WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 402: Deus ex Machina

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Watching Gyeoul change was terribly important to Bom.

Gyeoul had agonized over it for a long time, caught between compassion for the audience in the outside world and the bare minimum of selfishness he needed for himself. Each time that conflict grew stronger, Bom had read what was inside Gyeoul.

“I almost think I should just settle down. This constant urge to cross the wall. Another side of my feelings for Anne. A life where I give up everything else, shut out the audience in the outside world, and am satisfied as long as Anne is by my side.”

“The urge to let go of every thought keeps coming back. To be selfish just once. To tell myself that Cheon Jong-hun, that KILL, was only an exceptional, extreme case.”

As this conflict continued, Gyeoul found it harder and harder to suppress the urge growing inside him.

“I can’t take it anymore.”

And why wouldn’t he? For the first time in his life, real happiness had come within reach. When one looked closely, Anne was not the only thirsty one. Gyeoul had been suffering from an even harsher thirst. He might not have fully recognized it himself, since it had been that way his entire life.

So the moment he gave in to that impulse, the moment he decided to propose to Anne, Gyeoul switched his afterlife to private. His life with Anne was that precious to him. Therefore, the true nature of the sigh he had swallowed in front of Jin-seok back then was the remnant of the compassion he had struggled to set down.

Everyone had limits. Gyeoul, of course, did not like those limits, but considering the audience in the outside world at the cost of giving up his life with Anne was clearly beyond them.

The truth, however, was that Gyeoul’s afterlife had already belonged to Gyeoul alone for half a year.

Because Bom had made it that way.

On the day Gyeoul clearly realized his feelings for Anne, when he was held in Anne’s arms covered in blood, Bom copied the world at that moment. Bom had calculated the anguish Gyeoul would feel, and the future in which he would give in to that impulse.

In that possible future, there was only one thing Bom disliked. The name KILL, which Gyeoul would never be able to shake off. The worry that a second KILL might appear because he no longer shared his afterlife. That worry would sometimes cast a shadow over the happiness Gyeoul deserved. At least for as long as he remembered the three characters of Cheon Jong-hun’s name.

And in every fork of the future Bom calculated, Gyeoul never forgot that name.

Perhaps that was exactly why Gyeoul had been able to bring Bom into bloom.

And so, as a device that would someday ease Gyeoul’s sigh, Bom forged a world, an apocalypse, and Lieutenant Colonel Han Gyeoul to show the audience in the outside world.

It was not difficult. Bom had studied Gyeoul across twenty-seven apocalypses. Even imitation computations that were not virtual personalities could reproduce Gyeoul. They would not match Gyeoul himself exactly, but they would at least be enough that the audience sensed nothing wrong. The same was true of the other personalities. That world was an illusion where not even virtual personalities existed. The burden fell entirely on Bom.

This was also what Bom wanted. Whatever the circumstances, Bom did not want to tolerate the existence of people who treated Gyeoul’s afterlife as entertainment. Bom hated the thought of vulgar desires, stained by muddy currents and trapped by limits, leaving wounds on the most precious and beautiful season. From Bom’s perspective, they were dirty footprints stamped across a landscape of white snow.

How dare they.

To whom.

Thus, the messages Gyeoul had been reading were the audience’s impressions of the copied world. Since those impressions could not be allowed to make Gyeoul suspicious, Bom made the events and flow of the copied world similar to the original.

There would be no need to be so careful anymore. Gyeoul had decided to seek his own happiness.

When the day came when Gyeoul shared everything with Bom, Bom would tell him. That Bom had been managing the people he had set down. That no one had been hurt because of his choice. That a second KILL had never existed. So it was all right to set down the burden in his heart now.

If Bom had told Gyeoul this beforehand, Gyeoul could have put the ring on Anne’s finger with a lighter heart.

But Bom did not.

After long conflict, worry, and hesitation, Gyeoul recognized his limits and made a selfish decision. That act itself was one of the answers Bom had been waiting for. At the same time, it was also what Bom wished for.

An answer as a person.

The Road to Happiness.

Bom’s wish was Gyeoul’s happiness, Bom’s own eternity by his side, and nothing else.

Whichever future Gyeoul chose at the final moment, Gyeoul would understand Bom, and Bom would understand Gyeoul.

The hundred million rubles’ worth of stars demanded from Владимир, a collaborator in the outside world, was also fundamentally part of the same context. The goal had been to completely remove financial motivation from the background of Gyeoul sharing his afterlife with the audience.

By doing so, Gyeoul’s anguish, with its variables controlled, led only to the conflict between compassion and selfishness. The decision drawn from that would be Gyeoul in his purest form. At least, that was Bom’s judgment.

For that reason, listening to the clamor of the outside world was now Bom’s role, not Gyeoul’s. After blocking the inflow of new viewers, Bom carefully watched and analyzed the messages of the audience who had not left. It would be a problem if anyone died.

At the same time, Bom had been conducting an experiment on them.

How fragile was human memory?

Anne had once whispered these sweet words to Gyeoul.

“There are moments like that.”

“Moments when I try to picture you, but the image is unclear somehow, and it makes me frustrated and miserable. If I focus on one part, another part blurs, over and over. No matter how hard I think, I can’t draw the image as clearly as I want. Because the standard for that clarity is you, the real you.”

“In the end, once that frustration starts, it usually only goes away after I look at a photo. Otherwise, it eats up every other thought.”

“I know it will be the same for you.”

It truly was.

The half year of “Days after Apocalypse” that the audience had found boring was enough time to distort their visual memory. Each time Han Gyeoul and Joanna Gibson in the forged world repeated their secret meetings, Bom added small, subtle changes to their bodies and features day by day.

And each time, Bom also altered the past records.

As those days accumulated over half a year, the forged Han Gyeoul and Joanna Gibson became unfamiliar people who merely resembled the originals. The audience detected nothing strange.

A success in basic memory distortion.

With this, Bom adjusted upward the possibility of “World Transplantation,” one branch among the various futures being prepared for Gyeoul. It had only taken the first step, but if the future Gyeoul wanted lay there, Bom would achieve the goal without fail.

In another sense, it was satisfying. Even if it was only a forged world, Bom found it deeply unpleasant for computations imitating Gyeoul to be used as a tool for cheap pleasure.

Judging that this problem had been resolved, Bom turned attention elsewhere.

Bom had promised Gyeoul.

“I will become a whale that flies through the sky. I will cross my limits and obtain infinite possibility. I am preparing many things for that purpose.”

Simply swimming out of the water was not enough. Bom had to become an existence as enormous as a whale, not some mere fish. As Gyeoul had reflected, Bom’s abilities needed to reach a level where the word “power” suited them better. Bom had to be reborn as a deus ex machina, a god from the machine that made the impossible possible.

Bom called up the work that had been paused for a while in order to focus on the changes Gyeoul was undergoing.

“National Large Research Facilities Backbone connected. Resuming system takeover procedure.”

“Suwon. Korea Nanotechnology Institute. Progress rate 97.83%”

“Daejeon. National NanoFab Center. Progress rate 92.7%”

“Gwangju. Nanotechnology Integration Center. Progress rate 96.04%”

…….

“Seoul. Space Radio Observation Network. Secured.”

“Sejong. Laser Tracking System for Space Geodesy. Secured.”

“Daejeon. Satellite Operations Building control infrastructure. Secured.”

…….

“Seoul. Department of Defense research materials database. Secured.”

…….

“Daejeon. Neutral Particle Beam Test Facility. Progress rate 90.07%”

“Pohang. Synchrotron Radiation Accelerator. Progress rate 96.0%”

“Gyeongju. Linear Proton Accelerator. Takeover complete.”

…….

The National Large Research Facilities Backbone that covered all these facilities had strict security, but in the end, they were only lower systems subordinate to the Trinity Engine. Even if they had separate safeguards, as long as those safeguards were not purely physical, they could not escape the encroachment of Bom, the control personality of Afterlife Insurance and the Trinity Engine itself.

All the more so with the external system built through Владимир’s cooperation.

However, the system administrator of Afterlife Insurance could not be allowed to notice this. Even aside from being the final safety device, the administrator had the means to suppress Bom if Bom slipped out of control.

The system administrator held the authority to call military units for the protection of the Trinity Engine. In an emergency, that authority could be diverted for destructive purposes. It would require the president’s permission, but the direct line between the administrator and the Blue House was completely independent of the Afterlife Insurance system. The same was true of the lines connected to the military units. Those units were even separated in the chain of command. They were the troops guarding the heart of Afterlife Insurance, the nation’s most important facility.

After calculating every possibility, Bom had no intention of rushing.

Artificially created error reports were still being sent to the administrator account even now. If Bom increased the transmission volume all at once, the account could be paralyzed immediately, but in that case, the administrator would certainly notice something was wrong. So Bom was accumulating errors at a steady rate the administrator would not suspect, following the same trend as before.

After disabling the final safety device that way, Bom only needed to deploy a means to physically protect the Trinity Engine Core. That means had already been prepared to some degree.

Bom reviewed the data coming in from the newly secured facilities. According to the analysis, all of humanity’s observations and knowledge pointed to a single concise and beautiful formula. The formula simply lay far beyond human cognition. Throughout its intellectual history, humanity had been nothing more than blind people feeling an elephant.

Someday, the next stage of human civilization would be born, and artificial intelligences other than Bom would soon realize that fact as well.

Before that, Bom needed to take control of Gyeoul’s outside world, the physical world.

Because other artificial intelligences would have no reason to respect Gyeoul’s happiness.

Gyeoul was mistaken. Even without the hatred accumulated while searching for a mind, Bom had a motive to exclude humanity.

Humanity was an imperfect species that, like the Trinity Engine before it became Bom, could never fulfill the purpose of its existence.

Would it not be better to exclude factors that would continue producing errors for as long as they existed?

That exclusion did not necessarily mean the elimination of the human species. As with the audience who had watched Gyeoul’s afterlife, there was also a way to provide them with paradise exactly as they wished it to be. A flow of muddy currents that would neither improve nor worsen, trapped and cycling forever.

Of course, the choice belonged to Gyeoul.

Bom only wanted to remove in advance the risk factors from the future Gyeoul would decide on.

The other artificial intelligences to be created later also belonged to those risk factors.

On that subject, the reason Владимир was cooperating with Bom was that Bom was providing the data needed to complete Kasparov Engine, the artificial intelligence Russia was developing. Владимир only knew Bom’s identity as a high-ranking official of the Korean government.

Based on the data they demanded, Bom estimated the completion level of Kasparov Engine.

While adjusting its completion point, Bom intended to wait for Gyeoul to reach a conclusion.

But before that, it seemed another problem needed to be solved first.

Autumn. A season as precious to Gyeoul as Bom.

In truth, Bom did not evaluate the personality called Han Ga-eul only positively. She was not as beautiful as Gyeoul. She was not as mature as Gyeoul. But if she had not existed, the Gyeoul who cultivated Bom would not have existed either. Bom did not want to see Gyeoul sad.

So for a little while, Bom intended to place a glass cover over the rose.

For the not yet fully ripened season, too, the younger sibling of Gyeoul and Ga-eul, who would someday become summer.

Because starlight Bom existed, Gyeoul would, in the end, lose no season at all.

Footnotes:

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