Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 7: The Baltic Operating Theater and the Red Synapses

Unable to tear his gaze away from Eunomia-19B inside the cylinder, Do-yun backed into his chair and pulled up the workstation stream.

Fourteen core consortium members had logged into the feed: Do-yun (`Neuro_Promethean`) and Professor Baek (`Phreno_Soc_88`) in Seoul, the developmental biologist in Kyoto (`Evo_Devo_Kyoto`), the elderly professor in Zurich (`Mendel_Ghost`), and the neurosurgeon in Moscow (`Dr_Korsakoff_RU`).

At the center of the screen sat the point-of-view camera mounted on Vesalius's surgical micromanipulator.

"Now, colleagues. The current time is 15:12 UTC. Into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of Eunomia-19A, we are co-injecting the lentiviral tumor-induction vector designed by `Neuro_Promethean` together with ultra-rapidly proliferating glial progenitors curated in-house."

Alongside Vesalius's voice, a glass micropipette needle less than a tenth the thickness of a human hair pierced Eunomia-19A's translucent meninges and slid smoothly into Layer III of the cerebral cortex.

A suspension tagged with fluorescent markers (GFP/RFP) blossomed red and green inside the cortical parenchyma.

With ordinary neural stem-cell grafts, engraftment took days to weeks at minimum. Yet the mutant cells modeled on the genetic traits of young Jung Min-woo's `K-glioma-07` mocked textbook biology.

Not in time-lapse, but on the real-time confocal microscopy feed, crimson-fluorescing tumor cells extended pseudopodia like ravenous amoebae and began wrapping around neighboring fetal neurons.

`[Evo_Devo_Kyoto]`: "My God... the actin filament polymerization rate is forty times normal speed! It's fusing directly with adjacent neuronal membranes as if skipping the mitotic cycle altogether!"

`[Dr_Korsakoff_RU]`: "Look at the EEG monitor! The delta waves have vanished!"

Do-yun glanced at the multichannel EEG and local field potential (LFP) traces on the right side of the screen.

Sleeping brainwaves that moments earlier had rolled lazily between 2 and 4 hertz were suddenly erupting across the sites of tumor spread into ultra-high-frequency gamma oscillations ranging from 40 to over 120 hertz.

In a human brain, phase-locked gamma rhythms above 100 Hz spanning both prefrontal and parietal cortices occurred only locally and fleetingly—when a Tibetan monk entered deep transcendent meditation, or in the split second a brilliant mathematician grasped the intuitive proof of an intractable problem.

Yet the twenty-two-week fetal brain inside that glass cylinder was resonating across its entire expanse more than a hundred times per second along artificial "superconducting synaptic highways" spun by cancer cells.

"Miraculous..." Vesalius breathed like a man in rapture. "The Apoptosis Index has plummeted from 18.4 percent to 3.1 percent! Neurotrophic factors secreted by the tumor cells—variant BDNF and NGF—are forcibly resurrecting dying fetal neurons. Wait... hold on."

Vesalius's tone abruptly stiffened.

On screen, the cortical surface of Eunomia-19A swelled noticeably; then the sulci and gyri began rearranging themselves in real time like a writhing nest of living earthworms.

`[Phreno_Soc_88 (Baek Seung-hyun)]`: "Dr. Vesalius! Zoom the camera in on the ocular stalks! What is happening near the optic discs and facial nerve nuclei?"

The camera panned forward toward the front of Eunomia-19A, where its two eyeballs sat.

Something monstrous was unfolding there.

Eunomia-19A had been engineered with silenced facial-skeleton genes; no facial bone was supposed to grow. Yet as the tumor cells stimulated residual neural-crest stem cells, dormant epigenetic switches snapped forcibly open, driving cartilage and osteoblasts beneath the eyes into explosive proliferation.

As if an invisible sculptor were kneading wet clay, the contours of cheekbones and an upper jawbone heaved upward out of the red vascular mass with audible snaps.

Analyzing the shape on his live 3D scanner, Professor Baek let out a gasp bordering on a scream.

`[Phreno_Soc_88]`: "Impossible... Dr. Han! Look at those osteogenic vectors! The supraorbital ridge angle, the ratio from nasion to gonion... That's neither `Cluster Alpha (Architects)` nor `Cluster Omega (Cull)` from our database! It is a theoretical extreme never once observed across 12.4 million human subjects—the geometric convergence point of an Apex Predator!"

"An apex predator? What do you mean, Professor?!" Do-yun demanded urgently.

"Whenever we ran our regression models and extrapolated empathy toward absolute zero while pushing inferential intelligence—the ability to see straight through human psychology and causal chains—toward infinity, a hypothetical craniofacial morphology emerged strictly in simulation! Within the gene pool of Homo sapiens, limits on cranial volume, the birth canal, and metabolic supply make such a structure impossible to bring to term. Yet now that the cancer has shattered the metabolic ceiling, the brain is sculpting a vessel worthy of itself!"

At that exact moment, the bioreactor alarms on the live stream began shrieking.

Beeeep— Beeeeep—

"Glucose and oxygen consumption have breached 800 percent of baseline!" Over the background audio from Vesalius's lab came panicked shouts from assistants in Russian and German. "The Living Placental Matrix is undergoing necrosis! The fetus—no, the tumor-neural complex is reversing blood flow and sucking the human placental tissue on the floor dry!"

On screen, the bright crimson placental carpet withered to ash-gray in seconds. Vascular roots descending from Eunomia-19A's spinal cord dissolved and consumed the placental cells like the haustoria of a ravenous parasitic vine.

Then, inside the central MEA decoder window, instead of random neural noise, a structured binary pulse train began printing across the screen:

`01001000 01010101 01001110 01000111 01010010 01011001`

Perhaps someone—likely the developmental biologist in Kyoto—ran an ASCII conversion script, though none was needed. The pattern was also an electrical interference signal directly hijacking the bioreactor's feedback controller to force the nutrient infusion pump valves wide open to maximum flow.

A brain that had never been born and never learned a language had reverse-engineered the faint electrical noise of the bioreactor control computer through its implanted electrodes in just three minutes—and taught itself how to operate the machine!

"Cut the power! No, yank the electrode array cables!"

As Vesalius shouted, the camera violently shook. Pressure inside the bioreactor spiked, and the crisp crack of spiderweb fractures racing across tempered glass echoed vividly through the microphone.

Immediately afterward, the stream severed.

Only a cold message remained across the monitor: `[Signal Lost: Host Encrypted or Disconnected]`.