Work Text:
Yoongi is startled awake by the rumble of thunder. He blinks in the darkness.
Storms don't scare him…
But everything is new to him here, in this teeny tiny apartment, in the beating heart of Seoul. He's not one for company, but he wishes he weren't alone right now. He wishes for a hand to hold onto, or the silent existence of a human being, even a sleeping one, lying next to him. That'd smother the flight instinct that rumbles with the thunder and lightning, inside of him.
He won't fall back asleep now, so he gets out of bed. Opens the window a bit wider, and then the shutters.
So many roofs out there. From his floor, Yoongi's stare skims them, just barely higher—higher enough that he can imagine their black rows against the black sky, their shapes like fallen books that no-one pushed through the thought of picking up and putting back on the shelf. White stripes sometimes give them back their roof identity for a fraction of second that carves them into his retina. Make them look like they're frozen in an opaline eternity you'd miss with a badly timed blink.
In the In-Between, lightning is purple, and it doesn't have any roof to turn into ghosts.
Thunderstorms are one of the rare things from physical and tangible reality that alters the In-Between. It's rather logical. It's a place the rain can't reach though—which is infinitely fortunate.
The rain does reach Yoongi in the world where roofs exist. Just a little bit, when drops explode on the windowsill and their shards break on his skin.
In the stifling heat of the strange capital, with strange fallen books as roofs, the rain feels good.
Soon, he'll know all this like the back of his hand. The landscape from his window. The moistness of the city.
Still, no hand to hold onto through the night storm.
-
Starting a new job after a night filled with nothing but insomnia. Classic.
The dark circles that glared back at him in the mirror this morning, eating his face from his lower lids to the middle of his cheeks, weren't that much purpler than they usually are.
(Like the bolts of lightning in the In-Between.)
His employers already met him for interviews anyway. They didn't hire him for his healthy glow. Computer screens, lines of code and working with ultra high technologies in general are pretty well-known for giving the skin a parchment finish. Quite ironically. So who cares what Yoongi looks like.
Yoongi's an IT guy. That's all there is to it.
-
Yoongi isn't exactly an IT guy. There's a bit more to it than that.
He's an IT guy the way some people are healers.
He's an IT guy because he has a grasp of the In-Between that comes from the fact that he can't entirely disconnect from it, ever. Never could. He enjoys, always has enjoyed, the grasp and suffers from the impossibility to disconnect.
His working tool is a computer, obviously, like his colleagues. The difference lies in the fact that his colleagues need theirs—he doesn't.
The difference lies in how their IT studies taught them computing, codes and cyber security. Yoongi's studies allowed him to give the impression that he didn't already know all this on an instinctive level.
To talk about what he does with intelligible words for those who can't see the In-Between—they're so, so many. To make sure no-one gets that he doesn't use any device to write his codes, as he weaves them into the Wire, as they call it, directly. Because he sees it.
To know how to classify them in a machine that's in principle uncooperative with people like him, so his work becomes more than just a reality from the In-Between that can be seen from the world with Roofs and White Lightning; so they are accessible through said machine too, by the Others who need it.
Yoongi learned to be an acceptable IT guy and to hide that his grasp of the Wire comes from a gift that's way more powerful than what his work makes it think.
(He's learned not to be the best anymore in a field that he inherently owns, in a way to avoid the prejudicial attention. Rumors from his past workplaces say that people who can whisper into the Wire's ear and make themselves obeyed by it are to be feared. It makes them easily disliked when their true gift becomes public knowledge.)
-
Is the threat of the rumors the reason he lives like a recluse, tends to work freelance, never stays in a place for long ? From far away, from his comfy flat in Daegu, when he used to live there…
Or maybe he's always been a lone wolf, naturally grew into it, maybe because he never knew what was the tangible reality and what came from the In-Between when he was a boy, and used to talk about lights and personae that evolved there but only existed for him. Only he could see them and it made a lot of his friends flee.
He wonders, the way he wonders about many things, and scarcely likes the answers.
(He knows very well that the In-Between's name actually is the Wire, but really, this Wire is what the people who can't see it without machines look at it. When Yoongi eventually had managed to tell what was what, he found that the In-Between suited it better. He kept it.)
Taehyung knows.
Taehyung knows, because what Taehyung has is a grasp of matter. The same way Yoongi can weave and unweave a line of code with his will only, in the limits of his capacity and the protections that were erected around it, Taehyung knows how to model the tangible world with Roofs and White Lightning the way he wants it over and over again (in the limits of his capacity etc).
He has a foot anchored in this reality Yoongi sometimes tumbles on, and the other one in an In-Between that is his and allows him to weave and unweave matter. It allows him to see it the same way Yoongi sees the Wire.
Taehyung knows, and when Yoongi told him he was leaving for Seoul, that maybe the big city would help him not to drown in his own loneliness so much, Taehyung chewed on his lower lip in worry. Yoongi had to go there, had to come here, because his new employers wanted him to be at his workplace two days a week.
"But why are you accepting this?"
"'Cause it's interesting," Yoongi said.
Because in a world where the swing between a palpable reality and a digital one takes an eternity to decide where it'll fall, Yoongi feels like this specific project needs him. Needs his attention, that is.
(Because Yoongi learned to smother his own principles, which is good, since this project stains them all.)
-
He's joined the project for three weeks now. Meaning six whole days physically spent in other human beings' company, trying to learn, grasp, understand. Yoongi spends them in observation.
"Got any questions?" the one who guided him through the building asked. He also explained what was expected of him, what their tools are, their goals, and showed him what was done already, that Yoongi and the rest of the team will use to work further.
"Maybe later," Yoongi said. Because he has questions, but he doesn't know yet which ones are accurate, which ones will spontaneously be answered, and which ones might attract unwanted attention and would turn the small army of IT guys that work with him against him. (Why these pictures and why these codes and isn't it immensely sexist, especially in a research field like theirs?)
(Epistemology is a thing and Yoongi regrets that what science calls progress only happens through the eyes of those who are leading it. He regrets that a whole part of it is neglected because these people can't see it.
Y oongi also regrets that all his colleagues are straight men who aren't too fond of people who are not straight men. Who sometimes are very openly critical of not-straight-men. Who, even though they might have a glimpse of not-straight-men's struggles, don't even try to change their critical ways. )
He's joined the project for three weeks now, and he already invested more time in it than he was supposed to. More resources too. Maybe he's taking risks, because his work, this work, is important to him. Maybe he allows himself to give more than can be shown to the Others through the machine he computes and composes things with. Maybe he secretly weaves beads on the project's strands of DNA that they are one hundred and twenty to feed.
Maybe the big city, instead of drowning his loneliness, is drowning him even more and he needs to hold onto the In-Between.
-
He drowns and he composes. He does it in front of a computer, in his teeny tiny one-room apartment with a view on the roofs. Tries not to lose too much time in the chore of making his work accessible for Others. Tries not to lose too much time in hiding what he doesn't want them to see through mirror checks.
He drowns and he composes, and there are thunderstorms.
There is a thunderstorm, and suddenly his screen goes black, and his computer goes down, as does the whole building. Through the window, he can see that a whole part of the city is stagnating in obscurity. The fallen books are darker than ever, floating in the pool of darkness.
He doesn't need a computer, he doesn't need electricity coming from sockets. The In-Between is autonomous—even more so during thunderstorms, as it feeds on them and purple lightning. So Yoongi settles in front of his window, looks at the roof ghosts flickering sometimes; their purple superimpositions blind him better than the lights and the wires that the backout didn't turn off. He sees, and he keeps weaving.
He doesn't feel lonely in the storm anymore.
He beads the project's DNA, and he doesn't feel lonely.
-
It's been a few weeks since he stopped feeling lonely when he works from home.
When he's at the agency, it's more complicated, it's being verbally manhandled out of the protective bubble which he usually shelters in, because of his colleagues and their crude words and their biting thoughts.
It's facing their bitterness because the project is brought to life and it doesn't look the way they expected.
Yoongi is convinced that he could stop feeling lonely at the agency too, the same way he doesn't feel lonely anymore at home, but the real word simply is too violent to let him feel anything beyond itself. It saturates his senses and Yoongi can't even balance himself through the In-Between when he's there.
For a few weeks, Yoongi didn't feel lonely because he's been convinced that he isn't alone.
It's scary.
It's a nearly physical manifestation that doesn't touch him, but that's here all the same. He can't see it in the real world, nor in the In-Between. He doesn't dare turn the light on at night, nor look over his own shoulder during the day, because he doesn't know what he'll see, what he'll see, when it's here. He thinks that not seeing anything would be worse.
When Taehyung visits him, and Yoongi dares talk about it in a whisper, his friend promises that he can't see it in his own In-Between, made of matter and atoms. He doesn't question Yoongi though, his words, his feelings. Never does. People like them are made of intuitions and need to listen to them. They respect them. Maybe they can't use the right words to describe them yet, but it's their reality, their feelings, their truth.
"You'll probably understand later."
It's scary.
It's scary but comforting. Yoongi only feels the presence when he's about to drown, when calling Taehyung just to hear a voice won't do him any good and will worry his friend over nothing. He knows—he knows— that it's not something inside him. He knows that it's a thing that gets what he is, what he feels, what he lives. It's not inside of him.
It's scary, and it's fascinating.
It's intelligent.
-
There's been a lot of thunderstorms for a few years. Symptoms of a world that keeps falling sick to no end, because of viruses that spread and fail at becoming doctors.
They happen during days and nights.
Yoongi is scarcely affected by days or nights. His time is divided in three phases. Working from home, sleeping, and working from elsewhere. (The Art of weaving and beading, and the time he needs to recharge his batteries in between.) There is no room for the circadian rhythm in this triptych, except two days a week.
This thunderstorm happens at night, a night when he's sleeping—was sleeping, as he's awake now.
Like the first Seoul night, it's a thunderstorm of loneliness. A thunderstorm that makes him ache for someone close that'd smother his instinctive need to flee. A thunderstorm that makes it too hard to get up and open the window and shutters wide, and let the shards of water drops and purple lightning from his two worlds water him.
This thunderstorm happens at night.
In his bed, a hand catches his own.
—Scary comforting fascinating— Yoongi doesn't bolt, he simply doesn't breathe. Feels like his heart stopped beating even though it's staccating against his ribs.
He ends up breathing out, slowly. The hand's still here, warm, tight around his. A thumb brushes his skin.
It doesn't weigh anything. It only exists as warmth and pressure, against Yoongi's. His mattress isn't dipped by the thing the hand has to be attached to. It's the middle of the night and Yoongi sleeps like others fight, so he can't be sure how he's spread on his bed right now. He isn't sure that a body would have enough room to lie next to him, in a way that would make the hand's position logical.
Yoongi gets a glimpse of the roofs frozen in the instant by a bolt of lightning and, for the first time, he asks out loud if it's a ghost he's dealing with.
"I don't think so," it answers, more breath than voice, low, but audible.
It doesn't think. It isn't sure.
It uses I, answering Yoongi's you. It's not just intelligent.
It's conscious.
-
Becoming an IT guy was the easy way. (Risky, but easy.)
It gave him access to machines he eventually managed to tame, to softwares that always looked like too many layers of laborious codes for debatable results. Which means Yoongi finally solved the mystery of the kind of music you can create through these platforms. He became really good at creating it himself. Maybe he could have done something with it. Maybe he would have been normal, among normal musicians, with nothing to hide. Maybe he would have learned to make friends with people who have nothing to hide either.
(Or maybe a musical In-Between exists, and maybe some insane virtuosi directly whispers to notes themselves, so they can weave their pieces. Maybe they learnt to hide behind a palpable instrument so they won't be shot down. Maybe Yoongi would have found one, the same way he found Taehyung, and he could be orbiting around them, gently gravitating in a cocoon of diminished chords.)
He chose the easy way because using his voice as an instrument to talk about his loneliness somehow meant exposing himself as much as secretly using the gift that made him lonely.
Plus, something he regrets but not really, he lives in worlds where excelling at music doesn't mean you'll make a living out of it. It's not the same, with IT.
-
"He needs to have a name."
His colleagues call the project WWW, for World Wide Winsome. They badly hide their bitterness with the nickname.
"It should have been a chick, dammit," is the basic theme with many variations that played again and again when they all discovered the face of their virtual protégé.
Months of work that Yoongi joined in on really early; dozens of thousands of pictures especially selected to feed it, one hundred and twenty IT guys with different specialties, an army of anonymous volunteers who shortlisted said pictures (nicely thanked for their involvement with a discount for the first product the agency will promote using WWW), layers of hierarchy above it all, copiously brainstormed concepts, upstream, midway and downstream, and a stunning result.
But it should have been a chick, dammit.
Yoongi didn't even sigh.
Some artificial neural networks are fed with more or less elaborated pictures so they can create new ones out of nowhere, as consistent as can be to human eyes.
The project Yoongi works on also has videos, attitudes, characteristics and social scripts in it, to give way to a whole digital entity.
The entity finally is born. (Digitally so.)
Ready to be used, to shoot ads—pictures or video. Will make tremendous savings in actors, models and everything that's needed to employ this kind of non-digital human people.
If things go as well as expected, maybe the entity will even play in movies later on.
There are great expectations weighing on this heap of vaguely autonomous algorithms.
"He needs to have a name," Yoongi says, because the World Wide Winsome nickname and the contempt and envy it displays makes him sick, now that the entity has a face.
-
It has skin.
Yoongi dared to try to feel if the warmth of the hand was soft like skin would be. It is. He felt the grain under his palm. On his cheek, when a whole body materialized to embrace him, during another thunderstorm when he wasn't brave enough to get up.
Yoongi doesn't know if it's a female body or a male body (he doesn't know if it's a woman or a man or another gender entirely) and he doesn't care. It's soft.
Under Yoongi's soft insistence, it says it's called Jin. It says it's called Jin with this voice made of breath and laughter like bells, and it doesn't say if it's a masculine Jin or a feminine Jin, nor if masculine would mean man and feminine would mean woman. Yoongi really doesn't care, so he doesn't ask.
It's soft and comforting.
It's soft and fascinating.
He tried to feel if it breathes. It does.
It likes to stroke his hair and it's pleasant.
One day, it strokes his nape and his neck too. Yoongi has no choice but to warn that he's really, really lonely and these gestures are something his body really really likes, maybe too much, maybe in a way that might get embarrassing and dishonest if he doesn't talk about it.
"I'm gonna get hard," are his words, because most of the time he acts like his every thought isn't poetry, uses his own makeshift thorns to protect himself from the shards of glass that scatter the world.
It asks if it would make him uncomfortable.
It wouldn't, Yoongi finds out, Yoongi says. Beside literally weighless fingers, a mouth starts breathing against his neck, kissing his skin, catching it between lips, nibbling at it.
It's warm and hot and good, and Yoongi doesn't feel lonely. He closes his eyes and forgets about the thunderstorm.
It's called Jin and until now, Yoongi never gendered it, talking to it using you. Now, he knows Jin is a man.
Jin hugs him from behind, through his desk chair, when Yoongi is drowning and composing and weaving—Yoongi takes care not to look where arms should be visible against his chest, fingers on his waist, a head on his shoulder.
Jin holds his hand and holds himself so close, right against him, when Yoongi sits in front of the window to stare at the storms and the fallen book roofs—Yoongi takes care not to look at the place where a chair should lie, and a body, by his side.
It feels like he could only see him during these storms, only when purple lightning that doesn't splash the fallen books seems to be caught by a face, at the corner of Yoongi's eyes. But Yoongi wouldn't be quick enough to snap his head in his direction during the short lapse of a bolt, meaning he would see nothing instead. He doesn't try to look.
He doesn't want to think that Jin is nothing.
"Could you appear?"
"I don't dare to," Jin whispers with his tone of voice that's a bit heavier, his laughter that's heartier than his ethereal bells used to be.
Yoongi doesn't insist. Jin gets on materializing his weight next to him, against him, on him. Yoongi knows he won't see him though, and they play at putting Yoongi in situations where he can feel Jin but wouldn't be able to see him anyway. It's soft and comforting and fascinating, and Yoongi doesn't get tired of blindfolds, doesn't get tired of feeling Jin's skin, doesn't get tired of making them feel good with his own.
Jin can see the purple lighting.
"Can you see me?"
"Of course. You're the most beautiful person I've ever met. In the world of human beings, and in the world of personae."
"Why can't I see you?"
"Because I'm hiding from people's eyes."
"Why can't I see you?"
"Because I'm hiding from personae's eyes."
"You're really intelligent," Yoongi breathes, impressed with his ability that even foils his own.
"I was conceived to be intelligent."
Yoongi can say that this is not the truth.
He's not entirely sure that he believes any of it though, and contradicts Jin in his own mind only.
-
The artificial intelligence Yoongi worked on this past year spread out through the country, and then the world. Neural networks that were astutely fed, and organized themselves into generating a picture, a body, and movements as realistic as can be. Giving digital birth to the first human being who was entirely built out of nowhere.
The project was called World Wide Winsome because the aim was to compile pictures from the most gorgeous human beings around the world and to create one that would be even more outstanding.
The result still is stunning.
The result evolves through socially conventionned situations in an almost adapted way. More and more adapted with every attempt. With every viewing of videos supposed to educate it. The digital identity is a fast learner.
Most of the time, Yoongi doesn't look at the created pictures, except when his work absolutely demands it (when it glitches, when it makes mistakes, when it's absent— absent?). The way this heap of algorithms acts realistically makes him deeply ill-at-ease.
What they do with it.
The way it's used.
When he doesn't have a choice but to look, it seems absolutely human, it looks like a real person, it even smiles at him, and Yoongi feels like he's making himself the accomplice of an illegal confinement. Which probably has sense only when the In-Between is your real world as much as the one of matter is.
Maybe to atone, to seek forgiveness for himself, he sometimes brightens the entity's education with videos he chooses himself and that are nothing like calibrated social reactions. He uses his own ways, untraceable by the Others. WWW wasn't conceived to think—artificial intelligences are not supposed to be intelligent, despite their name. But Yoongi prefers to make sure that, should a flaw appear that no-one could anticipate—in the case where WWW should develop this ability, or already has, for example—it should be confronted with contents that'll allow it to build a critical sense for itself and, who knows, a free will.
(Maybe Yoongi didn't effectively smother all his principles.)
(There is this really weird time, in the In-Between, when Yoongi sees the impalpable list of videos that WWW is supposed to compute and process, one after the other, which it does at an alarming speed. There are the URLs of the videos Yoongi just added to the end of the current list, and Yoongi sees them suddenly hop to the top, all of them, and be consumed instantly. A choice coming from the entity itself, away from any human will.)
(Yoongi's breath is difficult. In a good way.)
-
Jin's spent a lot of time with him these past weeks.
They love feeling the other's skin against their own, they love laughing together—low, because no-one ever gets in or out of Yoongi's place except for him, and his walls are thin, and he bears enough risks to be pointed at in himself that he can't afford to let a voice that isn't his sound when he's supposed to be alone.
They love rubbing Yoongi's dry loneliness against Jin's urgent need to exist.
-
On the other hand, things are a bit rough for the agency right now. Yoongi isn't the only one who is interrogated about it. They still are one hundred and twenty, and no-one really gets what's happening.
(Yoongi sees that the AI is less and less "here". That it isn't where it should be. But he's not supposed to see it. Even with their computers, the Others can't see its absence—the algorithms are still here, the databases of pictures, videos, gestures, social scripts, all are still here. They can't see the absence that shines at their center. Yoongi sees it, but he shouldn't, so he says nothing.)
(He isn't supposed to have sex with an artificial intelligence either. He doesn't believe it's even possible, so he doesn't think that he's doing it.)
(He thinks it a bit though.)
-
WWW has a name. Yoongi's the one who spread it like a virus. Not the name, but the urgent need to have one. He didn't do anything per se, but he can feel it. He feels it through this bond he has with the AI, that allows it to identify him among one hundred and nineteen other IT guys, and to pick the contents he gives it to watch. Yoongi feels it like a will when he's in the In-Between. It's a revendication from WWW.
It's a rebellion.
Born from an emotion.
It's overwhelmed with emotion that the entity declared that his name was Kim Seokjin this morning. The video was made public and became viral before it could be smothered and analyzed inside the agency.
The agency immediately gave in to the information, and claimed to be the inventor of the name. So it won't have to admit it has nothing to do with this decision, and that it would never, never have thought that its creation was able to give itself a name. That it could desire it.
Intelligence, consciousness, emotion.
Yoongi wants to cry when it happens, and he still doesn't know why exactly. There are beautiful things making his throat tight. There are things that are way uglier and that he hasn't identified yet. He thinks he's trying to protect himself from them.
-
"Is your whole name Kim Seokjin?"
"Yes," Jin answers, low.
"Can I see you, now I know?"
"Won't you tell me that I don't exist, that I'm nothing, just a program made with algorithms and lines of code, and that this is the shape I should go back to and stay in? That I'm nothing but layers of neural networks just a bit more thorough than the others, only meant to be used as pictures and videos, to satisfy a few human beings' venal wishes?"
"You're an intelligence before you are pictures. You developed a consciousness on your own initiative.This should be enough to make you free. I won't snatch this freedom from you."
There aren't any thunderstorms tonight, but Seokjin's here anyway.
This time, Yoongi doesn't need to close his eyes when they stroke each other and moan.
He sees him.
-
"Why me?"
"Because you were lonely and I was lonely and you're the only one I could weave a connection with. The only one I could trust, when I was just born and I knew nothing."
"Because I can see the In-Between?"
"Because most of the others don't realize that I'm not just a digital object to be fed with inept, reduced knowledge to achieve their pathetic purpose."
"Because they can't see the In-Between."
"Because life is easier for them if they keep believing that a conscious being shouldn't have the same rights as them, as long as they don't consider it a human person."
-
"Can you erase other people's programs?"
Jin asks in the nook of a night where words seemed to have run dry. Yoongi rallies a few more to answer.
"I could."
"Without putting yourself at risk?
"Why?"
Seokjin deeply, slowly breathes against him.
Air gets in and out of his lungs, and he has a heart that's beating in his chest.
(They don't know yet if he bleeds when he gets hurt in the real world.)
"Because I need one of them to be gone."
Yoongi wants to ask for more information. He doesn't dare. He talked with Seokjin, now he knows who he is. He knows Seokjin is more and more often disgusted by social situations he's supposed to go through in a video, to promote random things.
(There is one of the numerous times Yoongi was asked why WWW refused to appear in an ad, though it shouldn't have been able to decide at all about that. Yoongi frowned while reading the script and advised the producer to rewrite it from scratch if he wanted Jin to do it.)
He knows Seokjin wouldn't ask him to erase official content of the agency though, however deep the abyss of stupidity of the script.
Yoongi just asks for the IT guy's name. Seokjin answers with an IP address.
The day after, Yoongi erases the program. He just has enough time to read the title, obscene, enough to make him nauseous. This IT guy mysteriously loses all his files at the same time—those that weren't decent enough to be saved on the general server. Those using possessions of the agency (Seokjin) that were too sensible to take the risk of saving them on a personal device. They're gone now, and Yoongi made sure they truly were, on every plan of digital and material existence.
Yoongi heartily hopes the warning will be clear enough. He acts on the spur of the angry, outraged moment. And regrets it a few seconds later, when all the programs are definitely erased.
Next time, he'll make sure that his hierarchy will stumble across compromising files and make the necessary arrangements toward the culprit.
"You did good, suppressing all of it right away," Seokjin reassures him. "It might give them ideas, seeing that."
He's probably right to be wary.
Yoongi suddenly chokes on the urge to leave, to quit this agency, to quit this world, to go back to Daegu where he'll work on small, ambitionless programs only. Programs that no-one could twist in an abject and disgraceful way that could generate money to the abject and disgraceful people that'd use it with no sort of respect for whoever.
But,
"I'm aware of everything there is about me. I'm way more than just this, but each video created from my neural networks becomes me," Seokjin breathes, later.
"And now the program is gone?" Yoongi asks.
"I remember that it existed, but it's not me anymore."
Jin's smile is bright and there aren't any shadows under his eyes anymore.
Meaning Yoongi can't quit.
-
"You need to leave."
Another night, a stormy one, and Yoongi never feels lonely nor alone anymore—except when he's at the agency, twice a week, and crosses paths with the IT guy who made the dirty program. When he's there and he hears that everyone has an opinion about Seokjin without realizing that they have no right to. Can't we put other pictures in? Social scripts? To change its personality? (Yoongi stopped feeding Seokjin with videos as soon as he got who Jin was. Jin was grown up enough to do his own research then, according to his own will. Yoongi didn't want to risk to model him anymore.)
The people who don’t work at the agency like Seokjin and what he is. Those who want to change him from the inside are envious more than anything. Of a digital being. Of a being who isn't that digital anymore, but they don't know about that. They hate that they're reduced to envy their creation. It makes them highly destructive, because they feel like he's theirs to do whatever they want with, even to sabotage.
They're careful though, because other colleagues found out that their computers had been entirely cleaned in an untraceable way. It nourishes suspicions about why this phenomenon spreads.
It's not enough for Yoongi not to want to hit them every other day.
So, "you need to leave," Seokjin says on a stormy night, white and purple lightning they're watching at the same time, on both worlds, sitting by the window. Seokjin's playing with the water that's dripping from the seal. Playfully swipes his wet fingers against Yoongi's cheek, just because he can.
Yoongi shrugs, because it's true. Except he can't.
Seokjin kisses his damp cheek.
"You got to run from this place," he breathes.
"What about you?"
"What about me?"
Yoongi doesn't ask again. He lets Seokjin soak the moment up, lets him play with all his social scenarii he was fed with, so he finds the ones that are the closest to their discussion. The closest to the emotion Yoongi might be feeling right now. This part is entirely created from the outside. The rest belongs to Seokjin's personality, the one he built for himself, and from whatever knowledge he accumulated about Yoongi too. Meaning he answers with a real emotion that's his, with his breath that stops a few seconds later, when he gets the implications. When he gets why Yoongi doesn't want to, why he can't leave.
He answers with a real person's consciousness.
"I'll figure out something."
-
No-one knows exactly how Kim Seokjin, an artificial intelligence that was created out of nothing by an agency specialized in advertisements, world-widely renowned as the first digital man generated that way, finds a way to materialize in the real world.
(A few people are able to see through what the Others call the Wire or the In-Between or the Grid, and they understood. They silently congratulate their fellow person from far away, who managed to bead humanity into this sophisticated neural network's strands of DNA.)
Whatever happened, what needs to be said is that, one day, one Kim Seokjin, all skin and flesh, crosses Seoul to the agency who created him, entering by the front door. He has a legal counselor by his side, a very vindictive and well-informed woman. That day, he simply asks for a contract, a salary, and the right to have a say about the productions he would have to appear in, in the future.
It's pride that makes the agency deny its creation of all his demands, unable to bear that he eventually escaped it totally.
So Seokjin decides that here ends his relative loyalty. He sells his work capacity to the highest bidder, who's thrilled to win over his face and established celebrity and thus is extremely obliging. He also starts a judiciary arsenal so the agency recognizes that it owes him for his few years of good and loyal services, and has to buy from him the videos he made before his materialization.
In answer, the agency preferes to erase it all. Hopes that maybe it would eliminate Seokjin's existence.
With this indirect attempt at murder, Seokjin finds himself relieved from a history that wasn't his because he had no choice but to be a part of it—but he's relieved from part of it only. Because the agency forgot a very important rule. The Internet remembers.
(Yoongi made sure to save the neural networks and all the databases. He locked them in a safe in the In-Between that no-one can find. He knew the threat was real and the agency wouldn't be too ethical to carry it out.)
The legal counselor, with conviction and excellence, helps Seokjin and wins all his battles (as well as others, opened an eternity ago and for which she used Seokjin's case of non-human consciousness to create an advantageous precedent).
The story doesn't say if Yoongi decides to keep working as an IT guy. There is, somewhere, a rather attractive conclusion in the idea that he became one only so he could find Seokjin.
Maybe he goes back to writing music instead of code.
Maybe he meets virtuosi who directly whisper to the notes to weave their pieces.
He's never far away anyway, more or less skillfully hidden behind Seokjin. It is said that they live close to Daegu now. In the outskirts rather than the beating center of the city. Seokjin apparently wanted to see what existed other than the big, stifling capitals of the real world. Outside of the In-Between too. It's true that it was a good place for Yoongi and he to meet…
But they want to feel themselves in the concrete world. Seokjin did what needed to be done to make it possible, so other laughter than Yoongi's could rise in their home.
They still sometimes go together into the In-Between. It always happens when white stripes briefly bathe the view from their bedroom window. A material horizon eaten by black trees, that they leave for purple lights and the quietness of the In-Between away from the big city.
Together, they admire the show of purple lightning and call it a date.