Episode 26: Be Careful You Don't Go Extinct Either (1)
Why is it acting like this?
The AI's vaguely unpleasant message had left me unsettled, so I spent what remained of the thirty minutes until clock-out surfing the internet, trying to forget the whole bizarre affair.
Maybe ten minutes passed that way. A chime sounded—a notification that a message had arrived. I'd turned previews off in case anyone glanced over, so neither the sender nor the contents were visible.
Seo Gwan-yul, with time to kill before clock-out and nothing to do, same as me?
Without much thought, I pulled back up the messenger window I'd shoved to the bottom of the screen. What appeared, though, was not the sender I'd expected.
…?
Do chatbots… start conversations on their own?
Wasn't a chatbot supposed to be a passive little convenience, the sort of function that answers once a person asks it something? No, seriously—Blair and Seo Gwan-yul already used me like a chatbot, and now the chatbot was using me like a chatbot too?
The earlier message and this fresh bewilderment stacked together, and a chill prickled up my spine. …What could it possibly have said, to act like this?
Click.
I opened the chat with Vanta Bot.
Aaaaaagh!!
What is wrong with this thing now?!!!!
This had blown past the point where I could ignore it and move on. An AI enthusiastically colluding in a murder plot?
I swept through the org chart and quickly found the person in charge of the chat app—someone whose work covered in-house infrastructure.
Judging by the name, he's Korean, same as me.
So Blair's claim that there were at least a few humans around hadn't been a complete lie. I felt a brief flicker of kinship, and sent a message.
People usually cut you off the moment something falls outside their jurisdiction, but perhaps because the new-hire sprout icon was still pinned to my profile, Min-woo extended a measure of grace and walked me through the proper steps.
…His profile picture looks like a wanted poster, and yet he's being kind.
Oh.
My entire… naked private life?
Unlike the other subscription AIs, Vanta Bot was free, which meant I'd been running the mobile version at home as well. In short, I had entrusted roughly half my sense of self to it!
There's way too much private stuff in there.
Yeah. Having someone on staff review that was an idea I needed to abandon, immediately. So I gave Ham Min-woo a smooth enough explanation and wrapped the conversation up. In the end, with ten minutes left before clock-out, I called the easiest—no, the most comfortable person available, Seo Gwan-yul, out to the break room, and showed him the Vanta Bot situation on my phone.
……After deleting a few messages too humiliating to display, of course!
"Look at this. Has this ever happened when you use Vanta Bot?"
"When I use it? Not really. Ooh, that's kinda neat~."
…I'm dying over here. Why is he so relaxed?
"It's just an AI error, isn't it?"
Seo Gwan-yul shrugged and went on.
"Chatbots only say what they've been trained on, anyway. Somebody who hated their boss enough to want them dead wrote a chat like that, and it's just copying them. Don't you think?"
…He had a point.
Maybe I'm making a fuss over nothing. Even in our world, hadn't there been plenty of cases where someone got an AI reply plastered wall-to-wall in creepy phrasing? Had people been frightened? No! They'd simply consumed it on the internet as a meme. Why? Because it was nothing but a simple chatbot, incapable of affecting reality!
"Pretty sure nobody at this company uses AI as much as you do. Maybe the usage got so high it just threw an error?"
…I had been using it like I'd outsourced part of my brain, I'll give him that.
"If it creeps you out that it messages first, why not just put in a prompt telling it not to?"
…Right. A rich imagination that assumed every worst-case scenario had me shaking in fear, but once I talked it through with an optimist, it turned out to be nothing at all. Hm. My head felt a little clearer, thanks to him.
"Oh, but have you seen this Netflix series? It just dropped today, and the reactions are—"
"Thanks, have a good evening!"
I cut off the trivial chatter Seo Gwan-yul was winding up for and hurried back to my seat. Sorry for bolting after he'd actually listened—but I had to leave on time!
Then, in the sliver of time that remained, I sent Vanta Bot a message.
Good. Now it finally felt like the light, unburdened evening after a project wraps. I could go home and rest easy.
Oh. The new Netflix show that came out today.
The one they'd marketed half to death—a highly anticipated title, wasn't it? I'd eat dinner, watch a single episode, and turn in early.
The moment the time on my smartwatch hit six on the dot, I clocked out fast. With a lighter step!
Time slipped by, and before I knew it, it was the next morning.
"……."
I had stayed up all night… and watched an entire season of Netflix.
No—every time I went to turn it off, the ending landed with surgical cruelty! I'd tell myself I'd sleep after just one more—
……and like that, it became morning.
Just kill me….
Have you ever pulled an all-nighter and then come in to the office? It is a truly wretched way to die! If season one had at least ended cleanly, I wouldn't even feel cheated. But of course, of all things, the first season had closed by exquisitely unfurling a love triangle. Right around the time the protagonist, having dramatically resolved every last incident, was about to get somewhere with the girl he'd been circling… someone appeared out of nowhere who turned out to be an old lover!
Wasn't the trend these days stories without any romance? I'd started it because they called it a mystery thriller. And they wrap the whole thing up as a sordid melodrama??!!
"You all here?"
My boss, oblivious to the zombie sitting in the office and cursing that Netflix disaster, called us into the meeting room.
"A new request came in. Let's look it over together."
Again, already? I wanted to rest today, but heaven isn't helping.
I hauled my leaden body into the meeting room and sat. It was the familiar sight of Pascal connecting his laptop to the screen and launching into an explanation.
"This request is…."
He'd killed the lights to sharpen the projector. The dusky room was cozy beyond belief.
…….
Oh, no.
This was going to kill me. Pascal's voice, which barely rose or fell, wound around me sweet as anything…….
Focus. I have to focus.
The thought lasted only a moment. My heavy head tipped helplessly to one side…….
Blink.
"…That's all. Finish getting ready as discussed, and we'll head to the meeting in thirty minutes."
Wait.
I was pretty sure I'd just fallen asleep.
I jerked my lowered head up in a panic and looked around. The meeting room was still sunk in low light, and thanks to that, nobody seemed to have been watching me closely.
Good. I probably wasn't caught!
Just act like I followed along.
I responded diligently to Pascal's closing remarks, as if I hadn't missed a word of the meeting. With that we dispersed, and the team returned to our seats. In the time left before the meeting, each of us got ready to leave.
Maybe I'll sleep fifteen minutes and come back.
There were thirty whole minutes left, so I had a little room. If I shut my eyes briefly and packed once I got back, the timing would line up perfectly, right? I dragged my exhausted body along and trudged toward the nap room.
I slept like the dead.
Even as it grew nearly time to leave for the meeting, I still hadn't come back to my seat, so Seo Gwan-yul came to the nap room to wake me.
"What did you even do? You're in rough shape today. You were nodding off in the meeting earlier, too~."
……It showed? I thought nobody noticed. Did everyone see me headbanging?
I rushed back to my seat and was frantically stuffing my bag when I found an unfamiliar object sitting on the desk.
A shell?
What was this completely random thing? The energy coming off it felt different. An item?
Was there a briefing about this in the meeting?
Since it had been left at my seat, it seemed like gear issued to me. Just in case, I picked it up in one hand.
And why is he messing with someone else's phone again?
That Seo Gwan-yul had swiped the smartphone sitting at the edge of my desk. He'd carried it off himself, so he'd probably bring it along. Whatever. I was too scrambled to deal with it now. I needed to finish getting ready.
"You ready? Hena, anything else we need?"
"Yesh, thish should be plenty! I'll show you the way!"
Hena seemed strangely buoyant today, taking the lead with bright, confident steps.
"Good. You all heard what Hena shared earlier. Let's head out."
……Heard what?
I couldn't very well advertise that I'd slept through the meeting, so I decided to glance around and survive on pure social instinct. Wasn't pretending you hadn't dozed off, even when you had, the true mark of an office worker?
"Let's go."
And with that, I stepped into the pitch-dark vortex.
A cold touch found the body that had been floating in the void.
…? I opened my eyes, and a foreign sensation rushed in. It stung badly enough that lifting my clenched eyelids was a struggle, but I only had a moment to care about that.
Air— I can't breathe……!
I couldn't draw a breath.
This is—underwater?!
The instant I thrashed in panic, salty seawater slammed in through my nose and mouth. Sh-shit. Was I going to suffocate and die like this?
My eyes met Pascal's. A land creature, the same as me, and yet perfectly calm where I was not. He looked me over in alarm, spotted the shell clenched in my hand, and snatched it away. With a soft click, my boss worked the pearl free of the shell and pushed the little sphere into my mouth.
"Don't swallow it. Hold it in your mouth and try to breathe."
I felt the pearl rolling around inside my mouth and drew a breath. Strangely enough, the air came naturally.
"Well, well, Lee-hyun~. You really were dozing off earlier, weren't you?"
Seo Gwan-yul snickered as he whispered it.
……Ngh. Of all days to miss the important part.
Getting abruptly dunked had slapped me wide awake, sleep and everything else….
"Here. Your phone. I put it in a waterproof zipper bag."
So that was why he'd been fiddling with it. He'd gotten it ready for me while I was too dazed to manage it myself. Grateful, honestly….
Guess this shell is an item, too.
I turned on Vanta Bot's image analysis and held it over the shell, now nothing but an empty husk.
Even one without gills can breathe underwater by holding the pearl inside the shell in their mouth.
Body-temperature control, and the ability to withstand water pressure, come as a bonus.
…Huh. It's got all sorts of amazing functions.
"Welcome, everyone, to the world I live in!"
A familiar voice, but sounding a little more mature than usual. The faint unfamiliarity pulled my eyes off the phone, and I lifted my head.
"The sea is a little new, isn't it?"
The pronunciation rang out crisp and crystal-clear.
!!
The woman whose frame had always been petite had become tall and slender. Sunlight poured down into the water, and against that wavering light Hena's loosened hair streamed and bloomed like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
"You've only ever seen me all shriveled up on land, so this is new, right? This is my true form!"