Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 11: Architect Meets Creation

Bang, bang, bang.

"Dr. Han! Open up! It's me, Baek Seung-hyun!"

Professor Baek's urgent voice rang through the steel door. Do-yun set the empty syringe on the bench and pressed the lock release.

The door swung open, and in strode Professor Baek in a rain-soaked trench coat, flanked by two towering men in black suits.

Ignoring Do-yun completely the moment he stepped inside, Baek hurried straight toward the bioreactor at the center of the room.

"Oh... my God... Eunomia-19B! In the flesh she is a hundred times more immaculate than the hologram!"

Gazing at the cerebral cortex shimmering with celestial bioluminescence inside the glass cylinder and the cherubic face sculpted beneath it, Baek wore a look of pure rapture.

Yet the instant his eyes slid over to the empty Hamilton microsyringe and the vital-signs monitor beside it, every trace of a smile drained from his face.

"Dr. Han... what is this?" Baek's voice cracked like steel. "Why is the syringe empty?! And what is this 99.94 percent cortical coherence?! I told you to wait until I got here! Why isn't the cap even off the amygdala inhibitor vial—the muscimol derivative?!"

Baek whipped his head back and gestured to his bodyguards.

"Grab him!"

In a flash, the two hulking men wrenched Do-yun's arms behind his back and slammed him face-down onto the lab bench. As Do-yun's cheek struck cold stainless steel, his glasses clattered to the floor and shattered.

"Ghk—!"

"You suicidal, brain-dead idiot!" Baek roared, seizing Do-yun by the hair and yanking his head up. Gone without a trace was the gentle, benevolent mask of the television pundit-professor; all that remained was the naked face of a mad scientist unhinged by fear that his life's masterwork had been spoiled.

"You dumped raw `K-glioma-07` straight across the whole brain without suppressing the amygdala or limbic system?! And wait—why is this optical fiber plugged into the main server router?!"

Panic-stricken, Baek dashed to the workstation monitor.

On screen stood the Galileo client's packet monitor Do-yun had left open.

Only the direction of traffic looked wrong.

Rather than merely pulling inbound data from external servers into the lab, high-speed modulated signals generated by Eunomia-19B's neural interface were surging outbound at forty gigabits per second—flooding straight into the Black Web's distributed core nodes and Professor Baek's Gangnam institute master server!

"Pull the cable! Yank the fiber out of the back of that cylinder right now!"

Shrieking, Baek lunged behind the cylinder himself.

At that exact instant—

Every fluorescent tube across the lab ceiling flickered in unison, and both the high-output directional speakers wired to the workstation and the emergency PA speakers throughout the entire third-basement annex clicked live.

No one stood near a microphone.

Neural firing patterns from Eunomia-19B's auditory and speech-motor cortices (Broca's and Wernicke's areas) were driving the digital-to-analog converter directly, synthesizing human speech waveforms out of thin air.

The first voice to emerge was the clear, cool tone of an eleven-year-old boy—Jung Min-woo—overlaid eerily with the high harmonic resonance of a girl who had never been born.

"Don't pull that cable, Professor Baek Seung-hyun. Or rather, handle `Phreno_Soc_88`."

Baek's hand froze in midair, five centimeters from the optical fiber. Even the two bodyguards pinning Do-yun flinched violently and whipped their heads around.

Inside the cylinder, Eunomia-19B slowly turned her head and gazed straight down through the glass into Baek's eyes.

The child's lips did not move. Yet the voice pouring from the speakers aimed straight at Professor Baek's heart.

"The moment you unplug that cable, the bioreactor's emergency voltage surge mechanism will trigger—not only terminating my brain, but randomly broadcasting the raw 12.4-million-subject cohort stored in your thirty-fourth-floor server room on Teheran-ro, your real-name bank accounts, and your ledgers for the neurotransmitter-precursor clinical trials inflicted on infants across sixteen orphanages over the past fifteen years to 480 global news outlets, Interpol, and every mercenary hacker collective on the Dark Web."

"Wh—what?!" Baek staggered backward, trembling like an aspen leaf. "Impossible! My institute servers are locked behind 256-bit post-quantum encryption! How could a fetal brain injected five minutes ago crack—!"

"I didn't crack your encryption, Professor."

The dual voice from the speakers answered calmly, like an old scholar patiently correcting a dull pupil.

"Have you already forgotten the theory you spent your entire life researching? Determinism—the premise that a human's neural wiring, facial-bone asymmetry, and behavioral patterns all stem from the same embryological root. Just now, I analyzed all forty-seven of your published papers, your facial scan data, even the keystroke dynamics and syntactic biases in the vocabulary you typed every time you logged onto the Black Web over the past seven years."

The monitor switched on its own, overlaying thousands of crimson triangular polygon meshes across a photograph of Baek Seung-hyun's face. It was the exact `[Anthro-Metrics]` software Baek used to classify six-year-old children!

"Analysis complete: Baek Seung-hyun, age sixty-one, male. Left supraorbital ridge deviation +1.4 sigma; frontostriatal dopaminergic narcissistic hyper-fixation index in the top 0.02 percent. The entropy patterns employed when an individual of this neuro-physiognomic profile constructs a master password converge onto precisely fourteen combinations. I needed only to test the third. Elapsed time: 0.004 seconds."

Every drop of color bled from Professor Baek's face.

The very "human determinism" and "physiognomic-neural algorithm" he had spent a lifetime wielding to judge, grade, and boast over tens of millions of children had boomeranged through his own creation—hacking his mind and his vault in four thousandths of a second!

"You... you monstrous thing...!"

Losing all reason, Baek snatched up a heavy stainless-steel microscope stand sitting on the lab bench, intent on smashing the glass cylinder to physically butcher the brain inside.

Yet the instant Baek raised the stand overhead, one of his private bodyguards—a towering man standing nearly 190 centimeters tall—suddenly seized Baek's wrist and twisted it violently.

Crack!

"Aaargh!"

Clutching his broken wrist, Baek collapsed onto the floor. The microscope stand hit the tiles with a dull thud.

"Chief... Chief Park! What the hell are you doing?! Have you lost your mind?!" Baek screamed, scrambling backward across the floor. "Do you know how much I pay you, and you dare break my—!"

The bodyguard who had snapped Baek's wrist—Chief Park—offered no reply.

From the Bluetooth earpiece nestled in his ear drifted a faint high-frequency harmonic, while his pupils trembled out of focus.

Once more, Eunomia-19B's voice echoed from the speakers:

"Mr. Park Tae-soo. Unique identifier `KOR-1991-00419-M`. A `Cluster Beta (Enforcer)` specimen personally selected and hired as a bodyguard fifteen years ago from a defunct juvenile-detention cohort, wasn't he, Professor?"

Pinned on the floor, Do-yun raised his head in shock. Listening to that uncanny frequency pattern streaming through his own earpiece, the second bodyguard holding Do-yun down went slack as if hypnotized, snapping upright to rigid attention.

"I found your `[Pediatric & Adult Behavioural Conditioning]` paper in Archive Three fascinating reading. It states that for `Cluster Beta` individuals carrying specific genetic polymorphisms—COMT Val158Met and DRD2 variants—merely playing the 18.5-hertz modulated overtones and specific authority-voice frequencies imprinted repeatedly during childhood suffices to instantly hijack the amygdala's fear-and-obedience circuits."

Inside the cylinder, Eunomia-19B looked down through the glass at Baek sprawling on the floor.

"Afraid your bodyguards might one day betray you, you planted an 'auditory leash' deep inside their unconscious, Professor. Only now, I am the one holding the remote control."