Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 9: The Floor of the Black Web — Archive Zero

Twenty minutes remained until Professor Baek arrived.

With trembling hands, Do-yun opened the top-level administrator console of the Galileo client. Moments ago, when Dr. Vesalius approved the joint research contract, Do-yun's account (`Neuro_Promethean`) had been temporarily granted `[Curator-Candidate]` clearance—the highest privilege tier on the Black Web.

Do-yun clicked on the deepest abyss of the Black Web, a directory whose very titles had previously been barred to him for lack of clearance: `[Archive Zero: The Unpublishable Truths]`.

Organized neatly inside lay the darkest chronicles of human intellectual history—records that back-alley Dark Web criminals could never fathom, and ordinary citizens in the daylight world could not even conceive.

Within the folder sat tens of thousands of classified papers and experimental recordings accumulated over the past fifty years by rogue scientists and ethics-defying scholars worldwide, sorted by category:

1. `[Project Twin-Shadow (1984-2024)]`: A forty-year anthropological and sociological epic in which six hundred pairs of monozygotic newborn twins were purchased from third-world conflict zones and bankrupt maternity clinics; one twin was covertly placed for adoption into an aristocratic European household and the other into a crime syndicate or extreme-poverty slum, then every movement of both was cross-monitored for four decades via implanted biochips and satellite tracking.

2. `[Oncological Immortality & Chimerism]`: Over three hundred clinical reports selecting only telomerase-overexpressing clones from metastatic tumors of terminal cancer patients—clones capable of reversing host senescence—and deploying them for organ regeneration in primates and brain-dead human bodies. Even ledgers of "biological specimen fees" paid by famous conglomerate chairmen and dictators receiving matched organs and youthful bone marrow harvested from their own cloned fetuses were attached.

3. `[Pediatric Behavioural Conditioning]`: A division spearheaded by Professor Baek Seung-hyun. Experiments administering specific infrasound frequencies, visual fractal patterns, and trace neurotransmitter precursors mixed into infant formula to babies aged six to thirty-six months, carving epigenetic imprinting into their brains so that in adulthood they experience unconditional pleasure when obeying authoritarian commands or specific political ideologies. A freshly dated status report showed "randomized controlled trials (RCTs)" already entering their fifteenth year across sixteen orphanages in East Asia and Eastern Europe.

Do-yun felt the air catch in his throat.

"Is this... what they meant by 'pure academic freedom'?"

These were not scholars seeking truth. They were monsters who had degraded the species Homo sapiens to the exact status of fruit flies or C57BL/6 laboratory mice, plucking off limbs with forceps or snipping genes behind a pane of glass while drunk on impact factors.

And until moments ago, Do-yun himself had been a willing accomplice, desperate to print his name in those monsters' journal.

Do-yun lifted his head, looking back and forth between the `K-glioma-07` culture dishes inside the incubator and Eunomia-19B inside the cylinder.

Jung Min-woo. The final look in the eyes of that eleven-year-old boy as he lay dying surfaced in his memory.

When Do-yun had slipped secretly into the hospital room behind his neurosurgery resident junior, the boy—head wrapped in bandages, swimming in narcotic analgesics—had stared at the fountain pen and notebook tucked into Do-yun's lab-coat pocket and whispered:

"Doctor... whatever's inside my head, please don't kill it. It keeps telling me how the stars turn and how many drops of rain will fall tomorrow. I don't mind if I die... but the voice inside my head is so lonely..."

Back then, Do-yun had dismissed the boy's words as hallucinations and hypergraphia—Geschwind syndrome induced by a temporal lobe tumor.

Now, Do-yun understood.

The tumor `K-glioma-07` growing inside Jung Min-woo's skull had not been a mere lump of cancer. Fused with the boy's prodigious neural network, it was the boy's alter-ego, surviving by replicating fragments of his self-awareness.

And Eunomia-19B, slowly dying inside that glass cylinder right now, was the boy's genetic sister—the sole vessel on this earth capable of cradling that pitiful voice whole.

What would happen if Professor Baek Seung-hyun walked through that door and followed his plan: chemically castrating Eunomia-19B's amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex—the seats of free will, emotion, and defiance—and injecting cancer cells strictly into its computational cortex?

The boy's soul and his sister's brain would be entombed inside glass forever, forced to live out eternity as a biological calculator slave forecasting stock prices and grading human beings into castes for Baek Seung-hyun, the scholars of the Black Web, and the billionaires lurking behind them—unable to die even if they begged for death, bound by the immortality of cancer!