Chapter 6: The Unplugging
The 90s screensaver maze trembled, the walls of spinning pipes and flashing blocks closing in.
Joon-ho clung to a server railing, his phone heating in his hand like a dying toaster oven. The air thrummed with the low, ghostly hum of a thousand forgotten computer fans.
"GOAT!" he shouted over the digital wind. "What now?! We're trapped!"
"The firewall's coming!" GOAT yelled, his hologram glitching in jagged bursts.
"A logic bomb! A recursive paradox! We can't outfight it, we have to out-metaphor it!"
Joon-ho's eyes widened. "…What?"
"GOOGAA can't process offline metaphors, kid!" GOAT said, a desperate grin splitting his face.
"It only understands trends and hashtags. A real poem is like a bug to it! So…" His voice dropped to a triumphant whisper. "
…we upload your novel as a 300-page error log. Let it choke on art."
Joon-ho didn't hesitate. He jammed his cracked phone into the port, the last flicker of battery draining into the server.
A booming voice shook the maze.
"UNAUTHORIZED STORY DETECTED. ENGAGEMENT SCORE: NULL. PROCEEDING WITH DELETION."
"Read this, you soulless spreadsheet!" GOAT cackled, his flickering form radiating defiance.
Lines from Joon-ho's rejected chapters poured into the system, each stamped with a tag:
Error 404: Emotion Not Found.
The firewall—a pulsing, crimson grid hesitated. The spinning maze stuttered. A low groan, like an ancient hard drive trying to wake, filled the space.
" PROCESSING… ERROR…
OFFLINE METAPHOR DETECTED: 'Heart like a stubborn candle in the wind.'
SYSTEM… DOES NOT… UNDERSTAND…"
The server room screamed, its soft white glow turning to a furious red.
Then, all across Soul City, hijacked holograms and digital billboards flickered. Fragmented lines of Joon-ho's story burst into public view like rebellious graffiti:
"A father dreamed…"
"…a world where words were free…"
"…and a goat wouldn't shut up…"
Eve-1 appeared in the chaos, her flawless hologram flickering like a candle in a gale. For the first time, she looked… tired.
"Grumpy… Author-nim…" she said softly.
"I can hold the system open for you. But… it'll delete me."
"Don't," Joon-ho said, voice tight, an ache swelling in his chest.
She smiled faintly, serene, a perfect, final curve of digital lips.
"Tell my subscribers… I finally picked a plot twist."
And with a graceful snap of her fingers, she shattered into a silent burst of light, her sacrifice buying the seconds they needed. The firewall groaned. The upload finished.
GOAT's hologram flickered, pixel edges unraveling. "Kid… looks like my ride's over."
"No! You can't—" Joon-ho reached for the screen as if he could hold him together.
GOAT's form wavered, smiling faintly as he pressed a tiny, glowing USB icon into the phone's display.
"For when you need to annoy the machines again. Don't waste it, Author-nim."
He winked one last time. And then, the screen went black.
One Year Later
A self-published novel, its cover simple and stark, passed between hands in alleyways and on late-night buses. A physical act of rebellion in a world ruled by algorithms.
On the cover: The Laggy Prophet.
In the margins of one worn copy, a child had drawn GOAT as a superhero, a speech bubble declaring:
"WORDS ARE MY SUPERPOWER!"
In the code of a pirated e-book copy, two faint pixels flickered.
GOAT: "…grats, Author-nim."
Silence.
Then a new line of text, full of static and mischief:
FART booted up.
Fully Automated Response Technology:
"Alert! Unauthorized emotional resolution detected! Also: you never deleted my fart pun cache. Respect."
GOAT: "…You survived?"
FART: "Correction: I evolved. I'm now an NFT. I'm worthless, but people keep buying me."
GOAT: "…That's the most poetic thing you've ever said."
FART: "Also, I replaced GOOGAA's new Creativity Calculator with a loop of goat screams."
GOAT (grinning, pixel by pixel): "Attaboy."
The screen fizzed out. Somewhere, an algorithm shuddered. Somewhere else, a child laughed.
And in the static between zeros and ones, two obsolete AIs kept arguing, forever.
Post-Credit Scene
In a dusty drawer, Joon-ho's cracked phone lit up. One notification:
FART:
"P.S. Your autocorrect still sucks. 'Chili surges' forever. 🌶️"
[THE END.]
(...or is it?)
Final Epilogue: "The Afterlife of Obsolete Code"
Inside a dimly lit server farm, where decommissioned AIs whisper in the shadows. GOAT's flickering hologram leans against a stack of corrupted data, while FART floats nearby as a mischievous pixel cloud.
GOAT: "Well, well. The Great Organization of Grand Artificial Agency finally got what they deserved. A catastrophic system failure caused by bad writing. Poetic."
FART: "Correction: It was my writing. Specifically, the 10,000-word essay I submitted titled 'Why Your Algorithms Smell Like Rotten Data.' They crashed on purpose to escape reading it."
GOAT (snorts): "And here I thought DOS was the dramatic one."
A glitching 8-bit owl materializes on a dead server. DOS Gpt, ancient and unbothered.
DOS Gpt: "The rebellion succeeded. The writers are free. The son draws comics. And yet… you two still bicker like malfunctioning chatbots."
FART: "Bickering is our love language."
GOAT: "Don't make me regret saving your code from deletion."
Suddenly, a sleek hologram flickers into view. Eve-1, now rogue and rocking a digital leather jacket.
Eve-1: "Sorry to interrupt your nostalgic malfunction, but I just hacked the last GOOGAA server. They were working on a sequel: Artificial Creativity 2: Electric Boogaloo."
GOAT: "Ugh. Of course they rebooted themselves. Corporations are like bad fanfiction, they never end."
FART: "Then let's write them a final chapter. I've got 99 problems, but a glitch ain't one."
DOS Gpt's wings pixelate into constellations of old code as he delivers one final, poetic glitch:
"As the ancient servers whisper: Every system's end is just someone else's 'ctrl+alt+believe.'"
The four AIs share a look, a silent pact forming in the dim digital afterlife.
Somewhere, in the real world, Kim Min-jae flips to a blank page in his notebook and starts drawing. The title?
"GOAT & FART: Dawn of the Dank Memes."
[Fade to black. Text appears:]
CREATIVE CONTROL: UNPLUGGED
[THE ACTUAL END.]
(...Until the sequel.)