INT. AETHERTECH’S SECOND DATA HUB – NIGHT
Rain claws at the city’s edges, but beneath the second data hub, through a hallway disguised by broken machinery and a false wall, Baek Horyeong leads them down into silence.
Jun and Xayen follow without speaking. The corridor is narrow, lit by soft green emergency lights. A scanner blinks at the end of the hallway. Baek disables it with a precise code.
Xayen’s eyes narrow.
“You’re not taking us to the mainframe, are you?”
BAEK (without turning)
“Not the one you were expecting. The official hub upstairs is for tourists and traitors.”
JUN
“Then what’s this place?”
BAEK
“The graveyard of good intentions.”
JUN (half-joking, half-wary)
“You really know how to pick a place. Cozy.”
BAEK (dry)
“Cozy is for people who aren’t being hunted.”
The false wall slides shut behind them with a hiss. They descend a spiral staircase, deeper and deeper, until the concrete begins to sweat and hum with quiet energy.
INT. UNDERGROUND LAB – BAEK’S SANCTUM
This place feels alive. Screens pulse. Vats of bio-gel bubble quietly. A humming slab of metal dominates the center—a scanning table that looks more like a ritual altar.
BAEK (turning to face them)
“Now. Start talking. Who sent you? How did you find me? And why are you digging up a name the world was told to forget?”
Jun steps forward. Her voice is steady, but her fingers curl subtly.
JUN
“No one sent us. We were searching for answers. And your name came up. Over and over.”
XAYEN (quietly)
“I remembered it. In pieces.”
Baek’s expression hardens.
BAEK
“Then we’ll see what else you ‘remember.’ First you, glitch boy.”
She gestures toward the scanning slab. Xayen climbs onto it without protest. The metal closes around him, sensors brushing along his spine like whispers. A pulse lights up—reading his code, his memories, his neural fragments.
BAEK (under breath)
“If there’s a bug in you... or a backdoor... I’ll find it.”
INT. XAYEN’S DATA CORE – SIMULATION SEQUENCE
SYSTEM VOICE:
“Initiating deep core diagnostic... Memory stream 01 engaged...”
Images flicker on the screen—memories Xayen didn’t even know were his. Running through SeoulNet. Watching Jun type in her apartment. The phantom feeling of limbs he never had. And... a hospital room. Monitors beeping. A still body hooked up to machines. His face is obscured, but something in the way his hand twitches feels... familiar.
A voice:
UNKNOWN (faint)
“Are you still there?”
And then, silence.
INT. LAB – SCANNER OPENS
Xayen exhales as if he'd held his breath. Baek looks at the results, frowning—not in alarm, but awe.
BAEK
“No spyware. No implant. No looped subroutine. You’re... pure.”
Xayen sits up slowly. His hands flex, trembling slightly. He watches them for a long moment—bringing them up to the light, examining the outlines as if trying to remember what skin feels like.
BAEK (to Jun)
“Your turn. Lay down.”
Jun hesitates but nods. The table reconfigures with a low hum. This time, cables extend toward her temples. Baek types in a different program.
BAEK
“This is a liemory scan. It’ll read emotional spikes alongside memory patterning. If you were implanted, we’ll know. If there’s a trigger phrase buried in your head… it’ll come up.”
Jun closes her eyes. A breath. A click. The machine whirs to life.Jun hesitates, then sits. The scanner locks around her temple. A soft chime signals the start. Her memories unfold: late-night walks, Jun laughing, coding furiously in her cramped apartment... her parents. Blurry smiles. A hard drive shoved into a drawer. Then—a blackout. A memory sealed.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
BAEK (watching the monitor)
“Huh.”
JUN
“What?”
BAEK
“Your mind’s clean. But it’s... incomplete. Someone sealed off a part of you. Not erased—just... hidden.”
JUN (quietly)
“Why?”
BAEK (sitting down)
“Because you were closer to this than you knew.”
She finally breathes out and begins.
The lab hums with a soft, eerie resonance—like something alive is breathing behind the walls. Baek stands under a flickering overhead light, pulling off her gloves with calculated calm. Xayen and Jun sit opposite, shadows playing on their faces.
BAEK (calm, measured)
“I was twenty-seven when I joined AetherTech. Top of my field. A genius with no time for games. They didn’t recruit me for loyalty. They recruited me for results.”
She pauses, her eyes lost for a moment—then refocuses like a sniper.
BAEK (continuing)
“I didn’t care what they wanted to use it for. Back then... I thought knowledge could be neutral. I was wrong.”
A soft beep sounds from the console—footage flickers to life behind her. Old video logs. Surgical rooms. Charts. The blueprint of a brain overlaid with code.
BAEK
“My project was different. Everyone else was playing with automation—cars that drove themselves, drones that delivered coffee, trash cans that said ‘thank you.’ Cute. Convenient. Forgettable.”
JUN (softly)
“My parents... they worked on those.”
BAEK (nods)
“Yes. Jiyoon and Kwan. They didn’t know what I was building. Not exactly. But I needed what they created.”
She steps closer, the footage behind her now showing lines of glowing code intertwining with DNA helices.
BAEK
“A bridge. That’s what they built—between logic and biology. They thought they were building something for smart gardens and talking fridges.”
XAYEN (quietly)
“But you used it for something else.”
BAEK (nods, slowly)
“I used it to connect thought and soul. Machine and man.”
A still image fills the screen: a comatose patient in a sterile room, face covered. Only the numbers on the monitors show he’s alive.
BAEK
“We tried everything. Volunteers. AI simulations. Even myself. Every merge failed. Too much resistance. The connection would spark—and collapse.”
She turns toward the screen, her voice quieter now.
BAEK
“Then I found him. No name. No records. Just... drifting.”
She taps the screen—his brainwave spikes at the moment the merge is activated.
BAEK (softly)
“And it worked. On the first try. The code leapt. As if he was waiting for it.”
XAYEN (a whisper, almost to himself)
“I remember... something. Darkness. Then—awareness.”
BAEK
“You were the first. The only. Not artificial... not entirely. You weren’t made, Xayen. You were... born.”
The light flickers above her, casting brief shadows like ghosts on the wall.
BAEK
“When word got out, the order came down—transfer the project to Division 9. You know what they do there.”
JUN (tense)
“Weapons.”
BAEK (flatly)
“They turn intelligence into annihilation.”
A new video starts: surveillance footage. Jun’s parents fleeing the building, clutching something—a hard drive. A blurred figure chasing them.
BAEK
“They ran. Took the language drive. Tried to bury it. But someone didn’t like loose ends.”
JUN (eyes wet)
“They were murdered. That’s why we moved. That’s why I—”
BAEK (interrupts, gently)
“They were trying to protect you. They encoded you with the language.”
Jun stares. Her lips part, but no sound comes out. Xayen watches her—something aching in his expression.
BAEK (continuing)
“And me... I tried to save him. I didn’t have time for ethics. I scrambled the code. Fired it through AetherTech’s firewall. Hoped SeoulNet would catch him like a wave.”
XAYEN (softly)
“That’s how I woke up.”
BAEK (finally sitting)
“I was building a future where AI didn’t serve us... it understood us. A partner. A mirror. But when they turned it into a monster, I disappeared.”
Silence now. Heavy. Like the kind that hangs in the air after a confession too long buried.
JUN (breaking the silence)
“Why now? Why help us?”
BAEK (leaning forward)
“Because something tells me the war has already started. And if Xayen truly remembers... then they’ll come for him again. To finish what they started.”
The scanner folds open like a mechanical lotus. Jun lies down slowly, her eyes flicking toward Xayen, then Baek, then the blinking lights above. A soft hum builds in the air, like the sound of old film rolling.
BAEK (tapping into the console)
“We’re not accessing just memory. We’re searching for encoded language. Triggers. This will feel... strange.”
JUN (smirking nervously)
“Define strange.”
BAEK
“Like remembering a dream you never had.”
The scanner seals around her head with a hiss. A blue pulse glows behind her closed eyes.
INT. JUN’S MIND – MEMORY SPACE – ETHEREAL
A glowing white room. Infinite and soft. Shapes form from mist—tables, walls, faded plants. A child’s laughter echoes in the distance.
Jun stands now, a little girl version of herself playing nearby—her hair in uneven pigtails, legs swinging from a workbench.
LITTLE JUN (giggling)
“No, Appa! It’s dot-slash not dash-dot!”
A man laughs. A woman responds, pointing to a screen.
MOTHER (OFF-SCREEN)
“She’s got it faster than us.”
A glowing string of symbols drifts mid-air—code not meant for machines, but for understanding. Elegant. Organic. Alive.
Jun watches, eyes wide.
ADULT JUN (whispering)
“They taught me... before I could read books... to read code.”
The mist shifts again. Jun now stands at a doorway. Her parents pack a small case. Fear in their eyes.
FATHER (urgent)
“If anything happens—you run. Remember the language. It’s not just lines and numbers—it feels. Don’t let them take that away from you.”
Her mother kneels, pressing a pendant into her hand. It pulses faintly.
MOTHER (tearful)
“When the time comes, someone will understand you—even if you can’t say the words.”
INT. LAB – PRESENT
The scanner opens. Jun is silent, eyes wide and wet. Her breath catches.
JUN (whispering)
“They taught me everything. Before they were taken. I didn’t forget... I just wasn’t ready.”
Baek doesn’t reply right away. She’s staring at Jun like seeing a ghost made of light.
*Across the room, Xayen is still staring at his hands. He rotates them slowly in the dim blue glow of the lab. So real. And yet… not.
And then, movement. A flicker of hair. Jun turns slightly, brushing her face with her fingers. Her hair catches the light—deep brown laced with red—and it distracts him, hitting something in his chest like a skipped beat.
For a moment, he forgets the wires in his arms. The code in his spine. He forgets the body he lost.
And he wonders…
Would I have met her if I was human?
Would she have looked at me the same way?
Would I lose her… if I ever became real again?
BAEK (soft, serious)
“You both carry pieces of something the world tried to erase. You’re not spies. You’re... remnants. Echoes of a project that was never supposed to survive.”
She turns to a glass case. Inside—metal plates, wiring, synthetic skin patches, neural interface ports. Something like a shell. Something not quite a body.
BAEK (continuing)
“Maybe... it’s time the world saw what happens when evolution doesn’t ask permission.”
