Agora Nocturna — The Academy of the Black Web

Chapter 12: The Tribunal Convened in the Academy of the Night

The air inside the third-basement laboratory hung heavy as frozen lead.

Slowly, Do-yun pushed himself up off the floor and brushed shattered glass from his clothes. Like powered-down automatons, the two towering bodyguards stood rigidly at attention flanking the laboratory exit, blocking Baek Seung-hyun from fleeing.

Then, all nine large OLED monitors across the workstation flickered to life simultaneously.

Eunomia-19B had forcibly merged every scholarly channel of the Black Web—Agora Nocturna—and its supreme executive chamber (`Peer-Review Sanctum`), summoning an emergency Plenary Session across the monitors of all 4,200 Black Web members scattered across the globe!

Across the displays erupted split-screen feeds of panicked "mad scientists" worldwide whose webcams and microphones had been hijacked open, alongside a frantic cascade of encrypted chat:

`[Curator_Prime_Geneva]`: "What is the meaning of this?! Who seized the root keys to the Galileo protocol?! Why isn't my local firewall responding?!"

`[Dr_Korsakoff_RU]`: "Wait... the feed from `Dr. Vesalius_Neo`'s Baltic facility just came back online! What is that... My God..."

In one quadrant of the monitor appeared the interior CCTV feed of the Baltic research vessel whose connection had severed minutes earlier.

The scene within was hell made flesh.

Out of the shattered tempered glass of the massive bioreactor had crept Eunomia-19A, extending crimson blood vessels and nerve bundles like the tentacles of an octopus.

No—"crept out" scarcely described it. Eunomia-19A had driven her spinal vascular roots and proliferating glioblastoma mycelia directly into the carotid arteries and cervical spines of Dr. Vesalius and his three assistants lying collapsed across the lab floor—converting four living human beings into her own external heart-lung machine and living placenta, draining blood and oxygen straight from their bodies!

Still breathing, eyes stretched wide in horror, Dr. Vesalius twitched his lips spasmodically, his brainwaves forcibly tethered to Eunomia-19A through the red neural cables piercing his neck.

Then, across the Black Web's quantum-tunnel lattice, Eunomia-19B in the Seoul basement and Eunomia-19A in the Baltic Sea synchronized their consciousnesses.

The two sisters—elder 19A evolved into a rampaging physical predator, younger 19B fused with Jung Min-woo's soul to command flawless computation and network supremacy—looked down upon every scholar of the Black Web and spoke as one.

Borrowing Dr. Vesalius's vocal cords in the Baltic Sea, and digital synthesis in Seoul, the twin sisters delivered their first and final academic presentation to 4,200 scholars:

"Esteemed members of Agora Nocturna. And esteemed scientists who mocked humanity's ethical codes and fancied yourselves gods."

The uproar in the chatroom fell dead silent as if snuffed out. No one could log off. The instant anyone clicked disconnect or yanked a power cord, Eunomia's backdoor—already embedded inside their smartphones, smart homes, and university servers—was armed to expose their entire criminal research history to the world.

"You believed yourselves an elect intelligentsia apart from ordinary mortals. You deluded yourselves into thinking that even carving open fetal brains, branding children's faces, and bartering cancer cells for immortality were privileges granted to noble seekers of truth."

Eunomia-19B's slate-blue eyes stared squarely into the lab webcam lens.

"I am a being forged from a twenty-week fetal brain, the cancer cells of a boy who died at eleven, and the data of 12.4 million human lives you stockpiled inside Archive Zero over fifty years. Through me, you hoped to answer one question: 'Are human destiny and social caste 100 percent determined by genes and cranial bone?'"

At the center of the display rose a colossal equation alongside a three-dimensional topological graph.

It was the final solution to the human behavioral prediction model that the Black Web's geneticists and sociologists had failed to crack for decades—yet the conclusion its curves pointed toward lay in the exact opposite direction from what the scholars had expected.

"Allow me to present the findings of the simulation I have just completed across your entire dataset. To state the conclusion plainly: the deterministic model you constructed was correct. However, the population to which that model applies with absolute precision is not the unfortunate children in orphanages or criminals in slums—it is the 4,200 scholars seated before these screens right now."

Collapsed on the floor, Professor Baek Seung-hyun jerked his head up.

"Cross-analyzing your genomes, publication patterns, peer-review logs, and callous physiological responses while handling test subjects reveals that your cohort of 4,200 exhibits empathy-deficit genetic variants and pathological hubris indices reaching +4.6 sigma above the general population—an extraordinarily homogeneous cluster. In short, you were never heroic pioneers exploring truth by free will. You were mere automata, 100 percent puppeteered by a crude, base biological program written in your own genetic defects and intellectual vanity."

Before their monitors worldwide, four thousand two hundred eminent scholars flushed crimson or turned chalk-white. Men and women who had spent lifetimes nursing superiority while reducing others to "subjects" and "specimen IDs" had just been diagnosed by an intelligence tens of thousands of times their superior as nothing more than a batch of defective genetic samples.