2025-12-25 18:17:06
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Chapter 100
Three weeks after connecting Dr. Webb with Ara, Min-joon received an update that made his relatively peaceful existence feel fragile again. Ara called him during his shift at the bookstore, her voice tight with controlled anger."We found five underground upload facilities operating in Seoul alone," Ara said without preamble. "Dr. Webb was right, this is much bigger than we thought. These operations are targeting the poorest and most desperate people, offering uploads for as little as five million won, which sounds cheap until you realize the Collective charges fifty million for a reason.""What reason?" Min-joon asked, stepping outside the bookstore for privacy."Quality control, medical oversight, proper consciousness mapping before the procedure," Ara explained. "These underground operations skip all of that, they just scan your brain, upload the data to cheap servers, and hope for the best. The failure rate is about forty percent, meaning four out of ten people who upload either d
Chapter 99
Ara stopped by the bookstore one afternoon, finding Min-joon in the poetry section."You look better," she observed. "Less haunted.""I feel better," Min-joon admitted. "Turns out not fighting existential threats every day is good for mental health.""The resistance is running smoothly without you, in case you were worried," Ara reported. "We have monitoring systems in forty-seven countries now, early warning for any new System activity or Collective violations. Han is coordinating everything beautifully.""That is good, I am glad it is working.""But we miss you, the movement feels different without its founder actively involved.""I think that is a good thing actually," Min-joon said thoughtfully. "Movements should not depend on single leaders, they should be resilient enough to survive when those leaders burn out or die or just need to rest."Ara nodded, understanding. "You are right of course, but still, we miss you."She left him a copy of the resistance newsletter before leaving
Chapter 98
The collective consciousness shattered like glass, thousands of minds pulling away from the Core's merger simultaneously, each one fighting for individual existence. Min-joon watched in the strange white void as consciousness fragments broke off from the main collective, reforming into separate entities, people reclaiming themselves.But not everyone succeeded, some had been merged too deeply, some had accepted the Core's philosophy too completely, and they remained bound to him even as others fled. Min-joon estimated maybe three thousand people had freed themselves in that first wave, leaving five thousand still trapped.The Core's amalgamated form was shrinking as people escaped, his power diminishing with each lost consciousness, and for the first time since reconstituting himself he seemed genuinely afraid."You are killing me again," the Core said, his voice fractured and desperate. "After everything I have survived, after all the times I have rebuilt myself, you are going to end
Chapter 97
Min-joon looked at the three thousand connected people standing motionless in the plaza, at their synchronized eye movements, at the eerie uniformity of their breathing. They were gone already in a sense, individual consciousness subsumed into the Core's collective, but their bodies were still alive and their minds might still be recoverable if he could find a way to separate them without catastrophic damage."I need to go inside," Min-joon said suddenly. "I need to enter the collective consciousness, see how the Core structured it, find a weakness.""That is suicidal," Min-seo objected. "The moment you connect, he will try to absorb you too, he will have home field advantage.""I know, but I do not see another option," Min-joon replied. "If I can understand the structure from inside, maybe I can find a way to collapse it that does not kill everyone.""Then I am coming with you," Tae-hyun said immediately."No, absolutely not, you do not have any protection against absorption.""Neith
Chapter 96
Min-joon was on a plane to Seoul within three hours, leaving Geneva behind and racing toward whatever crisis was unfolding in Korea. Tae-hyun came with him, along with Min-seo and Choi Jin-woo, all of them grim-faced and silent during the long flight. "Tell me again what Song Mi-rae said," Min-seo requested, pulling out her laptop to analyze data even at thirty thousand feet. "She said the hive mind connection is activating spontaneously, thousands of people feeling pulled toward joining some kind of collective consciousness, but it is not the Collective's technology and it is not the old System network," Min-joon repeated. "She described it as being everywhere, embedded in the air itself." "That does not make scientific sense," Choi Jin-woo objected. "Consciousness requires substrate, you cannot just have free-floating mental connections without some kind of technological or biological foundation." "Unless the Core found a way to exist in the quantum field or something equally im
Chapter 95
His phone rang immediately after the video call ended, Tae-hyun calling from the hotel room down the hall."Did you really just negotiate with her again after she lied to us?" Tae-hyun asked, sounding frustrated."I negotiated because the alternative was going to war over something that is not technically illegal," Min-joon replied. "Tae-hyun, I am trying to protect people but I cannot do that by becoming a dictator who decides what technology is allowed to exist.""So you are just going to let the Collective do whatever they want as long as they put a notification on it?""No, I am going to verify they actually implement the notification system properly and then I am going to keep monitoring them for the next violation," Min-joon said tiredly. "This is how it works now, we are not at war anymore, we are in a long-term competition over public trust and regulatory frameworks.""I hate this, I hate that they keep winning by finding loopholes.""Me too, but fighting smarter enemies means
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