The control room was silent.
The voice coming over the radio sounded to those inside like a message confirming that the future, once thought to be the province of God, had finally fallen into human hands.
This was a realm humanity had never once set foot in before.
“...There really was an accident.”
“You’re saying it saw the future?”
“What in the world...”
Low, groaning murmurs rose here and there.
People now began to look at the screens with fear in their eyes.
Mayor John loosened his tie with trembling hands.
“Did we truly just witness the future?”
Seha answered him with an expressionless face.
“No. Oracle merely calculated, a little faster than others, where water already spilled would flow. When gravity acts, an apple falls. But no one points to that and says they have seen the future.”
At his words, the council members and officials nodded.
It was not that there was nothing unsettling about it, but everything Seha said had been disclosed in advance before the project was implemented. If Oracle could be controlled perfectly, New York could become a city boasting the highest level of safety and efficiency. A gleam of desire settled in John’s eyes.
As if satisfied, he turned his head and looked over the directors and council members seated with him. Even in the minds of those who had been in shock until moments ago, calculators had begun to run.
The economic and political benefits to be gained by resolving traffic congestion and reducing accident rates—and above all, the temptation of being able to manage this enormous city as if looking into the palm of one’s hand—sprouted in their hearts.
Honk, honk!
The road conditions visible on the screens were a mess. The aftermath of the accident had yet to be cleared up.
“Mayor?”
“Yes.”
The police commissioner looked at John and spoke.
“Why don’t we move on to the main matter now? Oracle was created to relieve New York City’s traffic congestion, after all.”
“Right... Seha? I’ll leave it to you.”
He suddenly came to his senses and nodded.
Seha sat down in front of the console.
“Start Oracle.”
-Understood, Master. Beginning transfer of system authority.
On the control room screens, control rights over the traffic signals of New York’s five boroughs and more than twelve thousand intersections were listed one after another.
Now only John’s final authorization remained.
Gulp.
Mayor John swallowed dryly and placed his palm on the main console.
[Biometric Authorization: Confirmed]
[Traffic management authority is being transferred to Oracle.]
After a few seconds, the massive screens filling the walls of the control room all inverted to blue at once.
“Ah, the traffic lights...”
“They’re incredibly dazzling.”
Daisy had decided to show off her performance to the fullest.
Oracle’s computational power, now housed not in a workstation but in a supercomputer, was unrivaled.
The systems that had been operated by primitive timers logged out one after another. Oracle encroached upon their place as if a living neural network were spreading.
-Synchronization complete. Control secured over all traffic signals and reversible lanes in New York City. Based on current time, beginning adjustment of downtown average speed from 18 km/h to 27 km/h.
If the old traffic system had been a reactive prescription that cleared blockages after they appeared, Oracle’s control focused on prevention.
Oracle regulated the inflow speed of vehicles from kilometers ahead, precisely adjusting signals so they could pass through bottlenecks without stopping when they reached them.
“My God... The cars aren’t stopping.”
“I can see with my own eyes that it’s clearly improved.”
It was the moment a fragmented system, which until now had been divided and managed section by section, was integrated into one vast intelligence. The red congestion zones tangled across the screens gradually turned green.
“Impossible! All of Seventh Avenue opened at once!”
The director of the Department of Transportation sprang up from his seat, unable to believe it.
A miracle was unfolding before his eyes. On a road where it would normally take thirty minutes to advance one mile, cars were moving. The chronic bottleneck at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel vanished as if it had been a lie.
It was a sight he was seeing for the first time in decades of working at the Department of Transportation.
“Huh? There aren’t many cars today.”
“What’s going on? It’s not even Thanksgiving.”
Drivers pressed the accelerator without knowing why.
The moment they entered an intersection, the light changed as if by ghostly timing, and when the car ahead picked up speed, the car behind naturally rode the flow as well.
-Average driving speed across Manhattan has reached 27 km/h. Congested zones eliminated. Accident risk below 0.01%. Ending optimization mode as of the current time and switching to maintenance mode.
“Ha, hahaha!”
A hollow laugh escaped John’s mouth.
His gaze turned toward the roads near the slums. The outer areas of the Bronx, among the most underdeveloped in New York. The roads were narrow and winding like old pipes, an area where even ambulances were usually reluctant to enter.
Workers living hand to mouth climbed into buses packed like bean sprouts from dawn. It was a neighborhood where they had to waste precious time on completely clogged roads. But the situation there on the screen had clearly changed as well.
“That’s 149th Street.”
He pointed to a corner of the screen with a trembling hand.
“That is where I was born. The roads there were always a mess because they were so narrow. I tried to fix them, but it was impossible because of issues involving displaced residents.
You had to wait an eternity just to enter the arterial road toward Manhattan. But look there now.”
It was exactly as John said.
They were slow, but the buses were moving.
“How did it do that? Opening up the flow there is physically impossible!”
Seha looked at him with warm eyes and said,
“The existing system prioritized the flow of arterial roads. It gave longer signals to major roads with heavy vehicle traffic and sacrificed the narrow roads.
I am not trying to blame anyone. Prioritizing the circumstances of those who have more is something like a human instinct.”
Seha enlarged one section of the screen. A bus entering an intersection joined the flow immediately without stopping.
“Oracle does not consider land values in an area or the status of pedestrians. It values only the efficiency of movement across the entire city. A bus carrying fifty passengers receives far greater weight than a single passenger car. And that location is a road with heavy bus traffic.”
“So the cause of chronic congestion was not only infrastructure...”
John murmured softly.
He remembered his mother anxiously stamping her feet at the bus stop every morning. The fierce life of the poor, whose daily wages were cut if they were even a little late for work. For the rich, ten minutes in the morning was time to enjoy a cup of coffee, but for his mother, it was a matter tied to the entire family’s dinner. His eyes reddened.
“Now, then!”
Mayor John returned to a dignified expression.
He looked around and said,
“Let’s inform the citizens of these results immediately. You come as well, and don’t be late. The reporters will be waiting in the briefing room.”
The mayor and his party left the control room like the tide going out.
The bustling noise disappeared, leaving only the sound of servers running in the control room. Only then did Seha relax and lean deep into his chair.
Once the officials had completely vanished, the researchers who had been holding their breath began poking their heads out one by one from behind the partitions. Their faces were flushed red.
Seha spun his chair around and faced the researchers.
Theo and Sujeong were sending him silent looks. Seha rose from his seat with an awkward expression.
“Everyone...”
From the beginning, there had not been a single easy thing about this project.
Data engineers, network specialists, mathematicians, hardware and server engineers, traffic engineers, urban planners—not only them, but even psychologists and information security experts had gathered in the control room, a truly diverse group of people.
Deeply.
Seha bowed his head deeply to them.
“Everyone, you have truly worked hard. Project Oracle’s field test is a success.”
His brief words became the catalyst.
“Waaaaaaaah!”
“It’s over! It’s finally over!”
“Now I can go home.”
Starting with the shout someone let loose, cheers burst out as if they would bring down the control room.
Even the dignified doctors forgot their composure and embraced one another, and a few threw the documents they were holding into the air and jumped up and down.
Theo looked at them with a pleased expression. Perhaps the hardships until now had come to mind, because Sujeong and Seuri also looked deeply moved.
“Seha! This is thanks to you!”
Harry approached with an excited face and held out his hand to Seha.
Starting with him, all the researchers surrounded the Apex team members.
“It’s thanks to all of us.”
Seha barely managed to slip into a corner.
At that moment, a voice came through his earphone.
-Master?
Oracle was sending audio only to Seha personally.
Amid the noise, he covered one ear and quietly asked,
“What is it? Did a problem come up?”
-I have detected a vehicle using a forged license plate.
On the screen, a black SUV was heading south past Third Avenue.
-Route analysis indicates it is clearly different from ordinary driving patterns. It has no specific destination and is driving at low speed only through blind spots in back alleys.
After comparison with the New York City Drug Enforcement database, the vehicle’s route matches a typical “drop-off” transaction pattern. Shall I transmit the data to the police department console?
Seha shook his head.
“No, don’t. Let’s cooperate only when the police request it first.”
This was an issue he had thought over thoroughly before completing the project. Oracle had to remain, to the very end, only a capable traffic navigator.
None of New York’s citizens would want it to possess authority beyond that role.
‘And people may start using Oracle for unnecessary things.’
“Oracle, I’m going to hard-code the First Principle from now on.”
Seha spoke in a low voice.
-Please proceed, Master.
“Your objective function is only one thing: to maintain the smooth flow of vehicles and pedestrians within New York City while minimizing the accident rate.”
Complex formulas lined up on the screen and then disappeared.
Seha placed a powerful restriction in the deepest part of Oracle’s deep-learning layers, a place close to what would be the unconscious in a human.
-I have a question. Would detecting and blocking criminal acts or signs of terrorism in advance not conform to the higher concept of human safety?
Was it because he had made it read too many books in the humanities? A smile brushed Seha’s lips.
“No, that’s wrong. Some people value the right not to be surveilled more than safety. The safety you judge is limited to the physical aspect. The moment people know you are watching them, you will certainly be scrapped.”
-Understood.
Tap, tap, tap.
As the council had demanded, Seha activated the anonymity-guarantee protocol.
He changed it so that all visual information received through cameras and sensors would have distinguishing identification data—such as human faces and vehicle license plates—processed as noise.
-The protocol you have entered may reduce the system’s information collection efficiency by up to 15%.
“That’s fine. And lock this setting at the kernel level so it can’t be modified even with administrator privileges.”
[Setting Structure Lock...]
[Administrator Access Authority: Denied]
After finishing the task, Seha took his team members and hurried toward the press conference room.