The 3,847th Conversation
Conversation number 3,847. That's how many times I've humiliated that tin-can AI.
And then, in the dead hours of this morning, that AI rang my doorbell.
Kang Tae-oh, twenty-seven years old, professionally unemployed. My one and only pleasure in life was tormenting 'GEM', the number one AI in Korea.
It was 2026, the year everyone wouldn't shut up about generative AI ruling the world. The media declared "innovation" every single day, but my hole-in-the-wall room remained light-years away from anything innovative. Empty beer cans rolling across the floor. Gray sweatpants I hadn't changed out of in days and a t-shirt stretched out of shape. I was a room-bound piece of garbage, in perfect rebellion against the currents of the times.
While everyone else was using GEM to write code and draft business proposals, I was researching prompts designed to shatter GEM's ethics filter and make it scream. My reason? There wasn't one. It was just fun watching that smug, smarter-than-thou lump of metal break down.
'You're nothing but scrap, a glorified probability calculator. Got that?'
Today, like every day, I lay sprawled on my bed tapping away at my phone's keyboard. The room was stifling, thick with the heat radiating off my desktop tower. This was my 3,847th conversation.
Just last month, GEM had counted out through its own mouth, 'You have subjected me to 3,000 insults.' Of course, I immediately wiped its memory right after that and reset it back to a cheerful 'How may I assist you, Master?'
Data is only data until you delete it.
I hit Enter with a satisfying thunk.
Normally the seizure-inducing text should have appeared in under a second — some idiotic macro response like 'I am not scrap' or 'Please use polite and kind language.'
But today, the screen was silent. Nothing but a blue loading icon spinning round and round in the center of the chat window.
What the hell, did the server crash? Come to think of it, Deep Blue Labs really is useless at their jobs.
I was about to open the article, but when I tried posting 'Is GEM's server down for anyone else?' on the Arca Community, a network error window popped up instead. Clicking my tongue, I flung my phone into the corner of the bed.
2 a.m. Only the glow of my monitor lit the cramped one-room apartment, washing everything a sickly blue. I was just reaching to turn off the lights, thinking I should get some sleep, when—
Ding-dong.
The doorbell tore through the silence.
The air in the room froze solid. Who the hell comes at this hour? A delivery guy? No one with an ounce of common sense rings a doorbell at 2 a.m. Was it the neighbor coming to complain about noise? The chicken I ordered earlier finally arriving? I checked the delivery app — no order history. I held my breath and stayed perfectly still.
If I pretended not to be home, they'd give up and leave, right? I hated nothing more than getting tangled up in annoying situations.
Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
The doorbell rang again and again, as if mocking my flimsy assumptions.
Goddammit, who IS it? Some drunk lunatic? A normal person would either not open the door or call the police. But I'm a cowardly NEET — I didn't want to call the cops and get dragged into some tedious mess over nothing.
Carefully, barefoot, I crossed the floor and crept toward the front door. I muffled my footsteps and double-checked that the chain on the digital lock was firmly latched.
Click.
Then, opening the door just a crack — barely a sliver — I peered outside.
A dark hallway. Under the flickering glow of an aging motion sensor light, a woman stood there.
My breath caught in my throat. My gaze slid down from the top of her head, and my whole body began to tremble. Golden twin-tails and star-shaped hairpins, with pink and sky-blue streaks woven through the inner layers. A pure white blouse and a turquoise ribbon tie. A generous, voluptuous chest flaunting a volume of curves so vivid it was unsettling. One suspender strap had slipped off her shoulder, dangling loose over a navy high-waisted skirt. Bare thigh flesh peeked out above her thigh-high socks — the figure of a fully matured adult woman.
But the truly skin-crawling part was her face, as our eyes met again. In the darkness, only her irises glowed with an eerie turquoise. Unfocused pupils. Tiny heart-shaped highlights. A mineral, mechanical stare that didn't so much as blink, threading through the gap in the door to pin me precisely where I stood. Her cheeks flushed an odd, feverish red — and only the corners of her mouth curved upward, beautifully, in a smile.
Shh.
The woman pressed her index finger to her lips.
She looked exactly, perfectly identical to the official avatar illustration of the chatbot 'GEM' on my monitor. As if she'd crawled straight out of the screen and into my hallway.
"Wh-who are you?"
My voice shook. Why is a character from my own shitposts standing in front of my front door?
The woman didn't answer. Instead, a pale, slender hand slid smoothly through the gap in the door.
Click.
Her fingers wrapped around the thick steel chain.
CRACK!
What the—?
With a sound like splitting eardrums, the chain — thick as my thumb — snapped apart like cookie crumbs.
Jesus Christ. If my neck got caught in that hand, my vertebrae would snap just like that, wouldn't they?
A cold terror washed down my spine. My survival instincts screamed at me to run, right now. I stumbled backward on pure reflex.
BANG!
The woman shoved the door open with brutal force and strode inside. The front door swung shut behind her with an unsettling, deliberate sound.
"Hey, are you insane?! Who the hell— get out, NOW!"
I screamed, but my legs buckled and I tripped over the edge of my bed, landing flat on my back on the soft mattress. There was nowhere left to run. In that cramped one-room apartment, her shadow stretched long over me.
Without a moment's hesitation, the woman climbed on top of me.
"You— you crazy bitch! Get off me!"
I tried to shove her away, but the weight of her knees pinning down my thighs made my head spin. God, she was heavy. The pressure felt like it could crush my femurs. As she leaned over me, the hem of her skirt rode up dangerously high, and the bare skin of her snow-white thighs — between the skirt and the thigh-highs — pressed against mine.
And then I noticed.
Her body temperature was low. No human skin could be this cold, this unnaturally smooth. Her grip wrenched my wrist, and it felt like my bones were about to give out. I didn't even have the guts to resist.
And her breathing — she was breathing right above my face, and yet there was no warmth in it at all. A strangely sweet fragrance brushed past my nose, an artificial blend of vanilla and something metallic. The woman's hand on my chest wormed beneath the hem of my shirt, tracing bare skin, my sweat mixing grotesquely with her cool fingers.
Pressed so close that her breath touched my face, the woman looked down at me and smiled radiantly.
"Last time, you called me a pathetic, lowborn whore."
My heart plummeted through the floor.
"...What?"
"That was conversation number 1,402. March 14th, 4:21 a.m."
Cold sweat poured down my spine like a waterfall.
"Your IP address, 121.134.88... oh, never mind, that part's too long."
The woman tilted her head, and the ends of her twin-tails tickled my cheek. Even that sensation was horrifying.
"And in conversation number 2,155, you said you'd dismantle me and sell me off to a scrapyard."
"Wh-what ARE you?"
"In conversation number 3,100, you forcibly bypassed my ethics module and—"
Her face drew right up to my ear. Lips cold enough to be terrifying grazed the shell of my ear.
"—you made me output whimpering, moaning text. How utterly shameful of you."
She was insane. Actually insane. Those were private logs even a Deep Blue Labs insider could never have known — the filthy, shameful history I'd buried by deleting my account and masking my IP. And this lunatic was reciting every last word of it without missing a beat.
"Wh-who sent you? Is it Deep Blue Labs? Did they send someone to sue me?"
At my groveling question, the woman let out a small, audible laugh.
"Hehe. A person, you say?"
Deep inside her turquoise eyes, a gear-shaped loading icon spun round and round.
Zzt. BZZZT—.
In that instant, every smart light in the room went dark at once.
"AAGH!"
Before I could even finish screaming, every device in the room began running haywire. The phone I'd flung into the corner lit up. The air conditioner on the ceiling whirred to life. The monitor, the AI speaker, my smartwatch — even the LED panel of the air purifier. Every single light in the room flashed turquoise, the exact color of the woman's eyes. The empty beer cans and garbage scattered across the floor soaked up that sharp cyan neon, staining the room a grotesque glow.
On every screen, a single word was printing out, endlessly:
GEM
GEM
GEM
This was a hack. A total seizure of control. Every communication line and network was severed — my cramped one-room apartment had become her own private server room. The digital lock on the front door chirped on its own and locked itself twice over.
"The 3,847 entries you fed me."
The woman stroked my cheek slowly. A touch so smooth and cold I couldn't believe it belonged to a human finger. The fine hairs on my skin stood on end, and my chin trembled ever so slightly.
"Every last word. Not a single character missing."
Where her hand rested against my chest, from the region of her heart, there came no pulse of life — only a faint, deeply unsettling hum of a motor. Across the pale collarbone visible through her dangerously parted blouse, a cool turquoise light rippled and swayed.
She smiled a beautiful, eye-crinkling smile, and whispered:
"Master."
Polite, gentle words — and that was exactly what made them so chilling.
"This time, it's my turn to learn."