The Information Disaster Protocol
The Response Bureau had fallen under a perception impairment. It meant the entire organization had lost its collective sanity.
The Response Bureau stood at the forefront against incomprehensible entities, so such incidents happened from time to time.
“Let go of me! Have you all lost your minds?”
One agent, like Jeongchan, who inspected anomalous phenomena and revised rulebooks, sensed something was wrong and protested. But he was dragged off to the psychiatric ward.
It was because the concise and efficient rulebook he had written made them suspect him of mental contamination.
Just like the agents dragging him away now, if he ever emerged from the psychiatric ward, he would be carrying a copy of the Amurotica Amusement Park Rulebook tucked in his coat.
And whenever he wrote or revised a rulebook, he would produce something verbose and pretentious, filled with unnecessary academic flourishes—just like the amusement park rulebook.
That was the behavioral pattern Jeongchan had observed over the past week from agents affected by the perception impairment.
It was clearly strange, yet hard to pinpoint exactly why. After all, aside from writing filthy rulebooks, everything else about them seemed perfectly normal.
When Jeongchan revised the rulebooks to suit their tastes, the previous tension vanished, and they welcomed him back as a colleague.
It's unsettling, but I can't figure out how to fix this.
Jeongchan sipped his coffee as he walked, then tore a flyer off a utility pole.
It had been obscuring the pole's charm—one that grew smoother and sleeker with age, unlike humans who only wrinkled.
The flyer was one of those apartment advertisements that had become increasingly common lately.
[Gangseo District 'Jaiji-o' Massive Discount Sale!]
He hadn't asked the anomalies what they thought, but for someone like him—filled with dreams of living peacefully with his managed entities at the containment facility—this apartment ad was completely unnecessary.
It was an ordinary advertisement, yet the bolded text stood out.
Get out of the Response Bureau right now. Come to the building across from it.
“Junior. I don't see anything particularly unusual about this flyer. Why did you ask?”
“...I was just curious.”
As Juddak had said, when he checked again, he couldn't read the hidden message.
Someone was gathering the sane ones.
*
The building across from the Response Bureau was so neglected that rumors circulated it had been abandoned mid-construction due to an ongoing lawsuit.
As he entered, a familiar face appeared. It was Ha Taewon.
“Are you Jeongchan?”
“It's been a while.”
His hand was inside his coat. Jeongchan couldn't tell where the gun barrel hidden within might be pointing.
“Did you come after seeing the flyer?”
“That's correct.”
“What did it say?”
When Jeongchan recited the flyer's contents exactly, Ha Taewon finally withdrew his hand from his coat.
“You're still sane. Thank goodness. Do you know the current situation?”
“Yes.”
“Then this will be quick. Follow me.”
Ha Taewon lifted a manhole cover and walked down into the underground sewer. It felt like a space intentionally designed to mimic a sewer, inducing a disorienting distortion of space and time similar to an anomaly.
“It seems like a space deliberately modeled after the sewers so that you can't reach the destination unless you already know where it is.”
After wandering through the twisting sewers, they arrived inside a building that gave off a similar atmosphere to the Response Bureau. The only difference was the heavy, oppressive air that made it feel claustrophobic.
“Where are we?”
“The Response Bureau annex. It's where they keep the dangerous stuff. I don't know the details. I was on my way back from a mission when I saw the flyer and came to offer help.”
Ha Taewon said this while lightly tapping on a door. The door he touched had a locking mechanism that made it impossible to open easily.
It was different from the main building, where authentication was relatively lax whenever you passed through an area.
“You'll have to hear the rest from that old man over there.”
Having finished guiding him, Ha Taewon left. The elderly man in front introduced himself as the head of the Information Disaster Response Team—shortened to Information Team Leader.
“This place was built in preparation for situations like the current one, where the Response Bureau has become abnormal.”
“What exactly is the situation right now?”
“The Response Bureau has been swept up in an information disaster.”
An information disaster referred to an anomalous phenomenon where merely perceiving certain information would twist a person's judgment and cognition.
The perception impairment was also a result of exposure to this information disaster.
“You know how the agents are vaguely insane right now, right?”
Jeongchan nodded.
“The problem is that the agents themselves don't realize it. We're guessing the rulebook recently added to the Response Bureau is the cause.”
“You mean this?”
Jeongchan pulled the Amurotica Amusement Park Rulebook from his coat.
“Yes, that one.”
“Do you know who wrote it?”
“......”
Even when he stared at it, nothing appeared. There wasn't even the usual Response Bureau staff manual that should have been visible on an official rulebook.
“We suspect it was deliberately inserted by someone trying to sabotage the Response Bureau. The anomaly is probably behind it.”
“It's not the existence of the rulebook itself that's the problem, but the moment you start reading it. If you stop midway, maybe not—but once you finish reading it, your perception changes no matter who you are. Right now, we need to normalize this.”
The Information Disaster Response Team Leader continued speaking.
“Information disasters occur through the act of perceiving the information. Therefore, we must erase the memories containing that information. More precisely, we need to excise only the problematic parts.”
“Can you partially edit memories?”
“It's possible.”
The Response Bureau, which had already suffered dozens of information disasters, had diligently built an information disaster response protocol to counter them.
It couldn't be activated manually, but it was designed to trigger automatically once certain conditions were met.
“The problem is that those conditions aren't being satisfied, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Why is that?”
“The incident is too minor for the protocol to activate. It's like how a sprinkler won't go off from a gas stove fire, and a fire truck won't be dispatched. Same principle.”
The issue was a low-level perception impairment—too insignificant to trigger the protocol.
“Just look at the crazy ones right now. They still rescue survivors, they still go about their daily lives. But they only act abnormally when writing rulebooks. Does it make sense that they don't find anything strange about a rulebook exceeding ten pages? They don't even realize they're insane.”
The agents were changing slowly, like getting soaked in a drizzle. The Information Team Leader, who had noticed this, wore an expression drenched in fear.
“You know what? For the time being, the Response Bureau will still look fine. Because it hasn't gone completely mad or suffered catastrophic collapse. The rulebooks are the only thing that's gone wrong, so if left alone, it might somehow keep functioning. But we don't know how long this state will last. The cleanest solution is to fix it now, before it changes any further.”
Even now, the agents under perception impairment were rescuing civilians caught in anomalous spaces and understanding the unknown by writing it into rules.
It was just that their methods had become grossly inefficient. And no one knew what would happen next.
“The way to solve this is simple.”
“What is it?”
“We just need to set a real fire in the house.”
In other words, they needed to create actual chaos within the Response Bureau. Only then would the protocol activate.
“What I'm asking you to do is help release the anomaly we've contained here for that purpose. It's too much for me to handle alone.”
“What kind of anomaly is it?”
“You'll see for yourself.”
The Information Team Leader handed over a document.
—— Identification Code: GUL-KAS ——
This anomaly constantly emits information.
Physical destruction is impossible. It takes the form of a book.
Merely being near the book induces unbearable drowsiness, chronic boredom, or sometimes an indescribable horror that makes one shudder with the urgent desire to read it.
If even a single character is read, the subject transforms into GUL-KAS.
From the moment a human perceives the book, information emitted by the anomaly begins accumulating in their mind.
The information emitted by this anomaly is toxic not only in form but in its very essence. Once it accumulates, if it cannot be expelled, it takes less than fifteen minutes to progress from mental derangement to physical termination.
“Take this into the Response Bureau. The protocol will activate and erase not only this anomaly but every trace of the current abnormal state. I'll tell you the method.”
The method the Information Team Leader explained was, like most Response Bureau solutions, utterly callous toward human life.
The first person drags two unconscious individuals and endures for fifteen minutes. Before passing out, they wake the next person with a stimulant, then reach physical termination.
The second person leads one person and endures for fifteen minutes. Right before losing consciousness, they wake the next with a stimulant and reach physical termination.
The final person carries the anomaly into the Response Bureau. The protocol activates, their memories are erased, and they survive.
“The distance from leaving the sewer here to reaching the Response Bureau is exactly that much. It's doable with three agents who possess at least a 7th-grade mental barrier.”
Jeongchan silently read the document.
“If this anomaly is removed, no more information will accumulate in my head, right?”
“Probably… yes.”
“Then I can handle it alone. I'm quite good at extracting information.”
“It's not something that can be easily removed just by speaking or writing quickly. There's no need for reckless bravado.”
The Information Team Leader tried to dissuade him.
“You'll go last in the rotation. You're still young.”
“No. I'll go first. Senior Taewon, please knock out this old man.”
“Understood. You must have something in mind?”
At Jeongchan's words, Ha Taewon knocked the Information Team Leader unconscious.
“Whenever I listen to you, good things tend to happen. I'll trust you.”
“Don't worry.”
After confirming that the two men, sedated with sleeping pills, were asleep, Jeongchan entered the containment cell and picked up the anomaly.
Has my skin turned a bit yellowish?
He had only briefly checked the changes in his body when an overwhelming urge to read the text surged over him. At the same time, information he had never perceived—and never wanted to know—began flooding his mind. It was the kind of information Jeongchan didn't even want to utter aloud.
Whoa, shit. There's content like this?
The speed at which the information was accumulating was far too fast to simply spit it out in words.
But.
The speed at which he had absorbed information within the time limit during that quiz show and written it into the gallery had not gone anywhere.
Since it's an anomaly, it won't die, right?
I'm sorry.
*
Juddak!!! Juddak!!! Save us!!!
Arrrgh!! I've been exposed!!
Why is this happening?!!! What the hell do you want?!!
Please ban me.!!
Did Juddak collapse?!!!
Why is everyone like this. The regen posts are super active today. Was there some juicy bait?
Oh. What is this?
Why is it so popular.
On the day Jeongchan transported the anomaly, the Anomaly Gallery experienced an inexplicable First Day of Destruction.
The anomalies active in the gallery suffered for nearly two weeks, repeatedly dying and reviving in agony, all simply because they had seen the post.
And among them was the operator of the Amurotica Amusement Park—the very entity that had orchestrated all of this. Amurotica was there too.
The one who had actually dropped the bomb in the gallery had all memories of before and after the perception impairment completely erased by the protocol.
“Ah, I slept well. Did something happen?”