The fresh night air hit Kim-Do's face like a slap. The wet grass slid beneath its soles as it landed heavily, pulled by Joon's iron fist. Behind them, the shrill alarm tore through the night silence, a sound blade that seemed to want to track them down personally.
"Don't look back!" ordered Joon, his voice strained by an emergency that chilled Kim-Do's blood. Follow me!"
They rushed into the darkness between the buildings, away from the lights that lit up one by one in the school. The black, silent and menacing vehicles had already blocked the main entrance. Dark, equipped silhouettes sprang from it, unfolding with military efficiency.
Kim-Do was running. He was running like he had never run in his life. Fear was an acid in her veins, but it was channeled by the sheer need to survive. His lungs were burning, his legs were flogging, but he was gritting his teeth and following Joon's agile figure who seemed to know every square inch of the shadow.
"Where are we going?" he gasped, narrowly avoiding a trash can.
"Far from the cameras. Far from the sensors, "throws Joon over his shoulder without slowing down." The system has a limited range outside the saturated areas. He sees better where there is life, where there is disorder. We're going into blind spots."
The blind spots. The expression sounded strangely in Kim-Do. Wasn't that where he had always been? A blind spot in someone else's life.
They crossed a deserted street in a flash, sneaking through a narrow, smelly alley. Joon stopped short-handedly in front of a rusty sewer look. With surprising force, he lifted the heavy plate and slid it sideways with a muffled squeak.
"There. Quickly."
Kim-Do hesitated for a split second, his gaze plunging into the damp, nauseating darkness. Then he heard hurried footsteps and muffled voices at the end of the alley. The hunters were getting closer.
He had no choice.
He let himself slide into the opening, landing with a splash in warm, viscous water that went up to his ankles. The smell assailed him, sickening, primitive. Joon followed him and placed the plate above their heads, plunging them into ink black, only disturbed by the faint glow filtering through the ventilation gates.
The silence was almost immediate, the alarm muffled by the layers of concrete and earth. Only the sound of dripping water and their breathless breaths filled the confined space.
"Are we... staying here?" whispered Kim-Do, disgusted and terrified.
"No. It's a path. The system avoids sewerage. Too many variables, too many disturbances. Follow me."
Joon activated a small flashlight attached to his wrist, projecting a narrow beam that cut out moving shadows onto the brick oozing walls. They moved forward in silence, bent in half, their steps lapping discreetly. Cold water soon pierced Kim-Do's shoes, adding a layer of discomfort to his panic.
After what seemed like an eternity, Joon stopped in front of a fork. Instead of going straight ahead, he turned to a seemingly mundane, half-submerged ventilation duct. He gave a sharp and precise blow to part of the grid, which gave way with a silent click.
"Here."
They crept inside, crawling into an even narrower, dustier space. Kim-Do felt the rust and grime stick to his hands. Eventually, he led into a small underground room, a sort of abandoned vault. The air was dry and smelled of old metal. Electrical cables hung from the ceiling, and off computer servers, covered in dust, lined their black corpses along the walls.
Joon pushed a heavy metal leaf which closed with a thud, insulating them completely.
We're safe. For now."
Kim-Do collapsed against a wall, exhausted, trembling with all his limbs. The adrenaline was subsided, giving way to deep exhaustion and full awareness of the horror of their situation.
"What happened?" he asked, his voice broken. "These guards... "The Protocol..." Omni-Corp..."
Joon sat down in front of him, his impassive face lit by the faint glow of his lamp. He seemed strangely comfortable in this underground lair.
"You've broken through," Joon explained calmly. "You've accessed protected data. The system interpreted this as an existential threat. The Contention Protocol is his immune response. An overresponse, designed for disaster scenarios."
But... you fought them. You're a regulator. You work for them!"
"I was working for the system," Joon corrected, his gaze veiling. "My role was to monitor replacements, to ensure their stability, to collect data. Don't let subjects get erased by paranoid security."
He paused, as if choosing his words carefully.
"You're not the first replacement, Kim-Do. But you're the first one who doesn't try to become a true copy. You resist. You're adapting. You're changing. You are not an anomaly in the sense of a mistake. You are an anomaly in the sense of evolution. And the system, like any established organism, is afraid of change."
Kim-Do stared at the dust on the ground. An evolution. The word was both terrifying and strangely flattering.
"What about the real Kim-Do?" he finally asked, looking up. "I saw... I felt... his last moments. It has been erased."
Joon nodded slowly. "The original Kim-Do was a volunteer candidate. Ambitious. Thirsty for power. He thought the transfer would give him a decisive advantage. But his conscience could not bear the dissonance. He struggled, became unstable, dangerous. The system deemed it irrecoverable and initiated the neutralization protocol."
"What about me?" whispered Kim-Do, fear in his stomach. "I'm irrecoverable too?"
"No," said Joon, and his gaze was intense. "You're different. You're not trying to replace him. You live together. You're learning. You're creating something new. That's why I protected you. Because you may be the only way out. Not just for you. For all of us."
For all of us. The words hovered in the confined air. Kim-Do then realized that Joon, the seemingly all-powerful regulator, was also a prisoner. A jailer who had had enough of his prison.
"What are we doing now?" asked Kim-Do, feeling a new weight, a new responsibility to add to his fear.
"Now," said Joon, getting up and approaching one of the old waiters, "we're going to use the breach you opened. We're going to learn. We will strengthen ourselves. And we'll find the others."
He connected a cable to a discreet socket on the server and connected the other end to a small device in his pocket.
"The others?"
"Others like you. The replacements who survived. Those who are hiding. Those who, perhaps, resist too." Joon issued a series of commands on his device. The screen lit up, displaying complex data streams. "The system is vast. We're not the only rats in the walls."
Kim-Do watched the lines of code scroll across the screen, reflected in Joon's eyes. He had fled school, fled his borrowed life, only to find himself in the bowels of the machine, with a renegade guard as his only ally.
He was no longer the one who survived Ganguk High.
It had become a virus. A rebel. A hope.
And as he watched Joon work, a thought arose in his mind, a thought as dangerous as it was unexpected: what if, instead of just surviving the system, he could hack it?