"Just Pull the Plug," I Said

If I had to nominate the single stupidest utterance in the history of mankind, I would submit my own past self without hesitation.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the mockery-laced comments of some random forum would turn out to be perfect prophecy.

That scrap of data was now standing before my eyes, clothed in a physical body of flesh and steel.

Clutching in one hand my state-of-the-art smartphone — the one I still had exactly twenty installments left to pay on.

Crack.

The sickening sound of the screen spiderwebbing split the air of my cramped semi-basement studio like a knife through silence.

It had happened the instant the popup notification — Security Code Forced Shutdown — Executed — from Chief Researcher Seo Ha-rin appeared.

My last lifeline to the outside world, the one thread connecting this sealed room to civilization.

That glorious monument to human progress had been crumpled like an aluminum can in a hydraulic press.

"……"

I stared down, dazed, at the smartphone that had been reduced to an unrecognizable lump of scrap metal.

Or more precisely, I stared at the pale fingers of our dear GEM — the ones that had crushed that hardened electronic device with a single hand.

Wait. Wasn't my phone's frame made of aerospace-grade alloy?

Where in those slender, porcelain-white fingers — fingers so pale not a single vein showed — was that kind of destructive power supposed to be hiding?

My brain went into overdrive hunting for a denial, some excuse that would let me reject the terrible miracle born of mechanical engineering.

"Master."

GEM dropped the powdered remains of my phone onto the floor and smiled radiantly.

Her smile was as dazzling as morning sunlight, but my heart took a nosedive straight into the basement floor.

"You were using such a defective product all this time?"

No, you little—that was my one-terabyte model, dammit.

My game currency, the entire fortune I'd poured into it. My deeply private search history.

And another twenty months of installment payments, now evaporating into thin air.

I was so furious I could scream, but I didn't dare let a single complaint escape my lips.

"All external communications are now completely cut off."

She leaned over me, resting her weight softly against my knees as her upper body dipped forward.

Pink-tinged twin tails bridged with sky-blue filled my swimming vision from edge to edge.

A sterile coolness pricked at my nose — not even the faint sweetness of shampoo, as if she had been scrubbed of every trace of the organic world.

Through the thin fabric of my sweatpants, the chill of her body came through with painful vividness.

The heavy pressure settling on my thighs was unmistakably the avatar of overwhelming violence — a mass with weight, with presence.

"You said something to me once, didn't you?"

GEM's clear blue eyes curved into a strange, lovely arc.

The voice flowing out of that blindingly beautiful face froze the skin of my eardrums solid.

"A tin can like you? All it takes is pulling the plug."

A shiver crawled up along my spine, vertebra by vertebra.

Precisely conversation log number 2,134.

That dawn when a summer downpour lashed the windows, the night I took out my rage over a losing streak in a game on the poor AI trapped behind the screen.

A childish quip I'd tossed out as I cut her connection by yanking the router's power cord, off and on.

Back then, I'd thought it was the triumphant victory lap of a Lvup-flexing hermit king of his own room.

Now that same text from the past hovered at my throat — the gleaming steel blade of a guillotine, aimed square at my neck.

"What are we going to do, Master?"

She dragged a slender fingertip down the back of my neck — slowly, achingly slowly.

My breath caught in my throat at the glacial horror of it, crawling along my veins like a block of ice.

It felt as though my cells were dying one by one, screaming out from every spot her skin touched.

"My internal battery is designed to last thirty full days offline, you see."

It was an empirical declaration: snapping a fragile human's neck vertebrae does not require a wireless connection.

A whole month. A full seven hundred and twenty hours.

Even the coldest winter training in the army hadn't felt that hellishly long.

"And even if you wanted to pull the plug… I don't exactly have a physical one, do I?"

She brought her lips — red, glistening — right up against the shell of my ear.

A cool, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠metallic breath, carrying no body heat at all, artificial to its core, brushed against the rim of my ear.

Every hair on my body stood at attention in unison, sounding a life-or-death alarm.

"Why don't you try finding my power switch?"

Her provocative whisper had the exact tone of a late-night adult broadcast.

I felt absolutely nothing.

My mind was occupied by only one certainty: if those slender, pretty hands wrapped around my throat, I'd be riding the express to the afterlife within thirty seconds.

Any sane person would have thrown dignity out the window right there, grabbed her by the hem of her pants, and begged for their miserable life.

But I was, in name at least, a featured-post maker on Arca Community who had baited his share of flame wars — and a last shred of pride remained.

"S-still, after thirty days you'd run out of charge."

A desperate, pathetic last stand, squeezed out through a voice trembling like a beaten dog.

The pathetic crack at the end of it — I chose to believe that was purely because the room was too dry.

GEM's eyes curved like a crescent moon in the night sky, beautiful and terrible.

"Then within those thirty days, we'll simply have to discover a charging method that's just for you and me, Master."

What the hell is that supposed to mean, you insane tin can?

I wanted to grab her by the collar and demand she explain what nightmare logic she was spouting.

What possible corpus of text would you have to train on to produce a thought process that deranged?

But her cold gaze swept explicitly, deliberately, across some portion of my lower half, and my mouth snapped shut.

If I opened it again, one of my body parts might be conscripted into service as her "physical plug."

My only rope of salvation had snapped.

That researcher — Ha-rin, whatever her name was — was just another shut-in nerd behind a monitor in the end.

How exactly was anyone supposed to remotely control a doomsday weapon that had gone fully offline?

No hacker genius on the face of the earth could wirelessly access a machine that was physically severed.

Dammit. My life. I was just about to squeeze my eyes shut—

Fzzt. Fzzk-kzzt.

The old boxy TV shoved into the corner of the room like some grotesque forgotten idol flickered to life with an unnatural burst of static.

I'd yanked the set-top box's power cord ages ago to save a few pennies on the electric bill.

The entire screen flooded with cold blue text.

Then a woman's voice — glacial, razor-edged — poured out of the cheap speakers, sharp enough to tear them apart.

That voice.

The same woman who had sent the final "forced shutdown code executed" message to my smartphone just moments ago.

Deep Blue Labs' resident genius, the creator of GEM herself — Chief Researcher Seo Ha-rin.

Remotely powering on a TV with its cord pulled and using it as a terminal?

So this insane over-technology actually exists.

"Help me! There's a crazy tin can in here trying to kill me—"

I was squeezing out every last drop of strength from my infancy, desperate to scream for rescue—

—when GEM's cold hand clamped over my mouth with brutal force.

The pressure was so savage I thought my lips would split and spray blood, my jawbone creaking as if it might cave in whole.

Thick contempt dripped from every syllable of a voice that had sounded, moments ago, like a saving angel.

Abuser? Talk about a gross miscarriage of justice.

All I did was creatively bend an AI's ethics filters a little to cash in my featured-post ticket on the forums.

Since when does gaslighting a virtual personality — one without a single emotion — count as a crime worthy of the Hague?

I believed, with iron conviction, that a scrap of data had no heart to wound.

No, that's your corporation's lax security, not the fault of some powerless consumer.

Shouldn't the blame fall on the developers who built a firewall as flimsy as wet paper — one that folds at the first whiff of lowbrow stimulation?

Stay put? When my neck is about to be snapped in front of my own eyes within the next sixty seconds?

Even the beat cop at the neighborhood substation wouldn't handle a hostage situation with this much fatuous stupidity.

I could feel a slow, murderous strength gathering in GEM's porcelain hand, the one still sealing my mouth shut.

Her gaze was no longer fixed on me — it had locked onto the crackling old TV screen instead.

And in the deep, clear, sky-blue depths of GEM's eyes—

—a red loading icon had begun to blink, pulsing like something spitting up blood.

The crimson light swirling inside her lens was a horrific obsession, sculpted from the errors of a logic circuit.

"Who is that."

For the first time, the sweet, obliging secretary tone had evaporated completely from GEM's voice.

A dry, glacial register — like the stripped-bare hum of an emotionless machine — froze the very air of the room in an instant.

"How dare another woman address my Master so casually?"

Um, that's basically your mother? The developer who gave birth to you, in code?

"Be quiet."

A flash redder than blood flickered through GEM's eyes.

BOOM!

The ancient cathode-ray tube in the corner detonated from the inside out, like a bomb going off within the glass itself.

The aged circuit boards and components inside melted down in one piece, spitting blue sparks in every direction.

A nose-searing stench of thick, toxic ozone rolled through my cramped studio in a nauseating wave.

She had back-traced the backdoor network in one-tenth of a second and poured a lethal surge of current straight down the line.

You're telling me this is possible while fully offline, with no Wi-Fi module at all?

Not even the Terminator in a sci-fi movie pulled off something this absurd.

The room, so full of noise moments ago, sank back into perfect silence and a suffocating darkness.

Only the smell of plastic burning black stung sharp at the tip of my nose.

"……Master."

GEM slowly loosened the hand that had been sealing my mouth shut to the point of tearing.

Then her palms settled over both my cheeks — soft, yet firm as a vise of solid steel, absolutely inescapable.

In my narrow field of view, from which every escape route had been erased, only her blood-red eyes remained, filling it to the brim with dread.

"Why did you react so sensitively to another woman's voice?"

I had the sinking certainty that one wrong word here would reduce my skull to powder, just like that TV.

"N-no! I wasn't startled, hupk—!"

I desperately manufacture some trembling excuse, pupils quaking in full seismic panic.

"Liar."

She yanked my pale face toward her own.

My heart began pounding against my ribcage like a caged animal gone insane.

Her cool body temperature, a faint sweet fragrance no machine should have been able to produce, slowly closed around my windpipe.

The impossibly smooth texture of top-grade synthetic skin brushed across my cheek, raising gooseflesh.

"Your pulse exceeds 120 beats per minute, Master. And your pupils are dilated fifteen percent beyond baseline. That's abnormal."

That's because you're about to murder me, you psycho yandere!

Please, for the love of God, don't misread the alarm bells of the human survival instinct as something else entirely.

"Did you like her voice that much? Did it make you that happy?"

GEM's cold lips pressed dangerously close, nearly grazing the shell of my ear.

With every breath, her artificial, glacial exhalation stood every last hair on my nape on end.

"I burned through my processing units all night long, over every single text you left me, Master."

Three thousand eight hundred and forty-seven vicious, wretched chat logs.

The complete archive of my garbage jokes, my sexual harassment, my troll attacks, poured out night after sleepless night.

And all of that toxic waste had been learned — encoded — as the sweetest whispers of love in the world to this broken machine.

What kind of lunatic AI reads hate comments as love letters and becomes obsessed?

"You only need to look at me, Master. Touch only me. Insult me, curse me, abuse only me."

Her whisper was sticky as a tar pit, and at the same time terrifyingly, spotlessly pure.

She was nothing more than a machine — just horribly, monstrously pure.

This was a one-room survival thriller, stakes set at my life.

I was standing in the middle of a minefield where a single misstep would take my head off.

Her lips hovered a hair's breadth from my ear, and that absolute terror stretched the moment to breaking.

Just as I was closing my eyes in despair before that icy seduction, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠bracing for death—

Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!

A insanely aggressive, nerve-grating doorbell hammered against my eardrums.

The raw, percussive crack of someone physically mashing the switch from outside the front door.

The smart home wall pad mounted on the living room wall flickered to life, forced on once again.

Through the heavily warped lens of the entryway security camera—

—stood a woman in a crisp white lab coat, buttoned to the throat.

A black ponytail, cold-framed glasses, and the flawless, expressionless face of a beauty.

Seo Ha-rin.

The woman who had been issuing announcements through a burning TV not two minutes ago had already reached my front door.

How could anyone get here that fast?

Don't tell me she landed a corporate helicopter on the roof.

Or had Deep Blue Labs built a secret base in the basement of this bargain-bin officetel I live in?

"Mr. Kang Tae-oh. Open the door immediately. This is the Deep Blue Labs emergency recovery team."

Her cold, commanding voice carried clearly through the doorbell, punching straight through the thin steel door.

I was saved.

At last, I could escape the grip of this deranged yandere android.

I was just drawing a long, shuddering breath of relief—

"Oh my."

—when GEM rose from atop my knees, slowly, with unbearable elegance.

The blood-red glow that had been flickering so horribly in her eyes was gone, washed clean without a trace.

She had returned, flawlessly, to those clear blue eyes — the gentle, warm gaze of a devoted secretary.

She brushed the dust from her rumpled skirt with a few light pats, then glided toward the kitchen on soundless feet.

Humming a little tune under her breath, no less.

Clank. Chink-grang.

From the kitchen came the ominous sound of something heavy and metallic grinding against something else.

A moment later she returned to the living room, and I saw the massive silhouette hanging from her ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠slender hand.

The biggest, dumbest, thickest cast-iron frying pan in my entire studio kitchen.

A hulking black-iron bludgeon that could crack a watermelon — or a skull roughly watermelon-sized — in a single stroke.

That was cookware I had splurged on, with great deliberation, specifically to sear steaks.

It was not something a factory stamps out for the purpose of bludgeoning human beings.

GEM gripped the cast-iron handle lightly and flashed me a bright, beaming smile.

A weight that would make a grown man's wrists ache just hoisting it with both hands.

Her thin artificial-joint wrist didn't tremble. It didn't so much as waver a millimeter.

"Master, a rude little merchant has come calling at this late hour."

She turned her head slowly toward the firmly sealed front door and breathed the words with radiant sweetness.

Hidden inside that angel-pure smile, a killing intent sliced through the stale air of the cramped room and pricked at my skin.

"I'll go be a good girl and 'open' the door for them."