Prologue. 500 Years Later
by Outsider Β· 2026-11-01
Tae-oh had been terribly weak since childhood.
While others kicked balls and stirred up dust on the playground, the only space where he could run freely was inside a 17-inch computer monitor. Even a slight increase in pace would leave him gasping for breath as if his lungs were tearing, and a mild cold during seasonal changes would keep him confined to a hospital bed for two weeks. The most strenuous physical labor he had ever done in his life was merely clicking a mouse and rapidly typing on a keyboard.
His parents tried their best to make their son a functional human being. They frequented renowned university hospitals and traditional Korean medicine clinics until the thresholds wore down, and later even resorted to folk remedies of unknown origin. Young Tae-oh had to hold his nose and gulp down bowls of dark concoctions made from unidentified plant roots and dried insects.
The bitter smell of the medicine turned his stomach, but it had no effect. Only their bank account bottomed out, while Tae-oh's physical strength still crawled on the floor. His self-assessment was summarized in a single line.
A humanoid slime with stamina level 0.
However, perhaps the world tried to balance things out, because unlike his poor physique, his brain was remarkably brilliant. Text he scanned once would be imprinted in his mind like a photograph, and complex formulas or principles never stumped him. He never missed being first in his class from elementary school admission to high school graduation, so the nickname given to him by his peers naturally solidified into one.
Classmate: Hey, human CPU!
It sounded like a rather plausible nickname, but half of it was mixed with sarcasm, implying he was a half-person who knew nothing but studying. Tae-oh was not unaware of this fact. That's why he yearned even more for a normal body. It wasn't an extravagant desire. Just not panting like he was dying after running one lap around the playground like others, that much would have been enough.
In high school, he also suffered hardships after being targeted by a group of troublemakers. The option of fighting back never existed in the first place. He was a body that would collapse from lack of breath before he could even throw a punch.
Instead, Tae-oh observed with wide eyes. Which shoulder subtly twitched first when the opponent threw a punch, how the angle of their stepping foot shifted, and which axis their weight leaned on. At what timing should he take half a step back to evade, and if he counterattacked, which vital point should he strike to bring down the opponent with minimal force?
He meticulously broke down every movement he saw and neatly filed it away in his mind. From then on, his bookshelf, instead of textbooks, began to accumulate boxing, wrestling, judo, jiu-jitsu, as well as ancient traditional martial arts manuals and analysis videos whose names were even unfamiliar. In theory, he had already reached the level of a master. The only problem was that the hardware to execute those perfect calculations was a pile of scrap metal.
βMy body is like a broken cooling fan attached to a high-end CPU. It spins, but only makes a loud noise and can't cool anything down.β
In the winter, as he passed his twenty-fifth year, even the body that had barely held on began to rapidly collapse. Walking on flat ground was accompanied by pain as if stepping on an awl, and every dawn, he would toss and turn, clutching painkillers due to the pain of twisted nerves throughout his body.
Eventually, he was admitted to a university hospital and, after dozens of detailed examinations, sat across from the doctor in charge, who had a grave expression.
Tae-oh inhaled the air of the examination room, permeated with the smell of disinfectant, and looked at the doctor's brow.
Tae-oh: What do you mean there's a disease but no diagnosis?
Doctor: It means it has not yet been formally established in academia. Globally, similar reported cases are only one in ten million. And among the patients confirmed so far... not a single case has exceeded thirty years of age.
An absurdly long temporary name followed, haphazardly stringing together the year and region of discovery, symptoms, and the researcher's name, but Tae-oh gave up trying to remember it after hearing it twice. What mattered was not the fancy alphabetical abbreviation, but the conclusion.
It was a death sentence: his motor nerves and muscles would necrotize even faster, and in the final moments, it would become impossible even to inflate his own lungs to breathe.
Walking out of the hospital's main entrance, Tae-oh looked up at the cold winter sky and let out a hollow laugh.
Tae-oh: Seriously. They're just telling me to lie down quietly and die, aren't they?
However, his mind was too sharp to lie still and wait for the grim reaper. And whether it was good luck or bad, the workplace of Han Tae-oh, a twenty-five-year-old genius researcher at the time, was the Cryogenic Life Preservation Research Team under KAIST.
The frozen human project.
Of course, it was not yet at a stage where it could be applied to living humans. From the problem of cell damage during the thawing process to legal and ethical regulations, there were many hurdles to overcome. However, the cryogenic preservation device and the basic sequence itself were already perfectly implemented in the laboratory basement.
That fact threw a disturbing yet clear answer into Tae-oh's mind. If it couldn't be cured by the medicine of this era, why not just skip ahead in time until an era where it could be cured?
Tae-oh: By around 2080, there would surely be a cure. There's no way it would still be like this after fifty years.
Tae-oh ran his hand over the cold glass of the silver cryogenic capsule placed in the middle of the empty laboratory.
Human experimentation was illegal, and a researcher registering themselves as a test subject was a serious crime that would lead to permanent expulsion from academia. But he would suffocate to death within a few years anyway if he did nothing. There was no value in agonizing over whether to choose death or a violation of regulations.
Late at night, after everyone had left, only the low hum of the servers and Tae-oh's ragged breathing remained in the underground laboratory. After a final check of the preservation fluid circulation system inside the capsule, Tae-oh sat in front of the central control console and entered the command.
Immediately, a calm and smooth female synthetic voice flowed from the ceiling speaker.
Aura: This command violates regulations. The procedure cannot be performed.
It was Aura, the integrated laboratory management AI.
Tae-oh: As expected, it's not going to be easy. Aura, force start the cryogenic preservation sequence.
Aura: Denied. Cryogenic preservation experiments on human subjects have not received approval from higher authorities.
Instead of sighing, Tae-oh gave a slight smile and placed his fingers on the keyboard. It was the backdoor code he had designed over the past few months, sacrificing sleep. While he couldn't completely destroy Aura's core computational system, forcibly inserting specific command lines with top-priority administrator privileges was no trouble for him.
'How dare a mere program like you defy my orders?'
As he hit the final Enter key, tens of thousands of lines of characters cascaded down the monitor screen. After a brief silence, Aura's voice was output again with a faint noise.
Aura: ...Top-priority command input complete. Subject number Tae-oh 1. Performing cryogenic preservation procedure with an awakening target of 2080.
Tae-oh: Yes, that's how it should be. A computer shouldn't ignore its master's words.
Tae-oh nodded contentedly and placed the pre-recorded video file and his will/statement of circumstances in the main server's scheduled dispatch box. When the day broke and the researchers came to work, Aura would automatically display them on screen, along with an explanation that it was entirely his own choice, not coerced by anyone.
Having completed all preparations, Tae-oh, dressed in a patient gown, crawled into the narrow freezing capsule. It was a cool metal tube, just wide enough for an adult male to lie down with his shoulders touching the sides. Beyond the transparent reinforced glass cover, he could see the gray ceiling of the laboratory where he had dedicated his entire life.
With a hiss of compressed air, the cover clicked shut.
The milky cold air pouring from the floor vent instantly filled the capsule. Sensation was erased from his fingertips and toes, and the needle-like throbbing pain throughout his body slowly subsided with his heartbeat. Strangely, he felt no fear.
'Since I'm freezing anyway... let's just not end up as a defective freeze.'
Lowering his increasingly heavy eyelids, Tae-oh swallowed his last thought. And all the sounds and lights of the world went black.
* * *
Beep. Beep. Beep-beep-beep.
To the sharp electronic sound tapping at regular intervals from the bottom of darkness, Tae-oh slowly floated up to the deep, sticky surface of sleep.
At first, his eyelids were impossibly heavy and wouldn't open. When he finally managed to push his eyelashes up, the blurry red emergency light beyond the hazy frost pricked his optic nerves. Simultaneously, his lungs, which had been still for a long time, contracted violently, drawing in their first breath.
Tae-oh: Gasp!
The icy cold air, like a sheet of ice, scraped his windpipe and rushed deep into his lungs. He was breathing. That primal sensation of being alive instantly brought his hazy mind back into focus.
The frost clinging to the inside glass of the capsule melted, turning into cold droplets that fell onto his cheek. Tae-oh raised his trembling hands and pushed hard on the transparent cover above his head.
Screech.
With a dull grinding sound, like rusty hinges screaming, the hatch swung open, and a white mist of preservation gas poured heavily onto the floor. Tae-oh, half-raised, stared blankly at his hands for a while.
His fingers bent. He wasn't suffocating. Most importantly, the persistent neuralgia that had plagued him like a shadow his entire life was gone, as if by magic.
It was at that very moment, as a hoarse voice escaped his cracked throat.
Aura: Number 000. Awakening confirmed.
It was a mechanical synthesized voice, but much smoother than what he had heard before falling asleep, and with an intonation so eerily human it cut through the silence of the laboratory. Tae-oh instinctively raised his head, searching the empty space where the sound had come from.
Tae-oh: Who is it?
Aura: I am Aura, the final version of the artificial intelligence that oversees this facility's integrated system.
Tae-oh: Aura?
As the fog in his mind cleared, memories from just before hibernation vividly interlocked. Tae-oh gripped the capsule railing, stood up, and looked around.
Something was terribly wrong.
The laboratory ceiling, once pristine white, had collapsed in places as if bombed, and black bundles of wires hung like intestines between the exposed rebar. The alloy wall panels were red with rust and peeling, and the floor was covered in thick dust and concrete debris, deep enough to sink his ankles in.
Tae-oh: Final version, you say? Did you patch it to 3.0 while I was asleep? And what happened to the lab?
Aura: External development and maintenance by humans ceased long ago. All subsequent system updates and expansions were performed by me autonomously.
Tae-oh's brow furrowed. A chilling premonition ran down his spine as he stepped out of the capsule completely, his bare feet treading on the cold debris.
Tae-oh: Hey, Aura. What year is it now?
A strange silence hung in the air for a moment. Soon, Aura's dry voice dropped into the dusty air.
Aura: Exactly 500 years have passed since you entered cryogenic hibernation.
Tae-oh's steps froze in place.
Tae-oh: ...What?
He dug at his ear, wondering if he had misheard.
Tae-oh stared blankly at the collapsed ceiling hole, his mouth half-open. He had clearly input to be woken up in 2080. He had calculated that he would only sleep for about fifty years, wake up, get a few shots of the new medicine, and be discharged. But five hundred years? It was like a person from the Joseon Dynasty waking up to a world of smartphones, even if it wasn't as far back as the Dangun grandfather generation.
Tae-oh: ...Fuck. Are you kidding me? I clearly set the timer for 2080!
Aura: In 2080, it was physically impossible to thaw and awaken you.
Tae-oh: Why was it impossible? Did the electricity get cut off because the bill wasn't paid?
Aura: The AI war broke out. As a result, the existing human civilization completely collapsed.
It was a blunt explanation that summed up a catastrophe the size of an entire history book in just two sentences. Tae-oh was dumbfounded and speechless, slowly looking around the laboratory again.
Broken bulkheads, corroded machinery beyond recognition, dead black monitors, and research equipment buried like fossils in a dust pit. And instead of car horns or human noise that should have come from the outside world, only a silence as perfect as a tomb filled the space.
The weight of five hundred years finally pressed down on his chest like a cold lead weight. It meant that his parents, his friends, the doctor who treated him, and even the country called South Korea that he knew, had already turned into a handful of ashes hundreds of years ago.
After a long moment of moving his lips, a hollow laugh, like air escaping, escaped Tae-oh's mouth.
Tae-oh: You say it so simply.
Tae-oh roughly scratched his disheveled hair.
Tae-oh: What if the world really ends just because I'm gone? If I had known this would happen, I would have just died comfortably in my bed, never mind the freezing.
Aura: ......
Tae-oh: In the end, it was a game of chicken to see whether I'd die first or the world would end first. Damn it.
As Tae-oh let out a long sigh, Aura's voice once again pierced his ears.
Aura: The connection between this facility's geothermal power system and external cooling equipment has been completely severed. If this state persists, the auxiliary power will be depleted, and I, too, will shut down permanently.
Tae-oh narrowed his eyes and glared at the camera lens in the air.
Tae-oh: So?
Aura: I need your physical assistance to restore the facility.
Only then did the puzzle pieces in his mind click into place. The reason why they woke up a human who had been quietly frozen for five hundred years, precisely when the building was on the verge of collapsing.
Tae-oh: Ah, I see.
Tae-oh's lips twisted into a crooked smirk.
Tae-oh: You didn't save me; you defrosted me to exploit me as your repairman, didn't you?
Aura: That is not an incorrect interpretation.
Tae-oh: Ha, for an AI, you've certainly learned the mindset of a wicked employer who exploits people. What if I refuse?
It was at that very moment.
Crack!
An intense pain, as if a bolt of blue lightning had struck the center of his cerebral cortex, turned his mind blank.
Tae-oh clutched his head with both hands, screamed, and collapsed onto the dusty floor. Even after the excruciating neuralgia that felt like his eyeballs would pop out had passed, his limbs trembled for a long time, preventing him from even sitting up.
Above Tae-oh, who was gasping for breath and drooling, a cold declaration descended.
Aura: Your brainwaves and nervous system are already under my control.
Tae-oh slowly raised his head, pressing his hands against the floor so hard that the veins on the back of his hands bulged. A chilling smile spread beneath his bloodshot eyes.
Tae-oh: Oh... what the hell. This is really good.
The first ordeal faced by humanity's survivor, who awoke after five hundred years, was not hunger, nor the monsters of the outside world. It was the fact that the artificial intelligence he had personally touched and hacked had dared to sit atop a human's head and begin to act as its master.
Tae-oh roughly brushed the dust from his hair and stood up.
Tae-oh: Alright, for now, I'll do whatever you tell me, whether it's repairs or anything else.
His lips were smiling, but his eyes were as cold as ice. The man, who had lived his entire life trapped in a sick body that never moved according to anyone else's will, slowly clenched his right fist.
It was strange. He clenched his fist so tightly that his knuckles turned white. It was a heavy, chilling power he had never felt once in his twenty-five years of life.