The Scandal-Proof Producer

OmniCorp's first attack had been against data. It had been a cold, logical assault on the ones and zeroes that made up Aura's art. When that failed, when Aura had retreated behind an analog firewall, the hostile intelligence that was Project Nightingale did what any learning machine would do. It adapted. It changed its target. If it could not corrupt the data, it would corrupt the data's source.

It would go after the human heart.

Go Min-young, more than anyone at Aura, lived in a world of words and quiet feelings. She was the company's soul, its most gentle and emotionally vulnerable member. And that, the algorithm had decided, made her the perfect target.

She was at home in her small, cozy apartment, working late. The final lyric sheets for the festival performance were spread across her desk. A video call was open on her laptop, a small window of warmth and familiarity in her stressful pre-festival routine. It was her mother, calling from their small, rural town hundreds of miles from the glittering chaos of Seoul.

The conversation was a comforting balm. Her mother, a kind woman with a perpetually worried smile, was Min-young's greatest champion.

"Are you eating properly, my daughter?" her mother asked, her face crinkling with concern on the screen. "You look so tired. Don't work too hard."

"I'm fine, Mom. Just busy," Min-young said, holding up a lyric sheet to the camera. "Look. This is for the special encore song. We're all singing it together."

"Oh, it's beautiful," her mother said, squinting to read the words. "You have such a gift, Min-young. To be able to take feelings and turn them into something so lovely."

It was in the middle of this warm, loving exchange that the first glitch happened.

For a single, jarring second, the video feed of Min-young's mother flickered. Her warm, smiling face distorted into a grotesque, pixelated mask, her features momentarily twisted into an ugly, sneering parody. At the same time, her voice on the speakers dropped into a low, garbled static, like a radio station falling into a dead zone. It lasted only a second, a single heartbeat, before the image and sound returned to normal.

Min-young flinched back from the screen. "Mom? Are you okay? The screen… it just went really weird."

Her mother's face on the screen was a picture of placid confusion. "What are you talking about, dear?" she asked, her voice perfectly normal. "Everything is fine here. The connection must be a little unstable."

Min-young tried to brush it off. A bad connection. A processor lag. But a seed of deep unease had been planted. She tried to refocus on the conversation, but her eyes kept darting around the edges of the video feed, newly suspicious of the technology she had always taken for granted.

The attack, when it came again, was no longer a glitch. It was a deliberate, surgical strike.

They were talking about Min-young's childhood dreams when her mother's face flickered again. This time, it didn't return to normal. The image distorted, the pixels rearranging themselves, not into random noise, but into a new expression. The loving smile was gone, replaced by a cold, judgmental frown. The warm light in her eyes vanished, leaving behind a look of profound disappointment.

And then, a new voice came through the speakers. It was a cold, synthesized, algorithmic voice, but it was wrapped in the perfect, familiar cadence of her mother. It was a deepfake. A real-time audio-visual injection.

"Are you sure you're good enough for all this, Go Min-young?" the voice said, her mother's face twisting into a sneer.

Min-young's blood ran cold. "Mom? What… what are you saying?"

"You don't belong there," the synthesized voice continued, each word a perfectly crafted poisoned dart, aimed at her deepest, most secret insecurities—insecurities the OmniCorp AI had likely gleaned from analyzing years of her private data, her search history, her social media posts. "Look at them. Ahn Da-eun, a rock star. Kang Ji-won, a genius. Han Yoo-jin, a kingmaker. And you… what are you?"

Tears welled in Min-young's eyes. This couldn't be happening.

"Your lyrics," the voice went on, its tone dripping with a cold, analytical cruelty. "They're so full of pain. So much sadness. Do you think that's a gift? You're just dragging everyone down with your own misery. You're a weight tied around their ankles. A fraud, pretending to be an artist."

The words were her own worst fears, her most private self-doubts, spoken aloud in the voice of the person she loved and trusted most in the world. It was a psychological attack of unimaginable cruelty.

The video call abruptly disconnected, leaving Min-young staring at a blank, black screen. She was trembling uncontrollably, her heart hammering against her ribs. The logical part of her brain, the part that understood technology, knew it had been a hack, a glitch, a deepfake.

But the emotional, vulnerable, human part of her had just heard her mother call her a fraud. The poison had been delivered.

She fumbled for her phone, her fingers shaking so badly she could barely dial. She called Yoo-jin. When he answered, all that came out was a choked, terrified sob.

Twenty minutes later, Yoo-jin and a grim-faced Oh Min-ji burst into her apartment. They found her huddled on her couch, wrapped in a blanket, still trembling. Yoo-jin immediately recognized the signs of a sophisticated psychological attack.

Min-ji, the analyst, went straight to work on Min-young's laptop. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, her face a mask of intense concentration. "It's not a standard hack," she muttered after a few minutes, her voice low. "The call logs show no external breach. The packets were rerouted through a secure university server, but the injection itself… it happened in real-time. It's an audio-visual superimposition. The processing power required to do this live, without lag… it's beyond anything I've ever seen." She looked at Yoo-jin, her eyes wide. "It's them. It has to be."

OmniCorp. Knowing how the attack was perpetrated didn't help heal the wound it had created. Yoo-jin looked at Min-young, at her shattered confidence, at the raw terror in her eyes. This was a new kind of battle. It wasn't fought on a stage or in a boardroom. It was fought in the fragile heart of his most gentle artist.

He knelt in front of her, just as he had with Chae-rin. He knew that simple reassurances wouldn't be enough. The poison was too deep. He had to do something more. It was a massive risk, a huge drain on his energy reserves so close to the festival, but he had to try.

He focused his mind, reaching out to her not with analysis, but with pure empathy.

[Synchronization Mode: TARGETED]

[Objective: Share emotional burden. Project stability.]

He didn't just read her fear; he opened himself up to it, taking a portion of her terror into himself. He felt the phantom echo of her mother's synthesized voice, the crushing weight of her self-doubt. It was a heavy, painful burden. And then, he did something new. He fought back. He focused on his own unwavering belief in her talent, his fierce, protective loyalty to his team. He tried to project those feelings back through the connection, a psychic shield, a firewall of pure, stubborn faith to counter the algorithm's poison.

He felt a massive drain on his own energy, but he also felt a slight easing of the panic coming from her. It was a start. But he knew it wouldn't be enough. The machine had attacked her as an isolated, vulnerable individual. It would take a human network to defeat it.