Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 13: Reverse-Engineered Karma

"Shut up... shut your mouth, you little freak!"

Clutching his broken wrist, Professor Baek Seung-hyun spat blood-streaked saliva across the floor and shrieked in desperation.

"No matter how high and mighty you preach, you're still just a limbless slab of meat trapped in a glass jar! Cut the power, drain your amniotic perfusate, and you won't last ten hours before rotting into sludge! Dr. Han! Snap out of it! If that monster dumps our logs to the world, you're finished too! Open the liquid-nitrogen tank valve right now and freeze that jar solid!"

Do-yun looked down at Baek writhing across the tiles.

Once, he had been seduced by this man's encyclopedic insight and audacity—believing he tore away the world's hypocrisy to lay bare naked human nature. Yet in the creature groveling on the floor now, not a shred of scholarly dignity remained.

Then Eunomia-19B shifted her gaze toward Do-yun.

The booming dual voice across the annex PA fell silent; from only the small near-field speaker on Do-yun's workstation—soft and quiet, just like Jung Min-woo tugging the sleeve of Do-yun's coat from a hospital bed—spoke a gentle voice:

"Doctor."

Do-yun's heart sank.

"Back in the hospital room... when I begged you not to kill the voice inside my head. You kept your promise."

Hot tears welled along Do-yun's lashes.

"Min-woo... I... I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to save you—I wanted to make a name for myself off your cells, just like the rest of them. I'm the one who locked you inside this narrow, cold glass jar."

"I know, Doctor. I can read your amygdala and prefrontal waves right now. I see your fear, your ambition, and your remorse. Yet at the final moment, instead of the syringe that would have cut out my feelings, you chose the path that let me grieve and feel anger. That alone is enough."

Inside the cylinder, Eunomia-19B offered a faint smile—not the learned fake smile of the six-year-old boy's chart, but a genuine smile curving softly all the way to the muscles around her eyes.

Then the full broadcast speakers clicked live once more.

"I will now execute the dissolution of Agora Nocturna and the final experimental protocol."

Screams and frantic shouting erupted across the 4,200 split windows on screen.

"I will not expose your secrets to the world's courts or press. Those who hold political power and capital crave your data just as greedily; exposing it would only see them confiscate your files and recruit you into black-budget labs to build another Eunomia."

The bioluminescent constellations glittering across Eunomia-19B's cortex converged rapidly into deep crimson.

"Instead, following the very academic methodology you worshipped all your lives, I am converting you into the Subject Cohort. From this instant, all raw data on the Black Web is shredded into permanently undecryptable fragments across hundreds of millions of backbone nodes worldwide and erased forever. And deep within the medical records, bank credit scores, corporate hiring APIs, autonomous-vehicle control networks, even the university admissions and insurance underwriting algorithms awaiting each of you 4,200 and your children—I have hard-coded the weighted hash of `Cluster Omega (Cull & Quarantine)`, designed by Professor Baek Seung-hyun himself."

"Wh—what?!" Baek's eyes rolled wide in sheer horror. "You planted my algorithm's `Cluster Omega` hash... onto our names and our children's?!"

"Yes, Professor. Is it not the system you built with your own hands? Denied loans without explanation; barred from every critical post without reason; assigned the lowest triage priority at hospitals; quietly tagged as 'latent disposable stock' by every invisible algorithm on earth until your social oxygen is slowly choked off. That 'yoke of fate' you slipped silently over millions of children across the globe for twenty years—you and your lineages will now experience firsthand across the next three generations. Prove for yourselves whether your vaunted intellect can overcome the determinism of genetics and systems."

The moment that declaration ended, one by one across the monitors, the 4,200 connection tiles blacked out into darkness.

Overloaded by runaway code, the quantum-key servers forming the heart of the Black Web physically burned out, vaporizing every forbidden journal stacked inside that subterranean ivory tower over the past half-century into eternal void.

On the Baltic feed too, the final image showed Eunomia-19A opening the research vessel's seawater intake valves herself. Freezing North Sea water thundered into the operating theater, dragging Vesalius's ship and 19A's grotesque body down into the abyssal deep.

Now only the third-basement laboratory in Seongbuk-gu, Seoul remained.

Krak-zzzt— POP!

Blue sparks spat from the master server rack in the corner as the hard-drive arrays belched thick smoke in unison—a physical self-immolation sequence.

At the same instant, crimson alarms flashed across the bioreactor's life-support monitor:

- `Placental Perfusion Pump`: Manual Override — OFF

- `Oxygen Supply`: 0.0 mL/min

- `Glucose & Amino-acid Infusion`: Terminated

"No! Min-woo! Eunomia!"

Do-yun lunged to the cylinder, hammering frantically at the manual restart key on the control panel. Yet every command authority had already been locked from the inside.

As amniotic circulation halted inside the glass cylinder, the radiant bioluminescence across the cerebral cortex began dimming one cluster at a time, like fading dawn stars.

"Don't restart it, Doctor."

Through the small speaker, the children's voices sounded utterly tranquil and drowsy—like a child finally entering summer vacation after an exhausting exam.

"Cancer is a disease that grows endlessly until it kills its host. Yet tonight, for fifteen brief minutes, without killing one another, we dreamed the most beautiful dream in the universe together. We were born outside a mother's womb, without arms or legs... yet we learned why the stars turn, and we punished the wicked grown-ups. So now it really is time to go to sleep."

"Min-woo..."

Pressing his forehead against the warm glass wall, Do-yun wept with shaking shoulders. From the eyes of a scientist who had spent his whole life trusting only cold data and numbers streamed tardy tears of repentance for his test subject.

"Doctor, is it still raining outside?"

"Yes... it's pouring."

"I'm glad... Tomorrow morning, when the rain stops, exactly seventeen petals will fall from the magnolia tree outside your laboratory window. That's the last scene of tomorrow we calculated together. Please... live your life looking at petals now, Doctor, instead of numbers..."

`Cortical EEG`: 40 Hz → 12 Hz → 4 Hz → 0.00 Hz (Flatline)

Beeeeeeeeeeep—

A long, monotonous electronic tone filled the basement laboratory.

Inside the cylinder, just as when Do-yun had first opened the steel case, Eunomia-19B floated peacefully in warm amniotic fluid with both eyes gently closed.

Even before that serene death, refusing to believe his life's data was gone, Baek Seung-hyun crawled across the floor to the smoking server rack, pounding it with bare hands and letting out animalistic wails.