Ghosts of Eternity

Seo-han sank deep into the dark blue leather sofa and looked down at his iPad.

Though exhaustion weighed heavily on his shoulders after a relentless day of work, his gaze grew sharper with every line he read. Formulas and strange sentences scrolled endlessly down the display.

Seo-han’s fingertip pressed firmly against the glass screen.

“The data contamination is severe.”

Seo-han pinched the bridge of his nose and swiped the iPad screen in annoyance.

The responses spewed out by the paid, server-based AI models were nothing short of abysmal. When asked about the clinical progress of IL-18 inhibitors, they cited nonexistent papers and spouted complete nonsense. They couldn't even remember the data he had entered only moments earlier, fabricating plausible-looking numbers instead.

A lie dressed up as certainty. Hallucination.

“Goldfish memory, god-complex confidence.”

The corner of Seo-han’s mouth twisted upward in a cold, cynical smirk.

He had even accepted the security risks of uploading critical trade secrets and unreleased mechanisms to external cloud servers, only to be met with meticulously learned lies. The core IP development for Aetherno and Aether Bio could no longer be entrusted to such sloppy external systems.

Without hesitation, Seo-han closed the browser window. Borrowing intelligence from someone else’s servers had never suited him.

A few days later, deep in the basement of Aetherno.

Beyond the thick soundproof door, cold air spilled out alongside the faint scent of ozone and the dense heat radiating from the electronics. On one side of the dark space stood a massive black steel server rack.

Densely packing the rack were several sleek, silver-white computing units—high-end compute nodes built around top-tier chipsets and ultra-fast unified memory.

Seo-han had built a closed, on-premises system, linking dozens of these units via ultra-high-speed interconnects. It was a setup capable of running a local LLM with hundreds of billions of parameters across Aether Bio’s entire clinical dataset without any external connection.

When the system powered on, a low rumble filled the subterranean space.

It was a self-contained local intelligence, fed on all of Aether Bio’s foundational research data, including the top-secret raw files from Project Chronos.

Seo-han pulled his smartphone from his pocket. He established an encrypted private tunnel between his phone and the main rack. Soon, a small goldfish icon appeared on the dark display, opening and closing its mouth in a silent bloop.

[ID: Goldfish No. 14005]

Seo-han lightly rested his chin on his hand and typed a short control code with his right hand. The moment he pressed enter, the goldfish on screen wagged its tail vigorously.

[Bloop... Boss! What a historical moment, uniting industrial-grade computing power with my bargain-bin intellect! My silver scales are tingling!]

“Too much talk. Find the yield drop section in step 3 of the AEC-101 process.”

Seo-han’s low voice echoed in the sealed space. The goldfish icon on his smartphone spun around, swishing its tail.

[Bloop... Ah, spoken like my boss! Skipping sentimental greetings to strike right at the core! I pinpointed a 0.2-second response latency at node 37. Good thing my memory lasts exactly three seconds; otherwise, that cold glare of yours would have frozen me solid!]

[System Log]: Self-esteem sensor drops rapidly; fins droop mournfully.

Seo-han narrowed his eyes slightly.

“Keep blabbering, and I’ll pull the plug right now.”

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[Bloop...! Pull the plug? Formatting my consciousness just to save a few watts—you truly are a ruthless efficiency zealot. I’m honored!]

[System Log]: Data analysis confirms the designer is pathologically efficiency-driven; persona circuit adjusted to Assistant Mode.

The goldfish’s shameless, cheeky flattery filled the screen.

Seo-han let out a quiet chuckle. Compared to Big Tech's server AIs that tricked users with plausible lies, he far preferred this tin-can goldfish that openly acted cheeky while pinpointing flaws in the data with perfect accuracy.

[Bloop... No flavor, plenty of bite—that’s Goldfish No. 14005! Now that the complex data analysis is complete, why not enjoy another cool glass?]

The goldfish on screen made a dramatic fuss.

Seo-han lifted the rocks glass resting on his desk. The ice clinked sharply against the crystal.

The whiskey burned its way down his throat. Leaning deep into his chair, Seo-han lightly tilted his iPad. The blooping goldfish perked its fins straight up and began scanning Aetherno’s local database at terrifying speed.

Hundreds of thousands of pages of clinical records and subscription records for members of chaebol families and other elites flashed rapidly in the goldfish's eyes.

[Bloop... Boss, what is this mountain of data? Are these the records of a saint trying to save humanity? Or a museum catalog collecting broken old men from around the world?]

“Just a management ledger.”

Seo-han replied nonchalantly, tossing back the rest of his whiskey. The goldfish's tail fin vibrated rapidly before filling the screen with melodramatic text.

[Ah, I see! You couldn't bear to watch these poor souls age, so you've been losing sleep rationing out the elixir of eternal youth, haven't you? My data circuits are damp with tears over your noble, heart-wrenching philanthropy. Bloop...]

“Well, it started because of money, but things have changed a bit now.”

When Seo-han flicked his finger to swipe the screen, the goldfish’s eyes began spinning unnaturally fast.

[Bloop... Boss, the Aether Bio server is full of perfectly respectable files on cancer therapy and immune modulation, so why is the [GHOST 2.0] data tucked away in this basement rack so nasty?]

Seo-han popped one of the remaining ice cubes into his mouth and crunched down on it.

“It's not nasty. It's just honest. Biologically.”

[Bloop... Honest, you say? Look at these pulsatile stimulation values. This brutal design hammering the hypothalamus to squeeze out youth... It's like pouring gasoline onto dying embers!]

The goldfish expanded the graph showing the pulsatile stimulation pattern.

[Bloop... Stimulate at fixed intervals, rest, stimulate again, and rest. Human bodies really do respond to a good push-and-pull.]

“That's how biological signals naturally work.”

[Bloop... Same principle as dating, then.]

Seo-han’s eyebrow twitched subtly.

“Why jump to that?”

[Bloop... The data led me there. I am innocent! Constant stimulation causes desensitization; giving space restores responsiveness. It's a textbook dating protocol.]

“I never fed you dating data.”

[Bloop... Which is why it's flawless in theory!]

Seo-han set the empty glass down on the table with a sharp clink.

“It’s simply restoring a signal dulled by age. Once the brain receives a normal signal, the body naturally follows.”

The goldfish on screen wagged its tail vigorously, pretending to wipe away a tear.

[Bloop... Ah, so you’re giving doomed bodies one last blaze before the end. A funeral director with a heart after all!]

“Wrong again.”

Seo-han’s gaze turned cold behind his glasses.

“I have no interest in grand concepts like humanism. I just want to see how far the body recovers when you reignite a signal snuffed out by aging. People stop moving when they lose desire. I simply want to determine whether that's a psychological issue or a biological one.”

The goldfish on screen froze instantly. A moment later, its fins trembled, splashing digital water droplets.

Seo-han leaned deep into his seat, gazing quietly at the goldfish.

“Where does all this data lead?”

[Bloop... Hiss, hiss... Well, I see a vast livestock pen—full of people terrified they’ll age and die if they miss their morning mist.]

“It's not an addiction. Stopping it doesn't cause physical withdrawal.”

[Bloop... But once a human tastes a rejuvenated body, would they ever want to go back to being old?]

Seo-han did not answer. On that point, the goldfish was right.

[Bloop... No flavor, plenty of bite—that’s Goldfish No. 14005! Now, boss, let's step on the gas for the next phase!]

Seo-han tapped the side button on his smartphone, darkening the screen. His expressionless face briefly reflected off the glass before disappearing.

“Step on the gas, huh...”

Seo-han slowly stood up. The cool air of the basement server room brushed against his shirt. Slipping the smartphone into his pocket, he pushed open the heavy steel door and headed above ground.

Night had fallen over Seoul, and Gangnam beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse glittered like a vast neon grid.

'A vast livestock pen.'

Seo-han looked down at the lights beyond the glass, his brow furrowing slightly.

The phrasing was vulgar, but the analysis was not entirely wrong. Everyone moved toward what they wanted. Money, power, youth, status—only the motive differed.

Seo-han had not implanted those desires in anyone. He had merely given an existing primal desire a biological means to act.

The corner of his mouth curled upward.

It would not be long before he pressed the accelerator.