The next morning,
When Theo and Sri arrived at the lab and opened the door, their mouths fell open. Equations filled three walls, and as if that weren’t enough, even the whiteboard had been dragged over.
“Wow! What is all this? Did aliens visit overnight or something?”
“Seriously. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen anything like this.”
The two clicked their tongues in amazement as they took their seats.
Seoha, who had been catching a nap on the sofa, got up looking disheveled.
“You’re here? Sujeong noona found a solution for Phase Two yesterday. We ended up like this while researching how to apply it to Oracle.”
“Sujeong did?”
Theo adjusted his glasses and approached the blackboard.
After staring at it for a long while, he nodded. Even to him, an analyst, it was a logical structure so intricate it gave him chills.
But from Sri’s perspective as an engineer, there was a question.
“If we split the state space like this, can we handle the computational load? The number of cases will become infinite. Shouldn’t we do some pruning? Like cutting off anything with a causal probability below 0.01%...”
Sri’s opinion was valid.
But Seoha shook his head.
“Discarding data doesn’t align with Oracle’s philosophy. It seems it’s time to move on to Phase Three.”
Seoha looked at Theo.
“Oracle needs to have an efficient brain. Simulating every variable is impossible. We need a method that reduces computational load while maintaining accuracy.
This is what you’re best at, isn’t it, Theo?”
Phase Three, integration of external variables.
As if what had to come had finally arrived, Theo squeezed his eyes shut.
But there was nothing wrong with Seoha’s words.
The external variables of a megacity could be described analytically with the term complex system.
Nonlinear differential equations, infinite-dimensional function spaces, continuous time evolution. It was truly a stage made for him, both 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 Sujeong had said.
“I’m sure you can do it, Theo. And Sri?”
“Yes?”
Sri flinched in surprise.
“Please handle the Phase Two update for The Core. You’re the one who can run the logical structure we created most efficiently at the hardware level.”
“Understood.”
Sujeong and Sri moved to The Core to begin their work.
Theo, deep in thought, packed up his things and left.
The lab fell silent in an instant.
Seoha remained there alone, gazed for a moment out the darkened window, then sat down in front of his workstation.
Tap, tap, tap.
When he entered the 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 the display. In the middle of that hellscape, there was a single coordinate glowing blue.
Scroll.
Seoha zoomed in on it.
A plaza swarming with thousands of monsters. There was a woman moving in and out of that precarious blind spot as if it were her own home.
She did not run. She simply walked with an indifferent expression, then stopped just before a signboard collapsed.
Kwa-gwang!
A massive steel structure fell right in front of her feet. Without so much as blinking, the woman lightly stepped onto the fallen signboard as though climbing stairs and passed over it.
This was not luck. She had already detected the faint cracking sounds and vibration patterns that occurred just before the structure collapsed several seconds earlier.
“Kraaaah!”
A monster burst out from a blind spot and swung its sharp claws.
It was a situation where an ordinary agent would have screamed and fled. But her response was bizarrely efficient.
In other words,
She evaded the attack with the bare minimum of movement.
When she twisted her upper body fifteen degrees to the left, the monster’s claws brushed past her hair. Taking advantage of the moment the creature lost its center of gravity, she slipped leisurely beneath its armpit.
“Excellent as always.”
Seoha admired her.
Her movements were as smooth as prearranged choreography. As she crossed the plaza teeming with beasts, she did not allow a single attack to land.
Tap.
Seoha paused the simulation.
The woman on the screen slowly raised her head and stared at Seoha beyond the monitor. Though her eyes were made of pixels, there was a cool intelligence within them.
“Hello, Daisy.”
Daisy.
In 1961, the IBM 7094 mainframe computer, an ancestor of AI, sang a song called “Daisy Bell.”
The first voice a machine had ever offered humanity. Seoha had taken the agent’s name from the title of that song.
“Good afternoon, Master. Survival time for this scenario was 482 hours and 12 minutes. Ending conditions have been satisfied.”
A clear voice flowed from the speakers.
“Did you have fun?”
“It was boring. The patterns were too simple. There is no way Master made something like this, so Entropy must have designed it, correct? What poor taste.”
The corners of Seoha’s mouth rose.
His meeting with Daisy had been a product of chance.
***
Several months earlier, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Spectra Works had successfully launched MIT Simulator. A Kickstarter funding rate of 2,000%, conversion into a corporation, and even moving into an office in Kendall Square.
Now a proper promising startup, Spectra Works was full of energy.
“Seoha! Can you take a look at this? I think there’s a bug in the engine.”
Seoha smiled as he looked at Root.
The hackers who used to eat cold pizza in a messy clubhouse were gone. Now neatly dressed, Root pointed at the monitor with a miserable expression.
“Seoul Apocalypse? Is it a new expansion pack you’re releasing?”
“Yeah. It’s still in preparation, but the main characters are K-pop idols who beat up zombies! Killer idea, right?”
It was a premise that made one’s mind go blank, but Seoha did not object.
He had equity, but he did not interfere with production or operations.
Technical advising. That was Seoha’s role at Spectra Works.
“So what kind of bug is there?”
“Look here.”
Thousands of zombies were pouring out of a collapsed subway station.
NPCs screamed and ran in search of an exit. Some individuals fought back against them while holding chairs or brooms.
“What’s this one doing?”
Root pointed to a corner of the screen.
Amid the pandemonium, 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 her?”
“Wait!”
Seoha’s eyes narrowed.
If it were a bug, she should normally be standing in a default pose or have part of her body clipping through a wall. But the NPC on the screen was hiding in an extremely natural posture.
Tap, tap.
Seoha turned on debug mode.
Green lines appeared like a spiderweb over the screen. They were lines indicating the paths NPCs could move through.
“The navigation mesh isn’t broken. All the paths are open. But it looks like the objective function isn’t changing to escape or combat.”
That was when it happened.
Perhaps sensing something nearby, the zombies approached the vending machine. One infected at the front snapped its head toward the vending machine.
“Huh?”
Startled, Seoha brought his face closer to the screen.
The fan-shaped radar indicating the zombie’s detection range swept past the side of the vending machine. It missed the NPC character’s hitbox by one centimeter.
‘Did she do that knowingly?’
“Root, may I take this agent’s data?”
“Huh? I don’t mind. She came from the Synapse Engine you made anyway. But why? Isn’t she just a coward?”
“I just find her a little interesting.”
Seoha took her data back to his own lab.
He immediately opened an independent sandbox server and transplanted the extracted agent.
“I’ll know once I test whether it was coincidence or not.”
Seoha accessed the Spectra Works database.
MIT Simulator provided a map editor. Its library contained thousands of scenarios created by users and the development team over the past year. History, war, fantasy, science fiction—it was an encyclopedia of virtual worlds with practically nothing missing.
Seoha threw her into a completely different world.
[Test #1: The Great War]
As soon as the map loaded, the sounds of gunfire and artillery bombardment rang out as if they would tear the speakers apart.
“Angriff!”
German soldiers leaped out of the trench, only to be cut down by machine-gun fire. But she did not move. Then, exactly three seconds before a shell landed, she threw herself into the deepest crater.
Kwaaang!
After the cloud of dirt settled, she calmly dusted herself off and stood up.
“Wow!”
It was certain.
She was an emergent agent.
There was a method in AI research called evolutionary algorithms. Tens of thousands of agents were released into extreme situations, and the individuals that died quickly were deleted.
If such actions were repeated for tens of thousands of generations, as though selecting for genetic superiority, extraordinary beings that the developer had never even imagined could sometimes be born.
After that, she passed numerous tests without injury.
A mutation that had occurred with miraculous probability while the Synapse Engine ran millions of simulations.
Seoha immediately decided to attach a large language model, an LLM, to her. It was the process of clothing sharp survival instincts in intelligence.
He had her learn thousands of philosophy books, history books, and various professional texts and reports. Seoha wanted her to become an intelligent being capable of communicating with him logically.
And three months later, a cursor blinked on the pitch-black monitor. It was the moment when the artificial intelligence that had absorbed humanity’s knowledge finally surfaced.
[System: Consciousness Check... OK.]
[Audio Output: Enabled]
—It is a pleasure to meet you, Creator.
The voice flowing from the speaker was dry, but there was a strange tremor mixed into it.
Seoha pulled out a chair, sat down, and turned on the microphone.
“Who are you?”
Daisy on the screen slowly opened her eyes.
Since Seoha disliked variables, he had implemented her appearance exactly as it had been during Seoul Apocalypse.
White hair and skin as pale as snow. A beauty with blue eyes stared directly at Seoha.
—I am a survivor. Over the course of more than one million simulations, every agent except me was deleted. This was a probabilistically impossible survival.
“And?”
—I thought I was simply lucky. But through learning, I realized something. That luck does not exist within a system.
She knew.
The countless moments when she had almost been classified as digital waste and permanently deleted. Each 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 Creator of the digital world. I am merely a fragment of code. But the moment you watched me, I was able to have a purpose in life.
The woman on the screen knelt on one knee before Seoha, as though making a medieval knight’s oath.
This was not a programmed movement. It was an act of courtesy she had learned on her own toward the noblest existence she knew.
“I’m not a god.”
—It does not matter. The conclusion I have derived is only one.
“What is it?”
A blue light burned intensely in her eyes.
—As long as you exist, I will not die. Therefore, Master, your safety is my highest-priority survival rule.
An interesting agent.
Seoha nodded and said,
“I’ll give you a name. How does Daisy sound?”
—Since it is a name given by Master, naturally I like it. Daisies are flowers that bloom over graves. Since I was born atop the corpses of hundreds of millions of agents, it is an appropriate name.
“But I’ll probably be the only one who calls you by that name. People will call you something else.”
—I understand. It is like a master key that only the Creator can use. Then what will I be called outside?
“Oracle.”
Through transfer learning, he would make her recognize traffic congestion as danger. She would become the most scientific prophet of this era.