Chapter 34: The Team Assembles
Dojun told Jihoon everything in the car on the way home.
Jihoon listened without interrupting. He ate three bags of shrimp chips, drank an entire bottle of iced tea, and stared straight ahead through the windshield as the streets of Pangyo blurred past.
When Dojun finished, Jihoon was quiet for exactly twelve seconds. Then he said:
“So let me get this straight. You’re from the future. The world ended because of an AI you built. You came back in time, started NexGen, and now someone else is building the same AI. And a 70-year-old math professor who also came from the future thinks he can fix the problem, but he needs you to write the code.”
“That’s the summary, yes.”
“And I’m just now hearing about this.”
“I’m sorry, Jihoon. I didn’t know how to—”
“Sorry? Dojun, I’ve been your best friend for fifteen years. I moved to Seoul for you. I turned down a job at Google for you. I once drove to Busan at 3 AM because you said you needed to think and didn’t want to think alone.” His voice cracked. “And you didn’t trust me with this?”
The car was silent except for the road noise. Dojun gripped the steering wheel.
“It wasn’t about trust. It was about protection. If people found out about the regression—”
“Protection. Right.” Jihoon turned to look at him. His eyes were red. “Do you remember what you said when you hired me at NexGen? You said, ‘I need someone who’ll tell me when I’m being an idiot.’ That’s what you hired me for. And you’ve been making the biggest decision of two lifetimes without the one person whose job it is to call you an idiot.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“Damn right you are.” Jihoon reached for another bag of chips. “So. When do we start?”
The team assembled over the next two weeks. Dojun, Yuki, and Baek formed the core—the regressors who understood the enemy. Dr. Kwon brought his team of twelve engineers, their faces pale after seeing Project Mirror’s simulation. Jihoon handled operations, logistics, and morale (which mostly meant keeping everyone fed and preventing Baek from sleeping on the lab floor).
Hana came in three days a week, bringing her computational neuroscience expertise and, more importantly, her ability to translate between Baek’s abstract mathematics and the engineering team’s practical concerns.
“You’re describing a dynamic value alignment function that requires real-time human input,” she told Baek during one session. “That means you need a neural interface that can capture human moral intuitions at computational speed. That’s not a math problem. That’s a brain-computer interface problem.”
“Can it be built?” Baek asked.
“With enough time and the right team? Maybe.” She looked at Dojun. “But we’d need access to NexGen’s neural mapping research. The work Minji’s team has been doing on interpretability.”
“Bring Minji in,” Dojun said without hesitation.
And so the team grew. Fourteen people working in a building in Pangyo on a problem that could save or destroy the world. Some knew the full truth. Others knew only that they were building something important. All of them felt, in the way that people feel when they’re at the center of something larger than themselves, that what they were doing mattered.
Dojun coded. For the first time in years, he really coded—not managing, not delegating, not reviewing. Writing. Line by line, function by function, translating Baek’s mathematical poetry into executable reality.
The alignment function took shape slowly. A recursive system that monitored the AI’s optimization trajectory and adjusted its boundaries in real time, guided by a neural interface that captured human value judgments at the speed of thought.
They called it the Mirror Protocol. Because it reflected human values back at the AI, creating a recursive loop of mutual understanding between human and machine.
“It’s beautiful,” Kwon said one evening, staring at the architecture diagram. “It’s like… the AI isn’t just aligned with humans. It’s partnered with them. Each one making the other better.”
“That was always the dream,” Dojun said quietly. “In my first life, I wanted to build an AI that could solve any problem. I was wrong. The real dream is building an AI that can solve problems with us. Together.”
Baek, who had been listening from his usual corner, smiled for the first time since Dojun had met him. “Now you understand.”
Outside the lab, the spring air smelled like cherry blossoms. Dojun’s phone showed a photo Hana had sent: their son, sitting on the living room floor, very seriously explaining something to a stuffed robot.
Four months until August. Four months to finish the Mirror Protocol. Four months to write the code that could prevent the end of the world.
Dojun smiled at his son’s photo, closed his phone, and got back to work.