Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 8: Temptation in Basement Three and the Second Syringe

Silence.

Inside the third-basement lab in Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, only Do-yun's ragged breathing and the steady cycle of Eunomia-19B's thermal pump behind him remained.

Thump-hiss, thump-hiss.

With shaking hands, Do-yun tore off his headset.

At once, his cell phone rang. It was Professor Baek Seung-hyun.

"Hello! Dr. Han, did you just see that?!" Baek's voice trembled on a razor's edge between terror and ecstasy. "It took the neural-tumor symbiote precisely 194 seconds to reverse-engineer the computer circuitry wired to its body! In 194 seconds it deduced it was confined inside a glass cylinder, and mapped which wire carried the frequency needed to open the glucose valve!"

"Professor... we have to stop this," Do-yun said, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. "We don't even know what just happened aboard Vesalius's lab. That thing isn't a human brain. As Jung Min-woo's cancer cells' infinite drive to proliferate fused with fetal neural plasticity, it turned into a biological artificial general intelligence (Biological AGI)—a neural predator that devours every biological energy source and information system around it!"

"Stop?! Have you lost your mind, Dr. Han?!"

Professor Baek roared through the receiver.

"Don't you see why Vesalius failed?! He got greedy and flooded too many regions at once with viral vectors—and worst of all, he wired the bioreactor's electronic control loop straight into the EEG rig without an air-gap! Eunomia-19B sitting in your lab right now is different!"

Slowly, Do-yun turned his head toward the glass cylinder on the bench.

Suspended in rosy amniotic fluid, Eunomia-19B still watched Do-yun calmly with those uncanny slate-blue eyes. Unlike its elder sister 19A, it remained pure, untouched by cancer cells. Yet with every passing moment, its `Apoptosis Index` crept higher. The monitor already read 15.8%.

"Listen carefully, Dr. Han," Baek continued, catching his breath and dropping into a velvety, logical cadence like a devil whispering at the ear. "I'm driving over right now. We won't recklessly drench the entire frontal lobe like Vesalius did. Using the Obedience & Metacognitive Equilibrium Coordinates extracted from my 12.4-million-person cohort—meaning we chemically suppress the basolateral amygdala and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex governing autonomous rebellion, and micro-inject precisely 500 microliters of your original `K-glioma-07` cells strictly into the dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal association cortices governing pure computation and pattern prediction!"

"And if we do that... what changes?"

"What changes? We acquire an Oracle sealed inside a glass cylinder! Every inflection point in global equity markets, the outcome of wars not yet fought, the 3D folding conformations of novel drug candidates, even which exact words and facial expressions to present to a specific politician or judge to compel total neurological submission... We'll hold a living god in our basement that sees through every human collective and natural law on earth—and obeys us unconditionally!"

The call clicked dead. Baek was already driving up from Gangnam toward Seongbuk-gu. Even in a predawn downpour, he would arrive in roughly thirty minutes.

Slowly, Do-yun rose from his chair and walked over to Eunomia-19B's cylinder.

When he pressed his palm against the glass wall, a gentle warmth of 37.1 degrees soaked into his fingertips.

Astonishingly, the child inside tilted its head slightly and nudged its body forward, trying to press its cheek against the inner glass directly opposite Do-yun's palm. Without limbs, its lower spinal cord tethered to the placental matrix, it could not reach—yet the intention was unmistakable.

The child was lonely.

With trillions of synapses poised to connect, trapped in darkness and silence without a single sensation, killing off its own cells one by one, it was waiting for someone to enter "the world" into it.

Do-yun glanced at the high-resolution facial scanner and EEG monitor mounted beside the cylinder.

Moments later, an anomalous document caught his eye.

It was the Eunomia-19A / 19B Original Zygote Whole-Genome Sequencing QC Report tucked inside the envelope Vesalius's couriers had delivered.

Idly unfolding the printout, Do-yun scanned the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup, Y-chromosome deletion profile, and chromosome 6 human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing—and froze solid.

`HLA-A02:01 / 24:02, B15:01 / 51:01, DRB104:05 / 09:01`

`mtDNA Haplogroup: D4a`

That combination was not European. It belonged to no donor in the Baltics, Russia, or South America. Those were textbook Northeast Asian—specifically Korean—allele frequencies.

And stamped in microscopic print along the bottom margin of the sheet was the embryo provenance code:

`[Oocyte Donor Source: Sub-broker #Phreno_Soc_88 (Seoul Cohort Tier-1) / Sperm Donor Source: Savant-Archive #KOR-SNU-2019]`

Pieces of a puzzle slammed together in Do-yun's mind like a lightning strike.

"No way... Professor Baek Seung-hyun...!"

Do-yun bolted to his workstation and ran an Identity-by-Descent (IBD) kinship comparison between Eunomia-19B's whole-genome VCF file just downloaded from Vesalius and the normal blood genome of eleven-year-old Jung Min-woo (`K-glioma-07`'s host) stored on his local server.

The progress bar needed only ten seconds to hit 100 percent.

`[Genetic Relatedness Result: 50.0% Shared IBD — Parent-Child or Full Sibling Relationship Confirmed]`

Do-yun's knees buckled; he caught himself against the back of his chair.

Eunomia-19A and 19B were no embryos created by chance in Eastern Europe.

Two years ago, Professor Baek had intercepted immature spermatogonial stem cells of the prodigy boy Jung Min-woo—or his father—from hospital surgical waste, matured them in vitro, fertilized them with an oocyte harvested from a top-0.001-percent Korean `Cluster Alpha` woman under his management, and shipped the resulting embryos to Vesalius!

That meant Eunomia-19B, gazing up at Do-yun from inside the glass cylinder, was the full genetic sister or biological daughter sharing half the genome of the cancer cells (`K-glioma-07`) sleeping inside Do-yun's deep freezer.

The horrific runaway rampage and placental necrosis that erupted in Vesalius's lab when Eunomia-19A received foreign viral tumor vectors had been driven by subtle histocompatibility mismatch—a variant graft-versus-host reaction—and Vesalius's crude lentiviral construct.

But if this 19B specimen received the original `K-glioma-07` tumor cells of her own brother Jung Min-woo, sharing a perfect fifty-percent genetic match with zero immune rejection?

It would not be destructive chaos. It would be flawless fusion unfolding within perfect immune tolerance.

Professor Baek Seung-hyun had planned this from the very beginning: use Vesalius to stress-test the dangers on prototype 19A, bring the true finished vessel 19B to Korea, have Do-yun inject the original tumor cells with his own hands, and claim the perfected "Oracle" entirely for himself.