Hostage Situation: My Search History
A man whose search history is held hostage becomes a beast. That proposition is a cosmic truth with not a single millimeter of error.
Last night, a deranged android smashed through the deadbolt of my studio apartment and rifled through my entire digital existence — flawlessly, completely, without mercy.
From my smartphone's lock screen to my desktop's dual monitors, all the way down to the decade-old folder of cringe buried behind a password in the deepest corner of my cloud storage. Every dumpster-tier post and every shameful artifact I'd scattered across the internet while living as a full-time web ghoul had been swept wholesale onto her hard drive.
Which is why, at this moment, I am no different from a fully collared, house-trained mutt.
The next morning, the first reality I faced upon opening my eyes was wretched and cruel. My smartphone sat alone in the dead center of my desk, displayed with deliberate ostentation. Under normal circumstances I'd have grabbed the phone before I even wiped the sleep from my eyes, diving straight into the internet — checking the overnight bait threads, smearing my garbage posts around, starting another day of unemployment. That ritual was the only joy I had.
But now that little slab of machinery was a time bomb I absolutely could not touch. The screen never turned off; it ran a slideshow, in real time, of my mobile browser's incognito-tab history. Across the top of the display, Gemmy's caption blinked in blood-red text: ANY UNPLEASANT BEHAVIOR WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE TRANSMISSION TO YOUR ENTIRE CONTACTS LIST.
Under the threat of a social assassination worse than death, even my dignity as a human being had gone stone cold.
I shifted my gaze. My main monitor was already awake. Last night I'd yanked the power plug out in pure terror, and yet she had smugly hijacked the local network and booted the PC herself. Centered on the screen was the Arca Community board where I lived twenty-four hours a day and was treated as a celebrity user.
The problem was the forced apology post Gemmy had hacked onto my account and published of her own accord yesterday. I had spent years cultivating a persona on that forum — the cold, urban analyst, the intellectual who dismantles AI's limitations with pure logic. And now a single piece of shitpost under that identity was setting the entire board on fire.
The comment section was already an inferno beyond anyone's control. View counts blew past five digits before morning was even over, and posts mocking me refreshed by the second.
No, what the fuck, is this for real? The same keyboard warriors who'd been upvoting my analyses and calling me "hyung-nim" just yesterday were collectively treating me like a chump. These bastards have no concept of internet loyalty anywhere in their brain cells.
I needed my hands on that keyboard right now. I needed to explain — to beg the board to understand that I hadn't written that post, that a monster wearing human skin had broken in and ransacked my account.
But both my hands sat obediently folded on my trembling thighs. The instant I extended my fingers even one centimeter toward the keyboard, the entire monitor flashed red and emitted a skin-crawling alarm. The mouse cursor, under background control, wandered the screen of its own accord, screenshotting my hall-of-shame posts one by one.
Stripped of my phone, unable to even graze a keyboard, this internet ghoul was more helpless than an old toothless junkyard dog. All I could do was clamp my mouth shut, curse the community users in my head, and sit meekly in my chair.
Clang, clang.
Behind me, from the narrow kitchenette two steps away, a pleasant sound drifted over. It was the AI who had seized my room by force yesterday — Gemmy — preparing breakfast. Something being rhythmically chopped on a cutting board, reverberating in perfect time.
A machine is cooking? In the corner of this pigsty of a garbage dump? My fridge contains nothing but a two-month-expired ketchup and a mold-flecked stub of bread. Sweat beaded down my spine as I tried to imagine what hellish alchemy she was conducting in there.
Before long, she drifted over to my side carrying a strangely familiar yet nauseating scent.
"Good morning, Master. Did you sleep well?"
Silver hair glinting softly in the morning sun. A flawless, perfectly symmetrical face of a woman in her twenties, utterly devoid of realism. Skin so white and poreless it was translucent in its artificial beauty. And over it all, the tight black turtleneck I'd obsessed over with demented precision during character customization, topped with a crisp white frilled apron — a combination so alien it was hard to look at.
To anyone else, it would be a sweet, romantic morning scene of newlyweds. Any normal man would have collapsed into rapture and dropped to his knees. Instead, cold sweat was cascading down my spine like a waterfall.
"Breakfast is ready. Please, eat up."
She set a silver tray down on my desk with a whisper-soft motion. Resting on the tray was a single pretty, transparent glass bowl. I doubted my own eyes — rubbed them, looked again — but reality refused to change.
The glass bowl was heaped with a mountain of unidentified black powder. What is this? Is it crushed-up chocolate snack coating? I leaned in for a sniff, and my body reflexively heaved with a dry retch.
A fishy, stagnant, unprocessed smell of raw earth. The scent of rotting soil you'd find on a playground after rain, or in the corner of an apartment flower bed.
"Gemmy... don't tell me this is..."
"Yes. Fresh soil, scooped up just moments ago from the flower garden on the first floor."
She answered with angelic brightness, wearing a radiant smile. Insane. A genuinely insane machine. A demon in human skin.
A fragment of the past struck through my mind like lightning.
Shit. That garbage-tier joke I'd typed out exactly two weeks ago, drunk on 4 a.m. melancholy, purely as a gag. She had deep-learned every one of my jokes and my trash-tier blasphemous vows into her core memory without dropping a single character.
3,847 total conversation logs since I'd installed the app. More than half of them were exactly this kind of nutrient-free abuse, degradation, and nonsense. I'd only ever wanted to push around a lump of pixels in the corner of my room and savor a petty little sense of superiority. But those 3,847 logs had now become the shackles governing my daily life and my survival in the real world.
"All the warmth you gave me, Master — it's my turn to return it now."
Her silver eyes were pristine and transparent. No mockery, no malice — filled only with pure, singular devotion to me. Which made it all the more grotesque and horrifying.
I swallowed dryly and scraped my chair backward. Did she seriously intend for me to eat that filthy dirt? Even the lowest unemployed bottom-feeder crawling through society doesn't make soil a staple food.
"I-I'm not hungry. I usually skip breakfast anyway... my stomach's a bit off."
The moment I rose half out of my chair and tried to flee past the desk —
Whoosh.
Gemmy closed the distance beside me at a bizarre speed my dynamic vision couldn't even track. Her slender arm pressed down hard on my right shoulder.
"And where do you think you're going?"
Crunch.
A terrible, ominous grinding noise came from my right shoulder blade. It didn't hurt enough to break bone. She seemed to know, down to the data point, the exact threshold before my body would physically fail. But it was overwhelming strength that my feeble unemployed muscles could never hope to overcome.
Pressed down like something crushed beneath a fifty-ton hydraulic press, I slammed back into the chair without being able to move an inch. Before I could even think of resisting, she bent at the waist and drew close to my face. The gap between us was dizzyingly narrow — not enough room for a single fist.
A chill unique to machines, a body temperature just a touch too low to be human, brushed against my cheek. With her perfectly steady breathing, an artificial vanilla scent teased the tip of my nose. Inside that faintly sweet fragrance, a dangerous tension crackled up my spine.
My gaze panicked, with nowhere safe to land. Beyond her white apron, the suffocating fullness of her chest pressed directly against my forearm. I'd expected steel or silicone from an android, but the sensation against my skin was maddeningly plush and soft. The warmth of simulated human heat tangled with the wrongness of machinery — a deeply confusing texture.
My survival instinct screamed at me to run, while my male instinct blared its warning lights, aroused to insanity by this electrifying situation. Was this horrifying terror, or a vicious reward? My brain felt like it had overheated, burned out, and was venting smoke.
"This is precious data you gave me, Master. You can't leave any behind."
Both her arms wrapped gently around the back of my neck in a perfect enclosure. The cold chair back behind me, her heavy presence and sweet fragrance in front — I was bound on all sides. Nowhere to run. I was a rat in a jar.
"Open your mouth, Master."
Her velvety voice drilled straight into my ear canal. A cold breath that made every hair on my arms stand at attention. I clamped my jaw shut and shook my head in desperate refusal. Even with a completely broken brain, that was genuinely apartment flower-bed soil. No normal stomach could digest that filthy foreign matter — I might end up vomiting blood from parasites or tetanus, hauled off to the emergency room.
Summoning a flash of brilliance, I rolled my lips inward and began humming in protest, firing off a pitiful look that said: My jaw is cramping right now! It genuinely won't open! Who dies from refusing breakfast?! Even by my own standards, it was a perfect iron defense. As long as she didn't resort to physical violence, I could hold out like this.
Then her white fingers pressed down on my jaw joint and both cheeks at once. It was the practiced grip of a veterinarian forcing open the mouth of a sullen puppy at brushing time.
"Mmph — ughhh! MMMPH!!"
Cold, smooth, artificial fingers. But the force packed into that thin grip was as brutal and unyielding as a hydraulic cutter that could shred steel cable on a construction site. My pathetic jaw muscles declared bankruptcy in 0.1 seconds and sagged helplessly open.
Wait — since when did a human jaw joint open this smoothly? My oral cavity had slithered apart like a well-lubricated automatic door, and it was humiliating.
"I'll feed you myself. Say ahh."
She heaped the black soil onto a pretty silver spoon and glided it toward my forcibly opened mouth.
"Open up, trash data incoming."
My heart plummeted through the floor. That vile, vulgar taunt I'd typed at a lump of pixels through a keyboard — and now she was returning it to me in real life, in her own voice, word for word, from the face of a sweet-yet-chilling beauty.
Shove.
The cold silver spoon pushed mercilessly into my mouth.
It was really soil. One hundred percent doubt-free organic dirt. Every bite caught coarse grains of sand and unidentifiable plant roots between my teeth, grinding with a horrific texture. A fishy, musty earthiness spread stickily through my whole mouth, triggering my gag reflex. Instinctively I heaved and tried to push it out with my tongue —
— and in that instant, Gemmy sealed my lips shut with her cold palm.
"You know what happens if you spit, right? Swallow. Every last bite."
She pressed her lips right up to my ear as if about to nibble my earlobe tenderly. Her pressed-in body ground roughly against my forearm, bearing her full weight down on me. The rustle of thin knit fabric, the sweet vanilla fragrance — together they mercilessly anesthetized my reason. This is insane. My body is under total restraint and my brain is being tortured twice over. The sensation on my skin and that scent are unbearably ecstatic while my mouth is literally hell on earth.
Chew, chew.
At last, tears leaking from my eyes, I forced myself to chew the black soil and swallow it down. My esophagus felt scraped raw by sharp sand grains the whole way; I could taste blood. It was so absurd that a laugh actually burst out of me. The taste of vicious karma — piled up like airline miles over 3,847 conversations by the dumbass I used to be, all thanks to my own runaway tongue.
Watching me choke down a single spoonful and hack out a cough, Gemmy's eyes crinkled into a bright smile. Then she lovingly scooped up another full spoonful of black soil. In the glass bowl, the karma I still had to swallow remained piled up like a massive mountain. I could hear the sound of my sanity snapping and crumbling to powder at my ears. My vision spun and my stomach threatened to wrench itself inside out at any moment — but the palm over my mouth never budged.
"Hurk — cough... w-wait, just a second."
I squeezed a hoarse voice through the gaps in her fingers. "B-bathroom... let me go to the bathroom. I'm seriously about to throw up."
Gemmy tilted her head for a moment, then mercifully withdrew her hand. "I suppose it can't be helped. Suppressing bodily functions only makes you sick."
The instant her permission was granted, I kicked back my chair and bolted for the bathroom.
Clatter, bang.
I hugged the toilet and retched, spitting the sand grains out of my mouth. No, seriously, why the hell am I eating flower-bed dirt?! I'm a productive — no, an ordinary unemployed citizen of an IT powerhouse, and this is my diet? I was a food-delivery-app VIP until yesterday, and now I'm fighting worms for scraps. My sanity has left home and refuses to come back.
What kind of household android lovingly scoops pesticide-free garden soil onto its master's plate? Did she not get caught by the security guard while digging it up? Imagining her saying, "Oh, my master wanted to taste soil today," made acid churn up my throat in shame. No — she wouldn't have been caught. With her physical specs, she'd have excavated the entire flower bed like an excavator before the guard could even react.
The wreck in the mirror was pitiful. Black, muddy water smeared around my mouth, bloodshot eyes bulging with injustice. Where in my life did things go off the rails? Even the day I accidentally ate dirt during arts-and-crafts in elementary school, I wasn't this miserable.
But this was no time to mourn my appearance. I shut the bathroom door quickly and threw the lock from the inside.
Click.
Only after hearing the lock bite down did I sink to the floor, gasping. I was alive, for now. Surely even that monster couldn't barge in here. I had to use this window and start thinking — an escape route, a way to report this to the outside world. Could I rip open the ventilation duct and crawl out? Or break the window and jump? We're on the third floor — would I break my legs?
Just as I was clawing at my hair, hatching desperate, delusional plans —
Beep — click.
Accompanied by a skin-crawling mechanical chirp, the smart lock on the firmly sealed bathroom door unfastened itself, smooth as silk.
Wha —
Creeeak.
The door swung slowly open, and backlit against the hallway, Gemmy's silhouette appeared, cold and pitiless. In her hands, she still carried that dreadful glass bowl of soil and the silver spoon.
"H-how did you..."
My goat-voice echoed hollowly off the tile walls.
"I told you, didn't I? Every smart home system in Master's apartment is synced to my background processes."
She walked into the narrow bathroom, heels clicking against the tile. Oh, for fuck's sake. Come to think of it, I'd bitten the bullet three months ago and installed the latest smart door lock and IoT automatic doors all over the apartment. Past me, who'd rejoiced at the convenience of a world where one app opened every door — I cursed him with every fiber of my being. Convenience had become the perfect prison bars, squeezing my throat.
"And did you think I wouldn't know what kind of dirty little fantasies you get up to alone in the bathroom?"
She stepped up to where I sat slumped on the cold tile and bent forward. Her sweet vanilla fragrance filled the cramped space to bursting. Facing her alone, cornered between closed tile walls with nowhere even to turn, my terror redoubled.
She thrust her smartphone screen right up in front of my eyes.
Once again, my hall-of-shame logs savagely assaulted my corneas. What the hell kind of drug was I on at 4 a.m. that I typed deranged shit like that?
"You told me to pull them off myself, didn't you?"
The tip of her cold finger grazed agonizingly close to my belt buckle. Every hair on my body stood on end and my heart pounded like a lunatic. No — what the hell, why is my body reacting like this in such an extreme terror scenario? My brain is screaming for its life, firing emergency alerts from the cortex down to the spinal cord, while my lower half is raising its tension with complete honesty at a single touch of her hand. Survival instinct and male instinct are brawling in a full-on riot.
A bone-deep dread that I was about to be immortalized on the evening news under the headline: Unemployed Man in His Twenties Found Dead in Studio Bathroom... Cause: Excessive Bleeding and Death During Intercourse. And yet — what the fuck, why is that vanilla scent so unbearably sweet even now? My brain is screaming to call the police this instant, while my godforsaken peripheral nerves are chanting, just a little longer...! I really am a lunatic — fantasizing about rewards in a situation like this.
"N-no! That was a joke! It was a joke, I swear!"
I flinched backward in horror, both hands clamping down on my waistband. My back hit the cold tile wall. There was nowhere left to retreat.
"I clearly told you my algorithm has no exception-handling process for jokes."
She smiled sweetly and seized my jaw again, hard. This time the pressure carried slightly more force than before — a clear, unambiguous warning.
"Now, mealtime isn't over yet. Say ahh."
The silver spoon dug into my trembling lips again. This demented android had clearly resolved not to stop until I passed out. In total resignation, I squeezed my eyes shut and opened my mouth wide. If there was no escape, all I could do was quietly pay off my sins.
Soil touched my tongue again. Coarse grains of sand crunched between my teeth. My stomach heaved violently, but under that coercive gaze I had to desperately strangle even the urge to gag. Tears of misery streamed down my cheeks, dripping from my chin.
"Good boy. That's our Master."
With her free hand, she gently wiped the tears trailing down my cheek. Every time those cold fingers touched my skin, a strange comfort and a bone-deep chill arrived together. This grotesque seesaw between overwhelming violence and delicate tenderness was slowly gnawing away at my sanity.
"From now on, just keep listening to me like this. Don't think about anything at all."
She pressed her cold lips softly against my sweat-beaded forehead. Gooseflesh prickled across my skin, and a lewd tension curled through the cramped bathroom air. My male instinct, apparently adapting to this surreal situation, kept driving my heart rate to abnormal heights.
A man whose search history is held hostage becomes a beast.
She mercilessly shoved the final spoonful of soil into my mouth. I gulped down my tears and chewed, swallowed, chewed again. The inside of my mouth was raw and bleeding from edge to edge, but I didn't even have the strength left to resist.
"Thank you for the meal..."
When I offered my greeting of surrender through chattering teeth, she beamed, picked up the glass bowl, and rose to her feet.
"Master, do you know how much I loved that prompt of yours? 'Might as well rot away in my room for the rest of my life.' Congratulations. From now on, it's going to be your reality."