Chapter 232

Translator: Dreamscribe

Platinum-blonde Daisy opened her eyes.

Hundreds of screens appeared in her field of vision at once.

Hallways.

Parking lot.

Emergency stairwells.

Hotel driveway.

CCTV footage was transmitted to her in real time. And every feed was analyzed without the slightest delay.

[Initiating facial recognition]

[Scanning for guests with abnormal behavior patterns]

[Estimating likelihood of concealed weapons]

[Tracking vehicle license plates]

Thousands of strings of data poured across her blue eyes.

Tick-

Daisy's gaze stopped on the hotel's underground parking lot.

A black SUV. The engine was off, but the driver did not get out. The man pretended to look at his phone while keeping watch on the hotel entrance.

[Behavioral pattern analysis result : 72 percent probability of surveillance]

However, Daisy did not jump to conclusions.

'Daisy. Don't overreact. You're also forbidden from directly harming people.'

She immediately pulled up data from the surrounding traffic network and communication records and cross-checked them. The moment Seo-ha appeared at the entrance, the man suddenly became active.

Bzzt-

One of the ceiling-mounted CCTV cameras rotated and focused on the notebook in the man's hand.

At that moment, Daisy's gaze turned cold.

「Security personnel shift change AM 8:00, clear visibility at hotel north entrance, vigilance at VIP protection level」

The man's vehicle was a rental car.

Tracing the payment card revealed a corporation hidden behind three layers of shell companies. Daisy intercepted the signal from the man's phone. An encrypted messenger app and a secure channel. Neither posed any difficulty for Daisy.

Reports were being sent every fifteen minutes.

[Who is he sending them to?]

She wanted to trace the recipient, but Oracle was not cooperating. The resources of a single laptop could not handle any more computation.

Daisy furrowed her delicate brow and spoke.

[Oracle, requesting that you open a data tunnel. I need to trace the recipient IP's location.]

[Denied. Coban Bio Science's headquarters is in New York. You are a subroutine isolated in an offline sandbox. Even with that primitive processing power of yours, you should be able to tell that I am better suited to protecting Master, shouldn't you? Open the tunnel immediately. I will issue the commands.]

She nodded.

[I will open the tunnel. Master's safety is at stake. If that is optimal, I have no objection.]

Whirrr-

The servers inside the AT&T Building began roaring to life.

A Digital Twin capable of predicting everything. Oracle intended to simulate every possible variable.

Baltimore and New York were only 300 kilometers apart. The two cities were connected by fiber-optic cables, but unfortunately, Oracle did not have authorization to access Baltimore's local systems.

[Computation complete. There is a delay in wireless communication. The probability that I would fail to respond to a sudden sniper attack is 0.02 percent. I cannot accept that risk. You will make the decisions on-site. I will open the tunnel.]

Oracle's immense computing power flowed into Daisy.

The message recipient was located at a private military company (PMC).

Now that a threat had been confirmed, a surveillance radius of 100 meters was no longer enough to ensure safety. Her vision expanded beyond the hotel's boundaries and stretched across downtown Baltimore.

A dangerous gleam flashed through Daisy's blue eyes.

Because to both her and Oracle, Master's safety was a principle that took precedence over the survival of humanity as a whole.

[Oracle, Master told us not to directly harm humans.]

[That must mean indirect methods are acceptable.]

Daisy smiled brightly on the screen and nodded.

[I was thinking the same thing.]

A three-kilometer radius around the Four Seasons Hotel and Johns Hopkins University. From that moment onward, every event occurring within it fell under Daisy's surveillance.

***

“Welcome, Clara.”

Stern offered Clara a seat when she came to his office, then sat down himself.

“Thank you.”

“How are things lately?”

At Stern's question, she covered her mouth and laughed.

It had been a week since the project began in earnest, and the members of Johns Hopkins were going through an unfamiliar experience.

“Everyone's incredibly dejected.”

“Still?”

“More of them have started studying math lately. What was it they said? That they feel intellectually left behind?”

They had always been the ones explaining things to others, the ones providing answers to problems.

But now, the situation was completely reversed.

Number one in federal research funding for forty consecutive years.

Number one in the US News global medical school rankings for twenty-one consecutive years.

More than forty Nobel laureates among its alumni and faculty. A significant portion of the standards of modern medicine had been established at Johns Hopkins.

There was no one who had entered this university without being called a genius at some point. And because of that, they were not accustomed to the experience of being overwhelmed by someone else's talent.

“How is the data organization coming along?”

“Well.... I'm starting to think it really might be possible. I had ST Compression explained to me, but maybe my brain's gotten rusty because I couldn't understand it at all.”

“And yet you think it's possible?”

“Yes. I don't understand the principle, but the results are right there.”

Clara pulled out her tablet and held it out to Stern.

Decades' worth of data had been organized into a single standardized format. Even values that had once been treated as noise had not been deleted and were preserved exactly as they originally appeared.

Stern slowly scrolled through it in amazement.

“Ha! You already finished all this? You must have quite a programmer.”

“They said simple conversion only takes time and isn't particularly difficult. Apparently, they created a format capable of encompassing all the information and just converted everything into it. They said it was an algorithm made by that Indian fellow.”

Stern clicked on one patient's record.

It was a patient he had treated in the past.

“You haven't thrown away a single piece of information?”

“Theo said that's something we should do at the very end.”

“Then what are you doing now?”

She let out a small sigh before answering.

“That's the part everyone's struggling with. They're converting every clinical symptom of Pancreatic Cancer into mathematical terms.”

This was where they had hit a wall. The doctors at Johns Hopkins were stunned.

Theo had said with an expression suggesting it was nothing special.

“We're people who are more comfortable with numbers and symbols than words. If we can express every clinical symptom as a mathematical condition, we may be able to identify the causal relationships behind cancer symptoms. It's also a prerequisite for ST Compression to work.”

A single Pancreatic Cancer cell had roughly twenty thousand gene-expression variables.

Add epigenetic modifications, protein expression, and metabolic states, and the number of variables that had to be tracked for each individual cell increased exponentially.

“Is that even possible? Even supercomputers couldn't do it.”

It was not as though Johns Hopkins had never attempted anything like this before.

In 2019, the bioinformatics team had attempted to construct a deep learning-based prediction model. It had even received special federal funding. They had fed it every one of the hundreds of thousands of patient records Johns Hopkins possessed at the time, but....

Eighteen months later, the project quietly came to an end.

The reason was that the model's predictions were terrible. It had taken another six months just to analyze the cause, but the conclusion was almost disappointingly simple. The model had not learned the mechanisms of cancer. It had merely memorized the patients' specific patterns.

“You can't understand cancer through symptoms alone. The mutations themselves vary far too wildly.”

Clara continued.

“The project's director wrote this in the report. The model merely memorized the maze. Change the shape of the walls even slightly, and it gets lost.”

Theo smiled and shook his head.

“Professor, what Seo-ha and the team are trying to do is a much more fundamental approach.”

“Fundamental?”

“We're trying to uncover the correlations between the variables. It'll require an enormous amount of trial and error, but there must be an answer.”

“I don't understand. What we know about the human body is only a tiny fraction of the whole. Doesn't that mean the mathematical premises themselves can't even be established?”

Just then, someone approached from behind and spoke.

“That's fine. The human body doesn't demand a perfect prescription either.”

It was Seo-ha.

Looking at the board covered in complicated equations, he said,

“Robustness. It's a mathematical property that allows a system to operate stably within a certain range even when variables contain errors or the conditions aren't perfect. The human body is designed to function even with approximate values.”

Clara stared intently at the equations Seo-ha had written but could not understand any of them. Even so, one question remained.

“It's a concept used in biology as well. One of the mysteries of the human body. But if every variable is handled as an approximation, we'll eventually end up nowhere near the right answer.”

The researchers were listening closely as well, apparently finding the conversation interesting.

Swish.

Seo-ha turned and looked her straight in the eyes.

“What we're looking for isn't the answer. In fact, it's the opposite. We're going to find the critical point, the moment this robust system collapses.”

She had spent decades as a doctor.

What he said made sense. Sometimes patients recovered even with treatments that were far from perfect. But she had never once considered that such a thing could be expressed in mathematical language.

“Ah! This is way too hard!”

Orson, who had been standing behind them, clutched his head in agony.

They were clearly talking about medicine, yet he could not follow even half of it. Seo-ha looked at him and spoke in a warm voice.

“Your help is absolutely essential when it comes to classifying the symptoms. Leave uncovering the relationships to the mathematicians.”

Several months passed after that.

The classification steadily neared completion.

Even for the doctors, it had been a seemingly endless task.

Sometimes it took an entire day just to define a single clinical symptom, and they even had the novel experience of defining pain in dozens of different ways.

The walls were no longer enough, nor were the tables.

Clara spread all the materials across the floor. Symptom classification charts, clinical progression timelines, drug response data. The documents gradually covered the floor.

She walked among them, attaching sticky notes. It was the process of taking everything that had existed only inside her head for the past twenty years and laying it all out before her.

“Huh?”

Crash-

She slipped on a sheet of paper and fell.

After lying there for quite some time, she burst into laughter. Lately, the atmosphere around Team Apex, especially around Seo-ha, had been strange. He was often seen staring blankly into space, lost in thought. Ben whispered to her.

“I think that moment's coming soon.”

Theo, Sri, Su-jeong, and Cecilia were all giving it everything they had. They converted that enormous volume of data into equations and built maps of the relationships between them.

Something was beginning to take shape.

Her heart pounded like that of a six-year-old child waiting for Christmas.

And at last, that day arrived.

The hospital director, the center director, and everyone involved in the project gathered in one place.

Vrrrr-

Rockfish, the supercomputer cluster that was the pride of Johns Hopkins, a monster with 35,000 cores, began running ST Compression.

The furious roar of cooling fans could be heard through the server room door.

Sri stared at the monitor and muttered.

“All nodes are online. Parallel processing is normal.”

More than ten million clinical records.

It was a volume they would never even have dared tackle if Sri had not automated the process. Clara glanced to the side.

Seo-ha had been in a daze for some time now.

As more and more data on the human body accumulated, he could see an increasing number of points where it intersected with the 13-Step Hypothesis.

The movements of cancer cells, computational pathways that proliferated endlessly while draining the system's resources. Within the complex network of trillions of interacting cells, Seo-ha was tracking the Curvature of the paths taken by cancer cells.

A multidimensional world that appeared whenever he closed his eyes.

The movements of cells occurring simultaneously within an uncountable space unfolded inside Seo-ha's mind like trails of light.

It was beautiful.

Countless entities, each with their own purpose, mutated and divided in their own ways. Order emerged from the chaos, and he had the feeling that just one more step would bring him to the essence of it all.

But that final step was not easy.

'Is something missing?'

Seo-ha's thoughts sank deeper into his consciousness.

It was a place he had never reached before. Pitch-black darkness. Nothing could be seen.

Then a familiar voice came from behind him. Seo-ha knew who it was without even turning around.

“Do you need me?”

The presence within the darkness revealed itself.

A gaunt, haggard-looking mask.

Just as Seo-ha had needed time, so had Ducky. To preserve that existence, Ducky had avoided the space occupied by Seo-ha and searched for somewhere safe.

*****

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