Han Yoo-jin walked into the Starforce lobby looking like he had rolled down a mountain.
His suit was torn at the shoulder. Dried blood crusted under his nose. He smelled like industrial dust and ozone.
"Congratulations!" the receptionist cheered, popping a party popper. Confetti rained down on Yoo-jin's battered head.
She froze. "Oh my god. PD-nim? Did you get mugged?"
"I got reviewed," Yoo-jin muttered, brushing glitter off his shoulder. "Where is Director Park?"
"In the conference room. With the champagne."
Yoo-jin marched toward the elevators. His head was pounding. The sonic attack from Kang Eden—Subject One—was still ringing in his ears like tinnitus.
He checked his vision. The System interface was fuzzy, flickering with static.
[System Rebooting... 15%]
[Status: Vulnerable.]
He was flying blind. No stat checks. No cheat codes. Just his brain and a headache.
He kicked open the conference room doors.
Director Park was standing on the table, holding a magnum of Dom Perignon. Hana and Mina were laughing, wearing "Billboard #1" party hats. Olivia Ray was teaching Kim Min-ji how to shotgun a beer.
The music stopped. Everyone stared at Yoo-jin.
"You look terrible," Hana said, lowering her hat. "Did the Dragon Chairman beat you up?"
"Worse," Yoo-jin said. He grabbed a bottle of water and downed it in three seconds. "The government just launched their nuke."
"The government?" Park climbed down from the table. "Yoo-jin, we beat them. The Blacklist is gone. We're untouchable."
"Turn on the TV," Yoo-jin ordered.
"We're celebrating!"
"Turn. It. On."
Park grabbed the remote. The massive wall screen flickered to life.
It was on every channel. A broadcast takeover.
The screen was pure white. No logos. No tickers. Just a countdown clock hitting zero.
Then, a sound played.
It was a chord. Major key. Perfect pitch. It resonated in the room, making the glass windows vibrate. It sounded like a choir of angels, but synthesized.
A boy stepped out of the white void.
Silver hair. Glowing blue eyes. Skin without pores.
Kang Eden.
He looked into the camera. He smiled. It was a smile calculated by a supercomputer to maximize trust and attraction.
"Hello, World," Eden said. His voice was melodic, bypassing the ears and hitting the brain stem directly. "I am Eden. I am here to fix the noise."
A song began.
It wasn't K-Pop. It wasn't Pop. It was... math.
The beat was a perfect Fibonacci sequence. The vocal harmonies were mathematically flawless. There was no breath intake. No strain. Just pure, crystalline sound.
[New Artist Debut: EDEN]
[Agency: The Ministry (Cultural Preservation Unit)]
[Title Track: 'Perfection']
The room watched in stunned silence.
Mina shivered. "It's beautiful," she whispered, her eyes glazing over. "It sounds like... peace."
Hana shook her head violently. "No. It sounds like a ringtone. It's creepy."
Yoo-jin watched the screen. He saw what they couldn't. Even without the System, he recognized the technique.
It was the "Idol Particle" frequency. The same tech that made the Maestro dangerous, but refined. It wasn't draining energy; it was supplying it. It was flooding the audience with artificial serotonin.
The song ended. The screen went black.
Then, the metrics appeared on the news ticker below.
[Breaking: Eden's debut video hits 10 Million views in 10 minutes.]
[Melon Chart: #1 (Instant All-Kill)]
[Public Sentiment: Euphoric.]
Sol & Luna's Blackout dropped to #2.
Director Park dropped the champagne bottle. It didn't break on the carpet, just thudded dully.
"He... he took Number One," Park whispered. "In ten minutes? That's statistically impossible."
"It's not impossible if you control the algorithm," Yoo-jin said grimly.
He turned to the room.
"The party is over. Everyone to the war room. Now."
Ten minutes later, the mood in the strategy room was funeral-esque.
"He's an AI," Olivia Ray said, leaning back in her chair. "Look at his movements. Too smooth. No micro-expressions. Is he even human?"
"He's human," Sae-ri said from the corner. The Muse looked pale. "But he's been edited. Genetically. Psychologically. He's Subject One. The Ministry's masterpiece."
"He called me Zero," Yoo-jin said, leaning on the table. "He thinks I'm the outdated model. And looking at the charts, he might be right."
He pulled up the real-time comments on Eden's video.
"I feel so happy watching this."
"Why was I listening to loud noise before? This is real music."
"Eden is perfect. Sol & Luna are messy."
"They're calling us messy," Hana spat. "We aren't messy. We're raw."
"To the average ear, raw sounds like a mistake compared to perfection," Yoo-jin said.
He stood up and paced.
"Eden's strategy is 'The Cure'. He's positioning Sol & Luna, Min-ji, and Olivia as the disease. We are stress, anger, and rebellion. He is calm, order, and happiness."
"People like happiness," Park noted quietly. "Especially in a recession."
"It's fake happiness," Yoo-jin snapped. "It's Soma. It's a drug."
He looked at Mina. She was staring at her hands.
"Mina?"
"I can't sing like that," she whispered. "I listened to his high note. It's... it's 4000 hertz. Perfect sine wave. If I try that, my voice will crack."
"He wants you to feel that way," Yoo-jin said. "He wants you to feel inferior."
He slammed his hand on the table.
"But he has a weakness."
Everyone looked up.
"What weakness?" Olivia asked. "The kid looks like he was built in a NASA lab."
"The Uncanny Valley," Yoo-jin said.
He pointed to the screen, where Eden's frozen smile was displayed.
"Humans are wired to reject things that are almost human but not quite. Right now, everyone is dazzled by the shine. But give it a week. The perfection will start to feel cold. It will feel alien."
Yoo-jin's eyes narrowed.
"We can't beat him at perfection. If we try to polish our sound, we look like cheap copies. So we go the other way."
"The other way?" Hana asked.
"We double down on the mess," Yoo-jin said. "We become the Glitch."
He turned to the whiteboard. He erased the plans for the "Global Pop" album.
He wrote a new word in big, black letters.
HUMAN.
"We are going to release a documentary," Yoo-jin said. "Not the fun reality show we did last week. A real one."
He looked at Hana. "We're going to show the footage of you passing out after the Hongdae stage."
He looked at Mina. "We're going to show your panic attack in the vocal booth."
He looked at Min-ji. "We're going to show you crying in the hallway at Titan."
"That's career suicide," Park gasped. "Idols are supposed to be aspirational! If you show the ugly side, the fantasy breaks."
"Eden is the Fantasy," Yoo-jin said. "We are the Reality. We force the public to choose: Do you want a perfect robot who lies to you? Or do you want humans who bleed for you?"
He looked at his System interface.
[System Reboot Complete.]
[New Feature Installed: Empathy Link.]
[User can now gauge 'Emotional Resonance' of the public.]
The System was back. And it had adapted. It wasn't measuring stats anymore. It was measuring feelings.
"We need a new song," Yoo-jin said. "Scrap the pop tracks. I want acoustic instruments. I want breath sounds. I want squeaking guitar strings. I want mistakes left in the mix."
He looked at Olivia.
"You said you wanted to make 'real music'?"
Olivia smirked. "I'm listening."
"We're going to record an unplugged album," Yoo-jin said. "Live. One take. No pitch correction. If you miss a note, it stays."
"Live?" Mina looked terrified. "For an album?"
"It's the anti-Eden," Yoo-jin said. "He is processed. We are organic."
He checked his watch.
"We record tonight. In the garden. With the crickets chirping in the background."
"You're crazy," Hana said, a slow smile spreading across her face. "He's flying a spaceship, and you want to fight him with a stick."
"Sticks leave bruises," Yoo-jin said.
He grabbed his jacket.
"Director Park, get the cameras. Sae-ri, get the wine. We're going to have a campfire."
That Night. The Starforce Rooftop Garden.
The city lights of Seoul were a backdrop. A small fire crackled in a fire pit.
Microphones were set up in a circle. No sound booth. No glass walls. Just the night air.
Yoo-jin sat with an acoustic guitar. He hadn't played in years. His fingers hurt.
"Testing," he murmured.
[Emotional Resonance: High.]
[Atmosphere: Intimate.]
"Okay," Yoo-jin said to the girls sitting around the fire. "Forget the charts. Forget Eden. Just sing for each other."
He started playing. A simple chord progression. C, G, A-minor, F. The DNA of pop music, stripped of its armor.
Mina started singing. Her voice was soft, trembling slightly in the cold air.
"I'm not a machine..."
"I break when I fall..."
Hana added a harmony, low and raspy. Olivia hummed a counter-melody.
It wasn't perfect. The wind blew into the mics. A siren wailed in the distance. Yoo-jin missed a strumming pattern.
But it felt warm.
Yoo-jin watched the waveform on the recording laptop. It wasn't a flat, compressed block like Eden's track. It was dynamic. It had peaks and valleys.
He looked up at the sky.
Somewhere out there, Subject One was probably sitting in a sterile white room, recharging his batteries.
"You can have the perfection, Eden," Yoo-jin whispered to the night. "I'll keep the soul."
He nodded to Min-ji.
"Take the bridge."
Min-ji closed her eyes and let out a note that wasn't quite stable, but was filled with ten years of longing.
Yoo-jin smiled.
The war between the Robot and the Human had officially begun. And Yoo-jin just lit the first torch.