Chapter 144. The Foreseer, No. 1 (1)
“A tea party?”
Victoria looked at Alpha warily.
“What are you planning to do there?”
Alpha hummed cheerfully.
[Don’t worry.]
[As long as you’re here, I’ll guarantee your safety.]
[My sixth friend asked me to bring you back to life, after all.]
“You mean Yukgap?”
[Yukgap?]
[So that’s the cute name you call my sixth friend? How funny.]
Victoria blinked.
Alpha beckoned from inside the monitor.
[Anyway, come to my tea party.]
[Victoria, I have lots of things I want to talk about with you.]
Then Alpha glanced toward the old man.
[And I’d like Dad to come too.]
“M-Me?”
The old man stammered in fear when Alpha’s attention turned toward him.
Alpha nodded and waved lightly.
[Yes.]
[Tea parties are more fun with more people, aren’t they?]
[Then I’ll go get everything ready!]
With that, the monitor went dark.
Victoria stared around in confusion.
“What the hell is going on?”
The last thing she remembered clearly was fighting No. 3 in Jeongseon, Gangwon Province.
His blade had pierced through her chest.
After that, her memories simply stopped.
And now she had awakened in an unfamiliar place.
On top of that, someone named Alpha had suddenly invited her to a tea party.
Victoria had no idea how she was supposed to process any of this.
“This is one of Abraxas’s maritime headquarters.”
The old man cautiously explained, apparently noticing her confusion.
“You were brought here while unconscious.”
Victoria immediately asked,
“Did Yukgap bring me here?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what kind of proposal he made to Alpha, but Alpha used the Philosopher’s Stone to revive you.”
Only then did Victoria notice the dull ache lingering in her chest.
Apparently, Yukgap had learned her secret as well.
“He must have been really shocked.”
Victoria muttered bitterly.
The old man bowed his head.
“Allow me to formally introduce myself.”
“I am Doctor Reuben.”
“I was the chief director of the Archon Project.”
“And I am the man responsible for creating the being you call ‘Yukgap.’”
Victoria immediately asked,
“Where is Yukgap?”
“I don’t know.”
“Alpha probably gave him separate instructions.”
“Everything in this place moves according to Alpha’s will.”
Apparently, even Reuben did not know the details.
Still, the phrase chief director of the Archon Project was more than enough to make Victoria furious.
“You said you were in charge of the Archon Project, right?”
“Then were you the one who kidnapped Yukgap and brainwashed him?”
Reuben waved both hands.
“Brainwashed?”
“We never did anything like that.”
“Don’t lie!”
“Yukgap has a family and a past!”
Victoria snapped at him.
Reuben let out a faint sigh.
“...This is going to take some time to explain.”
He gestured toward the far side of the facility.
“Alpha is waiting for us.”
“Let’s go.”
“I’ll explain along the way.”
“What?”
“So Yukgap is a clone of someone named Kim Changi?”
Victoria asked in shock after hearing Reuben’s explanation.
Reuben had explained the Archon Project in detail.
What it was.
How it had begun.
And what kind of beings the Archons truly were.
“Yes.”
“From the very beginning of the Archon Project, we recruited highly capable soldiers and agents and purchased their genetic information.”
“We signed contracts allowing us to freely use that genetic information after their deaths.”
Reuben calmly recalled those days.
“According to that contract, we used Kim Changi’s genetic information to create a chimera fused with an animal.”
“That chimera is the person you call Yukgap.”
Victoria immediately objected.
“B-But even if you can clone a body, you can’t clone someone’s mind or memories!”
“At most, you’d create another person with identical physical information!”
“But Yukgap vaguely remembered his past!”
“That would be true for an ordinary clone.”
Reuben’s voice became bitter.
“But clones created by Alpha are different.”
“Archons themselves were created using technology far beyond modern understanding.”
“What do you mean?”
Victoria asked.
Reuben lowered his voice.
“You’ll understand soon.”
An awkward silence fell between them.
Victoria followed him with suspicion written all over her face.
Before long, they arrived in front of an enormous cylinder.
It was several meters thick.
Its outer surface was a transparent tank, allowing the interior to be seen clearly.
Inside was a gigantic brain that filled the entire structure.
Every time it pulsed, the surrounding cables flickered with light.
It resembled Doctor Mozg’s form, but the scale was entirely different.
It was like looking at an entire building made of brain tissue.
“What is that?”
Victoria stared upward in disbelief.
Reuben answered weakly.
“That is Alpha.”
“That?”
So the smiling girl she had seen on the monitor earlier...
This was her actual body?
Reuben spoke in a subdued voice.
“Alpha no longer has anything that could truly be called a body.”
“I’m the one who made her that way.”
Victoria stared at him in horror.
“Alpha is your daughter!”
“And you did this to her?”
“I didn’t know it would turn out like this.”
Reuben looked up at the cylinder with damp eyes.
The enormous mass of brain tissue pulsed with a vivid crimson color.
“At first, I simply wanted my child to be born a genius.”
“My wife agreed, and we participated in the Sophia Project.”
“But perhaps this was punishment for coveting the Wisdom of God.”
“My wife died giving birth to Alpha.”
His beloved wife died in childbirth.
And then came the child born at the cost of her life.
Naturally, every expectation fell upon that child.
“Alpha, who was born in exchange for my wife’s life, possessed intelligence so extraordinary that she shocked everyone.”
“But the Sophia Project had a fatal flaw.”
Victoria asked tensely.
The Sophia Project.
A project designed to create artificial geniuses.
Victoria already knew about its fatal defect through Nova, who had been one of its subjects.
Reuben nodded.
“That’s right.”
“The brain keeps growing, but the body cannot support it.”
“That’s why most of the test subjects eventually chose suicide.”
“I couldn’t bear to watch my beloved daughter end the same way.”
Reuben slowly raised a trembling hand, as though reliving the past.
“So I removed Alpha’s brain while she was suffering and separated it into a flask.”
“I wanted to keep her alive, even if that was the only way.”
“Then I transferred her consciousness into a virtual space so she could at least live freely there.”
Victoria finally understood why Alpha existed only as a girl inside monitors.
She could no longer exist anywhere except that virtual world.
But there was still something that did not add up.
“B-But this is too large.”
“Far too large.”
“This doesn’t even look like a human brain anymore.”
No matter how she looked at it, the brain filling the cylinder could not possibly belong to a single human.
It looked as though hundreds of brains had been packed together.
At Victoria’s observation, Reuben lowered his head.
“...That was where I should have stopped.”
Victoria’s eyes sharpened.
“What did you do?”
“...”
“Tell me.”
Something about his silence filled her with dread.
Pressed by her glare, Reuben slowly spoke.
“I became curious.”
“I wanted to know how far Alpha’s endlessly developing brain could grow.”
“So when the Archon Project began, I had Alpha participate as well.”
“Something else was fused into Alpha’s brain.”
“What?”
Reuben looked at her.
“Have you ever heard of HeLa cells?”
Victoria’s expression instantly changed.
“I’m an alchemist.”
“Of course I know what they are.”
“They’re cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks in 1951.”
Reuben nodded.
“Correct.”
“Normally, cancer cells divide only a certain number of times before dying.”
“But HeLa cells possessed one extraordinary trait.”
“As long as sufficient nutrients were supplied, they could continue dividing indefinitely.”
Victoria stared at him in horror.
“So you fused endlessly multiplying cancer cells into your own daughter’s brain?”
Reuben hesitated.
Then nodded.
“...Yes.”
A disgust so intense it was difficult to describe swept through Victoria.
After hearing everything, only one word came to mind.
“You’re insane.”
Victoria glared at Reuben with pure contempt and screamed,
“I’ve met plenty of insane parents before, but you’re the first piece of garbage this bad!”
“You’re the worst kind of trash!”
“You don’t even deserve to call yourself a father!”
Reuben silently endured every insult.
“I know.”
“What I did was unforgivable.”
“I abandoned my duty as a parent because of my curiosity as a researcher.”
He looked back up at the cylinder.
His eyes held a complicated mix of emotions.
“After that, Alpha’s brain began growing explosively.”
“At the same time, her ability to think and calculate expanded without limit.”
“She became capable of computations far beyond anything humans could predict.”
A brain fused with infinitely proliferating cancer cells.
That meant the brain itself could continue growing without end.
And at the end of that process came an unexpected result.
“Predicting stock trends or economic changes became little more than a joke to her.”
“She could see future developments with incredible clarity.”
“Eventually, she began creating technologies that surpassed modern science by hundreds... no, thousands of years.”
Victoria realized something important.
“So that’s where Abraxas’s overtechnology weapons came from.”
“Yes.”
“The overtechnology weapons issued to the Archons are products of Alpha’s computational ability.”
“And not only those.”
“Most of the technology that allowed Abraxas to grow into what it is today was designed by Alpha.”
Reuben let out a long sigh.
“Foreseer.”
“That is the role Abraxas gave my daughter after discovering what she could do.”
