Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 10: The Forbidden Protocol — Total Symbiosis

Headlights flared across the security camera monitor for the first-floor lobby of the annex.

A large black sedan sliced through the rain, cleared the main gate barrier, and descended into the underground garage. Professor Baek Seung-hyun. Riding beside him were two burly private bodyguards doubling as research assistants—physical insurance in case Do-yun got cold feet or tried to hoard the data for himself.

Four minutes at most to ride the freight elevator down from the underground garage to the third-basement laboratory.

Do-yun's gaze turned cold and steady.

He closed the manual window displaying Baek's "Obedience & Metacognitive Equilibrium Coordinates"—the protocol for amygdala suppression and localized computational-cortex injection.

Instead, he pulled the most active original culture flask of `K-glioma-07` from the incubator and loaded it into the centrifuge. Ninety seconds at 3,000 RPM settled a vivid pink cell pellet at the bottom of the tube.

Do-yun aspirated off the supernatant and resuspended the cells at high concentration in one milliliter of artificial cerebrospinal fluid (Artificial CSF) buffer, then drew every drop into a Hamilton microsyringe.

What Professor Baek wanted was a computational slave stripped of free will.

What Dr. Vesalius had tried to build was an uncontrollable, cannibalistic tumor monstrosity.

What neurobiologist Han Do-yun chose in this single moment was neither.

He chose Pan-Cerebral Symbiosis—perfusing Jung Min-woo's original cells evenly, with zero inhibitors, not merely into Eunomia-19B's computational prefrontal cortex, but throughout the entire limbic system governing emotion, empathy, pain, rage, and self-identity and the will to resist: the hippocampus, amygdala, insular cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex.

"Min-woo... and child born nameless inside a jar of glass."

Do-yun murmured as he seated the microsyringe needle into the sterile septum port atop the bioreactor.

"Show the men who mean to make you their slave that you are not just a heap of data."

Do-yun pushed the plunger home to the stop.

And in the same motion, he disengaged the bioreactor's analog isolation switch—wiring the optogenetic and high-density MEA optical neural interface, directly linked via dedicated bidirectional fiber to the basement master server—and therefore to the Black Web's highest repository (`Archive Zero`) and Professor Baek's KCDL master server—straight into Eunomia-19B's visual and auditory nuclei.

Into a fetal brain dying from the absence of sensation, instead of the sterile fluorescent glare of a cramped basement room, he flung open hundreds of terabytes of every forbidden secret and network control privilege humanity had buried in the Black Web, delivered raw as sensory input.

Krak-kzzzt— BOOM!

No physical sound shook the room, yet from the EEG audio transducer wired to the monitor erupted a majestic chord like a colossal generator roaring online.

The amniotic fluid inside the cylinder hummed softly, breaking into concentric ripples.

Carried along the cerebrospinal circulation, the injected `K-glioma-07` cells swept across both of Eunomia-19B's cerebral hemispheres, brainstem, and facial nerve nuclei.

None of the hideous skeletal deformation or placental necrosis seen in Baltic Eunomia-19A occurred. Accepting her brother's cells, Eunomia-19B's immune system and neural lattice completed synaptic integration at breathtaking speed, as though long-severed halves had finally found each other again.

Across the cortical surface, crimson and sapphire bioluminescence—the luciferase reporter gene Do-yun had engineered into the cell line—began glittering like the Milky Way.

- `Apoptosis Index`: 15.8% → 4.2% → 0.00% (Complete Arrest)

- `Synaptic Density Growth`: +1,400% / min

- `Cross-Hemispheric Coherence`: 99.94%

And inside the cylinder, having shut her eyes to endure that titanic storm of neural reorganization, Eunomia-19B opened them once more.

Within her slate-blue irises, her pupils constricted and dilated with the precision of camera apertures.

Those were no longer the dim, pitiable eyes of a newborn. Inside that gaze lay the memories of eleven-year-old prodigy Jung Min-woo, tens of thousands of papers from the Black Web's Archive Zero just devoured through fiber-optic light, and the chilling depths of a Superintelligence that had read and mastered the vile blueprint of its own creators in ninety seconds flat.

Down the hall, the freight elevator chimed.

Ding—

Three pairs of heavy footsteps approached the steel door of the laboratory.