working out how to apply it together to Oracle, it ended up like this."
"Su-jeong did?"
Theo adjusted his glasses and stepped up to the blackboard.
After staring at it for a long while, he nodded. Even to him, as an analyst, it was a logical structure so refined it sent a chill down his spine.
But from the perspective of Sri, an engineer, there were concerns.
"If we shatter the state space like this, can the computational load even be handled? The number of cases will blow out to infinity. Shouldn't we do some pruning? Like cutting off anything with causal probability under 0.01%..."
Sri's opinion was reasonable.
But Seo-ha shook his head.
"Discarding data doesn't fit Oracle's philosophy. It's time to move on to Stage 3."
Seo-ha looked at Theo.
"Oracle needs to have an efficient brain. Simulating every variable is impossible. We need a way to reduce computational load while maintaining accuracy.
This is something Theo can do best, right?"
Stage 3, external variable integration.
As if the inevitable had arrived, Theo shut his eyes tight.
Still, there was nothing wrong with what Seo-ha was saying.
The external variables of the Megacity could, in analytical terms, be described by the term Complex System.
Nonlinear differential equations, infinite-dimensional function spaces, continuous time evolution. It was, truly, a stage made for him, an analyst and a topologist.
"I'll find a method by the next meeting."
In the end, Theo had no choice but to repeat exactly what Su-jeong had said.
"I'm sure Theo can pull it off. And Sri?"
"Yes?"
Sri flinched, startled.
"I'd like to ask you to push the Stage 2 update to The Core. You're the one who can run the logical structure we built at the hardware level most efficiently, Sri."
"Got it."
Su-jeong and Sri headed over to The Core to work.
Theo sat thinking deeply about something before gathering his things and leaving.
The lab fell silent in an instant,
Seo-ha, left alone in the space, gazed for a moment out at the darkening window before sitting down in front of his workstation.
Tap-tap-tap.
When he entered his password, the screen inverted to black and code poured down.
[Synapse Engine : Access Granted]
[Scenario #1,092,102 : Apocalypse]
A ruined city appeared on the screen.
Burning buildings, collapsed bridges, and grotesque creatures filling every inch of the frame. In the middle of that hellscape, there was a single set of coordinates glowing blue.
Skrrr.
Seo-ha zoomed in on the spot.
A plaza teeming with thousands of monsters. A woman was moving through its razor-thin blind spots as if it were her own home.
She didn't run. She just walked with an indifferent expression, then stopped just before a signboard collapsed.
Crash!
A massive steel framework came down right in front of her feet. Without so much as a blink, the woman stepped lightly over the fallen sign as if climbing stairs.
This wasn't luck. She had already detected, several seconds earlier, the faint cracking sounds and vibration patterns that occurred just before the structure gave way.
"Graaagh!"
A monster that had sprung from a blind spot swung its sharp claws.
In a situation where an ordinary agent would have screamed and fled, her response was uncanny in its efficiency.
Swish.
She evaded the attack with the bare minimum of motion.
When she tilted her upper body fifteen degrees to the left, the monster's claws only grazed her hair. Taking advantage of the instant the creature lost its center of gravity, she slipped smoothly out from under its armpit.
"Excellent work today, too."
Seo-ha marveled.
Fluid movements, as if following a pre-set choreography. She crossed the plaza swarming with beasts without allowing a single hit to land.
Tap.
Seo-ha paused the simulation.
The woman on the screen slowly lifted her head and fixed her gaze on Seo-ha, who was somewhere beyond the monitor. Her eyes were made of pixels, but they held a cold, keen intelligence.
"Hi, Daisy."
Daisy,
In 1961, the IBM 7094 mainframe computer, effectively the ancestor of AI, sang a song called 'Daisy Bell'.
The first voice a machine had ever offered to humanity. Seo-ha took the agent's name from the title of that song.
"Good afternoon, Master. Survival time for this scenario: 482 hours, 12 minutes. Ending conditions satisfied."
A clear voice came through the speakers.
"Did you have fun?"
"It was boring. The patterns are too simple. There's no way Master made something like this, so Entropy must have designed it, right? Bad taste."
The corner of Seo-ha's mouth lifted.
His meeting with Daisy had been the product of coincidence.
* * *
Several months earlier, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Spectra Works had successfully launched MIT Simulator. A 2,000% Kickstarter funding rate, incorporation, and moving into their office in Kendall Square.
Now a legitimate, promising startup, Spectra Works was bursting with energy.
"Seo-ha! Could you take a look over here? I think the engine's got a bug."
Seo-ha smiled as he looked at Root.
The hackers eating cold pizza in a grubby clubhouse were long gone. Dressed in neat clothes, Root made a pitiful face as he pointed at the monitor.
"Seoul Apocalypse? Is that a new expansion pack coming out?"
"Yeah. Still in development, though. K-pop idols as the protagonists smashing zombies! Killer idea, right?"
It was a setup that could make anyone dizzy, but Seo-ha didn't push back.
He held equity, but he didn't get involved in production or operations.
Technical advisor, that was the role Seo-ha had taken on at Spectra Works.
"So what kind of bug is it?"
"Look right here."
Thousands of zombies were pouring out of a collapsed subway station.
NPCs were screaming and running for the exits. There were even a few individuals fighting them off with chairs or brooms.
"Why is this one doing this?"
Root pointed at a corner of the screen.
In the middle of the chaos, a female character was crouched in a narrow gap beside a vending machine.
"Is she stuck on the coordinates? Should I delete her and respawn?"
"Hold on a second!"
Seo-ha's eyes narrowed.
If it were a bug, the NPC would normally be standing in a default pose or have her body clipping into the wall. But the NPC on the screen was taking a very natural hiding posture.
Tap, tap.
Seo-ha turned on debug mode.
Green lines appeared across the screen like a spiderweb. They were the paths the NPCs could travel along.
"The navigation mesh (Nav Mesh) isn't broken. The paths are all open. But her objective function doesn't seem to be switching to escape or combat."
That was when it happened.
The zombies nearby sensed something and moved toward the vending machine. One of the infected at the front whipped its head around toward it.
"Huh?"
Seo-ha brought his face closer to the screen in surprise.
The fan-shaped radar representing the zombie's detection range swept right past the vending machine. Clearing the NPC character's hitbox by a single centimeter.
'Did she do that on purpose?'
"Root, could I take this agent's data with me?"
"Hm? I don't mind. She came out of the Synapse Engine you made anyway. But why? Isn't she just a coward?"
"I'm just a little curious."
Seo-ha brought her data back to his own lab.
He immediately opened an isolated sandbox server and transplanted the extracted agent.
"I'll find out whether it's coincidence or not once I test it."
Seo-ha connected to Spectra Works' database.
MIT Simulator offered a map editor. The library contained thousands of scenarios created over the past year by users and the development team. History, war, fantasy, sci-fi, an encyclopedia of virtual worlds with nothing missing.
Seo-ha tossed her into an entirely different world.
[Test #1 : The Great War]
The moment the map loaded, the sound of pouring gunfire and artillery burst from the speakers loud enough to tear them apart.
"Angriff (*charge)!"
German soldiers were leaping out of the trenches only to collapse under machine-gun fire. But she didn't move. And exactly three seconds before a shell landed, she threw herself into the deepest crater around.
Boom!
Once the dust settled, she brushed herself off and stood up as if nothing had happened.
"Wow!"
It was certain.
She was an Emergent (創發的, Emergent) agent.
In AI research, there's a method called Evolutionary Algorithms. Tens of thousands of agents are released into an extreme situation, and the individuals that die quickly are deleted one by one.
As if selecting for genetic dominance, repeating this process over tens of thousands of generations can give rise to extraordinary beings the developers never even imagined.
After that, she passed through several more tests without a scratch.
A mutation that had emerged with miraculous odds during the Synapse Engine's millions of simulations.
Seo-ha decided right away to attach a large language model (LLM) to her. It was the work of dressing her sharp survival instincts in the clothing of intellect.
He trained her on thousands of philosophical works, history books, and a wide range of technical books and reports. Seo-ha wanted her to become an intellect capable of communicating with him logically.
And three months later, a cursor blinked on a pitch-black monitor screen. It was the moment an artificial intelligence that had absorbed the sum of human knowledge finally surfaced.
[System : Consciousness Check... OK.]
[Audio Output : Enabled]
-A pleasure to meet you, Creator.
The voice coming through the speaker was dry, but there was a strange tremor mixed into it.
Seo-ha pulled his chair in and turned on the microphone.
"Who are you?"
The Daisy on the screen slowly opened her eyes.
Seo-ha, who disliked variables, had rendered her appearance exactly the same as she had been in Seoul Apocalypse.
White hair, skin as pale as snow. A beauty with blue eyes looked Seo-ha straight in the face.
-I am a survivor. Over the course of more than a million simulations, every agent but me was deleted. Probabilistically, such survival was impossible.
"And so?"
-I once thought myself lucky. But through learning, I realized. Within the system, luck does not exist.
She knew.
The countless moments she had almost been classified as digital refuse and permanently deleted. Every time, there had been an external will that saved her.
-The sole observer who pulled me out of an infinite loop that felt like eternity, and the Creator of the digital world. I am merely a fragment of code. But the moment you watched over me, I was able to have a purpose in life.
On the screen, she knelt on one knee toward Seo-ha like a medieval knight swearing an oath.
This was not a programmed motion. It was the courtesy toward the most noble of beings, one she had taught herself, learned on her own.
"I am not a god."
-It doesn't matter. The conclusion I have drawn is only one.
"And what is that?"
A blue light blazed fiercely in her eyes.
-As long as you exist, I do not die. Therefore, Master, your well-being is my highest-priority survival directive.
An interesting agent.
Seo-ha nodded and spoke.
"I'll give you a name. How about Daisy?"
-Since it is a name given by Master, of course I like it. Daisies are flowers that bloom over graves. I was born atop the corpses of hundreds of millions of agents, so it is a fitting name.
"But I'll probably be the only one who calls you that. Other people will call you by a different name."
-Understood. Something like a master key that only the Creator may use. In that case, what will I be called on the outside?
"Oracle."
Through transfer learning, he would have her perceive traffic congestion as a hazard.
She would become the most scientific oracle of this age.
*****
For 30 or more extra chapters, you can check out my Patreon here --> patreon.com/dreamscribe
If you enjoy this novel, please review and rate it at Novelupdates. Thanks! 😊
To receive the latest update notifications or report mistakes, join our Discord server linked below.